eX-skeptic

Psychology professor Dr. Rich Suplita believed science provided the best explanation for truth, and he promoted atheism on the university campus.  Over time, he began to question his own beliefs, and it led him to find truth in Christ and become an advocate for the Christian worldview. askaformeratheist.com ratiochristi.org/chapter/university-of-georgia/ To hear more stories about former atheists and skeptics converting to Christianity, visit www.sidebstories.com Episode Transcript Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to Side B Stories, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. You can also hear today’s story and see other video testimonies on our Side B Stories website you can find at www.sidebstories.com. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist but who became a Christian against all odds. Each story is different. Each journey courses a different path. Everyone has their reasons for belief and for disbelief. There are the reasons that sound good and reasonable as supporting our beliefs, and then there are the real reasons underneath the surface, sometimes presumed and unexplored, sometimes not particularly rational.  One of the most interesting findings in my research with former atheists was the difference between the reasons they gave for atheism, which they said were mostly based upon reason, science, and evidence, and in hindsight, the real reasons they said why they rejected God and belief in Christianity. It turns out, on self reflection, that one-fourth of them actually rejected God solely for more personal, rather than intellectual or rational reasons. For the remaining three-quarters, it was a mixture of both the personal and the intellectual. As humans, we are holistic beings. We are all susceptible to rationalizing what we want to be true. Of course, our desires and objective truth may line up, but sometimes it’s good to be skeptical of our own beliefs, to look more deeply at why we believe what we believe.  In our story today, Rich was compelled to examine his own beliefs, first as a Christian, and he found his beliefs wanting. Then, as a militant atheist, he became skeptical of his own skepticism. As an academic and deeply introspective and contemplative thinker, he became willing to look at his intellectual reasons for atheism but also beneath the surface to the real reasons below. I hope you’ll come along to hear what he found along his journey from belief to disbelief and then back to a much stronger belief in God and Christianity than he once knew.  Welcome to Side B Stories, Rich. It’s so great to have you with me today.  Yeah. Good morning. Thank you. So the listeners know a little bit about you. Can you tell us a bit about who you are, where you live, your education perhaps?  Sure, yeah. My name is Dr. Rich Suplita. My wife, Mary Kathryn, and I, we live in Athens, Georgia, and we do a lot of ministry at the University of Georgia, with Georgia students. My educational background: I did my underground at West Virginia University, which is my home state, and then came to the University of Georgia in 2000. From 2000 to 2005, I was a PhD student, earned my masters and then my PhD in psychology, with an emphasis on neuroscience and psychopharmacology, and I went on to teach as a lecturer at the University of Georgia for about 10 years after that. Wow. Okay. So you’re an academic by training and history, but it sounds like you’ve moved in a completely different direction from that, and I can’t wait to hear all about it. Now, let’s get into your story from childhood. I know that part of your story is that you were a militant atheist, but you didn’t start that way. Why don’t you bring us into your world as a child? Talk to us about your family, your community, friends, culture. Was God in any of that at all?  Yeah, sure, absolutely. He was. Very much so. I was raised in a middle class, blue collar family in north central West Virginia, a little town there called Fairmont, West Virginia, and my family and I, we were members of a Church of Christ. And so it was a three-times-a-week thing. We were very much in the habit of going to church. I learned a lot of Bible growing up, Bible verses, Sunday school, all of that, so God was very much in the picture, although it never really resonated with me on a deeply personal level. So you went through the routine, and I guess the ritual of going to church three times a week, but it never took personally for you. Through that period of time, would you ever say that there was even an intellectual assent to belief in God? Was it something that you had accepted on that level, although you didn’t accept it personally, perhaps?  Oh, yes. Absolutely. I did believe that it was true, and there was good and bad there. It wasn’t all a negative thing. There were certainly positives. I believed it factually, and I would say, and part of this was a product of the time. In American evangelicalism at the time, there was a big emphasis on fire and brimstone, eternal judgment, and of course, that is a true part of the Bible that needs to be put into perspective, but as a child, I really remember thinking of God as a God who was displeased with me, who didn’t like me, who almost was a God that I was terrified to really approach, and I really think I just had no understanding of grace growing up, and for that reason, it was easy for it to not make its way into my heart. I went through the protocol that I learned about, “What must a person do to become a Christian?” because I did believe it intellectually. I did believe that it was factually true. I hadn’t even considered that it might not be, and so I wanted to be on the right side of eternity. And so I went through the protocol that my particular denomination offered, and I do remember feeling a certain peace when that happened, but there was no life change. I really went back to being the same kid, the same teenager that I always had been, and there was no real desire in my heart to pursue Christ for truth’s sake, pursue Christ for the sake of Christ being the son of God and true and worthy of my worship. So you lived with this, I guess, rather tentative belief. Belief in the sense that it wasn’t taken personally or with life change. How long did you express belief in God, and when did doubts or resistance or rejection of that start to come?  Yeah. So I retained my belief in God and even, I would say, religious practice, going to church, maybe not three times a week, but on a very regular basis, throughout my undergraduate years at West Virginia University. I do think it was some time during that time frame, especially towards the end, maybe the last year, if I’m remembering correctly, that I started, for the first time, really questioning the possibility of, “Well, maybe Christianity is wrong. Maybe there’s some truth here,” but beliefs like, “The Bible is the perfect word of God.” I started to question that. Like many college students do, I really came to question the creation narrative. “Did God create like Genesis 1 and 2 says He did? Or is that just a metaphor for evolutionary processes over billions of years?” And so I was really wrestling with those questions at the time, but I would say that the deep skepticism didn’t set in then. That was something that came more during my graduate school years. Okay. Because I would imagine, pursuing psychology at the university level, a lot of the coursework is through the framework of a naturalistic or materialistic kind of thinking. Was that influential in your pushing back against these kind of narratives that you were finding a bit unbelievable?  Yeah, absolutely. And that’s what I really remember. And there are only certain snapshots that, when I look back, stick out in my mind, and of course, you have a whole life that’s being lived there. With anybody’s story. Regardless of whatever direction they’re moving toward or away from, there are a lot of complicating factors. What I remember in terms of the classroom and academia, what I was learning during my graduate school years, there was specifically a History of Psychology class, a seminar for graduate students. We had 15, maybe 20 students in there. I’m one of the students. And I loved this professor. He was a semi-retired professor emeritus, and I just loved his personality. Great guy. I connected with him. He had a very warm heart, was very approachable, but he was, from what I could discern, adamantly a disbeliever in anything supernatural. And that’s where the enemy—I want to be clear this man is not my enemy. We have an enemy of our souls, Satan. But I think that’s where the enemy does his best work, is through people that come into our lives that are very disarming, that we have their words, their beliefs, their philosophies that are certainly counter to the Bible, and so I remember a big part of the class was really instilling this metaphysical position of naturalism, of physicalism, the idea that, when it comes to understanding the brain, the human mind, that is the subject matter of psychology, that really understanding it as a machine is the proper way to view it, that it is a mechanical thing, mechanical problems lead to psychological problems, damage to the brain causes these different types of dysfunction, and consequently, a corollary of that would be that the mind is what the brain does, nothing more and nothing less. So did that then cause you to question your own spiritual nature?  Yeah, I think it did. I was still involved with Christianity, but it was becoming more and more in a marginalized sense. But I was previously married. My wife Mary Kathryn was previously married. My now ex-wife and I, we were members of a church when we moved from Savannah up to this area of Georgia, so there was still a connection to Christianity, but I increasingly disbelieved it, I would say. It became something that… What was really resonating to me was science. “I’m a neuroscience student. I do scientific research. This book is outmoded. It’s outdated. Hey, maybe there are some good things in there. Religion’s not all bad. It can give a person a sense of culture and kind of the background, a way to connect with family and certain friends,” but in terms of it being objectively true, I had pretty much checked out at that point. So, this religion that you had intellectually believed, you found very strong intellectual reasons to leave it behind.  Right. In terms of my personal conviction… At that point, the question did God exist, I probably would say, “I don’t know.” I would have probably said, “Probably not. There’s probably not a personal God Who is described in these books that we call the Bible. That’s probably much more myth and legend, embellishing different nationalistic stories in the Old Testament, a lot of wishful thinking in the New Testament, among desperate people, and that’s… I didn’t think about it a lot, but I think that would characterize pretty much where I was at the time. Yeah. So you left it behind. I guess for many years of your life you had believed it, but I guess in your twenty-something, as you became educated, you became, I guess in a way, too smart to believe that kind of superstition.  Yeah. You mentioned or inferred, I guess, that Christians essentially were uneducated, perhaps a little bit ignorant, and they believed that a book that just doesn’t hold up to what an educated person would actually believe. So as you’re moving forward, what are you finding? Do you move into atheism by default? Or does it become more of an intentional decision and identity?  Yeah. I think there was actually both of those. I think there were two phases there. I think that kind of what I have been describing up until this point was more by default, more passive. You know, you’re in graduate school, and I remember I still went to a Bible study the first year or two that I was on campus at UGA as a grad student, and you become sort of like a family with your lab partners. Your major professor, the fellow graduate students. You just do life with these people. You do classes, seminars, go to conferences together. They really become like your siblings, and they jokingly got me a little action figure Jesus for a birthday present one year, and I thought it was hilarious, because I wasn’t an evangelical Christian by then. I just was still going to Bible study, but I was… The first couple of years there, it was funny for them to playfully, gently mock, shall we say, my residual beliefs. But as I said, during that trek through grad school, I became more and more influenced by these folks. Their worldview. Their politics. Their devotion to science. That was such a strong association, and we know that the word science can be used in many different senses, right? But the idea that I’m a scientist. You know, “Science says X.” This topic of the Bible or Jesus or the apostles, that’s religion, and that’s a far inferior way of knowing and experiencing reality than the scientific method is. And so that was the passive part of it. The more deliberative stage really came, I think, in the aftermath of being on the receiving end of divorce documents, and I think, in retrospect, a lot of that had to do with emotional pain that I didn’t understand at the time as pain, but it was, I think, reflexive and sort of catapulted me more into what we might call militant atheism. It’s interesting that you revealed that, that there was some kind of emotional pain that catapulted you into a more militant atheism. I’m trying to hear and possibly infer the connection there. Why emotional pain would push you towards a more militant atheism. Why do you suppose that was?  Yeah. And I want to preface my statement with I’m just talking about myself. Right.  I want to be clear. I’m not trying to insinuate that all atheists are angry people who are mad at God. I can’t speak for them. They have their own stories, and when they tell me, I listen to them, and I believe what they say. For me personally, in my own situation, I really do think it was a disappointment with God more than a disbelief in God. Because again I had sort of jettisoned the Bible, but the idea that there was something higher, a higher power. I would go back and forth. The psychologist in me would say, “Well, that’s just a residual thing from your childhood, going to church,” but there was something that seemed to go beyond that. But I was disappointed in this God for my own failures, for the failures of my marriage, my family, the fact that I was not going to be a daily presence in the life of my three daughters anymore. And that was the big one. That was the big one, more than, I think grieving the actual dissolution of the marriage, it was, “We’re not going to be an intact family anymore,” and there was a sense… I don’t know if I really thought of it in my mind at the time this way. I don’t think I would’ve put it into these words, but there was really a sense in which God or the universe or whatever you want to call it, my higher power had failed me or let me down. So, yes, I can see then where disbelief would be both intellectual and personal or emotional in that sense, that there were a lot of reasons to push away from this God who you once believed as a child. So how long were you in this particular phase of your life? And what did that looking like, walking as a militant atheist?  Somewhere around the year 2002 and 2003, I checked out, and then my return to Christianity, at least in terms of believing it to be factually true, and maybe we can get into this more later, was late in 2011, and so I’m going to say roughly an eight-year period of time that I would’ve said… And at the time, I would’ve never thought that there was any possibility of me ever calling myself a Christian again, like, “That was my past, that was my childhood, those were my formative years, I left that behind,” and the idea that I would ever go back there would’ve almost been laughable to me at the time. Did you move into a strongly atheistic community that was reinforcing and supporting your ideas?  Yeah. I think so. I do remember coming across The God Delusion, which was probably the most popular of what are called the New Atheist books, of course that one by Richard Dawkins. I would say that was really my entrance point to a more militant variety of atheism. Like, “I’m not just a skeptic now. I’m actually going to wear, to own, to appropriate this title atheist, and I’m not going to be ashamed of that.” So of course I read Dawkins, and that sort of introduced me to the other New Atheists, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, a philosopher, and I would say probably what ended up being the most influential of all to me actually was the podcast, the internet show out of Austin, Texas, with Matt Dillahunty, Atheist Experience, spending many, many hours, sometimes until two in the morning, watching back episodes of that. So you were really looking towards becoming very saturated, I guess you could say, in the rhetoric and the language and the thinking, really, of the atheist community. So you walked in that for, it looks like a period of eight or nine years. What started changing your view? If you were so ingrained in that kind of thinking. What happened then?  Again, you know, it’s challenging to try to really pinpoint specific things, but I’ve done that, and again, I don’t think it was one thing, but I really believed that there was sort of, at the same time, an intellectual problem that I was developing with metaphysical naturalism, physicalism, materialism. It goes by different terms. This idea or doctrine that all that exists is matter, all that occurs is matter in motion. There’s a universe filled with stuff, natural stuff, obeying natural laws, but there’s nothing beyond that. As a neuroscientist, I developed an intellectual problem, and it really focused on the idea, more than anything else, of free will, of choice or volition. I have never found a way to… And this is something that philosophers have discussed at length, but I’ve never been able to reconcile metaphysical naturalism, physicalism, with the idea that there’s some type of capacity in human beings for genuine meaningful choice or volition. And so I really was confused by that problem, and I knew… I saw it as being a problem for my own beliefs, my own worldview at the time, and I think, mapped onto that roughly at the same time was just the experience of being a father to three daughters. That was huge. I think I had gotten myself to the point, for myself, where I became kind of satisfied that, “Okay, I’m here on this planet for who knows how long? 50, 60, 80, maybe 100 years, and then I’m just going to die one day, and that’s going to be it. Lights out. Fade to black. And it won’t matter because there won’t be a me to be aware that I had ever existed.” One of the things that I would say as an atheist was, when people would bring up this idea of the existential problem, I would say, “Well, does it bother you that you were not alive 100 years ago? Does it bother you that were not alive 200 years ago?” And of course, people will say, “No, because I wasn’t alive yet.” And I’d say, “Exactly, so once you and I are dead, we’re not going to care that we’re dead. We just won’t exist anymore.” So I think I got in a position where I was satisfied with that for myself, but I could never get to the same level of satisfaction with that being true for the lives of my three daughters. I can see where the existential problem could be dismissed pre and post death, but as you said, when you start looking at the implications of your own worldview and see if they’re actually livable, like trying to say that free choice is an illusion. I presume that you had some differences, then, with Sam Harris and the way that he perceives free well. Or as a neuroscientist, the whole concept of consciousness and where that comes from. So there’s the mental life. But there’s also, again more existentially, meaning and purpose, human dignity, values, those things. From an existential individual perspective, did any of those things also bother you?  Yeah. I think it did. Especially centered around the idea of justice and human rights. And it’s not something I went as deep in to the time. Now, I think today this has become sort of like the backbone of my main apologetic when I interact with skeptics. But yeah, there was the idea… I remember thinking, at least a bit, about ethical systems, and what is the justification for human worth and dignity and value on metaphysical naturalism, which was the basis for my atheism at the time. I could not get myself past a utilitarian view of that. People are essentially worth… their value, their dignity is tantamount to their value to society, their perceived value or their real value to society, but of course, where does that leave someone who is severely physically disabled or mentally disabled or something like that? Is this a lesser person? And I would think that a person who is going to be consistent with a truly metaphysical position would have to say that that’s true, although there’s something in us that recoils against that notion. You know, it strikes me as almost ironic that the more that you ventured into atheism, listening to Matt Dillahunty and reading books, that it actually surfaced some issues or some cognitive dissonance in you. The logical endpoint of atheism, in many different ways, is a little bit difficult to take, in terms of when you’re thinking about reality and how just intellectually and experientially things match with reality, somehow that it actually surfaced some areas of tension or cognitive dissonance for you that allowed you to become a little bit more skeptical of your own skepticism.  Yeah, absolutely. And that’s what I started experiencing. And so I really… How would I phrase this? I checked out on atheism, in terms of its militant variety, in terms of it’s Richard Dawkins esque, Matt Dillahunty esque… For a while there, I really wanted to get something like the Atheist Experience started in Athens, and I thought it was great what they were doing there. I think they called themselves the Atheist Community of Austin, Texas, and I’m like, “Wow, it’d be great if we had something like that here in Athens.” Long about this time, which would’ve been 2010, going into 2011, I’m like, “Okay, this is not my future. I’m not that convinced of these things.” In fact I retreated to a more moderate position. I still would’ve never thought that I would ever, in a million years, become a Bible-believing Christian again, but I wanted to retreat away from the militant atheism, more to an agnosticism, a weak agnosticism, an agnosticism that really appreciated ideas like the idea in NA, Narcotics Anonymous, of a higher power. You know, my higher power. A guide. Some type of spiritual guide that helps me get through life and relate to people and those sorts of things, and so I knew that… I had served at this point, the previous two years, as the faculty advisor for UGA Atheists, a student organization of skeptical students on campus. It had been the Secular Student Association, and eventually, it went back to being the Secular Student Association, but during the years I was involved, it was called UGA Atheists. So I knew that, going into the following year, I was going to say, “No. Hey, ya’ll, I’ve had a good time. This has been fun getting to know you, but I’m too busy. I’m not going to do that again next year.”   I came across the… the guys with The Great Exchange outreach. So what happened there? Who are the guys with The Great Exchange outreach?  Okay, so yeah, The Great Exchange is an outreach or an evangelistic survey. Which is really just a nine-question survey, so you just ask people walking by, “Hey, do you have a few minutes to take a spiritual interest survey?” And roughly half the people, depending on where you are, will say yes. And so it asks questions like, “Describe your spiritual background. What was that like?” “Do you believe in God?” “What do you think God is like?” “What do you see as the greatest problem in the world today?” “Is there a solution to that problem?” And really it’s kind of a funnel. But the real kicker question is, “If you were to stand before God, and God were to ask you why should I let you into heaven, what would you say?” Well, I skipped a couple of questions. One of the questions is, “Who, in your opinion, is Jesus Christ?” And so you just write down, in a few words, what the person says. The last item is, “If you could know God personally, would you like to?” And if the person says yes, then the idea is you ask, “Do you have about three to five minutes? I would like to tell you what the Bible says, what scripture says about how you can know God personally.” So it was the first ever Great Exchange event. It was on Good Friday of 2011, which was an extraordinarily late Good Friday that year. I remember. At the very end of the semester. And I was approached as I was walking across the Tate Plaza at UGA, and so what I did is I gave all of the atheistic answers to the questionnaire. And mind you, I had checked out on atheism at this point. The true response for a lot of those questions would be, “I just don’t know. For the past several years, I’ve been calling myself an atheist. I really went kind of extreme with that. That’s not where I am now, but I really don’t know who Jesus is. I’m open to the possibilities.” And so this was the Holy Spirit at work arranging this particular time and circumstance for me to meet some guys, specifically Pastor David Holt. He wanted to know kind of like what we’ve been talking about here. What got me into skepticism, what got me into atheism, where I truly was now, and specifically what did I make of Jesus, what did I make of the claims of Jesus of Nazareth. So we started meeting once a week, on Fridays I believe it was, in downtown Athens at a coffee shop, just to talk about those things. Well, yeah, that’s interesting that he started by asking you questions. And trying to really get a sense of who you are, what you were thinking, rather than just pounding you with information or what you should believe, that he was actually willing to take the time with you to really explore what your thinking was.  Right. So where did it go from there? Did you start studying certain things? How did Dr. Holt lead you?  Yeah, eventually I did. That was after a few meetings. The first, we talked for about an hour that day, at The Great Exchange, and I believe I gave him my email. I know I received an email from him within a few days, maybe that same night. I don’t remember. “Hey. Great meeting you today. I think your story, what you’ve described is fascinating,” and he asked me, “Why do you disbelieve in God?” or, “What are your intellectual problems with the God of the Bible?” Just a very open-ended thing, and I think he was looking for a more succinct response than what I returned to him, but I probably sent him back about 10 or 12 paragraphs worth of information. And of course I didn’t know David. We’re very close now, but I got a response—anybody who knows David, this will resonate with. It’s like, “Okay, thanks.” I’m like, “Really? That’s it?” But then he followed it up very quickly with, “Can you meet?” “Are you open to getting together, getting coffee, because I really want to talk to you one on one?” And you can explain maybe more specifically where you’ve been, what journey you’ve been on,” so we started doing that. Yeah. I’m, I guess, a little bit surprised that you were so willing to meet with a pastor, but it shows that you did have a willingness or an openness to actually explore, at that point. And I think that’s huge.  Yeah. And he’s just a very… He’s very gifted. He has an amazing ability to connect with people and to hear them, to, I think validate them without compromising what he believes, and just really… And people are eager for that. People are so eager. I’ve heard it referred to as evangelism with our ears, right? Which I’m terrible at, by the way. There’s a lot of room for growth with me, but I’m aware of that, and I try to do better, but asking people the questions and really letting them… It doesn’t matter who we’re talking to, whether it’s an atheistic or an agnostic or a Muslim or a Buddhist, we don’t want to go in and tell them what they believe, right? We want to ask questions and let them tell us, and of course, naturally, that’s going to build rapport and open up doors. So, as you were having a conversation, and he was asking you questions, was he trying to rebut your points? Or was he just continuing to ask questions? And then where did that lead?  Yeah, that’s a good point. Unlike me, probably, my tendency, he did not jump on the opportunity to say, “No, you’re wrong about that, and let me give you seven reasons that shows that my position is correct.” Rather, he just really asked the questions and good follow-up questions. I remember, at some point, I think maybe it was the second or third meeting we had, where we’d talked about so many things, and he says, “Well, what would you say right now, at this point, where we’ve been, this journey you’ve been on, one or two of the big issue things that you see that really keep you away from placing your faith in Christ.” And I think that’s a great question, when you’re at that point with a skeptic, and so I thought about it for a minute, and I said, “Okay, well, there are really two that pop into my mind. Number one is evolution.” Okay, this is not where I am now, but I said, “I’m a scientist. That’s what I do. That’s my background. That’s my education. I teach. One of the things I teach here at UGA is a seminar on evolutionary psychology, and this is settled science, and there’s just really no way that I think I can reconcile that with what it says in the book of Genesis.” Okay, again, my tendency would be to start giving people disproofs. And I’m not saying there’s never a role for that. There can be a role for that, but that’s not what David did. He said, “Okay. What’s the other one?” Rather than objecting, just, “Okay.” He’s still in listening mode. And what a great example. And I said, “Okay, the other one of all the things that could be considered is the doctrine of hell, of eternal punishment, and I don’t understand how it can be just or fair that people would spend eternity in hell, which is infinite punishment, for finite sin,” and again, he didn’t these rebutting. I know he knows good answers to both of those questions, but he didn’t jump in with those, and what he said instead was, he said, “You know, those are really deep questions. You’re going to have to spend some time thinking through those and investigating and reading and praying.” He said, “But we’ve been talking about Jesus, and really that is the bull’s eye. That is the bull’s eye of Christianity, the Person of Jesus, the work of Jesus, specifically the biblical claim, and the claim of the apostles, that Jesus died and rose again, the resurrection of Jesus.” And that was, I think, at the point where he gave me what we call the 21-day challenge. It wasn’t in the 21-day form. But just a challenge to read the Gospel of John. It has 21 chapters. These are not like chapters in a novel. You can read a chapter in like 3-5 minutes. And so the idea of the challenge is to devote 5 minutes a day, read one chapter a day, and just ask God, say, “God, I don’t even know if You’re real. I don’t know exactly who Jesus is. I would like to know if this book is true. If it’s accurate. If this is giving me valid information and true information about Jesus, please reveal that in my heart in a way that I’ll understand it as a read. David just gave me the challenge to read the Gospel of John. He’s like, “Would you mind doing that? We’ll meet again next week, next Friday. Between now and then, get out your Bible and read it.” And I told him I would, and I’m thinking to myself at the time, “I don’t mind doing it. I’ll read it.” I didn’t say this out loud: “I’ll read it, but I already know what it says. I grew up in church. I grew up memorizing Bible verses. I know that it says Jesus died and rose again. I know that. So what good’s it going to do me opening up my Bible and reading?” And so I went home, … I was cleaning my apartment. I’m there by myself. Which I never did. And so I think this is also a divine appointment, right? And I’m dusting one of my bookshelves, and right there, between two of my psychology textbooks, is my old NIV Study Bible from when I was a kid, teenager. And it triggered my memory, and I said, “Oh, yeah! I told Pastor David that I would read the Gospel of John. I have no excuse. Here it is 6:00, 6:30 PM. I’ve got nothing to do tonight.” The semester was over at this point. Grades had been submitted. Nothing but lull time. And I’m like, “I really have no excuse,” and so I sat down there on my couch. As I opened the Bible, I thought again to myself, “What’s the point? It’s not going to make a difference. I already know what this says,” but I said, “Well, I told him I would do it, so I’m going to do it.” And I began reading. And what did you find?  Well, a lot of familiarity. Things I hadn’t thought about for years. The stories, of course, sounded very familiar. Jesus meeting the woman at the well in John 3, His discussion with Nicodemus. That was all very familiar territory. And it was… For lack of a better term, it was just fun. It was kind of fun revisiting that territory. And then I got to John chapter 11, which is halfway through. The narrative of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead, and what really… I would say the real turning point, at least in my brain, was His words to Martha. I think it’s John 11:25. Martha’s confused. “Why did You let our brother Lazarus die? If You had been here, he would’ve lived.” And Jesus says, “Well, your brother will rise again,” and Martha doesn’t know what he’s talking about. “In the last day, Lord. I know. At the end of time that he will rise. All of the dead will rise, so he will rise then.” And then Jesus makes that “I am” statement, “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in Me, even if He dies, yet shall He live, and whoever lives and believes in Me will never die.” And then, the real kicker: “Do you believe this?” And in the context of the narrative, of course, He’s talking to Martha, but I really knew in my heart. That’s just the best way to describe it. I can’t intellectualize this. The skeptics who are listening, I don’t know a way to intellectualize this to them. I’m not trying to. I would just say, in the deepest recesses of my heart, I knew that the Christ, the Messiah, was putting the same question to me, and I knew that my answer was that that I did. I don’t know why. I don’t know how. But I knew that I did believe that.  That’s amazing! That’s amazing. So in that moment, I’m sure it was a surprise to yourself.  Yeah, it was. So at that moment, the whole concept… Pastor David had talked about who Jesus was and His resurrection was the most important question to consider, and here you are confronted with the narrative of Lazarus being resurrected, but somehow it affected you in terms of Jesus saying, “I am the resurrection.” That it was something more than just rational statement, that there was something deeply spiritual about that and deeply real. I’m sure you finished the book of John, and you met with Pastor David. Did that question of Jesus and the actual resurrection of Christ and its association with His proclamation of being the resurrection, did that come into play in terms of your belief or confirming that more intuitive deep personal belief in His statement of who He is?  Yeah. It definitely did. You know, the question comes sometimes: When was I born again? And I don’t know the answer to that question. I guess I’ll find out if it’s important. Does the time scale really matter? I don’t know. If there was a moment in time, I do look to that moment as being the moment, but I could be wrong about that. I would say, more than anything, it was a seed. It was a big seed. It was a huge seed. But it was a seed that was planted. I knew that my recognition of the truthfulness of who Jesus was and is, that He wasn’t just making a proclamation of what He had the power to do. He was talking about his identity. I didn’t say, “I can raise the dead,” he said, “I am the resurrection.” And I had never seen that before. I knew that verse. That verse sounded familiar to me, but I’d never, ever seen it in that light before, and so that was the real… What I realized at that point in time was, “This truth is going to have to change everything about my life.” There’s a lot we could go into. But to really bring all of that to fruition took another two or three years. But I could never—even though I tried. There was a point in time where I actually tried to divest myself of all of this. I wanted to go back to secularism about two years later and even tried to, but I could just never turn my back. I could never turn that off in my mind, in my heart, this truth of Jesus is the Son of God. He died, and He rose again. Everything was stripped away, back to that, but it ultimately was that truth that brought me to a point of completely surrendering my life, not just my mind, but also kind of getting off the fence of cultural Christianity, which I would say I was on for the first two or three years of this, finally getting kicked off of that fence in late 2014. It really was that truth that was the anchor. I can imagine a skeptic listening to your story and just saying, “Oh, you just had an experience. You were looking for something, and you saw what you wanted to see of Jesus when you started reading the Bible, but how does this match with your calling yourself a scientist? How can all of this, the way that you viewed superstition in the past, why don’t you view it that way now?” How do you integrate, essentially, your mind and your intellect with your beliefs? Just because you believe Jesus is the truth, which we do, and that His claim to be the resurrection is true, but how… I can just, again, hear a skeptic saying, “How can you forsake your mind and all that you know about reality?” Were the pieces able to come together?  Yeah. Well, I think that’s sort of an ongoing thing. I do decidedly come down on the Christian side of this thing now, and I can appreciate their question from their perspective. It’s genuine. It’s a good question. It’s not a question that I can really, again, over intellectualize to them. I can talk about my journey. We can, and we should, point people to resources, to sometimes what we talk about as what’s been called the legal historical case for the resurrection, the changes in the lives of the apostles, their eventual martyrdom, this being the catalyst for Christianity spreading across three continents within its first generation. There’s all of these facts, and I do talk about those a lot, but I am convinced that the Bible makes it pretty clear, going back to John chapter 3 and Jesus dialogue with Nicodemus. “Unless a man is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of heaven.” He’s not talking about heaven or hell there. He talks about that in other places. He’s talking about the ability to see the work of God, right? We perceive, as scientists, as naturalists, we perceive the three-dimensional world around us. Jesus obviously is talking about something that, what would be trans dimensional, something that involves a reality that transcends the three-dimensional reality around us, and He’s saying this is the ultimate and true reality, and a human being can’t even begin to fathom that unless they’ve been born again by the Holy Spirit of God. Now, of course, that is going to sound like a cop-out to a skeptic. I get it. The only thing I can say is that I’ve experienced that, right? And I don’t know who it was. It was a brilliant mind who said that the man with a testimony is never at the mercy of a man with an intellectual argument, right? I mean I get it, but it’s kind of like you’ve got to really jump in that pool and start splashing around. If you just try to say, “Okay, this is going to be a purely intellectual endeavor to me, nothing more and nothing less. I’m just going to analyze it in a completely rational and logical sense,” I don’t think you can ever get there. I don’t think anyone is ever argued into the kingdom of God that way. There has to be the proverbial door of the heart that is at least cracked open to the possibility of this all being true. Thank you for that. And I would presume, then, that the cognitive dissonance that you had within your naturalistic materialism or atheism, that some of those issues are resolved even existentially, like being able to explain or ground your freedom to choose, or, like you say, where human dignity comes from, rights and values, or things that like, that it seems that you have a more coherent worldview, not only to think but also to experience.  Yeah. So one of the groups that we help lead on the campus of the University of Georgia now is called Ratio Christi, and it’s Latin for “a reason for Christ,” so we take on a lot of these apologetics themes and topics. My favorite recently, because I think is so timely… it’s perennial in one sense, but it’s very timely in another… is what we call the moral argument for God, that if God does not exist, then there are no objective moral truths. What is moral? What is right and wrong in a naturalistic framework is just feels. It’s a matter of opinion. It’s a matter of how many people feel strongly one way or the other. But the truth of the matter is that all sane and rational people recognize that there are certain moral truths, moral absolutes, that are not subjective. They’re not open to opinion, right? Human rights, value, things like… You can think of the extreme. Murder is wrong. If a person says it’s okay to murder, it’s not like they have the wrong opinion. They’re factually wrong. It’s not like they have the wrong opinion. They’re factually wrong. When we say racism, there’s a big one. Racism is—when I say that it’s wrong—and here my atheist friends almost always agree with me. Thank God! My agnostic friends agree with me. Buddhist, Muslim, we call could say, okay, well, when we see these racist things happening, people being the victims of race crimes, “Wow! That’s truly wrong.” That’s not just my opinion. That is a moral fact. That’s a moral absolute. I would understand that as only being possible if human beings are more than stardust. We’re not just the end result of a certain conglomeration of stardust. Being rearranged and reassembled by natural laws over billions of years can never get you to that point where we say humans have objective worth, objective dignity, objective value, and consequently, well, racism is wrong. Murder is wrong. Sexual assault is wrong. That’s not just an opinion. Those are moral facts. And so that, I would say, is one of my favorite questions and discussions to have with my skeptical friends and is certainly something I would encourage fellow believers to look into and at least ask those questions to our atheist friends. “Do you believe that humans have real dignity and worth and value? And if so, according to your worldview, what is that based upon?” And then just listen to them. Don’t try to trick them up or gotcha. That’s not the point. But really just have them think through it out loud with you. That’s great advice. Rich, it sounds like your world and your worldview both have changed dramatically, not only from the kind of more superficial Christianity you held as a child and a teenager and even early adult, but obviously changed from your militant atheism or even your agnosticism. You’ve come to a place where you seem very passionate about what you believe now and that you’re helping others to understand the same. Or at least challenging in their worldview. I take it that your world and your worldview have changed dramatically. Can you talk with me about how that has transformed your life?  I would say there was a coherency there that was lacking in my life before. I don’t think I realized at the time, but I think that postmodern secular humanism, which was a big part of what we did in UGA Atheists and that type of advocacy. I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily bent towards radical individualism, but it tends in that direction, right? The emphasis being on self, charting your own path through life, doing good for others, but really in so far as much as it also benefits you. And in one sense, that’s very reasonable, but I would say what change has there been in my philosophy of life since then, just that recognition, that observation that’s so apparent in the New Testament. I think of the verse in Romans where it says that we are individually members one of another. This organism, this spiritual organism that’s what Paul calls the Temple of God, which is the church, not a temple made out of bricks and mortar and those sorts of things, but of individual souls. And just understanding that my purpose in life, the reason why I’m on this planet for however many more years that the Lord has me here, is to be a functional part of that body. We don’t all look alike. We don’t all have the same role. Paul uses the metaphor of the body. Some are hands, some are feet. Some are mouths. Some are ears in the body of Christ. And God has given me a specific role, and my life is not about the radical individualism that I used to live for. I think most people would’ve said I was a pretty good guy, you know? My peers tended to like me when I was an atheist, and I got good reviews, and people wanted to take that class, and probably in the worldly sense, people thought that I was a pretty good guy, but I know that I was very selfish. I know my life was about me and really nothing beyond that. Understanding now that the church, the body of Christ, being part of that body, announcing the kingdom, these are the things that occupy my time and thoughts and my life now. Wow! That’s amazing.  Okay. Yeah. Yeah, so going back to the time leading up to my conversion, really leaving atheism and understanding who Jesus truly is, I remember that my oldest daughter, Annabelle. Her mother, my ex-wife, was still involved in her local church and taking my daughters to Sunday school, and I received a text that says, “Annabelle is going to be baptized two Sundays from now,” and it had the date and the time. And this is while I was the faculty advisor for UGA Atheists, and so I received the text, and… I don’t know. I had mixed emotions right up front. I think it was mostly negative, like, “Why are they inviting me to this? She knows I’m not religious anymore. Is she just trying to antagonize me?” Well, clearly that was, like, okay, that’s not the case. I told a few of my skeptical friends, my atheist friends, and of course, we made the obligatory jokes about if I walked in the building the walls will start shaking and that sort of thing. But then it was actually one of those friends, one of my atheist friends, encouraged me and said, “You know, you probably should go. You probably should just go, smile, take the pictures. Be a good dad. That’s what a good dad would do. It’s not about you. It’s not about what you believe or disbelieve. Hey, you can talk to her about that later.” That’s what my friend told me, and so I said, “That’s good advice. I think that’s what I’m going to do.” And so that’s what I did. And I went there for her baptism service, and that day, sort of an unexpected thing happened in my heart, and not just that day, but following that. I really experienced a sense of joy, and it wasn’t something I was putting on. It wasn’t just an artifact of being around my daughters, which always made me happy. Well, not always, but usually. Depending on how well they were getting along. But it was a real core joy, a joy that Annabelle had embraced Jesus, and talk about cognitive dissonance. That was extreme cognitive dissonance, because I’m thinking to myself, “Here I am. I’m the faculty advisor for UGA Atheists. I talk against this religion all the time. I go out onto campus and actually try to dissuade people from believing in a personal God and specifically the God of the Bible, and now one of the three people that I love the most on this planet, that I have certainly the deepest affections for, has made this… whatever you want to call it… personal decision for Christ, received Christ, decided to follow Christ, and I’m not angry about this. I’m actually joyful. That’s really confusing to me. If I’m sure that it’s false, if I’m sure she’s making a bad decision by doing this, shouldn’t I be angry? Shouldn’t I have some sense of righteous indignation, where I want to go and talk her out of this, and that’s just not at all where I found myself. so this was very much the preliminary changes that were getting me to a point where I knew that atheism wasn’t a good fit and I wasn’t going to continue staying with… I would’ve still considered myself very much a secular humanist. I had no intention of changing that. But on the spirituality topic, it was more of like, “Okay, I’m certainly open to spiritual possibilities now.  So, Rich, as we’re winding up your story, and it’s just really amazing, and it sounds like you have a lot of experience, not only as a skeptic but talking to skeptics. If you have any advice for the curious skeptic who might be listening in, what would that be?  Yeah. So what I would say is truth exists, and truth matters. One of the things I really liked about the Atheist Movement… I know that sounds strange to say that, but I do believe that this is a good thing, is that myself at the time, and most committed atheists that I talk to today, would affirm that objective truth exists, right? Most of the atheists I talk to are not proponents of relative truth in the ultimate sense. They would say that there is such a thing as ultimate reality, that it has a certain nature, and that we can have discourse and discussion about those things because truth is a meeting ground, right? More than anything, that’s what truth does. It unites and it divides, but it is there, and our quest should be to… It just popped into my mind. One of the things that Matt Dillahunty used to say, of all people; he said, “I want to believe as many true things as possible and reject as many false things as possible.” I think that’s great. That’s one of the best quotes that we could bring to the table here. I do believe that truth exists, and going back to Christ, His claim was not just to teach the truth, His claim was to be the truth. He says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the father except through Me.” And I do believe that a person with an open mind, a posture of honesty at heart, being willing to go where the information leads, will see Jesus, will come to see Jesus in an entirely new light. Yeah. And I would imagine, based upon your own experience, too, reading the Gospel of John is probably a good place to start.  Yeah. Absolutely. Any of the gospels. I have a fondness for the Gospel of John, but if you want to do the 16-day challenge, hey, you can do Mark. It’s not quite as much of a commitment. Yeah. That sounds good. Kind of short and sweet. He’s a very pragmatic writer. So if there are Christians today… Obviously, there were Christians who played a role in your life in terms of bringing you towards what you now believe as truth, like that pastor, Pastor David.  David Holt. Yeah. Yeah. How would you encourage us as Christians to engage or interact with those who are skeptical or don’t believe?  Yeah, so if you’ll allow me, I’ll preach to myself a little bit. Because I always have to remind myself. I like to debate. I’ve always liked that, regardless of which end of this I’ve been on. It’s always been extremely enjoyable to me for people to push back, and let’s butt heads a little bit. Not in a mean-spirited way, but let’s exchange ideas, and I’ve come to realize that not everyone has the same affinity for that as I have. And there is very much a necessary role of being good listeners. Knowing some good questions, right? They don’t have to be enormously complex. We meet people all of the time. The Great Exchange questions are a great starting point. What was your spiritual background like? Do you believe in God? If so, what is God like? And even if the person expresses disbelief, then well, “Who in your opinion is Jesus of Nazareth?” I think that’s one of the best questions, possibly the best question that we can ask. We don’t ask them telling them what they believe, again. We just ask them because we really want to know. If a person is going to be intellectually honest, then they’re going to have to do something with this historical figure. The person, the man who has undeniably influenced the history of the world more than any other person. What is true about him. What can we know about him? Why did he leave such an enormous impact. And I think those are fair questions for anyone. I think that’s great advice. Yeah. I can almost see Jesus turning to His apostles and saying, “Who do you say that I am?” And that is the biggest question for everyone. So thank you. That’s very wise. I mean, your story, it has such an arc to it, from embracing some form of Christianity, dismissing it, militant atheism, but then being drawn back to truth. I mean, truth has been a major thread throughout, from the beginning to the end, and Rich, I want to thank you for coming on board to tell your story. I’m sure many people will enjoy it, relate to it, and really be inspired by it, so thank you for the wisdom that you’ve given us today.  Absolutely. It’s been a real joy. Thank you.  Thanks for tuning in to Side B Stories to hear Rich’s story. You can find out more about him by visiting his website askaformeratheist.com, and we’ll include that link, along with the link to his work at Ratio Christi, in the episode notes. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can reach me by email at sidebstories@gmail.com. I hope you enjoyed it. If so, that you will rate and subscribe and share this podcast with your friends and social network. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll see how another skeptic flips the record of their life.   

Former atheist Leah Libresco rejected religious belief until she encountered intelligent Christians at Yale University. Her search to find the grounding of objective morality led her to God. Resources written by Leah: Website:  www.leahlibresco.com  Book:  Arriving at Amen (the story of her conversion from atheist to Catholic) Book:  Building the Benedict Option (a guide to building thicker Christian community) Resources/authors mentioned by Leah: CS Lewis GK Chesterton Allister McIntyre, After Virtue Episode Transcript Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to Side B Stories, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist who became a Christian against all odds. You can also hear today’s story, along with other short video testimonies from former atheists, on our Side B Stories website.  Oftentimes, we think that atheists have nothing in common with those who believe in God, but that’s not necessarily true. Both points of view can equally acknowledge the existence of certain parts of reality, but they have different explanations about what something is and how it came to be. One of those hot topics of debates between atheists and Christians is something we all have a very deep intuition about, that there are certain things or actions in our world that are really right or really wrong, not merely for ourselves but for everyone. As C.S. Lewis says, if someone cuts in line, we automatically think that’s unfair according to some commonly understood rule or standard of fairness, and that’s certainly the case for much more serious points of injustice.  It doesn’t take a lot of time to consider whether or not certain things are more like vices or virtues.  In our own minds, we are constantly making judgments about whether or not something or another should or should not be the case, whether or not someone ought or ought not to do something. We simply can’t help ourselves in the way that we are constantly judging.  The problem is not that we can’t or don’t know what’s right or wrong. The problem isn’t even that we aren’t capable of living good lives with or without God. The problem is, rather, where we ground those moral duties and obligations as true and real, not merely opinion or preference.  From an atheist household, Leah Libresco learned to critically analyze ideas from a very early age, fostered into her Ivy League education and beyond. Her intellect drove her to deeply consider the seeming difficulties that lie with the problem of objective morality. It led her to reconsider God. Let’s listen to her story:  Welcome to the Side B Stories Podcast, Leah. It’s so great to have you with me today.  Thank you so much for having me. Leah, so the audience knows who you are, a little bit about you, your education, why don’t you give us an idea of where you live. Are you married? Do you have children? Any of that.  Yeah. I grew up in New York. I went to Yale University, where I studied political science, and now I live in northern Virginia with my husband and our two daughters. Oh, wonderful! Wonderful. So let’s start back… You said that you were born or grew up in Long Island? Is that right?  That’s right. All right! So you’re from the big city. So why don’t you walk us back to the early part of your life and growing up. Tell me about your family, about your culture. Was God any part of that picture at all?  I’m from about 40 minutes by train outside the big city. So growing up, that was definitely a big part of my life. I’d go to the Museum of Natural History for my birthday almost every year. But my family wasn’t religious, and I grew up in a community that was mostly nonreligious. I think there probably were some people of faith in the surrounding community, but not in a way I noticed. I didn’t know anyone who believed in God personally that I knew of. So it just wasn’t part of your world at all. It was part of my world, in that I knew there were people who were Christians in the world, but not knowing any personally, that meant Christianity was mostly relevant to my life when it made the news, and that was usually in a bad way. Ah, ah. Yes. That seems to happen a lot, where Christianity gets a very uniquely distorted picture from the news and from the arts many times, and it sounds like you grew up in a very culturally enriched environment, but also heard, obviously, things from the news and that sort of thing about faith or Christians or Christianity. Did you say that you were raised a secular Jew?  My family is Jewish in our background, but it’s long enough since anyone practiced that we don’t remember the last person to practice. So my family was Jewish by heritage but not particularly in practice in any way. Okay, so it was more of a cultural, like affiliation, but you didn’t practice the high holy days or any of that.  No. The closest we got is that we watched the Shari Lewis Chanukah on TV, which I assumed everyone watched growing up, but I have the impression that may not be true. Okay. So growing up in this environment, you had religion, I guess, as part of the cultural background, and you had bits and pieces of religion in your culture, I guess, with regard to just what happened in the city or in your environment. What did you think religion was growing up? Obviously, it wasn’t for you or for your family. What was it in your mind?  I thought it was a mistake. I thought it was a mistake people held onto for a long time, in the same way you can have a theory of disease or a theory of physics that’s outmoded, but it takes a while for people to be comfortable with the truth that we understand better. You know, even in what you’d think of as a hard science, like astrophysics, there will be a long transition where people who are very invested in an old model of the world don’t find a new model satisfying. And that’s kind of what I thought Christians were, people who had a false model of the world and who were having trouble adjusting to a true, newer model. So it was an outmoded way of thinking about reality, about the world. Is that something that was informed, not only by your family, but by your education as well? Were you interested in the world of ideas? What shaped your thinking about all of that?  Absolutely! Well, I was a teenager during kind of the heyday of the New Atheists, of people like Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, etc., and I think a lot of the way they wrote was really focused on the threat of religion, the sense that religion wasn’t just wrong in a passive, ignorable way, but it changed people’s lives for the worse. It kind of focused on flash points of conflict, teaching evolution in public schools in some parts of the country, and that made it feel more urgent as an error to correct than just a different mistake people might make. That’s an interesting way of looking at it, because certainly the New Atheists were very strong in their rhetoric against religion, that it was a poisonous thing that needed to be extricated from society, that it was not good for, I guess, mankind or for the world. Did you affiliate basically with their ideas? Did you believe in the way that they believed in this anti-theist kind of way?  I definitely did. And I will say they pay religion a kind of compliment that people who don’t believe but are willing just to tolerate it don’t, which is that they think religion makes serious claims that matter, that change your life, and if the under-girding logic for those claims isn’t true, then those ways you’d change your life don’t work. And in some ways I find that, now as a Christian, still more respectful than just saying, as someone did to me after I converted, “Well, whatever makes you happy.” And I said, “I don’t care what makes me happy. I care what’s true, and I would hope that, as my friend, you’d care about that for me also.” Right. So truth was important for you, even as someone who especially as someone who was intellectually minded, who pursued not only your education in a serious way, but truth was very important to your life and the way you thought about things. Why don’t you talk with me a little bit about that, especially as you’re moving in towards higher education and how you made sense of reality in a sense? we all want to make sense of reality, intellectually, existentially, we want to embrace a worldview that makes sense of our worldview and of our world in a comprehensive way that matches with what we know and experience. And you are a very thoughtful kind of brilliant mind, I think, who was pursuing those kinds of things. So tell us a little bit about that. Walk us through who you were more intellectually.  Well, it’s funny because in some ways, looking back, I see the movement of the Holy Spirit in things like my math classes. Because math was a place where I was really getting to dig deeply into hard questions about what’s real. What’s at the bedrock of what’s real. That’s not always how math is taught, which is a shame, because math is a philosophical proposition, as well as a set of formulas. Its claims about how do we know what’s true? How can we best explore it? And I loved that! It felt urgent and exciting and beautiful and difficult. And it had that sense that it does take work. These questions aren’t easy to answer, but you can be part of a tradition that’s exploring them. You can have a shared set of tools, a shared way of deciding, “These are our axioms. Here’s how we can extend from them to figure out the next true thing we can uncover.” I think the core thing I got from mathematics, which then I brought to philosophy also, was that when we look for the truth, we’re like archaeologists. We’re uncovering something that’s already been laid out before us and trying to make sure we don’t damage it or misinterpret it as we pick it up. We’re not architects who get to build things to suit ourselves. Everything we receive is a gift. So you were not necessarily of the postmodern ilk of creating your own truth or believing in relative truth as it were, but rather you were discovering truth, like in mathematics. That it was something to be found and not something to be created. That is a very, I would say, intellectually honest pursuit towards truth, and really, in a sense, almost counter-cultural to what was happening in the postmodern world, but you speak of things like math, which was a little bit more, I guess, objective in its nature. But I’m curious, too, as you’re moving along, and I presume that you identified as an atheist. Is that right?  Absolutely. In your atheism, as someone who pursues truth, a pursuer of truth, did you look at the existential or even intellectual implications of your own worldview? As you were pursuing these kind of grander and almost abstract concepts in philosophy and in math, what about the existential implications of atheism and naturalism or materialism or whatever you worldview you embraced?  Well, this is where I found parts of the New Atheist movement a little dissatisfying. Because I’d say that a lot of the people participating in it in good faith were focused primarily on shoring up defenses against religion, or on arguing people out of religion. I think that came from a feeling of being very embattled in America, that people felt so under threat as atheists that there was no room for what you might think of as the luxury of expanding their own philosophy, articulating their own view. It was just about clearing space. But I felt we had some space, and that, if you were going to try to argue people out of religion, you had to argue them into something else. Being an atheist wasn’t my philosophical identity because you can’t simply not believe in something as your creed. What I was initially was someone who was a deontologist stoic. I was interested in an articulation of moral law that was really rules based, rather than outcome based. What’s the right thing to do, no matter what happens, and I cared a lot about what’s in my control? How do I not become attached to things that aren’t in my control and focus all my efforts on where I can make a difference? And so what was frustrating at the broader atheist movement is it didn’t seem interested enough in what I thought was the really fascinating question. I thought religion was a boring question, so I wanted more space to argue about how should we live our lives? Where do we acquire our sense of the good? How do we fight each other about where those senses differ, so that we can uncover the truth collaboratively, if pugilistically. Did you ever see any religious people engaging in a deep way in those kinds of discussions? If you got bits and pieces of religion based upon political or perhaps provocative statements or caricaturing in the wider culture, what did you think of Christians? And again, were they engaging in these kinds of deep discussions? Well, this is where I really lucked out. Because when I went to Yale I joined a political debating group that wasn’t what you might think of as a debate team, where you’re assigned sides at random and you’re kind of seeing how well you can argue for any given idea. This was a philosophical debating circle, where people were arguing only for what they actually believed, because the goal was to change people’s minds, and it was be terrible to argue so well for something you thought was false you changed someone’s mind to that! Yes.  And so that was where I was meeting really interesting, smart Christians, who obviously didn’t believe their faith just out of an obligation to their parents or unaware of questions people might ask about it. Some of them were also converts who had considered it and then cleaved to it, and I was given such a gift in spending every Thursday night and every Tuesday night—we met twice a week—arguing until late in the night about any kind of philosophical or ethical question and seeing how people thought about it. And what under-girded their philosophy. So were you surprised that there were serious-minded Christians who actually thought deeply about these things? Because I know, again, there’s oftentimes a negative stereotyping or caricaturing of who Christians are, and I wonder if any of those negative stereotypes were broken down by actually meeting someone who was so other than what you expected.  I was surprised. And I also had the benefit of learning the gap between what my Christian friends actually believed and some of the lowest common denominator rebuttals to Christianity that were prevalent among New Atheists. There were ways in which, as I talked to friends, especially Catholic friends, about, “Well, how do you sort out, if everyone has different interpretations of the Bible, how do you have any trust that you’re right?” What they articulated about the magisterium and tradition sounded more like what I was used to in mathematics. You know, we have a long history of how we interpret this. We have processes for adjudicating what’s right. Figuring out something new if someone poses a new question takes a while because we’re cautious about what we articulate as true because we have this deposit of faith it’s our duty to safeguard, not just kind of spout off about. So obviously, you were able to appreciate, I guess, with this meaningful debate, that the history of Christianity or belief in God has some substance and some longevity and some, I guess, long intentionality, that these concepts and ideas have been discussed and thought about for a long time now. Of course, that in and of itself doesn’t make it true, and you are a truth seeker. So I’m curious. As you were going through these debates on Thursday nights, was it making you question your own view of reality or truth? Or was it opening you towards some potential other explanations of reality?  I think one of the things that really changed for me is I didn’t think Christianity was self refuting, which is what I would have said, that the claims were incoherent. They didn’t hold together. That you had to ignore big gaps to remain a Christian if you looked at it. And instead, I didn’t think it was true, but gradually, especially through reading C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton, who both made a big difference to me. I thought of it as something that held together from the inside that I thought still was false, but it’s the difference almost between a well-written fantasy or sci-fi book, where you could imagine that that whole world works. It isn’t true. It isn’t where we live. We’re not in this intergalactic civilization, but it feels real, versus the ones that kind of feel thin, that the author didn’t think it all the way through. You can’t imagine the story could continue outside the confines of the book because it isn’t well thought through. It isn’t a full, rich world. And Christianity shifted for me from being one of those kind of schlock y books to being something that could work if it were true. And there were even parts I found attractive about it, but I didn’t think it was true, and I could never believe in something, no matter how well constructed, if it wasn’t founded on truth. And meanwhile, my own atheism, as I explored it, as I tussled with my friends, it had gaps. It had questions it didn’t answer well, but there was nothing in it I thought was false, so I kind of had the juxtaposition of what you almost might think of as a beautiful, filigreed clock, all put together very well, with centuries of labor, to see how you can get the pieces to inter-mesh, that wasn’t on, that wasn’t running, that wasn’t true, animated by something true, and that was Catholicism. And then on the other hand, I had this patchwork sail with big rents in it and ugly seams, and that was my atheism, but there was nothing in it I didn’t believe. And I figured I had a great deal of the rest of my life to try and make sure I kept working on it and filled in the gaps. Now, this patchwork sail. You said that there were some rented areas, I guess you could say, of fabric that were a little bit more difficult to take, or really, I guess, understand. Or unanswered questions. Were there any that were so unsettling that it caused you to look beyond atheism? I mean, at the time, it sounds like you really believed that it was true. It just wasn’t perhaps as comprehensive of an explanation as you wanted. What were the tears in the fabric for you? I think one of the unsettling things was when I moved beyond what I said. Deontology was where I started. A sense of what are the rules? How do you derive these rules? And a certain belief you can derive them logically. You can follow something like the categorical imperative. Whatever I do has to be something I could will for everyone to do. It can’t be a special rule just for me. But I found that that wasn’t as satisfying as I wanted, in part because I realized—and this is partly my own faults and my own sinfulness at the time—because I cared so much about doing the right thing, especially when it was hardest, I found that I was sort of rooting for other people to be bad, so that I could be best! Because it doesn’t feel like there’s as much virtue in being kind to someone who’s kind to you. It feels more satisfying to go, “I’m extremely kind to someone who is unpleasant to me.” And so I wanted to be able to distinguish my virtue in a way that I realized didn’t work. Didn’t work according to the very standards that I cared about, of universalizing things, of not treating myself as a special moral actor. And I wound up more and more attracted to the claims of virtue ethics, which, instead of kind of starting from a rule book and just how well can I follow the rules, says, “How well can I become the person I am meant to be?” It’s a teleological view. It’s aimed at something. It doesn’t require that morality is something that’s so hard but we do it anyway. It says, in some senses, what I’m made for. And I read a book, After Virtue, by Alasdair Macintyre, that was making this case. It was very moving. I was so excited. I took it, at the time, to the Catholic friend I was most often talking about these questions with, and I said, “Well, this is what I believe. This is what I want to work on as an atheist,” and he said, “Well, you know Macintyre became Catholic, right? He didn’t find that this worked.” And I was so mad, at Macintyre specifically. For giving up. And I was like, “Well, I’m not going to wuss out like Macintyre did. I’m going to keep developing this theory of virtue ethics as an atheist.” Of course, you know where this ended up for me also. So how far along did you go along that trail? Of really trying to kick against the goads as it were? It strikes me funny, too. You speak of, especially in your deontology, that it didn’t feel good to be kind to someone who was just kind to you, but you wanted to be able to love your enemies, or something to that effect. I wonder if Jesus’ ethics even came into that somewhere along the way. It’s like, “Wow! It sounds like your desires were something along the lines of the difficult ethics of Jesus.”  I think you’re giving me too much credit, though, because of course when you love your enemy, you love your enemy for their sake, or even for God’s sake, for loving them the way God’s loves them. But I wanted to love them in the sense of, and then I will be so strong. It’s almost virtuous bench pressing, right? Like loving my enemies is bench pressing 500 pounds, and I want to do that. I don’t just want to love nice people, so it’s just the bar, empty. Right, right. So, again, you were frustrated that Macintyre actually relented in some way, that he betrayed you in some way and became a Catholic, a believer in God. So then you wanted to become this stalwart defender of virtue ethics. So where did that take you?  Well, so ultimately it took me to what felt like, not a dead end, but a wall I couldn’t see my way past. Something I had to build something new or uncover something new to get over. And that problem was that, if virtue ethics is teleological, if it’s aimed at something, the question is, “Where do I get the sense of who I’m meant to be?” This sense of the final end of man. That’s a different way of framing morality than just, “Let me think logically about what’s fair to everyone.” And that was where I got stuck. Because it felt like morality was a lot like math, which is how I’d felt the whole time in some way. It was real. It was separate from me. It was transcendent. And the question was: How do I come to have knowledge of it? For math, I didn’t think it was that weird. You’ll find people who disagree, but I found the old kind of Plato explanation pretty satisfying. I can look around the world. I can see my two hands. I can see my two shoes, and go, “Well, my hands and my shoes are of different types, but there’s something that’s the same about them, and it’s that there’s two of each of them. There’s some separate thing that they participate in, and it’s bigger than them. It’s the concept of two itself.” And I found this satisfying for math. You can kind of sneak your way that way into getting the natural numbers, and then if you have the natural numbers, one, two, three, etc., you can get to basically anywhere else in math from there. It just takes a really long time. But it felt like there was a foundation. These things are different than the physical world. I can see them in the physical world, but they’re more than just that. And when it came to morality, I didn’t have a good way to get there. I thought, “I can claim that I’m doing it the same way.” I can say, “Well, I see someone defrauding an old woman, and I see someone kicking a puppy, and I go, ‘How are these things alike? They both participate in the form of injustice.’” And I think they do, but I don’t think that’s how I work it out. And I couldn’t say with a straight face that was how. The numbers are a lot more obvious than injustice. It didn’t feel like I worked it out by comparing, “How are these things similar?” but like I already knew something about injustice and recognized it in each of them. And the problem was, “How do I know?” “How do I, someone who’s not transcendent, come to have knowledge of the transcendent?”  So that was a conundrum for you. A turning point or a pivoting because, when you’re dealing with these transcendent concepts and realities, like you say, that’s one thing, and as you’re speaking, too, I’m also thinking the teleological nature even of virtue ethics, it’s going somewhere. And that also is a transcendently grounded kind of concept even, rather than things just are.  Exactly. There’s an ought-ness. There’s a way things ought to be. And that’s how we know how to go from A to B, or that we’re getting better, in a sense, or progressing. So I can see, from an atheistic perspective, your worldview breaking down. Somehow these tears and rents are getting larger and more difficult for you. So was this a turning point then, at which you said, “Okay, there has to be a transcendent source. There has to be something more, someone more.”  Well, it’s kind of funny because it was a… This was the thing that made a turning point possible, but that was kind of a simmering problem. I thought, “I’ll just keep reading. I’ll keep discussing. I’ll see what I can do with this,” and then the bigger moment that this was laying the groundwork for kind of came when I was back at college, after I’d graduated, for an alumni debate. And I just had such a strange feeling while I was there. We weren’t debating a topic related specifically to religion. But I could tell that I sounded like the Catholics, even though they were on different sides of the resolution. It wasn’t that they all believed the same thing. It was a topic like “resolve nationalize the curriculum.” It was something that’s prudential. People can be on different sides. But what they were appealing to and the way they reasoned all sounded similar. They were part of one conversation, and so was I! Which was weird! And I could tell, kind of, if you came into the room and didn’t know anything about religion, and you were just trying to group people in the room based on, “Who sounds like they agree on the fundamentals here?” that I was with them, and this bothered me. I bet!  So after the debate, it kept bothering me, and we were having a toasting session, where we make toasts, we pass around a big cup, and I just had the impulse that I should toast the Nicene creed and become Catholic. And that didn’t really make any sense to me, and I thought out, “Well, that’s crazy. Because first of all, I don’t think I know the whole Nicene creed by heart. Second of all, I think toasting the Nicene creed at a debating event is actually not how you become Catholic. Of course, you go through a process of RCIA, and if I were going to become Catholic, I should do it in a Catholic way, not in a weird debate culture way. And third, I don’t believe in God.” And come to think of it, three should have really been one. I don’t know what that was doing as last on my list. And that night, I gave some other cop-out toast. I was just troubled by this. And what was worst is, three months later, I came back for another alumni debate. We have them a lot because we’re all weirdos. And the same thing was happening to me during the debate, that same feeling of which side I was on. So I skipped toasting. I didn’t want to go to toasting. Because I thought, “I don’t want the same stupid problem again.” And so I kind of laid out for him what I’ve been talking to you about, this problem of, “I’m more certain that morality is transcendent. I’m not willing to let go of that, but I can’t articulate how I come to have knowledge of it, and that’s where I’m stuck.” And so did he, through your conversation, help you resolve this? Or come to a place of awareness or decision?  Well, what was great is that, I’d been talking through what I talked through with you, that sense of, “Well, I have this feeling about how this can work for math and not about how it works for ethics,” and Ben said, finally, “Well, you’ve kind of gone over with me what doesn’t work for you, but there doesn’t feel like there’s any point in wallowing in that, or continuing to explore it. No matter what, you need to think of something new. So if it’s not that kind of platonic ladder building up, what do you want to think about next?” And I’d spent so much time kind of working the problem over and over in the same place, that that space of freedom to just think of something else… I said, without really thinking about it, “I guess morality just loves me or something.” That’s an unusual statement.  It is! And Ben looked pretty pleased when I said it, but I really needed a second then, to sit with it. I’d said it, but did I believe it? And the more I sat with it, the more I did, that if there’s something I have that I can’t reach myself, then I can’t give up the truth that I hold. The question is, “How do I have it?” If I can’t build something up, then it must’ve com e down to me. And once I’m talking about morality that way, I can’t be talking about some kind of inert rule book, because a rule book doesn’t move, right? I’m talking about the form of the good no longer just as a static form, but as an agent, something that acts. And so once I’m talking about goodness itself in some sense as a being that acts, that not just acts or moves but loves, that does this for me. I could recognize who was talking about. Goodness itself lowering Himself to take the form of the slave for my sake personally, for yours personally. I knew I was talking about God and not in some broad encyclopedia entry of God, but I was talking about the incarnation. Well, that’s a tremendous shift. I mean, that realization that morality loves. I would say that that was a major shift in your understanding and even acceptance of that new way of really looking at the source of morality itself. So I presume that was a turning point for you.  It was. The next morning was the first time I ever went to church as someone who believed it was true. I’d gone with friends in college, so I wasn’t unfamiliar with it, but that night with Ben was the night before Palm Sunday, and so then I went to church the next day believing that it was God there on the altar, that we were talking about historical truths of what had happened in the entrance into Jerusalem and then what happened after that. That was kind of the conversion of heart of coming to believe that God was, but the preparation to enter the church and kind of the constant conversion that makes up anyone’s life is now not just believing that God is, but knowing Him, spending time with Him, developing a friendship with Him, in a way that even I, as a big math enthusiast, can’t say that I have a personal relationship with the Pythagorean theorem. That was really a big shift also. From, as an atheist, wrestling with the question of God as an intellectual proposition, versus, once that had been settled, coming to know Him. So as a truth seeker you not only pursued truth as a proposition but truth as a person now, it sounds like. But now you’ve somehow embraced a story which some, I guess, atheists would say, “Well, it’s still not real, and it’s still not true,” but for you it sounds like it is. That it is the true story of reality. Is that what I’m hearing from you?  Well, except that I would never say, “For me, it’s true.” What’s true is true for everyone. What changed wasn’t what was true for me but what I understood about the world, but everything that’s true was already true. It’s just a question of whether I know about it yet. Oh, oh. That’s wonderful. Well, this has been a very insightful conversation. I think your conversion from atheism to Christianity is obviously very intellectual, but it’s also very, very personal. As we’re wrapping up, because it sounds like you’ve had a tremendous life change but that there are also very skeptical intellectual atheists who are listening to this podcast. If you had something to say to them in terms of their own pursuit of what is true, what words would you have to offer for them?  I think the encouraging thing is it’s always worth pursuing what’s true and that you can turn to your friends as a way of exploring ideas, of really delving into tough questions in a way that will strengthen your friendship. I was friends with a great number of Catholics before I converted. I’m still friends with a number of people who aren’t. And in all those cases, as long as we were arguing with the sense of we both love the truth and we want to live in the truth together, exploring those questions made us closer friends. It didn’t pull us apart. I think there’s a real maturity and grace that comes with that ability to discuss and to debate even ideas without it being a negative exercise, and you obviously have the grace and the intellect to be able to do that well, and I think we can all learn from you in that. And for the Christians who are listening, obviously we can all take a cue from what you just said to the skeptic, but did you want to add anything with regard to how you would encourage Christians to engage with atheists or nonbelievers? In a sense, Ben did a beautiful job, I think, in leading you to think more deeply about your own ideas. What would you say to the Christian?  I think it’s to be confident that God is working in everyone’s life and is calling them by name. And in my case, that calling didn’t look like a calling to church for me. It looked like an interest in mathematics, but looking for wherever your friend is ardently pursuing the good, the true, and the beautiful, strengthening that desire, and then really not so much trying to divert them from that but to say, “I have something even more to offer you.” I wanted to know what was good and what was true. And I didn’t think there was a person behind it. I would have been satisfied with a rule book! And the surprise is that God is always responding to our desires for something bigger and better than what we think we’re pursing when we aren’t pursuing Him. That’s really wonderful. Well, Leah, thank you again so much for giving of your time and telling us your story, and I know that there are some ways that, when people are listening, they’ll want to know more or hear more about you, and we will include some of those contact points in our episode notes. If you want to add something here, you’re more than welcome.  Yeah, so after I converted, I had that conversion of the intellect, I did write a book, Arriving at Amen, that’s more about the conversion of heart that followed, of learning to pray, learning to think with God instead of just to think about God. And then, a little while after that, I’ve written a second book called, Building the Benedict Option, and that’s about building deeper Christian community wherever you are. Something you can do in the next 4-6 weeks, not something that has to wait for everything in your life to be settled. Those sound like wonderful resources, and we will definitely include those in the episode notes, as well as any websites or connections with you. Thank you again, Leah, for coming on. It’s been a true blessing.  Thank you so much for having me. Oh, you’re welcome. Thanks for tuning in to Side B Stories to hear Leah’s story. You can find out more about Leah by visiting her website at www.leahlibresco.com. We’ll include this website, along with her books, in our episode notes. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can reach me by email at info@sidebstories.com. I hope you enjoyed it, that you’ll rate, subscribe, and share this podcast with your friends and social network. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where another skeptic will flip the record of their life. 

Former atheist Stacy Gleiss traveled across the world and explored worldviews and philosophies until she finally found what was true, good, and beautiful in Christianity.   Stacy’s Philosophy Group: Philosophy in the Forest: http://philosophyintheforest.com   Authors and Books recommended by Stacy: Soren Kierkegaard Lee Strobel, The Case for Christ C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy Episode Transcript Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to the Side B Stories podcast, where we see how someone flips the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to a former skeptic or atheist who unexpectedly became a Christian. On the surface, in a world without God life seems so free. Someone can live without constraints of religion and morality without someone or someone telling you who you are or who you ought to be. You can dream and idealize. You can create and recreate yourself and your identity, your own meaning and your own purpose, pursuing it on your own terms. You can design yourself in your own life, free from criticism or control except for yourself.  It’s called expressive individualism. But oftentimes the underbelly of this pursuit begins to show. The idealism begins to crumble, and the dreams begin to fade. Satisfaction fades to that which is elusive and fleeting. Temporary pleasure erodes into long-term pain. Poor choices result in deep pain and regret. Perhaps we are not the best judge after all. Perhaps our identity and our ideal cannot be found in what we want or what we think is best for ourselves. After all, identity is fragile if it’s based upon our own passing whims and desires. Meaning becomes meaningless if it’s only determined by what we create or deem important. Temporary pursuits gratify for the moment, but lasting satisfaction seems an ever-elusive dream. As one of the wisest men who ever lived said, it’s like chasing after the wind, and we know that when we sow the wind, we often reap a whirlwind. We cannot run from ourselves and our own brokenness.  Our story today touches on these personal realities. Searching for identity and meaning and purpose on her own terms, yet finding herself in dark realities and desperate places. Is there something more than this, Someone who can provide a life that is true and good and beautiful?  Let’s listen to Stacy tell her story of moving from darkness to light, from a kind of death to life that is truly life. Welcome to Side B Stories, Stacy, it’s so great to have you with me today.  Well, thank you for the opportunity. I’m really happy to be talking to you today. Wonderful. It’s great to have you. So our listeners know a little bit about you, Stacy, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself.  Well, my husband and I live in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, which is the northernmost part, so it’s very cold, and we enjoy a lot of outdoor sports, fishing, hunting, hiking, and so on, and a lot of my time is spent with a tiny house mission center called Philosophy in the Forest. Well, that sounds intriguing, and I would like to come back to that a little bit later and find out more about what Philosophy in the Forest is. So why don’t we get started with your story. Were you raised in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Has that upper Midwest region of the US been your home since you were a child? Where did you begin your life? And tell us a little bit about your family, whether or not there was any religious belief or anything associated with that?  Yes. So I grew up in Michigan, in lower Michigan, the lower peninsula, the mitten part, as they say, and I lived on my grandfather’s farm for a good bit of the time. We lived in a rural area. We were not religious. My parents did not talk about God. I don’t even think we owned a Bible. So I didn’t have a religious upbringing, but when I was about 12, my family joined the Mormon church, so we went from 0 to 100, you know? Because that’s a very active, involved faith. There must have been a strong Mormon community around you, I’m guessing? Is that how your family got acclimated or involved with the Mormon church?  No, actually it was pretty rare when I was a child. There weren’t that many Mormons around, but my aunts, my father’s sisters, had joined the church at a certain point, and they kind of brought missionaries around us. Oh, I see. So you had some influence of Mormonism in your life, and I’ll explore that in a moment, but did you have any historical or orthodox Christianity or any form of Christianity around you at all? You said you grew up without much reference to God in your family, but I wonder in your friendships, relationships, in your culture, was there much of Christianity around you?  Not that I sensed really. I mean, there’s churches everywhere, and you kind of have an idea that a lot of people are Christian, but I didn’t really have any interactions with that until we became Mormon. Okay. So like you said, back to this Mormon faith, I know that Mormonism does require quite a fully orbed belonging, as well as belief. How long were you and your family in the Mormon faith, and is it something that you embraced personally?  Well, first I think my parents may have been in about five years, but I left the church a little earlier than they did. First of all, for me, as far as beliefs, I didn’t believe it. Instinctively, there’s such a concentration on Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon that you don’t get enough about Jesus and God, which they do talk about, but it’s kind of overridden by Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon, so I knew that there wasn’t an ancient people living in North America. Pretty much American Indians came here first, so I knew instinctively it wasn’t true, but I was going for social reasons and kind of putting up with it because Mormon kids were nice, nicer than the average kids that I grew up with or were in my school. And I had a lot of rejection issues because of a disfiguring accident when I was five, so the Mormon kids were nicer, and I liked the activities, so on that front, it was good. On the truth front, not so good. Okay. So it was a great placing of belonging and building friendships and relationships but not so much in terms of substance of belief.  True. So even through all of that, belief in a real God or Jesus or anything just wasn’t even on the radar? No. But you said that your family left after five years and you left before that. What caused you to leave if it was a good place of belonging?  Well, it was kind of accidental. It was kind of a passive exit, I guess. It was a casualty of a change in my life that happened when I was 16. I went on a cultural exchange trip to Japan. I became very infatuated with the culture. I saw it as a place of acceptance and meaning, and there was a layer of spirituality with Buddhism there that I thought was interesting, and so I became infatuated with it, and I was quite determined to live there, to the degree that I married a Japanese man at 18. Okay. Well, that’s a major pivot in your life.  It is. When you’re moving from American culture to the Japanese culture, I’m sure there’s quite a lot of cultural adaptation, much less expectations as a wife, and then also you mentioned the spiritual aspect of Japan, which is a lot more Eastern in its influence. Let’s start with the spiritual influence there. You moved from a very kind of Western understanding of a potential for a Judeo-Christian God, but you moved into an environment in which it was, in many religions, even godless. You mentioned Buddhism and that you married someone. Did his family embrace that kind of Eastern religion or spirituality?  Yes. So you mentioned about the change from a Judeo-Christian American culture. I traded in my culture really not knowing very much, so it was pretty challenging, so whatever I’m telling you wasn’t immediately obvious. I saw all the interesting things about Japan and the acceptance, and I just jumped headlong in, and then I would learn more about the faith. For example, it seems like Buddhism is more of an over layer to their culture. It’s more recent for them. Because their ancient worldview is more feudalistic, honor, shame, the typical things you might think of, and then also a paganistic polytheism, so that’s kind of the under worldview, and then the over worldview has the Buddhist elements, which are a little more, I think, peaceful feeling in a way. And calm. Meditation and everything you might think of with Buddhism. Did you embrace that personally?  I think I would have liked to get involved with Buddhism a bit. His parents were definitely Buddhist, and he said he was Buddhist, but he never practiced it. He didn’t pray at the altars or the temples, so sometimes I would sneak in and pray for something at the family altar or at a temple, kind of say a quick prayer for acceptance and for understanding of what it was I was facing, spiritually and otherwise. But he never did those things. And I would come to learn that he had more of an older, ancient culture perspective, the guilt/shame culture and that kind of thing. He was very proud of their warring history, so he really liked that underside and kind of mocked, actually, any spirituality. So that came to affect me, obviously. I felt acceptance from his parents and from the neighbors, actually, but a lot of rejection in the home, under that kind of underside of the culture, which is more guilt/shame, I guess. I would imagine that would be quite difficult, in terms of coming from the individualism and freedom associated in the US, particularly the rise even of feminism, and you’re talking about the eighties, so a lot of that had happened in that time, and when you go to a culture like Japan, where things aren’t quite the same, I would imagine that would’ve been challenging in your life. Did you stay in Japan for very long? You said you moved back to the US.  Yeah. We didn’t stay in Japan as long as I thought we were going to. So we ended up coming back to the US, and then I had children, but even here in Michigan, downstate, especially in the eighties and early nineties, there were large pockets of Japanese families here to support the automotive industry, and we lived in a pocket like that, so our house was always run the Japanese way, according to the culture. There was no duality. The worldview was according to the older Japanese culture and then plus atheism, which my husband was clearly atheist, I would figure out over time. That he just didn’t like any spirituality at all. So that was our worldview in our home, Japanese culture plus older Japanese culture plus atheism, basically, and I came to feel that way, that there was no God. What did you think, in terms of what you had around you… Granted you lived in a culturally saturated Japanese environment, and your life and your lifestyle at that point was probably really engrossed in that, and you didn’t believe in God, and that was a perfectly obviously acceptable point of view within your family and your surrounding culture. I wonder, did you ever give a thought to God, even as an adult? What did you think religious belief was? Was it a construction? Was it something that was just culturally constructed for people to gather, like the Mormons? Yeah. I think that that Mormon start kind of had an effect there, too, whereby I thought, “Okay, the Book of Mormon and Joseph Smith, those stories are just not true,” and that’s kind of modeled after the Bible in a way, and the Christian culture, so I thought probably that’s also not true, and it seemed like a crutch as well, so I was pretty ingrained in my atheism by the time… The marriage lasted 14 years, well two years engagement and then 12 years together, so… yeah. By the time I left, I was a full-blown atheist, and on top of that, I had studied existential philosophy near the end of my marriage, and although Christian philosophers come into play there, like Anselm, Augustine, and Kierkegaard, their cases were kind of downplayed. Every time we would get to those particular areas of study, they seemed to be downplayed, and there were so many dominant atheists in the mix in existentialism. So it kind of further backed what I had come to believe. So you became convinced, more than ever, that there really was not God. That it was just probably a construction of sorts, a social construction.  Yes. And if I could mention how it felt to me. Yes.  What it felt like was I was living in kind of a challenging household culturally and belief wise and with the guilt, shame, and all that, and the rejection, so what it felt like to me, by the time I graduated with my degree in philosophy, was that I lived in a box, this cultural box, and below me was like a false floor, like it was an un up-ended cardboard box, and I was going to fall through, and there was nothing but a black hole abyss under me. And then it also felt like… I thought there should be something above or some hope, some sky, some daylight, and I couldn’t sense that, either, so that kind of feeling caused me to lose a lot. It caused me to lose my… I left the marriage abruptly. I kind of lost my way in my mind, and I lost my children. And so it was tough. That sounds devastating, devastating. I suppose that, as a thinker… If you are studying philosophy, you think about things critically and existentially, and of course, the endpoint of a nihilistic worldview can be very despairing. There is not much in the way of hope and life and light there, according to those who are proponents of that, those philosophers. And so it sounds like you really hit an endpoint or a point of, again, existential angst because of the logical endpoint of your views.  Yeah. Ideas do have consequences. They don’t just live in your mind. They actually affect your life, and I would imagine that could be very devastating, especially in the fact that you’re losing your marriage and your children and you’re losing your own way. So it sounds like the bottom had dropped out for you, and you found yourself in a very dark place, a despairing place. So walk us on from there. What happened during that time period? Or what brought you out of that?    So you just kind of took some steps forward. All the while still embracing an atheistic worldview? Or naturalistic or materialistic worldview, as someone would be more prone to say.  Yes. That’s right. So my husband was, I said, American, and normal meat and potatoes guy, outdoors-man, and he told me he was Christian, and then I asked him why, because now I’d had a husband who told me he was Buddhist and found out he wasn’t Buddhist. I said, “Okay, so you’re a Christian. What does that mean?” He had no idea. He just said, “Oh, I just believe. I was baptized.” So okay, well, then, I guess I’ll just stay with what I have, but I suppose during my move to this small town, of course now I was seeing more churches. They were popping up into my purview. My coworkers were all American now. So I got this sense, and I think it was a pretty Christian town actually, and I got the sense that Americans were really nice and tolerant and forgiving, and that wasn’t the version of the Japanese culture I got. I got the older version. So I was feeling pretty good about that, and they were probably having an influence on me. The catalyst for my change, I think, was Sally. This woman whom I met over the phone accidentally. That’s quite a story on its own. Yes. That begs some curiosity. So an accidental meeting on the phone. You met a woman named Sally. I presume she was a Christian?  Yes. That’s right. Just like I was finding most of the people around me were Christian, or a good portion. So Sally was from another state altogether. She was from California, and I’m in Michigan. So we met accidentally. She was an older woman, and she witnessed to me. We became pals by phone and letter. I didn’t really go for anything she said, but shortly after I met her, a really dark secret came to light, and Sally was there for me. So I guess that meant a lot. Obviously, you had developed a relationship, a friendship with this woman who seemed to have a faith in God, in Christianity, and it sounds like she cared for you at a time when you actually really needed it. And that opened you? Did that soften you to the things that she was saying about God?  No. No. Okay.  No, it didn’t. So this dark secret was really, really not good at all, and it involved my daughter. She never… I had two children. My son I regained custody of, but my daughter never came back. She was so broken from my leaving and from my breakdown that she wouldn’t come back to me or spend time with me. So this dark secret was revealed by her, and it really turned my world upside down. And my friend Sally sent me a Bible right after she heard about it, and inside the Bible, it had this note, this sticky note which is still there to this day. It says, “This book will contain all the help you need.” And it contained scripture. I paid no attention to it. Two more years would pass. I’d lose touch with Sally, because she ended up in a nursing home, and she had no relatives whatsoever, so I lost track of her. But between the Christians I lived around and Sally and this burden now of this guilt over my daughter’s situation… Well, I saw a church one day that had a sign that said, “Got Jesus?” or something to that effect and had a class. It mentioned a class. I went online, signed up for it, and that was Alpha. My goal was to disprove the faith, so that I could get Sally and the other voices, whatever they were, out of my mind and then maybe I might try Buddhism again. I might try to understand that better because I never got a chance with that. So you walked into a church. You had had some experience with church. It was just the Mormon church. What was your experience when you first walked into a Christian church and opened the Bible for the first time?  Well, the people were all really nice. And the Alpha presentation was tolerable, understandable, kind of nice sounding, and so I stuck with it until… I almost dropped out at about the 11th or 12th week, though. There was a lesson on forgiveness, and having been in a Japanese culture for so long, I just had this sense that I have to carry the weight of the things I do wrong on my back all the time. It’s kind of like sackcloth and ashes or something. I have to do this. So I didn’t like that. I told them I didn’t like it. I thought it was a ridiculous idea that Christ would bear that, and then a member of the group, the church, gave me The Case for Christ book, and I read it, devoured it, and came out thinking, “This is probably true,” and kind of, “Now what?” So the Alpha course is really presenting an overview of the Bible and the story of God. Who is God? Who are we in our humanity? Obviously, they talked about the need for forgiveness and how we carry some sin, and you wanted to hold onto the burden of your own guilt, and the gospel, or the good news, is that Jesus wants to carry your burden of sin for you, so that you can receive forgiveness for what he did on the cross, rather than what you’ve done to try to remedy your own guilt or sin. But that was too tough to take for you.  Yes. So it just didn’t make sense. So you left there, but then you found intellectual confirmation or something that was satisfying for you to believe that it’s true, but there’s a real difference between believing a person came in history and did something on your behalf and actually accepting it personally, and it sounds like there was a great divide there for you.  Well, it took me a couple of weeks to think, “Now, what do I do?” Because it was, I guess, that offense. The offense of the cross. Am I going to be able to accept that? And so a couple of weeks later, I was at a funeral, my husband’s uncle, whom I didn’t know very well, but I found myself sobbing inside during the whole thing, like something deeply touched me in a way that I can’t even explain today. But when we left, I turned to my husband and I said, “I think I’m Christian,” and I began… At the funeral party, I remember witnessing to other people. “I think I just turned Christian at your father’s funeral.” And they were glad for that because he was a Christian man, so that was kind of interesting. Yeah. So I guess the pieces came together. You were able to see your own need and accept His gift for you of salvation.  Yes and no. Okay.  So that’s kind of a bump in the road that I came to, still. I thought… So here we are. My husband and I start going to church. I get baptized in Lake Michigan. Life is better. I feel a little relief. I could sleep better. But the bump in the road is that I still retained, unwittingly, a lot of control. That I had to fix things. I had to make things better. Constant. And then, this particularly became an issue when, about five years after I became a Christian in 2010, so it was about 2016, my daughter, who had been back in my life for then about nine years, abruptly left, estranged me. There were a lot of reasons. I hadn’t handled her brokenness well enough, I felt, and she felt that way. So there was still a harshness. I didn’t say this, but there was a harshness to me from being in that culture, a lot of rough edges, and when I accepted Christ at that funeral, my image is the Grinch, like the heart, the little heart that’s in the cage, like the heart’s growing and busting out. So some of those edges smoothed, but it was probably too late, and I still did not give all of my guilt to God. And I realized that… So she was gone. My husband and I moved up here to our second home here in the Upper Peninsula, where there’s a lot of nature, and there was more time. I didn’t work full time then. And I began to be outside a lot, just walked miles. I walked 10, 13 miles a day, just talking it out with God, and eventually would get so much insight and vision that, while I believed, the fact that I wouldn’t give over my children, and I still idolized my children so much, and I wouldn’t give up the control I needed to keep all the balls in the air and everything right, that that was showing I didn’t trust the gift. I didn’t trust God. And so my belief was too shallow. It was almost… I envisioned like Abraham and Isaac, like I had to say, “No matter what, I believe, and I trust you with these most precious things to me.” So that was the bump in the road that ended up deepening my faith. And that allowed the guilt to almost be completely gone, and then it allowed me to feel joyful and do what I’m doing today. So that’s where I’m at with that. Yeah. It’s such an oxymoron, isn’t it? The more we surrender and the more that we give, the more joy that we feel, and that’s certainly the case with God and our humanity. We want to retain control. It’s just something that we have to lay down almost daily, almost moment by moment. It is a constant struggle, and it sounds like you had a real, real deep challenge with that, and I’m glad to hear that you’ve learned, in a sense, the joy but the difficulty of surrender. I’m curious—Stacy, you said that you have come to a place where you are today which is a lot more firm in your faith and your life and the life of your mind coalesce more, and you mentioned at the beginning that you actually have a place, a house of ministry where you talk about philosophy. Now I’m curious because, at the beginning, you were really invested and believed in the existential philosophers, and you felt the despair of nihilism, but there were some philosophers that were put off to the side, you had exposure to, but you really, at that point in your life, had not embraced. I’m curious, then. After you became a Christ follower, you believed in God and Christ and a different worldview altogether, did those philosophers resurface in your life? And how was philosophy really re-framed in your mind in terms of how you see truth and reality and how it applies to your life, and then what you’re doing now with it to help others understand really philosophies talking about the big questions that we all ask about life. Talk with me about how you were able to put those pieces together.  I’ll try to summarize that. That’s kind of a big one. So it’ll be almost two years ago now, a year and a half, I started the Colson Fellowship Program. I felt a need to study more. I hadn’t had so much time when I was working full time, and I felt the need to study my faith more and go deeper with it, so at the same time, I wanted to be better at defending the faith for my children. My son still communicates with me, and he’s not a believer, and he has a lot of nihilistic thinking. Both of my children suffered quite a bit. So it was important to me to study apologetics. I felt such, as a young person, such a need for meaning in my life, and Kierkegaard has the stages along life’s way that show a human being’s kind of progression from what they call a mass-man to a knight of faith. There’s this over-arching paradigm. And so I used that to identify people that I encounter, I guess. So here in the forest, there are all kinds of people, just like there are in the cities or anywhere else. There’s believers. There’s marginal believers. There’s spiritual but not religious. There’s transcendental worldview folks. There’s atheists. We have them all right here in the forest. We have a microcosm of what’s everywhere. So I used Kierkegaard’s system, these stages upon life’s way, to understand where they are with the meaning of life and where their worldview, along with kind of a worldview survey that I have—I run that through my mind technically. I typically don’t ask them to take it, but they may, and I kind of identify where they are. But this is a lot of relationship building. This isn’t like I bring somebody in and I’m like a spiritual counselor. This is relationship building with people. That’s where philosophy’s a little more relaxed, I think, as a term. They don’t come in expecting I’m going to hit them over the head with my Christianity or my worldview. It’s very open and very soft entry. I call it pre evangelism. But not only do I use Kierkegaard’s philosophy in what I do, but I also use C.S. Lewis. So in order to get to the truth, it feels like the good and the beautiful, which I love G.K. Chesterton for his take on beauty, and I use a lot of his stuff as well. So the good and the beautiful lead one to the truth, I believe. That’s easy to show when you’re up here in such a beautiful place. So I kind of use all of that to bring people to the truth which they can base their meaning of life on and gain fidelity of belief. No. It really sounds intriguing, and I imagine you foster a great deal of very deep and meaningful discussion, very insightful discussion, and how wonderful that you lead people towards self-introspection, towards introspection of their own views, but also views about reality and leading them to a place of being able to see, perhaps for the first time, what really is good and beautiful, and ultimately true. So it sounds like a really wonderful and very unique work, and it’s intriguing, and I know that you have actually a website, don’t you? Philosophyintheforest.com?  I do. Yes. And so anyone who’s interested in seeing more of Stacy’s work can certainly go online and take a look. So Stacy, as a former atheist—for years, you were an atheist. How old were you when you became a Christian, by the way?  Well, I became Mormon, if that counts. Mormon was 12, but Christian was… I think I was 46? 46. Yeah. So you lived a good long time really looking at the world through atheist eyes.  Yes. And I wonder if those who are skeptics or who are actually looking at the big questions, maybe even struggling in their own sense of nihilism, I wondered how you would advise a skeptic, who might be listening today.  Oh, the skeptic. I would say to the skeptic that—and this is Kierkegaardian of me, I suppose, but the most important thing for the existing individual is to find the meaning of life, the reason for which we should live and die. And without that, we’re living precariously. We can’t know the absolute truth. We can reason our way close to an approximated truth, but we cannot know the absolute this side of eternity. Therefore, the individual needs to get as close as possible, and in order to do that, it takes investigation. It takes thoughtful investigation. But also it takes taking a step back and understanding what the higher truths are of this world. You can find them, those things which are good that we know are ultimate goods. And those things which are clearly beautiful. And build upon that to get to as close to the truth as possible. And then, from there, you need to think about, “Is there a litmus test for this or that view that I’m looking at? That I’m thinking will hold up this goodness and beauty?” Look at the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and find out whether it’s true or not. And I would challenge them to do that in an open-minded way, and if they find that it’s true, then they need to go with that. That’s what I say to the skeptic. You’ve got to get rid of your bias. You’ve got to be open minded and investigate, and The Case for Christ book is a good book for that part of it. Mere Christianity is good for talking about the good. And I love G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy for the nature and the beauty and the joy that that brings us. So that’s what I recommend for the skeptic. Yeah, I like what you’re saying there. There’s something called abductive reasoning, where we reason to the best explanation for reality. It may not be certainty, but we look at everything holistically, and we look at a cumulative case for what we see and experience, and it leads us to truth, really. Like you say, we all have certain biases, but we try the best we can to look at things in a neutral point of view or through a neutral lens. Again, that’s not absolutely possible, but we do the best we can to look and find actually the person who is truth, and like you say, it stands and falls really on the person of Christ. So that big question is, “Who do you say that I am?” He asks. He asks that of all of us.  So in terms of your advice to Christians who might be listening, what would you say to Christians in terms of how they would engage someone who’s skeptical?  Yes. Very important. I’m glad you asked that question. Because it’s a struggle out there. A lot of Christians struggle to do that, to share the gospel, and I’ve found that, number one, I have to be approachable, and before I just had all these rough edges and stuff, even when I first became Christian. So the joy that I found by giving the control over to God more and more and more, that relief is so incredible, and that gives me joy, which makes me approachable. So be approachable. Be joyful, really joyful. I don’t mean just say, I’m going to be happy today. It’s different. You’ll know if you don’t know now. And second, I would say be a listener. Make relationships. Both my husband and I have a lot of relationships in our neighborhood, and our neighborhood is big in terms of miles because there’s very few people, so you live five miles away from somebody, you know who they are. So we make a lot of relationships, and I think, in our minds, we have a little gauge—I wouldn’t tell them this exactly, but where they are with their worldview, if they have a worldview—well, everybody does to a degree, but how strong is their worldview? How embedded in that? How knowledgeable are they about it? And kind of gauge that through relationship. And then, third, I would say find an opening to bring in the good and the beautiful, and for that, I recommended a couple of books. Mere Christianity and Orthodoxy as good reads. Sometimes difficult but really helpful. So find that opening, because today people really want the good, and they’re very skeptical of you saying you have the truth. Naturally. So the good and the beautiful are really keys. And keep encouraging them and telling them that our meaning in life really is to face that difficult topic, that the meaning of life is very important for them to grasp, so that they can have a firm foundation, like I have. So that’s what I’d tell them. Yeah, that’s very good, and if I could just add one more question onto that, just a natural outflow of what you’re telling us as Christians and the importance of meaning, and I think meaning is really on the surface of culture these days. People are searching for meaning. So, in your life, if someone said, “Well, how is your life meaningful?” or, “What is the meaning that drives you in your life?” “Have you found that source of meaning that moves you every day?” How would you define meaning or your quest for meaning or the manifestation of meaning in your life?  My meaning isn’t based on any man-made culture. It’s not based on anything man-made or circumstance. My meaning is based on a God Who loves me, Who delights in me. He finds me delightful, and when I’m joyful, He finds me really delightful. He rescued me because He delighted in me. That’s the meaning of my life, is I know my God wanted me. And it makes sense. He’s an artist. Obviously, he’s an artist. He wants all kinds of crazy people, really. He wants all kinds. So I’ve been through all of this, and I have a meaning. All of this has had a meaning. As tragic as some of it has been, but it has a meaning and a purpose. And I’m there to delight my Lord as much as possible, as much as humanly possible. Yes. To know and be known by God. And to make Him known- Yes. … is what you’re saying that you have found. You’ve been found by the Creator of the universe. But I would imagine that that really fuels your life. It sounds like it does.  It does! It drives me hard. Because I want to help so many people, and I find my time is very taken up by that relationship building piece now, and… yeah. It’s unbelievable, really. Yeah. So you want others to find the joy and the peace and the meaning that you have found.  Yes. This is a beautiful story! It is good, and it is beautiful. And it’s true!  It is. And your story points to all of those things, Stacy. So I just want to thank you for coming on and really revealing some very deep things about yourself, some very hard things, but pointing us all to really think, as a philosopher would, to make us think about our own lives and how we view those big and deep questions. And I hope that everyone who’s listening to this will be more thoughtful and intentional about pursuing those big questions and actually pursuing the person of Christ, where all of that lies.  So thank you so much, Stacy, for coming on today.  Thank you. Thanks for tuning in to Side B Stories to hear Stacy’s journey from atheism to God and Christianity. You can find out more about her group, Philosophy in the Forest, in the episode notes. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can reach me by email at thesidebpodcast@cslewisinstitute.org. If you enjoyed it, I hope you’ll follow and share this podcast with your friends and social network. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll see how another skeptic flips the record of their life.   Stacy’s Books: “The Mind Hike: Finding Meaning Through Truth-Seeking” https://amzn.to/3h8rAJo “The Six-Foot Bonsai: A Soul Lost in the Land of the Rising Sun” https://amzn.to/3vcX6xZ     For more stories of atheist conversions to Christianity, visit www.sidebstories.com

Former atheist Guillaume Bignon set out on a quest to disprove Christianity and was surprised by what he found. Guillaume’s Book: Confessions of a French Atheist: How God Hijacked My Quest to Disprove the Christian Faith Guillaume’s Twitter: @theoloGUI Website featuring Guillaume’s work: https://www.associationaxiome.com To hear more stories about former skeptics and atheists who became Christians, visit www.sidebstories.com Episode Transcript Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who is a former atheist who, against all odds, became a Christian. Our beliefs, religious or not, are shaped within a context of place and people and events. We tend to believe the ideas of the people we like, that fit in with how people around us view the world. Most beliefs are not tested but rather assumed. Caught, not taught. And then shaped to fit into our individual understanding and experience of the world. According to many in Western culture, belief in God has nothing to do with their lives. More than that, to believe in God is not only irrelevant but embarrassing. It’s social or intellectual suicide. The scientifically minded don’t believe in God, in the supernatural, in the superstitious. Besides all of that, it constrains your lifestyle. For the happy atheist, there’s no felt need or desire for God. They’re just fine navigating life on their own. This begs the question: For someone like that, what would change their mind? Why switch course and change and turn in God’s direction? For the former atheist in our story today, life could not be going any better. As a sophisticated thinker, a successful businessman, an esteemed athlete and musician, Guillaume was also an avowed atheist. But he unexpectedly came to believe that God was not only deeply relevant to his life but was the source and center of life itself. In fact, he now holds a doctorate in theological philosophy, discussing issues of reality and of God. How in the world did that happen? I hope you’ll come along with me today to listen and to find out. Welcome to the Side B Podcast, Guillaume. It’s so great to have you with me today! Thanks for having me, Jana. It’s a pleasure. Wonderful. Why don’t you give us a sense of who you are right now, where you live, a little bit about your life before we go back into your story? Yes. So as my accent really betrays, I am French, but I do live in the United States now. That was kind of part of my story of how I went from France to the US, but yes, I grew up in France, near Paris. Today, I am the US. I have lived for many years in New York, or in the New York area, and I have just now recently moved to Virginia with my wife and five young children, so the five young children explain the move away from New York. We are in a little bit more of a peaceful area in Virginia. I am an engineering manager. I work in information technology, and in my spare time, I am a philosopher and apologist, so I engage in topics around the Christian faith, philosophical theology, and all sorts of related matters. It sounds like you’ve got a very, very full life. For sure. Five children! My hat’s off to you, though. What a blessing that must be! But a busy life, no doubt. So you were telling me, through that self-introduction, that you grew up around the Paris area in France, and I want for you to take us back there to your childhood. Give us a sense of what that looked like growing up. Was there any sense of religious belief in that culture and in the culture of your home and even in your own life? Yes. So as a young child, I grew up in France near Paris, in the suburbs, in a very loving family. I have an older brother and a younger sister, and the three of us had a wonderful family with our parents, and as far as religious beliefs are concerned, we are at least nominally Roman Catholic. I mean I didn’t really get very invested personally in this. It was more of an inconvenience than anything else, something that we just did, maybe out of tradition and maybe a little bit of superstition, but not really a very strong life conviction, at least not for us children. So that was kind of my environment. But that’s not something that lasted for very long because, when we grew up and were given a bit more freedom, my parents didn’t force us to continue attending church, and we very soon decided that this was not really for us, and so we were able to—I mean I say we because my brother went a couple of years before me, but I followed along, and we simply stopped going to church, and at least my life as an atheist at that point didn’t really differ much from what I had always believed or done. It just that I no longer had to go to church on Sunday morning, so that was just an initial inoculation to religion and then the departure and not much of a life radical change as a result. You fairly quickly said that you just moved into atheism, like it was a default position. And it sounds like you did that as a teenager, I presume, and I wondered: Was that just a presumption that you made? Was there any intellectual thought or investigation towards a naturalistic point of view? How did that happen? It happened fairly naturally. Again, in France, I think this is a little bit in the air we breathe. It seems like a default position indeed, not believing in religion, and we just… God is not really an entity. It’s not even a question. So it’s not a topic that we spend too much time thinking about. And so, no. That was just, “Okay. If we are done with religion, then I guess let’s live without God, and this is fine.” And there wasn’t all that many other alternatives or options. I wasn’t considering another religion, and so there was just default, and this is how I figured I would live my life. So did you give naturalism much thought in terms of its implications for your life? Or were you just fine without God, and that was pretty much all you thought about it? No. I mean I certainly started to believe there was nothing beyond the natural world. Whether there were any important philosophical consequences from that belief is not something that I really asked myself at that time. I simply figured that I didn’t need God. I didn’t need Him to be happy and to have a good, full life, and so I simply ceased going to church, and I focused on my own projects and trying to live a happy life, and I sought for happiness in a number of avenues that seemed fun and right to me. I was playing volleyball at that time. I was very engaged in sports, so I was having fun and became good after late puberty and ended up growing pretty fast and being big and jumping high, so I ended up having fun playing volleyball, and I ended up playing in the national level, so traveling the country on the weekends to play the games, trying to have fun and just seek for happiness in that area. I was also playing music. I played the piano when I was little and then got into playing the keyboard and started to play in a band and writing my own music, playing in concerts, so I was trying to live the dream of being a rock star in my own world. And I studied math, physics, and engineering, and so I sought to have a solid job and a good income, and I ended up graduating from engineering school and then starting to work as a computer engineer in the financial industry. So I figured this was stability and income, and I had volleyball and music to have a range of enjoyments of this life to seek my own happiness. So it sounds like you really had life by the tail. It sounds like, from almost every perspective, that you were successful. You were athletic. You were a musician. You were brilliant. You studied and achieved at a level, and that you were working. So it causes one to pause and say, “Wow! If life is going so well, and I’m sitting with you talking about God and your belief in God, how in the world did that happen?” What was the catalyst that turned your head or turned your mind or your heart to become open towards even the possibility of God? Yeah. Well, besides the volleyball and music, as far as avenues to seek my own fulfillment and happiness, for a young atheist in France of my age, there was one other goal that I very much was running after, and it was women. And so I was very much seeking feminine conquests and trying to have enough material to satisfy the banter of the locker room in the volleyball games, and so I had a pretty rough history of relationships and treating women very much poorly. A lot of cheating and a lot of… just very… lying and deception and simply self-enjoyment and fulfillment. And that’s another area that was instrumental in me being converted by Christianity again because it happened very fortuitously, while on vacation, I was in the Caribbean with my brother. We were visiting my uncle. And there was a very serendipitous meeting, on a day where we were on the distant beach, where we didn’t have a car to come back home, and somehow we decided to hitchhike our way back home, and after a few seconds of hitchhiking, there was a small car that stopped with two American women in it. One was from New York. The other one was from Miami. They were both very attractive. One of them was a former model, and the car that stopped didn’t stop to pick us up. They stopped to ask for directions. They were lost on their way from the airport to their hotel, but as it so happened their hotel was right next door to the house that we were staying at, so when they told us that, we said, “Well, that’s great! We’ll tell you where it is if you’ll pick us up and drive us there,” and they hesitated for a second and then eventually we got in. And we started talking, and I immediately went into seduction mode and trying to connect and trying to see them again, and the French accent kicked in, and the seduction worked out decently, because they gave us their room number again and made plans to see us again while on the island. And so we did go and see them and showed them a good time on the island, and on the day where we were on the beach, I pretty much made the move, and I was now in a relationship with one of them. And I was fairly hopeful that this would be a bit more serious than just an island romance because it was a very romantic situation. She was really exceptional. And so I… Yeah. Well, I was hopeful it would lead to something more. The problem is that, in conversation with her on the beach, I found out a couple of pretty devastating news. One was that she claimed to believe that God exists. She said she was a Christian. And to me at that point that was clearly an intellectual suicide. I did not have any respect anymore for belief in God. And the other piece that she mentioned was that, alongside her belief in Christianity, that included a belief in abstinence before marriage, and that was really not what I wanted, and so those two things were extremely problematic at the time. So that was how I got converted by Christianity, by having to say, “If I want this to work with her, I’m going to have to disabuse her of her beliefs about religion first and then about the sexual ethics that come with it, as a very important piece for us to be together.” And so I still… With anybody else, those beliefs would have made me run away with no questions asked. I bet. But she was special enough that, when I went back to Paris, and she flew back to New York, I decided to try to work it out as a long-distance relationship and that her religious beliefs would have to take care of themselves, and that we would work it out. Wow. So you were distanced not only geographically, you were across the world, but you had quite a distance in your beliefs. So that, I would imagine, would cause a lot of problems, but for whatever reason, it opened the door to investigate a little bit more closely what belief in God meant. So what did that look like? Take us on from there. Sure. So I went back to France, and here I was in this extremely problematic long-distance relationship, and I thought if I’m going to have to convince her to stop religion and to be with me and happy, I would have at least to explain to her, to give her some good reasons, right? To use my common sense and explain to her why this is silly to believe in God, but I realized if I was going to refute her beliefs, I needed to at least understand what she even believed, and I realized I had very little knowledge of what Christianity was even about, so I did pick up a Bible that was left in my closet and dusted it off like Aladdin’s lamp, and I started to look at it and see if I could glean some of the very distant memories I had of Christianity, but I very quickly realized that I really had no knowledge at all, and it was something that we would need to figure out together because it was foreign to me. So I figured, “We’ll discuss those things when we see each other,” and that’s something that we organized fairly quickly after the vacation. We did make plans for her to come visit in France, and so she came, and I got to see that religion was going to be clearly the center of the problem, that it was a very real thing for her. A couple of things really concerned me: One is that apparently her pastor was the one who was dropping her off at the airport and picking her up, and to me, that rang some sort of alarm bells, like, “Oh, what is going on with the pastor there? Is this some sort of a cult like I’ve seen in documentaries?” And the other is that she apparently had been given the address of a church in Paris to visit, and to me, that seemed completely unnecessary. Could she not skip a few Sundays of not going to church while she’s with me in France? So it was problematic. The fact that she had somehow the need to get the address of a church in Paris was concerning to me. So she came to Paris, and this is where we started to talk a little bit about our potential future, and I asked her if her religion could be… I was trying to take it slowly and to ask her, before I tried to convince her to stop religion altogether, I figured, “Well, I’ll at least start with a degree of openness,” and I said, “Well, if I never change my mind, would you be okay to be married with an atheist?” I thought it would be a bit of a longer conversation, but she very casually almost said, “Oh, no! Absolutely not. That wouldn’t work out.” And I was shocked. Like what kind of intolerant belief that here I was almost ready to make a concession that she could be a religious person and she was not ready for me to be an atheist. So I said, “Well, this is nonsense. That means it’s not going to work,” and it was kind of a tense evening. And then she was really upset that I was this close minded, and she said, “Well, why won’t you even hear any of what I have to say? Some of my reasons. Why are you so closed minded?” And I realized I was really not open to that, and so that launched me into a little bit more of a thinking about, “Okay, let me hear the other side. Let me understand what you’re believing and then think about it for myself, so that I can actually see what we’re dealing with and I can refute it on solid grounds,” but not just on a whim or ignorant of what she actually believed. That’s kind of the turning point there in terms of my getting ready to investigate those things seriously. So when you were investigating, then, or when you started the process, it sounds like you wanted to take down her beliefs. I’m curious, even just getting started with the investigation, you tried to move to a little bit more openness to respect her and her beliefs and try to figure those out. Would you see it as a movement towards disproving, rather than true investigation? In terms of a neutral perspective. I know none of us are neutral. We all have biases, but how would you judge your own motives and perspective at that time? Yeah. I mean, I think it was a progressive change in terms of openness. I certainly started as a very negative project because I just wanted to remove that barrier between unsuccessful, and I couldn’t stand the idea of religion. I felt I had wasted enough time in my childhood with this nonsense, and I had no intention of really giving much more time to that activity. So I was certainly not willing, but I was also trying to be fair to whatever it is that she believed, so that I could give it a fair hearing and actually use my common sense to refute it, but at least refute something accurately. And then, at the same time, there was also a part inside of me that thought, “Look, if I’m going to take this seriously, if I’m going to investigate and actually think about it somewhat objectively, then I need to force myself to be a bit open,” and I also didn’t want any of my desires to influence this reflection one way or the other, because yes, I didn’t want religion at all, and so that could force me to just refute it even if I don’t have a good case against it, but there was also the real possibility that, if she was not open to changing her mind, that maybe I could be motivated because of her to now, all of a sudden, say, “Oh, yeah, yeah, sure. That’s true,” but that’s going to be just to make it work with her. And it was very clear to me that neither of those scenarios was positive, was desirable. If I were to believe all these beliefs, it would have to be based on the truth, not be based on my desires to be with her or not. So there was kind of that approach to objectivity, trying to force myself to be somewhat neutral, even though I was aware there were influences on both sides that would be irrelevant and that needed to be kept outside of my reasoning. So you were, as best you could, pursuing truth as the most important thing? I think yes, as best I could. None of us is fully objective, but I think this was a concern, to think about this properly and figure it out. Yeah, yeah. So walk us through that. How did you start to begin this process? Yes. So the first thing I did is that I actually opened that Bible and started to read the New Testament for myself to get an idea, finally, as a young adult of what it actually says. Because I had memories of my childhood, time spent in the church pews, bored every Sunday morning, and when I took the Bible, I expected to find in there some of the boring platitudes that I remembered from my childhood. And here, it was a very different experience, reading the New Testament, reading the gospels for myself, this description of the life and ministry of Jesus. The Person of Jesus, when I started reading about Him as a young adult, was very captivating. I thought I was confronted with a very compelling character, a very smart teacher, a master with words who navigated masterfully through conversations, who was constantly winning the exchanges when people came to try to entrap Him and to catch Him in his words, and He would always masterfully navigate those conversations. He was teaching with a sense of authority, saying that the kingdom of God had come in His ministry and that he was the Son of God. He claimed all sorts of big things and was just a very compelling character. So it tasted nothing like I remembered from my childhood, and it made me a little bit uncomfortable. I wasn’t too sure what to make with that Jesus. And who was also morally impressive, that he was able to humble Himself and wash the feet of His disciples and just present a compelling picture, so I was very captivated by the person of Jesus I was reading in the New Testament. Yeah, I think it’s often surprising. Someone has an idea of who they think Jesus is from some cultural reference or from a picture or a painting they saw as a child or whatever, and then once they started reading themselves, the scripture, what they find is something so much more robust or impressive or intelligent or stronger than they had thought in their own mind, and it sounds like you were very surprised and, like you say, captivated by the person of Jesus. Yep. So that was one piece here in my investigation, to be confronted with the real Jesus of the New Testament and to find Him really compelling. Another piece is that I tried to be somewhat open and did something that, in retrospect, was probably mistake number one, or mistake number two, but I thought, “Look, if any of this is true and I’m going to give it a fair hearing, then that means that there’s a God who would be looking at me doing this right now and would probably be interested in the fact that I’m looking into it,” so I started to pray as an unbeliever, just somewhat… I mean I saw this as an experiment. I was a scientist, and I was an engineer, so I figured, “Let me do the experiment, and say, ‘Okay, I don’t believe there’s a God, but if there is one, go ahead and reveal Yourself to me. I’m open.'” And so that was kind of the next move, unbelieving prayer, which, in retrospect, as a Christian now, I very much say, “Well, this was clearly not a lost prayer,” but it’s just a move that I did, and that’s just about all I had for that investigation just on the moment. I couldn’t really end up in church even if I wanted to because, at that time, I was playing volleyball in the national league, and every weekend, I was traveling around the country to play the games, and it’s just that, shortly after I prayed that unbelieving prayer, there’s something that happened out of the blue is that I developed an injury on my right shoulder. And it’s not something that came from an accident or anything very explainable, just out of the blue it started to hurt. The shoulder would be inflamed, and in ten, fifteen minutes after the beginning of each practice, I just couldn’t spike anymore, and I was just unable to play, and the doctor really couldn’t see what was going on. The physical therapist tried to help, and that didn’t really do it. And they were basically saying, “Look, we don’t really know, but you’re going to need to rest that shoulder, so you need to stop volleyball for a few weeks, and we’ll reconvene.” And so, against my will, I was now off of volleyball courts for a number of weeks, and so I figured, since I’ve been reflecting on this Christianity thing and trying to figure out what she was about, what I did is I went on my computer, and I recollected the address of the church that she had been given when she visited me. She had opened it on my computer, so I was able to go and get the address again without telling her, and I figured, “I’m going to go and see what those Christians do when they get together, just to get an idea,” and so I picked up that address, and I drove to that church in Paris, and once again, it was shortly after I got my own apartment, thankfully, because clearly if I had still been with my family, I could never have justified my going to church, but now I was isolated, by myself, off of volleyball courts, and I had the address, so I went. And I drove to that church in Paris, and the way I would describe it is that I went there like I would go to the zoo, to see some weird, exotic animals I had heard of but never seen in real life. And so I walked into that church, and it was very awkward because I was constantly thinking that this was already an offense against my intellect to be even present in the building, and that if any of my family or friends could see me there I would die of shame. But nevertheless, I walked into the church and observed some of the differences between that church and the Catholic church of my childhood. But I was touched by some of the genuineness of the people. Again, all of this was very awkward and felt strange to me, but some of them were praying, and it really looked like they were actually talking to a God who they thought was there. It wasn’t rehearsed or recited prayers, like I was used to. And they genuinely believed that stuff. And so I sat down, and I just watched the service. The music was modern, and as a musician, I was interested in the talent of the musicians but clearly couldn’t sing the lyrics with their religious nature. And the sermon was an interesting piece. I don’t remember a word that the preacher said on that Sunday morning. Maybe I was just too focused on my feeling of being ashamed of being in the building and what would happen if anyone saw me there, but I don’t remember what he said. But the sermon ended, and I thought, “I’ve seen enough. I’ve got what I came to see, let me escape now so that I don’t have to introduce myself to anybody and don’t have to connect,” so I don’t make eye contact with anyone, and I just jump on my feet and walked to the back of the church to escape. And this is when I opened the door to leave, and I literally had one foot out the door, and there’s a big blast of chills that just started in my stomach and went up in my chest and grabbed me by the throat, and I was frozen on the doorstep. With goosebumps. And I heard myself thinking, “This is ridiculous. I have to figure it out.” And so I completely turned around. I closed the door, and I walked straight to the head pastor, and I introduced myself. And I said, “So you believe in God, huh?” “Well, yes.” And I said, “Well, how does that work?” and he offered that we should talk about it if I was willing to make an appointment with him. And so I did. And years later he told me that he didn’t really believe that I would actually come, but I said, “All right. Fine. I’ll be there, and I’ll come, and we’ll chat.” And this is how a long series of conversations started with this pastor in France. His name was Robert. He was American, but he had been a missionary in France for many years. And I showed up to his office on that day and started to unpack my questions. I told him about my situation, what I was looking into, and we started talking about Christianity. Were you letting your girlfriend know? You said you kind of went there without her knowledge for the first time, but were you communicating with her about what you were reading in the Bible? What you were experienced? What you experienced that day at the church? Yeah. A little bit of that. It seems fuzzy. I mean it’s many years ago, so I’m not super clear on the details of what transpired. After a while, I did tell her that I did go to that church and then there was this conversation, but somehow I kept things very separate in my mind. It was really all about my thinking and investigation of those things, and she was somewhat out of that. I started the conversation with that pastor, Robert, in France, and it started to be more about our exchange together than really anything that I would do with or without my girlfriend at the time. So it was really just an independent investigation, it sounds like, you and the pastor. Yeah. That’s how I recall it. Yeah. Yeah, so we started talking, and I asked some of my previous questions, and he would not necessarily engage in what we would call apologetics, and I don’t know that he offered really positive arguments in favor of Christianity, but he was explaining, at least within his own worldview, the coherence of his beliefs, and that was impressive enough already for me at the time, that there was somebody who was actually willing to answer questions and explain his beliefs about God. And he seemed to really believe it, I guess. There was no doubt. This was not a facade. He really believed this stuff. He gave me one little booklet that was very interesting of him. He gave me a little booklet that he had written with a number of questions and then the Bible references for me to go and find out the answer for myself. So that was kind of an introduction to some of his Christian beliefs, and I did this, so I took that little booklet of his and went home, started to open the Bible and go and get those answers and write them down, and then every answer led to more questions on my side, so I wrote all of my questions on those papers, and this would fuel the next conversation when I went to see him again and could ask those questions, which led to more questions, so it quickly turned into a pile of paper with lots of questions, and this is what drove our exchange. And through these conversations and my own reading of the Bible and my own thinking, there’s a number of areas, a number of topics, on which I came to simply realize I was mistaken and to quite significantly change my mind, and… yeah. So some of those topics were my view of the supernatural, miracles, and whether it was intellectual suicide to believe that there was something beyond the natural world. Another one was my view of science and the role that science needs to play in our beliefs and justifying our beliefs and our knowledge of the world. Another one was my view of sex and Christian ethics around relationships and marriage. And another one was my view of knowledge and what it takes to know something. And then my view of salvation. So that’s five areas in which I really had a significant shift, that’s supernatural, science, sex, knowledge, and salvation. Those are quite big areas. Especially for someone who was an atheist, an avowed atheist, all of your life. Especially, like you say, the very first one, just the reality of the supernatural. That’s a really tremendously big issue. Either the natural world is all that exists or there’s something more than the natural world. How did you come to believe or accept that there was something more than the natural world? Did it come through reading the Bible? Or was it more, like you say, apologetics-related things? What convinced you there? Yeah. So here, the shift wasn’t immediately that I believed that something beyond nature existed. My shift… I was starting from a bit farther down. My shift was to simply accept that one could believe that and not be stupid. That was a little bit of a shift, but that was something that I was confronted by Robert, that in front of me was this guy who was clearly educated, who was smart, who was not emotionally unstable, wasn’t trying to use religion to compensate for some weakness, and he genuinely believes that there’s a God and that Jesus was raised from the dead and that miracles are actually possible and happening. So the beginning of the shift here was to simply say, “Okay, what’s going on with that?” that somebody could not commit intellectual suicide but actually believe those things. So I was confronted by Robert’s existence, and then I also realized there’s actually lots of smart people who believe that there’s more to the world than just nature in motion. So it wasn’t that I embraced the supernatural just quite yet, but I placed it on the map by realizing some people can actually affirm it, and it’s not like I had a solid argument for why that couldn’t be, right? So I figured this was just a possibility and started to respect that a bit. So that was my shift on the supernatural at that point. The shift on science was simply realizing that I had somewhat assumed that science would be at the center of all this, and I was a scientist myself. I studied physics, engineering, science, and biology, and I figured science is how you know things about the world. And then I reflected and tried to see, “Well, what have I learned in all of my engineering studies of science? What do I know that actually conflicts with the existence of God?” And it was an important step because I hadn’t really sat down and actually given much thought as to what counts for or against God’s existence, and for the first time, I realized that, for all of my scientific pretensions, little of my scientific knowledge was even relevant to the question. Certainly none of what I had learned or knew about science was a refutation of the existence of God. So that shift on science simply said, “Well, probably this is probably not the most relevant consideration,” and I realized that there’s plenty of things that we know in life that are just not based on science. That’s just not how we know things. And I figured that maybe God’s existence and the truth of Christianity would be in that category of things that we can possibly know, but it’s not going to be based on science itself. And now today, as a philosopher, I realize that this is absolutely basic, right? The idea that science is the only way to know things is very sophomoric. It’s really a bad idea. And these tons of counter examples, and it’s even self-refuting. So that’s really not a good philosophical view, but that’s one that I came to surrender in my own thinking about those matters. So if I am working down through that list again of topics, the next one, I suppose, was sex and the Christian ethics around that. And here, that was a minefield because I was clearly bent on not accepting the idea that abstinence was a good idea before marriage. And here the progressive shift that happened is that Robert was able to paint a picture that was more attractive, that there was something genuine about his understanding, so he was able to defend the Christian view as one where God is designing marriage. He’s the Creator of the world, and He’s in a good position to tell us some of the good conditions for us to engage in sex. And surely I didn’t like that picture myself, and this is not what I was planning, but there was an internal consistency once again, and there was also some degree of appeal from a more traditional and more conservative view of relationships and sexuality. I myself had this long past and long history of terrible treatment of women and cheating and lies, and this was not good, and so there was a part of me that was ready to contemplate that maybe the more conservative ethic on that front would be actually refreshing. But not all the way to that Christian belief. So there was a bit of back and forth there. And one piece that he was very helpful at was that I was also concerned that the Christian view of relationships like that had also some intolerant aspect to it, which was, “You should not marry a non-Christian,” right? To me, that seemed intolerant. And that Robert was very helpful in clarifying. Look, there’s actually plenty of good wisdom in that. If belief in God and Christianity is very central, which it should be for a Christian, then this makes good sense to say that your spouse, who is going to be the most important person in your life on this planet, shares the most fundamental beliefs about life. Otherwise, your marriage just doesn’t stand a chance. So that, I understood, was no longer intolerant. It made good sense. And he was able to defuse that. Yeah. So your girlfriend’s statements about not being willing to marry an atheist, I guess, was making more sense to you at that point? Yeah. Yeah, yeah.  So you said also the issue of knowledge was something that you had to work out? Yeah. And so this was a bit later on, and this is a piece that was really a turning point there. When I started to realize that the Christian view was making much more sense than I had hoped it would and that I was starting to suspect this actually… I don’t really have much of a case against it. And I was starting to wonder, “What do I make of this Jesus character as well?” At least I never really bought the idea that Jesus was a fictional character. It seemed clear to me that He was a person steeped in history, that minimally He was this teacher in Palestine in the first century who gathered lots of people and clearly had an impact such that the world is still very much at least influenced by His teachings and lots of His followers. So I was really unclear, and I was starting to wonder what would happen if this would actually be true and if my life should have to confront a change, a radical change, in beliefs. And I continued to have those unbelieving prayers and trying to see, “Okay. Well, I’m starting to see that there’s room for Christianity to be true. I’m curious if God really is there, could He reveal this more powerfully to me, in ways that would really convince me, would make me certain.” Because if there’s one thing that I didn’t want to do it was I didn’t want to just believe, have blind faith. I really wanted to be quite confident that what I embraced or what I concluded would be the truth, and this is one piece where I realized my view of knowledge and the expectations that I had in terms of certainty were also misguided. So what I really hoped for was that I would have absolute certainty, that there would be really strong grounds for an irrefutable belief in God if that were where I landed, and I realized that this was a very unrealistic expectation, that there’s lots of things that we know in life that we don’t have absolute certainty for, but there’s one category of knowledge that’s very respectable and very important to us, and it’s simply testimony, that we could be knowing things simply on the basis that somebody else who knows it told us. And it sounds a bit silly, but there’s tons of very important things that we know like that. I know my name. I know my date of birth. I know what happened on the day I was born. I know lots of things, not because I have proof or certainty of any sort, simply because somebody who knew told me this was true. And so that was an important intellectual shift when I started to contemplate Christianity and it started to make sense, and I was starting to suspect this might actually be true and it would be a huge deal. I realized that my expectations in terms of knowledge were unreasonable, and I realized there’s lots of things that we know simply on the basis of a testimony, and I started to see the gospels that I was reading as pretty much satisfying that criteria, of testimony, realizing this is actually comparable to a testimony of people who were there, who said, “This is what we’ve seen. We’ve spent this time with this Jesus. Here’s what He said. Here’s what He’s done.” And obviously the story of His being crucified and His allegedly raising from the dead. So obviously there’s the supernatural aspect in there, and then there’s the question of whether or not that testimony is reliable, but I came to see that this was similar to the claim that somebody has seen something, they tell me, and now I know. So I came to appreciate the reliability of that testimony to come to the knowledge of what happened to Jesus, of who He was, and what He did, allegedly rose from the dead. And obviously, we don’t want this… You know, it shouldn’t be simplistic, like somebody says something, and now we just believe it, and we’re gullible because we just take everything. No. You don’t get knowledge just because somebody says it. It has to be a reliable source. And so that question is whether or not the gospels are reliable as a testimony to what Jesus said and did, and the important point here again, when we look at what I was considering at the time, is that I wasn’t aware of all the scholarly debates around the reliability of the scriptures like I am now, because it’s my interest, but at that time, I was still convinced that I didn’t need to know all of those objections in order to form a justified knowledge about what Jesus said and did. So at the time, this is pretty much where I landed. I saw the testimony of the gospels as reliable, as telling me what happened, and intellectually, it seemed like, yes, that made sense, and I could trust that this was the truth about what happened in history. So that was the last very strong intellectual shift where I changed my mind in terms of the truth of this happening. But that doesn’t make me a Christian quite yet, because there’s the final shift that needed to happen, and it’s the shift of heart more than the shift of mind. And that’s the part where I came to understand the message of salvation. And so this is another piece that happened concurrently to all of my reflections, is that, through all of this study and my prayers started to become like, “God, again, if You’re there, really show Yourself powerfully,” and I was hoping for God to just open the heavens and shine the light and say [CROSSTALK 49:01]. But what he did was very different, but it was very powerful, too, is that he reactivated my conscience, and it was very unpleasant because what happened is that I had come to commit some really nasty stuff. I had essentially cheated on my girlfriend multiple times and in aggravating circumstances, and so I’ll spare you the details, but basically I had done all of this stuff, and I had obviously covered it with lots of lies, and I was lying to myself as well, and in my experience of asking God to reveal Himself to me, He simply just took that and shoved it in my face, and I was just afflicted with guilt. I could only see what I had done, my own sins, and it was very crippling. And it’s in the midst of this pain that the message that I had been reading all along, the message that I had actually had a very hard time understanding intellectually, finally clicked. I had been reading, that Jesus died on the cross for us, but I hadn’t really made the connection. I couldn’t see, like, “What’s the connection between Jesus dying on the cross and me, my life as a Christian if I were to become one?” And it’s in that area of pain when my conscience was reactivated that I realized, “Yes. This is why Jesus had to die. Me. He paid the penalty for my sins. Those very ones here that I can’t stop seeing, that I’m crippled with guilt about,” and I realized this is now the good news that this text has been proclaiming, that I can repent of my sins and simply trust in Jesus, and because of His sacrifice on the cross, He can forgive me freely, and I would have eternal life freely on the basis of my faith in Him and not on the basis of my righteousness. And that message hit me like a ton of brick. And so this is really the shift that happened in the heart, as much as in the mind, where I was willing, and I said, “Yes. That’s the one. Okay. Lord, You’re real. This has happened. Take my life and save me,” and there was a very strong spiritual renewal. My guilt evaporated. I was literally born again, quite literally. It was a very significant change emotionally, spiritually about that. I felt like I had encountered the living God and that my sins, that had become very real to me, were now forgiven because of what Jesus had done. Wow! That’s quite something. It sounds like, although you began this search, obviously, to see if it was true, but you not only found that it was not only true but real and real, not only intellectually but real for your life, for your person, for your soul. And I can’t imagine the shift, the juxtaposition that you must have experienced. How long was this process? How long did this take you? It sounded like you were quite on an intentional journey. From the time that I met Robert on that infamous Sunday morning to the time that I actually embrace the good news, it was a number of months. It was probably less than six months. But yes, several months, and the final piece is that, when I finally was convicted and realized this was the real deal, it was just at the right time that I was planning to go, for the first time, to visit my girlfriend in New York. And so this was an extremely conflicting moment, because I felt like I had believed that this was the truth, but now I needed to confess my own sins to her. And I figured that… I was extremely conflicted because all the advice that I had been given was, “You don’t need to mention any of this. It’s done, so just be happy with her.” That was not the advice that Robert gave me, obviously, because I didn’t tell him any of this before I went to New York, but my friends had given me this advice, to simply not say anything, and inside of me, my conscience was very activated, and I thought, “There’s no way I can build a relationship with a lie,” so I was confused. I went there, and I discovered New York. We had a very intense week, and towards the end, I finally caved in, and I did confess all of my sins and figured, like, “This is going to break us up, and this is going to be over, but at least I will live in the light, and I will be able to walk according to my conscience.” So this was extremely painful. She took it very negatively, and that was just before I was leaving, so I flew back to Paris, and I thought we were done for. Well, I knew, except that when I walked out of the airport in Paris, there was a message on my phone that she still wanted to try and forgive me and to make it work. And so at that point started a period of me trying to make it work with her. And I had thought, “God has been using all of this to bring me to faith,” so I was ready to make the jump, and what I did is that I took steps to basically turn my life around. I left everything in France, and so I quit my volleyball team. I quit my band. I quit my job. I found a job in Wall Street because I was working in finance, so that worked out quite well. And then I moved to the US to be with her and to just have this new life. And so I was full of hope and emotions, and then I arrived, and then this is where the story takes another turn, which is that our relationship turned out to be really bad. We were not meant for each other at all, and it took me a number of months to accept that truth, but all of this was not for us to be together, and so we actually broke up after that. And this is the place where I was starting to wonder, “Well, okay, God. What are You up to? This is what I get when I turn my life around?” And so I was in New York with very few social connections and no volleyball team, no band, just my job, and all of my evenings and weekends were just free, and this is just about the time that I started to have to answer questions from my family and friends in France about my newfound faith, trying to convince them that I hadn’t lost my mind, so this is what started conversations where I started to engage intellectually and tell them, “Look, these are some of the reasons that I’ve come to believe,” and then I was curious and started to study and understand, “Oh, yeah, there’s other good reasons to believe this is true,” and so I shared those, and I enjoyed the exercise of sharing that, and the next thing you know, I was spending all of my evenings and all of my weekends just thinking and researching those things, watching debates and documentaries and reading books and following the footnotes and really enjoying this, and after a few months of doing this all the time, I figured, “If I’m going to be spending all of my time and all of my resources doing this, then I might as well get a degree out of it,” and so this is how I applied to seminary, and I, a few years later, graduated with a Masters in Biblical Literature with an emphasis on the New Testament, and then after that, I pursued my studies with another degree. I got a PhD in Philosophical Theology. So this is how, after the move and after my conversion, I ended up walking through the small door and into the world of Christian scholarship, without planning any of it, but I ended up being active and writing and researching and speaking, and what’s fun is that some of the folks that I studied initially turned out to be colleagues and friends, and the whole thing feels a bit surreal, but this is where I am now. You’ve coursed a long journey, from unbelief to not only just Christian belief but compelling, deep, scholarly Christian belief and debate, and that you are now one of the voices that people look to and listen to on very deep theological and philosophical areas, it’s really quite impressive. It sounds like, for someone who held truth to be supreme, that you still hold truth to be, in the person of Christ, to be incredibly supreme, not only in your life personally but contending for that in terms of the Christian worldview and even, like I say, at a deep and a scholarly level. For the skeptic who might be listening in, someone who thought they would never believe in God or never even think about investigating God, when I look at your life and listen to you, you are someone who obviously, again, is a brilliant thinker and someone worth looking to and hearing your wisdom. What would you say to someone who might be curious, at least, to investigate like you did? Yeah. So I don’t know that I’m necessarily in an awesome position to give them advice and tell them what to do, but here’s a couple of pieces that I will mention. The first is that, if they are intellectually curious, they should definitely consult some of the material that is discussed, controversial material, right? The debate material on the truth of Christianity, that there is some really good thinking happening and that there are some really good reasons to believe that God exists and that the Bible is actually reliable and that we get a good account of what happened to Jesus. So considering the intellectual case is one advice, and some of them have, some of them have never done that. I would recommend that you look into that, actually. And the other is a little bit more personal and dear to my heart, but it’s also the encouragement to not assume that you know who Jesus is, that you know because we’ve heard about Jesus and maybe you’ve attended church and you’ve heard a million stories, but I would recommend that you try the same experience as I did, which was to say, “Let’s forget about everything I’ve heard. Let’s pick up the sources and see what people actually saw and the kind of character that He was,” and I trust that this can be extremely transformative, to be put face to face with the real Jesus and not the one that we think we know. That’s good advice. And for the Christians who are listening in who, especially they may know someone in their life who’s not a Christian, but they want them to know. And you encountered Robert, for one, who is an intelligent Christian who sat down with you and answered questions in a thoughtful way, was patient with you in moving through this intellectual and spiritual and very personal material in different ways it affected your life. How would you advise Christians to engage with those who are skeptical or even searching? Yeah. So there’s a couple of pieces of advice that I like to give Christians while engaged in conversations with what could be old atheist self, right? So some of the things that I think worked quite well and that are a really good idea and encouragement. One would be to never assume that the person that you’re speaking with actually knows the Jesus of the Bible, so the same piece of advice applies here. Try to point them to the scriptures. First of all, as Christians, we’re convinced that the scriptures are alive, so there’s actually a spiritual benefit in reading the text. But just to point them to make for themselves a good opinion of what Jesus actually said and did, so to encourage them to learn, just on the historical realm. And the second is to not assume that they’ve heard the gospel, so as evangelical Christians, we like to think that this message is obviously the constantly proclaimed truth of the scriptures, that everyone has obviously heard that we are saved by faith in Jesus, that eternal life is not based on our own righteousness, but it’s purely by faith in Christ because He died on the cross to pay the penalty in our place. That message that I came to understand and accept as part of my conversion was radically new to me. I had never heard anything like that in over 25 years, and so I don’t want Christians to assume that this message is understood and known by everybody, and there’s very much a place in the conversation with an atheist to say, “Let’s forget a second whether or not it’s true. I’m not trying to yet convince you that any of this is true. But do you even know Christianity affirms? What is the message? And I’d be happy to tell you what it says before we can come to discuss whether that’s actually true,” and to explain that gospel succinctly, and I’ve done that with a number of folks, and I found there’s plenty of value in simply laying out the account on the table directly to say, “This is the message,” and to try to see if they actually understand this. And one test of whether they understand it, I have found, is that very often, right after I’ve explained this, the first thing that comes out of their mouth is the objection that Paul himself anticipated in Romans when he lays out the gospel. He anticipates somebody’s going to say, “Well, if we’re saved by faith. If our good works don’t do anything, then why not go on sinning just so that we can enjoy this and that grace may abound?” So Paul anticipates this, and I’m hearing this very often when I present this message, which tells me, “Yes. Now they get it.” So that’s a check where we understand. Now, the message is understood and correctly evaluated. It’s a very positive place to take the listener, and then we can discuss the merits of the message, obviously. But I think this is a helpful piece to do. Yes. Very, very helpful. As you say, I think oftentimes we’re coming from our own perspective and presuming what the other person knows and oftentimes, we’re very, very mistaken on that, and the gospel, I think is the most important thing, right? It’s why Jesus came. It’s the big question you had, “Why did He have to die?” And that is the most important question of all. Thank you for bringing that to the fore. And for those who are listening, I also want to let everyone know that Guillaume has put all of his story down in writing in a new book that he is publishing and releasing called Confessions of a French Atheist, Thank you so much, Guillaume, for coming on and telling your story. You’re just incredibly articulate, and we are all blessed by seeing what your journey was and just are so encouraged. You know, sometimes I think we look at someone and think they would never become a Christian, wouldn’t even think about becoming a Christian, but we look at you and see that God can reach down in extraordinary and very personal and powerful ways. And even gives you chills and goosebumps. Something extraordinary happened for you to stop in your tracks and just say, “No, I actually am going to investigate this.” It’s just amazing to me, story after story that I hear, where God reaches people and, like you say, in serendipitous ways almost, and circumstances, and He does that for us all, to be honest. Sometimes we don’t recognize that, but He’s a personal God who reaches us in personal ways. So thank you for coming on to share your story with us today. It was really my pleasure. Thanks for having me, Jana. Oh, you’re so welcome. Thanks for tuning in to today to hear Guillaume’s story. You can find out more about his book, Confessions of a French Atheist, and how to follow him on Twitter in the episode notes. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can reach me by email at thesidebpodcast@cslewisinstitute.org. I hope you enjoyed it, if so that you would follow and share this podcast with your friends and social network and that you’ll rate and review it as well. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll see how another skeptic flips the record of their life.

MIT graduate Chris Lee was raised to reject religious superstition and embrace science alone.  His search beyond a purely naturalistic worldview led him to believe in God and Christianity.   To read Chris’ written story, you can read his article “My Christian Story” here   To read and listen to more stories of skeptics and atheists’ conversions to Christianity, visit www.sidebstories.com Episode Transcript Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to the Side B Stories Podcast, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist who surprisingly became a Christian. Why do atheists become atheists? There are as many answers to that question as there are atheists. Every skeptic has a reason, or more likely, every skeptic has several reasons for rejecting God. Sometimes, it’s on the back of bad experiences with Christians, Christianity, and faith. People or institutions who are supposed to represent truth and grace, lives of integrity and generosity, genuine love for God and others, well, they don’t. They’re supposed to demonstrate lives that have been transformed into something other, something more, something different, something better than what is normally expected by those who don’t claim God as authority and guide, but they don’t. If they reflect God, then they are poor ambassadors for the one they supposedly represent, or so it goes. Once someone starts to distrust Christians, they can begin to doubt the whole endeavor of Christianity and God. Belief is no longer attractive or plausible. It is no longer an option.  Today’s episode taps into this reality, the reality of human failure to embody God well. It can be very disorienting. It can lead to disbelief, and unfortunately, it often does. But the question in today’s episode is whether or not someone can find their way to belief in God despite all of this human failure. Let’s listen to Chris Lee’s story to find out.  Welcome to the Side B Stories podcast, Chris. It’s so great to have you with me today!  Thank you, Jana, for having me. Wonderful. Before we get into your story, why don’t you tell me a little bit about who you are, where you live, maybe a little bit about your education, what you do?  Sure, absolutely. I live in the Boston area, in a little town called Braintree, about 10 miles south of the downtown. By day, I consider myself a software engineer in financial services, so fin tech, and by night, I jokingly say that I’m a cult fighter. I graduated from MIT in 1997, and also did my master’s degree in divinity at Gordon-Conwell Theological seminary. Oh, okay. So you’re pretty highly educated, and of course, in the Boston area, academics is prevalent there, so I’m sure we’ll find out more about what you mean by cult fighter?  Something like that, yes. Something like that. I forgot the exact term. But anyway, so that sounds very intriguing. I’m sure we’ll get to that later in the podcast. So you’re in Boston now. Let’s go back to your childhood and where you were born and grew up. Tell me a little bit about your family, whether they had any belief in God or not, or how they directed you.  Sure. I grew up in western Canada, in a city called Vancouver, a beautiful, amazing place to grow up. Very multicultural. And my parents, my dad was very much an atheist, a humanist, so did not have any beliefs, and in fact, had been very hurt by a number of Christians in his life, so he had very much turned against Christianity and was, as you might expect, anti Christian. My mother was very nominal. She might have gone to church a few times now and then in college, as well as afterwards, and certainly she had a belief in a higher power. She believed in God. She prayed, but it was not very evident in her life, and certainly if she mentioned that she was Christian, it was only in name. As I mentioned, the very nominal side. So that’s the background. So Vancouver. Is that—tell me, culturally speaking, is that much of a religious community?  No! Not at all. Okay.  I would say probably less than 20% even identify as Christians. Certainly, it’s very small. It’s maybe more than New England where I am, which is something like 5% or less evangelical and something like very nominally Roman Catholic, but certainly religion in western Canada was not a public thing and was not even a major factor in people’s lives. So did you have any exposure to what you would consider a more robust form of Christianity growing up? Any people that you knew? Or was that in your world at all?  Sure. So there’s kind of two major influences. My grandmother was very devout, but we didn’t have a lot of exposure to her. And then my best friend in high school was able to answer a lot of my questions, and he was and continues to be a very devout Christian today. And so whenever I had weird questions, like, “I don’t understand the Bible,” or, “I don’t understand this Trinity thing. This is weird,” I would go to my best friend in high school, Vern, and we’d talk about it. And he very cogently explained to me these doctrines. Okay. So you did have some influences. So as you were growing up, you had a father, you said, who was a secular humanist. He was an atheist. You had a mother who had a nominal expression of faith. So when you were growing up, did you have any belief in God? Were you following in the footsteps of your father or your mother? Or was it an issue or something—did you go to church? Talk with me about that.  Sure. So my younger brother and I were taken to church for a while, maybe off and on. Whenever we went on vacations or whenever it was convenient, so maybe a couple of times a month, and mostly to go to the Sunday school programs and socializing. And I really didn’t get much of the faith, and a lot of it seems like rituals, so I really didn’t understand why people did what they did, and then, when I was 12, my dad came up to me and said, “Well, Chris, you’re twelve. You’re old enough to make your own decisions. If this is what you want to do, then you have my,” whatever, equivalent of blessing, I guess. “You can do that, but if you don’t want to do it, then stop doing it.” And I said to him at that time, “Yeah, I don’t understand this. It makes no sense. I’m going to stop doing it.” And, also around the same point in time, we were talking about college applications already, at age twelve, and preparing for higher education, and also I had become very enamored of science. Kind of like Carl Sagan puts it, that the cosmos is all that is and all there ever was and all there ever would be. And really believed that science could or would be able to explain everything. And so I said, “Well, this all seems like superstitious hogwash. Every kind of religion, especially going to church and things like that.” So I, at that point in time, decided, “I’m going to be an atheist.” And it was a distinct moment in my life that I remember. It was over two years where I said, “I don’t believe any religion is true. I reject it all.” “All this stuff seems like either fantasy or hogwash, your choice.” So when you rejected God and that metaphysical reality, any kind of supernatural reality, by default, in a sense, you embraced a naturalistic view of the world.  Correct. I know you said you really honored or revered science in a way as being an ultimate explainer, in a sense, of the world and that there was not anything more than that. Would you say that you looked at the naturalistic worldview with any kind of critical eye at all, in terms of the logical implications of that naturalistic worldview? Or were you looking more at just the positive aspects of “intellectual people believe in science, not in hogwash.” What was your line of thinking around that time?  That’s a great question. So yes, absolutely, I actually carried through a number of the logical conclusions, so, in fact, we were being taught, not only evolution and all that it entails, but you can apply that also, you know the Darwinian evolution, to the survival of the fittest. And certainly in terms of implications, if I’m smarter than somebody else, I deserve to live longer or… deserve to have my opinions heard more rightly than other people. I became very elitist in a way. I’m kind of ashamed now to admit it, but I certainly had this air of superiority because I thought that my thinking was correct, more correct than others, and certainly that those who were more correct deserved to have their voices heard, and the less correct voices did not deserve to have their voices heard. So certainly I did carry through in some of those implications of what I believed. I didn’t fully see that certainly naturalism and humanism have certain assumptions, like, as you alluded to, if you basically eliminated all possibility of the supernatural, that it’s almost like, “Okay, everything has to be explained by science,” or it’s kind of like you’re almost using science in a way of being like god in the gaps instead of using God as the God of the gaps, things like that kind of argument. Yeah. That tells me a little bit about you, that you are, obviously, a critical thinker. That you are willing to look a little bit more closely at what you were embracing, not just what you were rejecting. So you were obviously a student, a teenager. You had embraced this atheistic identity. You were moving towards university and developing an elitist, intellectualist way of thinking, I guess to pursue your goals of academia and achievement. So I wonder, were most of your friends thinking in the same kind of way? Did you have a lot of friends who called themselves or identified as atheists as well?  I had some friends who were atheists, maybe one or two, and then the rest of them were largely agnostics, true agnostics, meaning they didn’t know, so in my mind there’s a major difference. Atheists are—within reason, you determine that there are no supernatural… there is no existence other than what we know. There is no possibility of any God or gods. And agnostics can range from, “Well, I’m not sure, and I’m not 100% certain that my position is correct,” or it doesn’t have to be 100% certainty that there are no gods, but maybe even 99%, 97% sure. That would be an atheist position, and then some agnostics were like, “Well, I haven’t thought through it enough, so I don’t know what to believe.” It strikes me, as you were talking about the embracing of your naturalistic worldview, that there was somewhat of a Darwinian perspective on who was perhaps the stronger or the more fit. And I think that oftentimes there is a dismissal of the religious in that kind of scenario and almost a contemptuousness. Did you ever have a sense of that? As just a part of your atheistic worldview?  I didn’t get to that point where I saw all, whether it was Christianity or other religions, as having zero credibility and zero value. I think I was much more a pragmatist about it and very utilitarian. It’s like, “Okay, well, I guess some Christians do function as counselors, and they give free counseling and help out the homeless. Okay, yeah, that’s somewhat useful,” and I definitely heard a number of my brother’s sentiments, whether that’s expressing that Christianity is just a crutch for those who are mentally weak or other sentiments that are similar. So you lived with this perspective for a little while, while you were in high school. So take us on your journey from there. How long were in this atheistic perspective? What, if anything, kind of starting making you question, perhaps, your own perspective and becoming open towards another?  Sure. So I would say it was just over two years, maybe somewhere between two and two and a half years, that I very much would self-identify as an atheist and would tell you, “I’m an atheist. I don’t believe in anything. I believe science can explain everything or will explain everything.” And I think even I had an atheist high school teacher who questioned that a little bit, and he said, “Well, wait a second. Are you sure that science will be able to explain everything?” I was like, “Wait. You’re an atheist. Aren’t you supposed to accept that science will or can explain everything?” But it was really a set of three circumstances that really made me think that maybe atheism is not correct or maybe that there is an existence outside of what we know, outside of a naturalistic environment. So the first thing was I was walking home—this was in, I think, the end of seventh grade or eighth grade or something like that, and I was walking home from my school, and on the way home, there’s one side of the road that has a sidewalk, and the other side has no sidewalk, and the other side that doesn’t have a sidewalk is actually further, and for whatever reason, I decided I’m going to cross the sidewalk. And a car came over, kind of barreling out of control, on the side of the sidewalk, where I was standing, and I thought to myself, “Well, that’s really strange. It’s completely illogical and irrational to cross the street where it would be a further path and it’s not got a sidewalk, and crossing the street, I could’ve been hit by a car. Does this make sense?” And it’s like, “I wouldn’t have seen the car coming from behind me, either, but it did eventually run over that piece of sidewalk. So hmm.” That was a little puzzling, and I didn’t think anything much more when that happened. Like it was a near miss?  Yeah. It was a near miss. Well, that was an unusual piece of intuition, that I crossed the street and should have been dead, and I’m alive. And there’s no rational reason for this. So, okay, whatever. And then, the second time, my mother was driving my brother and I back from whatever it was, I think from the high school, and she had just finished the night shift, so she was overly tired, and she forgot to stop at a stop sign, and a car kind of came over the hill and broadsided us. And it was on my side of the car, but five seconds before the accident happened, I’d actually unbuckled myself and moved over to the center of the car. Not seeing the car. I just unbuckled myself and moved. And again, I was like, “My goodness! I survived another crash and could have been seriously hurt.” My mother actually did have whiplash and concussion, and she had to wear a neck brace for many months afterwards, whereas I didn’t have any injuries whatsoever. And it was very remarkable. So again, it was kind of like, “What?” I should have been fully seat belted and not taken it off at any point in time, but for whatever reason, I moved. And then a third time we were passing in between two warehouse buildings, and there was a railway crossing, and there was actually a train coming our way, but the gate had not dropped and there was no signal, and we barely missed it. It was—I don’t know—six feet? Ten feet? It couldn’t have been more than that. And so there was a series of situations that I realized, like, “Probabilistically, I should be dead. And if I had followed everything rationally, done everything rationally, stayed on the same side of the sidewalk where eventually the car would’ve run over, kept my seat belt on, that I should be dead. And yet here I am alive, and all these things not very rational.” Right.  “So is there perhaps something more than what I see, maybe more than rationality, maybe more than naturalism,” and so that led me to thinking, “Okay, maybe I should think there is the possibility of a supernatural,” and then at that point I kind of went from atheist to agnostic. And I definitely would not say I was a Christian, did not want to explore Christianity at that point in time, but at least at that point in time, I would have put it this way, “I’m open to some existence beyond the natural, whether that’s God, gods, goddesses, whatever. I’m open to it. And maybe I should go look into these things.” So this was at the age of fourteen. Okay. So then you started looking, I presume, and tell me about that journey. Where did you go first? What did you start looking at first?  So I was very interested in pantheism, so I started exploring Greco-Roman gods and explored that to its logical conclusion. It was like, “Okay, maybe more gods is better, and having a god for everything.” So I’d already studied Egyptian mythology, Norse mythology, Greco-Roman gods, even Hindu gods, and it seems like, to me, that if there were such gods or goddesses, they were very haphazard, like throwing dice with our lives. And, for the Egyptians, it was like, there’s a god for everything. There’s a god of Nile. There’s a god of the dead. There’s a god of fertility. There’s a god of the rain. There’s a god of the sun. And so on and so forth. And certainly I think, as I’ve read, in retrospect, as a Christian now, when we use the word universe, it’s like one out of many, and we’re trying to make sense of the diversity of life and the diversity of… whether it’s beetles or whether it’s life forms or numerous other things, and I think that the pantheism appeals to the diversity, trying to explain that, but it didn’t do a good job of trying to unify, “Why does science make sense?” “Why is physics so mathematical and so elegant and so beautiful?” The pantheism doesn’t unite very well there. And so I slowly rejected polytheism or pantheism. I moved into human wisdom religions, so Taoism, Buddhism. I actually practiced a number of things. Like, “I feel hungry!” “No, I don’t, because this is causing me to be imbalanced, and I should not have strong desires, because that’s what causes conflict.” And so I practiced a number of these things, and I realized later, especially becoming Christian, that it’s like, well, sometimes God does work through our desires. Certainly, we love justice. We love beauty. We love truth as Christians. And certainly even compassion or things like that… There’s a number of virtues that Christianity espouses, and these are things that we should strive for. If justice doesn’t matter and we should have no desires for justice, well, who cares? Just let everybody do their own thing. And then we get anarchy and chaos, but anyways. Yeah. I was going to say, there are such things as good desires.  Right, absolutely. Worthy. Yeah.  And also that there are some times that God does tell us, as a Christian, it’s like, “Well, I’m feeling tired.” Well, is it legitimate, like I didn’t get enough sleep? Or maybe I did work really hard for 12 hours on physical labor or things like that. And so my body is telling me, “Hey, maybe it’s time to get some sleep.” Instead of saying, “Okay, I’ve got to deny myself and not have these desires for sleep,” or whatever. So I actually slowly but surely rejected those human wisdom religions. I actually had my own Tarot card deck. I had crystals. I was playing around with that. I was into horoscopes and into biorhythms and all kinds of things. And that seemed a little arbitrary. And then eventually I got back to monotheism. And I studied with a rabbi, and we read the Old Testament. He instructed me fairly well. I actually had a very strong sense of the holiness of God. That’s one of the major themes of the Old Testament. A number of the books, especially Leviticus, emphasize God’s holiness. And whether it’s Isaiah 6 or numerous other passages, that God’s moral perfection and that He’s utterly sinless and that no fellowship can exist between a being of utter absolute moral perfection and sinlessness and imperfect, finite creatures. And so I actually was struck with a sense of my own sinfulness and my unworthiness because of that experience, and I was like, “Okay, this is nice. I’m glad I studied it. Okay. Moving on.” And then I studied Islam, and I actually had my own copy of the Koran and read it a lot, and it struck me as like, “Well, if we actually carried a number of the statutes, like carried eye to an eye, unfortunately what we see is, like, “Okay. You knock off my brother. I don’t know why. I’m going to go knock off your family or several of your brothers,” or things like that. And then there were later hadiths that had to address, like, “Okay, you can’t deal with other followers of the way that way,” or the followers of the way of peace that way. And I realized that a number of the things in Islam were untenable if you follow it through philosophically. You can’t do that as a society. You can’t do that even as a family. And I cannot exercise eye for an eye. And that will only perpetuate a cycle of violence and wrongdoing. And so I came back to Christianity, and I had already been somewhat instructed by the Jewish rabbi and others, that the Old Testament ends at basically Malachi in our canon, and then Matthew is the first book, and of course, as soon as you dive into Matthew and right after the genealogy, you get into, within chapters five through seven, the Sermon on the Mount. And this was mind blowing to me. It was like, “Oh! Of course! This is correct! This is how you defeat evil. Turn the other cheek and not retaliate.” So it actually surprised me. Caught me off guard. In contrast to everything that I had studied beforehand. And even… Jesus has the passage about prayer, and so I said, “Okay. Let me try this. Maybe it might work. God, if You are real,” I remember praying, “please show Yourself to me. Please guide me or help me understand,” and I did have the distinct impression that this was happening and that… My best friend from high school started spending more time with me, and taking me to things, some of his youth group activities, although they weren’t terribly overtly Christian. They were more social. But, anyway, my best friend Vern explained to me a number of things at that point in time, so I was much more open and saying, “I don’t understand the Trinity. I don’t understand why God has so many names. What is this?” And so my friend was very patient and kind of took me through and explained to me what it meant and slowly but surely I think I was like, “Okay, I can see that. That seems reasonable.” So he laid that foundation. So you were, at this point—how old were you then? You said later in high school?  So this was—Vern and I started spending a lot of time when I was sixteen and seventeen. So at this point in time. And you had been, it sounds like, on a very diligent exploration, exploring all of these different potential faith traditions that didn’t seem to have substance, or at least didn’t seem to satisfy your understanding of God or faith or how it relates to reality or the human condition perhaps.  Right. Except when you got to the Old Testament. Then it really peered into the human heart. You said you felt the holiness of God.  Yes. Which that can be daunting. But I love what you talked about when you started reading the New Testament, and you started with the stories of Jesus, the gospel narratives, and that there was something palpably different, in the sense that there was something there a little bit different than what you had felt or experienced before. Now, again, I’m thinking about this. You had moved from atheism to agnosticism. Agnosticism but with an openness and a willingness to see these different faith traditions or religions for what they were. You were willing to actually take them on, to try them experientially, which again I think is very laudable, in your search. Rather than just looking at things intellectually, you actually tried them out experientially. I’m curious. When you started reading the New Testament and you obviously, as an inquisitive person, you started critically thinking, and you had these big questions. And Vern was there, and he was helping guide you. Was he a good resource? Or was he, let me just say, more than a nominal Christian? Was he able to engage with you in a way that was intellectually satisfying? Able to answer your questions? And also was he someone who actually embodied Christianity in a meaningful way? Not just nominally. Not just by name only but actually took it seriously. Yeah. Vern has always been rock solid in his faith. And he’s very much self-identified not only as a Christian but been very serious about his Christian faith. At that point in time, even when we were both sixteen and seventeen, he had certainly internalized his family’s faith but also had explored it and was able to articulate why he believed what he believed and could explain a number of things in his faith. And I don’t ever recall that Vern was ever at a loss. He knew his stuff, and he really knew his faith. So you obviously knew that he was a Christian, and you… because I think sometimes we wonder how we can start meaningfully engaging with those who aren’t Christians, but you obviously knew something about him that you were willing to engage with him, ask him questions, and he was approachable, which sounds pretty wonderful. As you were reading the Bible and it has this miraculous content, as a former naturalist, when you were reading those kinds of things, was that off putting? So it was actually a long process for me to come to actually accept the Bible was true. So I think I started exploring Christianity when I was sixteen, and I would not have ever said, “Yeah, I’m definitely a Christian.” In fact, I remember distinctly going off to MIT and thinking, “Okay, when I get my life in order, and when I finish my PhD or something like that, then I might consider exploring Christianity more seriously, and maybe then I’ll think about becoming a Christian,” and things like that. So it was not even on my radar when I went to MIT. Okay.  And so it was actually about a three-year journey, from sixteen to nineteen, where there were a number of things, and even, shockingly, you might find, at MIT, there were a number of professors who were Christians, including my academic advisor and now the department head of AeroAstro. That’s Daniel Hastings is a devout Christian. He was my undergraduate advisor. And then there were numerous other ones, and then little hints here and there, like they talk about Cantor sets or Gödel and his formulation of God and actual infinities and things like that, talking pretty high level, but I was resonating with this, and I was going, “Huh. I never thought of it that way,” in terms of actual infinities as a way to prove our God. And there were a number… I had a material science professor who jokingly mentioned that some MIT students, pranksters that they were, they decided, “Oh, let’s enter a wine contest and figure out how to synthetically make a wine, and they combined, obviously, ethanol and various carbon compounds and things like that, and then they entered the wine contest,” and the judges were like, “Oh, this is really, really good! Where did you get the grapes?” and they were like, “Uh, yeah. We can’t tell you that. Proprietary knowledge,” or whatever, and they got busted, and they got eliminated, but they synthetically created a wine from water, carbon compounds, and alcohol, ethanol. So the idea of even Jesus turning water to wine suddenly became far less far-fetched. And obviously somebody who is very advanced in technology could do these things, but obviously the technology didn’t exist back then, so it even argues that somebody who was the Creator of the universe, or somebody who had mastery over nature and the elements, would be far superior in order of magnitude than any human being that existed. So even my time at MIT kind of opened me to a Christian worldview. Wow. That’s interesting. So it sounds like, even though you were trying to venture a little bit away from thinking about God, that you entered into an environment where actually there were some very high-level discussions about that very reality. So did that kind of bring you back around to thinking more seriously about the potential for God’s existence?  Sure. I think I would say that, somewhere between… I was eighteen or nineteen, and certainly whether it was my freshman year sometime or by that summer, I had accepted that, “Okay, the Christian God exists. Even if I’m not a Christian,” like I would not self-identify as a Christian at that point in time. I did say the Christian God exists, and certainly my sense of His holiness prior to the end of high school and my own unworthiness kind of alluded to that, or at least gave me some sense of that. And certainly towards the summer of my freshman year, so as a rising sophomore at MIT, my best friend in high school took me to a number of church events that I started to realize, “Oh, the Bible is not just abstract and full of weird stories and genealogies. It’s very practical and applies to my life.” And of course I’m not ready to live it yet. This forgiveness thing, too hard, not going to try. And the moral codes. “Nah, nah. Not for me. It would be too hard. Nice ideas, certainly, but not ready to follow after the steps of Jesus.” So I would not, again, identify myself as a Christian. I was, at that point in time, age eighteen, turning nineteen, at least recognizing, “Okay, the Christian God exists. I recognize His existence and certainly His presence in my life, and it makes sense of all that I’ve gone through, and certainly I recognize the Bible is factual and credible and certainly practical.” So that’s where I was. So you embraced it a bit intellectually.  Yeah. That it was propositionally true or historically true?  Yes. But you weren’t willing or able to… willing, I guess, is the right word.  Yes. To embrace it personally. So then what happened? How long did you stay in this bit of an ambivalent state?  Sophomore year, I was launched into grades, so I kind of threw myself wholeheartedly into my grades and was getting straight As even at MIT, and even my professors were patting me on the back, saying, “Keep it up,” “You’re doing great,” “Whatever you’ll want will be open to you,” whether that’s graduate studies or whether that’s working for NASA or whatever else. And so it seemed like the world was my oyster, and I was really working hard, too. I was maintaining some extracurriculars and successfully auditioned… Out of ten french hornists, I was the only one who selected for MIT Symphony Orchestra, and it was a fabulous experience, and numerous other extracurriculars. So I was doing everything that I’d ever wanted to do, and yet I felt like it was empty. And so kind of this existential angst here. I had finished up one of several all nighters, so sophomore year in Aeronautics and Astronautics, which is nicknamed rocket science. And I came into my room and was thinking to myself, “Hey! Everything that I’ve ever wanted has come about. I’m at MIT. I’m doing incredible. I’m doing research. I’m involved with all these extracurriculars. I’m at the top of my game.” It’s like, “If this is the best life now, I’m living it,” and it wasn’t a nadir or I’d lost everything. I was at the top. And yet it was like, “Is that all that there is in life?” Like, “I’ve accomplished everything that I’ve ever wanted, and yet why do I feel like something is missing? There’s something else.” And I had packed a red King James Bible, which I kept on the left side of my dresser, and coming back into my room, I was thinking through, and I was like, “Yeah, I’m pretty sure if I kept this up, I’d be doing fine in life, and then what? Then get married? Then get a job? Get whatever, and what does this all mean?” And I was at a loss for answers, but as I came into my room, my eye fell on my King James, and I opened it up. “Seek first the kingdom, and all these things will be given to you as well. Seek first His kingdom.” And I realized, “You know? Yeah. I don’t know. Chris doesn’t know what’s right, what’s best for Chris. I think I might.” And later, as I became a Christian and I started studying, I realized, “Yeah, there is a big God-shaped void in my heart, and I’ve been trying to stuff it full of everything else, of extracurriculars and achievements,” and it wasn’t satisfying. And it’s not like God necessarily changes you and you become like the Borg or whatever. It’s not like that when you become a Christian. God reorders your life, and it’s not like I had a lobotomy after I became a Christian and was dumb thereafter. It continued to be intellectual and use my intellect to honor God. But at that point in time, late October 1991, I was 19 years old, and I think I remember praying, like, “God, I don’t know what’s best for my life. I don’t even know how this is supposed to go. I know that You know because You have seen the past, the present, the future. I know how this is supposed to go. I know You know better than I know what I need, and please help me find people who will help me order my life as would please You.” So you surrendered. I mean, you finally came to that place where you were willing to go His way instead of your own.  Right, exactly. Right. Wow. And so you said that was… You had kind of reached the pinnacle and it wasn’t enough and then you surrendered. And then, I’m curious. In terms of your Christian faith walk, have you been able to find that sense of fulfillment or satisfaction or meaning that seemed so elusive for you when you had everything?  So it has not been easy. And sometimes the route is very circuitous. So even though I prayed for God to put people in my life who would teach me the Bible or teach me His way, I got involved with a deviant group, the Boston Church of Christ, at that point in time. In fact, one of my friends in the MIT Symphony Orchestra had just joined the Boston Church of Christ, the extended International Churches of Christ, and he had been seeking out people that he was going to try to bring in. And so, because we were pretty good friends, he decided to invite me, and I got involved with the Boston Church of Christ. And that was a little bit over 2-1/4 years of that, and kind of a long story short, it took an amount of time of searching after that before I came back to Christianity again. So certainly a lot of looking for the truth and trying to understand what is the truth, and then I came back to Christianity, and then in trying to align my life with God, I did eventually make a lot of sense of my difficulties, my suffering, my circuitous route in life, and things like that. So it hasn’t been easy. It hasn’t been like going from mountain to mountain to mountain to mountain. It’s been very circuitous. And for those who aren’t familiar, just in a nutshell, the Boston Church of Christ is not what you would consider an orthodox Christian group. I presume from your work with cults that you would consider this group to be cult-like or a cult. Is that right?  Sure. So there’s a number of synonyms, because the word “cult” can certainly bring out a lot of strong emotions, so I try to avoid the word cult sometimes. Certainly, we can talk about either authoritarian groups or totalitarian groups, groups that tell you how to run your life or that bring out unhealthy psychological dynamics. Certainly yes. Absolutely. Or we could talk about spiritually abusive groups or groups that cause codependency, especially on leaders or other members. Yes, absolutely. So I try and use synonyms for the word cult, yes. It is not an orthodox group. It’s not terribly healthy. In a nutshell, yes. But you found your way out of that group and found, a healthy, normative kind of Christian church, I presume.  Yeah. So that, again, is circuitous. In a nutshell, I went from… My friends that I consider Christians outside of the Boston Church of Christ were shocked when I started hanging out with them. They were like, “Hey, Chris. Did you know you’re hanging out with the members of the Boston Church of Christ?” And I was like, “Yes, I did.” And then they’re like, “You know there’s all this controversy, and let us give you numerous pages and numerous articles about how controversial they are.” And it’s like, “Oh, my gosh! What have I gotten myself into?” And then I made the mistake of, again playing the scientific principles, so it’s like, “Okay, I won’t tell them I’m looking for something, and if I don’t see it, it must not happen anymore,” but that was the wrong leap of logic. It was, “If it doesn’t happen, it probably is that they’re not telling me,” much like in corporations. It’s on a need-to-know basis, rather than total transparency. And so I was very committed to the Boston Church of Christ for a number of years, and then even became a leader, and was actually, for having some integrity, like I really believed that there were Christians outside of our group, unlike the Boston Church of Christ, that I tried to present to the conciliation meeting and failed horribly, but it got back that I was orchestrating it and that I dared to question that there are issues, like things that could be improved in the Boston Church of Christ, so I was kicked out. And I can honestly say that was God acting, because I would not have had the strength to leave, and I would not have chosen to leave on my own. And the people have since, numerous of my friends who have left have apologized, and I was like, “No, no, no. Nothing to apologize for. We were kind of under that mindset and being unduly influenced.” I had to unwind a lot of that stuff and figure out, “Okay, what does Christianity actually teach?” And, “What is actually correct?” And it was examining my faith. And that led me to studying the scriptures even more intensely and in the original languages and studying church history and theology and things like that. Kind of a weird coincidence, when I was involved with the Boston Church of Christ, one of the deans of administration at MIT had kind of taken me aside and said, “You know, I know you’re involved with the Boston Church of Christ. You really should take some time and study maybe at a theological institute. Study your church history. Study your original languages. Study your theology,” and at that time, when I was a member, I scoffed at him. “All you need is the Bible.” And I had done poorly. My grades had kind of plummeted when I was involved with the Boston Church of Christ, and I had to take some time off. And then eventually… That was kind of a further purification process, too. It’s like I had to get rid of everything, all preconceptions of who I was, so I had kind of wound myself up to be, like, “Okay, I’m this really smart guy who is an MIT student,” and suddenly, I was stripped of all that. I had to take some time off. No chance of returning for at least a year. And then I had to claw my way back to finish, and then eventually did finish, and all these experiences had kind of led me to a point where I was like, “I’d really like to study my faith better, not only for myself, but also to teach it well. And that led me to seminary, and I actually asked that dean for his recommendation letter. And as well, I got involved with a much healthier church, and there were a lot of people who were refugees from the Boston Church of Christ there. Then, you have a heart, obviously, for those who get wrapped up in things like that. I’d like to ask you a question. As someone who is such a thinker and with an appreciation for philosophy and science and theology, there’s often a push back against Christianity that, if you believe in science that you cannot believe in God or religion or have faith. How would you answer a skeptic or someone who raises that objection, that you cannot believe in them both together?  Sure. No. Absolutely. That’s a great question. I was fortunate that I got to meet Alvin Plantinga when he was at Harvard, and he exactly lectured on this. And the way he put is this: There seems to be very superficial concord between scientism, which is really what it is. It’s not just science, but it’s scientism. It’s a purely science and naturalistic point of view. But there’s actually some deeper discord in the ways that they actually conflict, so it’s almost like you have to outright object or get rid of any of the supernatural. You have to ignore a lot of things, and so while there is very superficial concordance between scientism and atheism or humanism, but also linked to truth, that there’s much deeper concordance between Christianity and science. And not surprisingly, there are a number of Christians at MIT who were strong Christians but also strong engineers and strong scientists. And they didn’t see a conflict. Yeah. There’s a basic order and rationality to the universe itself, and the elegance of mathematics, and the way that you’re able to even pursue observation and evidence and that there’s a predictability to it. And all of those things that would not be unless there was a transcendent source. Even your own rationality, right?  Right. Absolutely. There’s a comprehensibility to the universe. And we have a mind that can comprehend. So there’s just so many things with regard to actually belief in God that allows you, like you say, to even understand the physical nature of the universe and science. It’s really quite wonderful and elegant when you look at it. And there are those, like you say, that have brilliant minds that can see all of that and that there’s no conflict.  So as we’re wrapping up, Chris, let’s kind of turn for a moment. If you had a skeptic sitting in front of you who was actually curious. Maybe think back to when you were in high school and you were actually looking. “There has to be something more. I feel it.” Or, “I intuit.” Or, “I have an experience,” like you did, that they’re, “Okay, there’s something more, and I want to search for it.” There’s an open willingness there. What would you say to that skeptic? How would you speak to them?  Yeah. Obviously how Christianity is lived out and how it is practiced is going to be a little to quite flawed. Go to the source and look at what Christianity actually is. And go to the author of Christianity, Jesus Christ Himself, Who I believe is the only perfect person who ever lived. And see the difference, the qualitative difference of his teachings as compared to Buddha or Mohammad or numerous other teachers. And also be open to Christianity and kind of look beyond—even if you look at my life, I’m sorry, I’m a horrible signpost. I’m a flawed person. And I will be the first to admit that, yes, this means I’m a sinner, and I don’t live up to the ideals which I’d like to espouse. But look to those ideals. Look to the ideals of Christianity. And see whether they’re true. And not only that, that Christianity is not just head knowledge, but it’s also about a relationship. And how would I approach a relationship, right? I’d want to talk to that person, get to know that person, and maybe figure things out. And as I hinted at some of my early turnings, it was about prayer, and I had to turn to God and say, “Hey, I really don’t know if You’re real. I kind of feel silly sometimes, but show me. Please guide me.” And even with all hesitancy that you might have, like you might know you’re certain that He is there or whatever, but try. And try talking to Him. And try getting to know Him, this God that we profess. That’s wonderful. I think, as I’m reflecting on your story, too, as you’re talking and prior to accepting Christ, you felt this great weight of sin. And the holiness of God, but yet you said, right there, that Jesus was the only perfect person who could ever live, and He lifts that burden from you, right? He lifts and forgives your sin, so that you don’t have to bear that burden anymore, and I think that’s a really beautiful part of Christianity. If you turned for a moment then to talk with Christians who may know someone or are engaged with those who don’t believe, how would you best advise them to engage? Like Vern did with you. Sure. I actually still have a number of friends who are atheists and not Christians, and to this day, one of my best friends from MIT is an atheist, and I think he admires that I’m truthful, and I’ll be happy to point out the flaws, and there’s times where he’s like, “Hey, Chris,” his name’s Matt. He has a PhD from Cornell in statistics now, and he’s more fascinated about Christianity from an intellectual point of view, but Matt will say, “Hey, Chris. I’d like to watch Jesus Camp with you sometime and get your insights.” And sometimes I’ve used interesting analogies, so it’s like, “Well, there is definitely some people in the church that I’m like, ‘Okay, you know Crazy Uncle Bob who just wants to talk about fishing all the time? Or Aunt Emma who just has 57 cats, and she’s the crazy cat aunt, and whatever else.’ Yeah there’s some of that in our background, and I’m sorry. They’re a part of the family still, too. And yeah, I’ve got to accept them, and it is what it is, but hopefully there are some more sane parts of the family that you can identify with and get along with,” so there’s definitely times where I haven’t tried to hide all of our warts and pimples and things like that. It’s like, “I’ve got crazy parts of my family and also in the extended family, and that’s also true in Christ, and that’s okay. We’re imperfect. But we are part of the same family, and yeah, maybe I would really like them not to be, but they are.” And also having an open dialogue with them, so Matt knows that he can talk to me about anything, and we have actually a pretty interesting relationship, like we’ll talk about the New Atheists, and he’ll have read them, and I’ll have read them, and we’ll compare notes. And although Matt is an atheist, he’s never been like, “Chris, you’re crazy for believing what you believe.” He’s respected it, and even with my work with cults, he’ll see, “Okay, so you’re basically a specialist. And you deal with all those weird parts of the family that people don’t want to really acknowledge exist. So yeah. Good for you. Good on you.” So he respects you.  Yes. And what I love about what you’re saying here is that you keep an open dialogue. You speak with him intellectually on his terms. You read things together. You discuss them. You have a nice open dialogue. It’s not defensive. It’s inquisitive. You learn from each other. And I really appreciate that you have ongoing relationships, because I think that’s tremendous. I think that’s huge. Wow! What a story! Chris, amazing story. Amazing life. And amazing intellect, too. And I think that bodes well for really demonstrating—your whole story demonstrates this real strong intellectual pursuit of truth and what’s real. And that you have come to a place of not only believing it intellectually but giving your life to the One Who exists, Who’s real, Who lived the perfect life. And so He’s obviously transformed you and given you loads of meaning and purpose in your life.  Mm-hm. So I just really appreciate you coming on board today to talk to us about your story.  Thank you for your time. Very good.  Thanks for tuning in to the Side B Stories Podcast to hear Chris’s story. You can find out more about his ministry, Exposing Cults, by visiting his website, which I’ll put in the episode notes. If you enjoyed it, follow, rate, review, and share this podcast with your friends and social network. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll see how another skeptic flips the record of their life.   

Kyle‘s childhood faith disappeared when he began questioning Christianity, finding no answers.  His inquisitive mind led him on a long journey to find the truth. bkylekeltz.com Kyle‘s recommendation for apologetics reading for those who want to know more of the evidence for the Christian worldview: On Guard by William Lane Craig Episode Transcript Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who was once an atheist or skeptic but who surprisingly became a Christian. It’s often believed by atheists that there is no evidence for God, that science is the sole source of knowledge, and that science points to a godless reality. There is no need to impose a God explanation any longer, they think. We are beyond that, more sophisticated than that. Science has or will have all of the answers eventually. It is acknowledged by both secular thinkers and Christians that science does provide knowledge of how and when the material universe acts and reacts, causes and effects, and that much can be known through the scientific method. That is not in dispute.  But what happens when scientific observations actually point towards the need for an explanation outside of material universe in order to understand and explain what we see of the universe itself? What happens when investigating science causes someone to question their own secular understanding of reality? That which we observe and measure needs greater explanation than the material world itself.  But within atheism, the closed universe of cause and effect is all there is, was, or ever will be. We are pieces in the clockwork of the universe, winding down to an inevitably encroaching end, with no real meaning or purpose in life.  What happens when that sense of personal emptiness begins to take root? There are points of tension intellectually, personally. Competing explanatory worldviews are on the table. How does someone decide which one is true? These are but a couple of the issues faced by our guest, philosopher Kyle Keltz, in his journey from atheism to belief in God. I hope you’ll stay with us to hear his story.  Welcome, Kyle. It’s so great to have you today!  Hi, Jana. Thank you so much for having me on. Wonderful. So glad to have you. I am curious, as we’re getting started. Kyle, can you tell us a little bit about who you are, before we go back into your story. Tell me about your life now?  Okay, yes. Well, my name’s Kyle Keltz. I live in Lubbock, Texas. I’m married to Laci. I have two sons, who are eight and six. Their names are Thomas and Jack. I have a PhD in philosophy of religion from Southern Evangelical Seminary. I also got a master’s degree in apologetics from the same seminary. Like I said, I live here in Lubbock, Texas. I work at South Plains College, where I teach Introduction to Philosophy, Intro to World Religions, and English Composition. Okay. Wow! You’ve got a full plate!  Yes. And it sounds like you are a strong proponent of the Christian worldview at this point, but I know you were not always there in that place of a proponent of Christianity. So let’s go back. Let’s start at the beginning and your childhood. Tell me a little bit about where you were born and your family and whether or not God was anywhere to be found in your home environment or among your friends.  Okay. Yeah. So I grew up in—well, they call it west Texas. It’s actually closer to the panhandle, around Lubbock. I was born in Lockney, Texas. I claim Lubbock. But I think I had a pretty typical middle-class upbringing in the Bible Belt. I loved playing video games from an early age. That’s mostly what I did. But as far as God—was there religion in our family? There definitely was. When I’ve thought back on this in the past, I’ve called this nominal Christians. But the more I’ve thought about it, the more I realize I don’t really think that’s the case. I think I was just more hardheaded than anything. Both of my parents are Christians. They’ve usually served in the music side of ministry in churches. But they both talked to us about Christianity. They both tried to get us to go—I say “us.” I have a sister. They’d try to get us to go to church every Sunday, and the more I think about it, I think they had a huge influence on me eventually becoming a Christian. So I think it was around when I was—1989, when I was about eight years old, I do have a memory of my mom talking to us like she usually did about heaven and hell, and I remember thinking, “Well, I want to be with my family and go to heaven,” and I actually remember, when I was eight, that I prayed for Jesus to come into my heart. So that was kind of the extent of it. Growing up, we would go to church. I don’t know. Like I said, I think I was more hardheaded than anything, more immature. I didn’t listen much at church. I didn’t like going to church. I fell asleep a lot. And it became like a habit. I just would go to church and fall asleep in the sermon. Didn’t like going to Sunday school that much. But my parents were great. They had a good influence on me. I think I have a memory—I even tried to read through the Bible in the seventh grade. I didn’t make it. I think I stalled out probably in Numbers or something, but yeah. I mean, they had a good influence on me. I just wasn’t into it that much really. Okay, yeah. So you had kind of a childhood faith. Your family, obviously, were believers in Christianity. You went to church. And it was just part of your life and the rhythm of things. I’m curious. Did you have any other friends who were invested in Christianity at all? Or were you just kind of hanging out with guys who pretty much felt the same way you did?  Oh. Yeah, that’s a good question, Jana. So most of my friends didn’t, if I remember correctly. Especially… One of the big turning points for me was in high school, is whenever I started claiming to be an atheist. At that time, most of my friends weren’t involved in church. I did have one that was highly involved, but thinking back to [sic] graduate school, I don’t even remember talking about religion with any of my friends. We moved around a lot, so I had to make friends everywhere we went, and one of the ways I did it was I just—an easy icebreaker for me was, “Do you like video games?” Okay.  And if they said, “No,” then it was awkward, but if they said, “Yes,” then I could almost instantly make a friend, but that was kind of… Usually, me and my friends, we would just go play or ride bikes, go play in town or play video games, and I don’t remember talking about religion with just about anybody. It wasn’t until really high school that I did have a friend who, still to this day, is a really strong Christian. And he was back then. But most of my friends weren’t. So you said you started thinking more that you didn’t want to or didn’t believe in Christianity when you were in high school? Tell me about that.  I think it was in junior high or a little bit younger—and thinking things that probably most kids don’t think. Like I remember one time sitting in my room thinking about what it would be like if nothing existed. I’ve just always had this mind that I was always daydreaming and/or thinking about why we’re here and things like that, so that really started to come to a head in high school, and that’s when I actually started questioning whether Christianity was true or not. And I haven’t said that—like I said, up to this point, I’m almost 100% sure, 99% sure that I wasn’t a Christian. Because my understanding was that I had prayed for Jesus to be in my heart, so that was my understanding of what it was to be a Christian. But I don’t think I understood the gospel message. But I still called myself a Christian. At this point, I think it was my junior or senior year, I started to really question everything. I remember I had so many objections to Christianity but the more I learned about Christianity later on, the more I realized that they were all kind of—like I wasn’t objecting to Christianity. I was objecting to my misconceptions of what Christianity was. But I do remember one issue I had was that I thought—I did look in the Old Testament, and I saw that God was commanding the Jews to take over the land of Canaan, and I was like, “That doesn’t seem like something a good God would command. It just seems like maybe the Jews were just using their idea of some god as an excuse to do conquest.” I also had questions like—I didn’t think that Christianity made sense because I would tell people, “Well, you know, if Jesus is the only way to be saved, but He just only showed up 2,000 years ago, what about all the people before Him? Does that mean that they all went to hell?” And I had many questions that were similar to that, and I just—the people I would ask—I can’t remember if I talked to my parents about it or not, but the people I did ask didn’t have the answers. And I got to the point where I didn’t think anybody had the answers. And a lot of times, I just wouldn’t even talk about it, because, to a certain point—I was pretty convicted it wasn’t true, but I didn’t want to argue to other people that it wasn’t true and hurt their beliefs, you know? Right, right. Or perhaps even—like your parents. I’m sure that would be a difficult conversation to have.  Yeah. But when I asked people, it was mainly just people from church or friends that I knew that I thought would know something about it. It was mainly just asking the people I knew these questions, not really… And that’s what blows me away now, knowing how much apologetic material was out there during this time, I can’t believe I missed all of it… but yeah. I think it’s easy to miss if it’s not, if those kind of answers aren’t to be found in your culture, in your circle of friends, family, church, whatever. So you started having these doubts. You were internally questioning the reality of Christianity. You began to, I guess, intellectually push away from it? And you were keeping quiet about it. It sounds like you were… I guess, like you said before, it may have been a bit too much of an uncomfortability to let it to be known that you were an atheist among your own circles?  Yes. Now I was outspoken with my friends. I think I was just quiet about it with my family. I wasn’t sure how they would take it. I think maybe eventually I told them. What happened was I graduated from high school, and I went straight into the Army, and I had signed up for college money basically, but I signed up for the army to go serve for 4-1/2 years, and when I left the house, I really became like a staunch atheist. I actually still have some dog tags in a box somewhere, and you know, at the bottom, it usually says what religion you are, and I had some that said “N/A,” you know? N slash A. And I remember being really proud of that. And they always said—there’s a saying in the Army. They say, “There’s no atheists in a foxhole,” and I just used to sneer at that and be like, “No, I don’t believe in it at all.” To be honest, and the more I’ve thought about it, I wanted to be a Christian probably because of my family influence, but I remember wanting to believe that God existed, but I just couldn’t. It was like… I don’t know. It’s almost like working out, and you’re trying to get that last rep in of whatever you’re doing, and you just can’t do it. That was how I felt. I wanted to believe. I just couldn’t bring myself to believe in it. But that kind of takes me to the next step, was where—I guess there was something in me that felt like there was more to life? Because there was a time where I literally thought, “If I died today,” like I actually wasn’t even afraid of death, like I thought, “If I die today, it’ll just be like going to sleep.” I just won’t exist anymore, and for all eternity, that’s it. I’ll just be like being unconscious. But I don’t know. There must have just been something in me. I thought there must be more than this. So while I was in the military, I started researching other religions. And I read a lot of books. I read books on new age things, if I remember right. I know I read a lot of books on Buddhism and Hinduism. I remember the Bhagavad Gita was one of my favorites. I think I even read a little bit about Islam. I don’t know. I think I tried meditating a little bit here and there, but I always felt silly. The more I read about Hinduism, the less it made sense to me. But I did transition. I think it was for a couple of years I was an atheist, starting in high school, going into the military, but then I started leaning more towards agnosticism or at least being agnostic leaning towards atheism. After a while, I quit being so outspoken about God not existing and all that. I transitioned into a period where I was like, “Okay, I’m going to start looking into it and try to figure out what I think is true, and I’m not going to take a side on this right now, and I’m not going to try to talk people out of being Christians or religious.” So when you decided to start looking, though—because it sounds like you looked a lot of other directions than Christianity, so you were willing to look. Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, but was it one of those “anything but Christianity” kind of searches at the beginning?  I think so. In the beginning, it definitely was. Because I had all these unanswered questions about Christianity, and I didn’t think anyone had the answers, so I began to assume that there were no answers, so that’s why I mainly went looking to other places first when I was trying to figure out… when I went on my “search for truth.” But just thinking about the catalyst that started the search, it was that you were looking for something more in life, because you must’ve—like you say, the death was the end. So you must’ve been thoughtful enough to understand the implications of your atheism, that there’s not much in the way of objective meaning and purpose, that there is no life after death, all of those things. Right. So you were thoughtful enough about your own worldview, the implications of your own worldview, that you saw that there was something missing, at least from a human perspective, that you wanted something more existentially in your life?  I think so. And I don’t want to say that I had completely thought out every angle of atheism or the implications for that on a comprehensive, logical, coherent worldview, but yes, I certainly had realized that, if God didn’t exist, which I didn’t think He did, that basically nothing mattered. And that if I died, nothing would happen. I would just cease to exist. And it’s funny, too, because you keep your living your life, and you keep going, and you have goals, but you tell yourself, “Ultimately, it doesn’t matter, but I’m going to do it anyway.” So I don’t think I’d thought it completely through, but I definitely knew that, at least. But yeah, I think at the end of the day, though, I definitely knew there had to be something more than that. And so that’s why I did start looking for other—at least to see if maybe one of the other religions might be true, or there’s something in it that really struck me. So as you were looking through these other religions, it sounds as if you weren’t finding what you were looking for in terms of… I don’t know. Intellectual substance? Or meaning? Or whatever it is that you were searching for. Why don’t you tell me about that? Or what it led towards. If it led away from those? What it led towards?  It was Buddhism and Hinduism that really intrigued me the most. You know, there are several types of Buddhism. I was really into thinking about or wanting to try to practice the ones that are more meditative and more intellectual. I got into Hinduism, though, but yeah, when you try to read about, in some of the writings, how did the world begin and—oh! That reminds me of one of my major objections to Christianity. It was because of Genesis 1. I used to think that because Genesis 1 says that… Or let’s say this: It seems to say that the world was created before light was created. I used to say, “Yeah, it seems to obviously be saying that the world was created before the sun was created, but science says otherwise,” so that was another major objection I had. But you know, when you start reading in other religions, what they say the origin of the world is and kind of the purpose for why we’re here and all that, it really… I don’t know. It wasn’t satisfying, I don’t think, and I was trying to—I guess because of the way my mind works, I was trying to integrate it into what I was seeing in my everyday life, and I was trying to make sure that all the concepts lined up with each other. And it just wasn’t really clicking. And that really does kind of lead in to what I started doing next. So I got out of the military. I was still agnostic at this point. I got in in ’99, and I was in for 4-1/2 years. I think I got out around the beginning of 2004, and I came back to Lubbock, and I started going to Texas Tech University. At this time, I think that, because I didn’t find anything satisfying in these other religions, I started going to philosophy of religion. I specifically remember buying a book called Philosophy of Religion: Selected Readings, and philosophy of religion, it’s not completely… Philosophers of religion can be dabbling with just about any worldview. They can be theists. They can be pantheists. So I bought this book. I was like, “Well, I want to see what the philosophers have to say about all this.” I don’t know why I bought that specific book, but I saw in the table of contents that it talked about god of theism, it talked about pantheism and several others, I believe, and it had all these other things into it. And that really was a turning point for me. Another thing that was happening in my life, around the time, the last couple of years in the Army and some of those years going through college—and this leads up to my conversion—was I was having I think it’s called sleep paralysis. Have you talked to anybody that’s experienced that? Well, I think I know what you mean just from a personal experience, but why don’t you describe what it is, essentially?  Oh, okay. Yeah. Well, and I didn’t even know it was called something back then. But I would have these, and I call them dreams. I honestly don’t know what you would call it. Because it’s like a dream, but you’re in the exact place you’re in, and you’re in the exact position you’re in, but I would have something that—I didn’t know it would be a dream at first, right? So I’d just think I’m awake in bed, but in these “dreams,” I would notice that there was a dark figure standing in the room somewhere. And when you realize that there’s a dark figure standing in your room, you want to sit up and ask who it is or see what’s going on. But then at that point I would realize that my whole body was paralyzed and I couldn’t move. And obviously that’s a jarring experience, so I would realize that I couldn’t move, and then, for the next couple of seconds, I would try with all my might to move and I couldn’t, and the dark figure would still just be standing there over me, kind of across the room, never right over me, and then maybe a minute or so later, finally I could move because it’s because I just woke up. But I’m in the same place. It feels like I just woke up, but I’m in the same place. I’m in the same bed and position, but I just sat up, and I’m breathing real hard. And you know, whenever I’d wake up, there wouldn’t be anything there. But it was always so weird, and I had it occasionally. I didn’t think much of it, to be honest. It would happen, and I was like, “That’s weird.” I might tell somebody about it. I remember one time specifically I was on vacation from the Army, and I went hunting with my dad. We stayed the night at my grandma’s house in a small town in west Texas, and yeah, this one night. I slept on the couch that night, and I remember two people standing over me talking about me, just, “He’s doing this. He’s doing that. Blah, dah, dah, dah, dah,” and I wanted to sit up and be like, “Who is this in the living room?” because it was just me and him. I think my grandma and grandpa were out of town that night. But I couldn’t move, and I never saw who it was. When I finally was able to wake up, sit up, no one was there. So I just mention this because this was kind of happening alongside me looking through all these other religions, and I started to be more open to maybe taking another look at Christianity, or at least theism, because I didn’t find any of the other ones compelling or interesting after a while. Yeah, so Kyle, I imagine those experiences were quite frightening in some ways, I wonder. Did you consider that these figures—probably there was a palpable reality to them. Did it make you question whether or not there perhaps was something beyond the materialistic world? Something spiritual, perhaps? Maybe even a dark kind of spirituality?  I don’t think so. In the beginning and for several years, I thought they were just weird dreams. Okay.  Yeah. There was a specific example that happened that really jarred me, and that kind of leads up to my conversion, really the main part of my conversion story. Yes.  Oh, okay. So yeah… Okay, so I joined the Army for 4-1/2 years. When I got out, I joined the Texas National Guard. And I decided to stay in the Texas National Guard while I went to college at Texas Tech. I started school in 2004. What happened was it took me like six years to graduate from Texas Tech, but I went to school for less than four years out of that time because I got deployed to Iraq a couple times. So on this one specific deployment, in 2005—we were in southeastern Iraq. We were the Texas National Guard, and it wasn’t a super important mission or anything, but they had us basically stationed out in the middle of nowhere, just northwest of Kuwait. But we were at what is called a radio relay point out in the middle of the desert. And there were only like fifteen of us. Most of our time was just spent on guard duty, really, and maybe going out and helping truck drivers every once in a while. Now, leading up to this point, on this deployment, obviously it was really boring, because we were just doing guard duty, so I did a lot of reading. And I had ordered that philosophy of religion book, and I remember in that anthology there was an article titled “The Kalam Cosmological Argument” written by J.P. Moreland. And if your readers aren’t familiar with the Kalam cosmological argument, it’s a philosophical argument for God’s existence based off of the beginning of the world, right? And the argument says things that begin to exist have a cause. The universe began to exist. Therefore the universe has a cause. And I was reading that article by J.P. Moreland in this philosophy of religion anthology, and I just could not come up with an answer to this idea that there had to be a beginning to space and time. I tried. I came up with a few solutions, but it was so interesting because I just couldn’t come up with a satisfying solution. And it really started to hit me that I thought that there was a beginning to the universe, and if there was a beginning to the universe, I thought obviously it would follow that there had to be a God who made it begin. So I was struggling with this at this point. I was wrestling with the Kalam argument, and then one night in the guard tower… And like I said, I don’t know if these are dreams or not. Because it seems like you’re awake but then you go through this experience and then you kind of wake up from it. But I don’t know. So I’m on guard duty, and I thought I was just kind of sitting there, watching everything, and I started to hear someone come up this ladder. It’s not like a ladder. I don’t know what you would call it, but it’s these things that kind of stick out from the tower, so you grab onto those and step on those. And they were metallic, so it was a very distinct noise that someone would make if they would climb up the ladder. And oftentimes, some of my friends would come up and visit me, and would visit them. Or maybe my squad leader would come up and see how I was doing. So it wasn’t a big deal. It was a very common thing for someone to come up the ladder and see you. So I’m on guard duty. I hear someone come up. I don’t think much of it. But all of a sudden, when I could hear those footsteps and hands coming up that ladder to the top, this dark figure emerges. Oh!  And it really freaked me out. But I couldn’t move, you know? And then it stood there, and I couldn’t move, and then maybe a few seconds later I could move, and then it wasn’t there. So that really freaked me out for some reason. Way more than the other ones did when I was in bed. And that’s really the point where I started thinking that maybe there was something to this. And I started thinking about all the other times it happened. And I was wondering maybe that there’s some bad force out there that’s not happy with what I’m doing. And I think it was almost the next day—I don’t remember what it was. I think it was probably one of these camouflage Bibles that you have all over in the military. I think basically I took something like that and flipped to the back and looked for plan of salvation portion, you know? And I prayed the sinner’s prayer basically. And from then on, I definitely… I think that was the moment I was saved, but from then on, I definitely said I was a Christian. I never had someone to mentor me, so it took years before I finally started taking the Bible seriously, but I at least said I was a Christian. So if I’m listening to your correctly and kind of putting the pieces together, and I suppose, from intellectual point of view, you were reading J.P Moreland, the Kalam cosmological argument, that from, again, an intellectual point of view, you’re beginning to see that the beginning of the universe requires a sufficient cause outside of the material universe, and that God seems to be the best explanation for that, and so I guess, in some way, you began to become open, again intellectually, to the idea of at least a theistic god or someone, the Big Banger who caused the Big Bang, as the sufficient and necessary cause. And so I guess, once you made that step, it was almost as if these episodes, these sleep paralysis episodes and then the seeing of the dark figures, that prior to that you just dismissed them, but after that, it was enough for you to kind of—push you is probably too strong of a word. But it was enough of a frightening experience or a sobering experience that you were able to apprehend at least that maybe, if there is a God, then maybe there is an evil force? Or a dark force? That’s real. If God is real, then maybe there’s something else that’s real that’s not so good?  So it was through an interesting journeying, both experiential as well as intellectual, and then experiential again to bring you to a point of willingness, to where you actually looked at the Bible and looked at the back. And you were willing and really, it sounds like, very in earnest to accept God at that point.  Yes. And it’s funny, because I look back on it now, and I thought I was so smart back then, when I didn’t believe in it. But I honestly—since I’ve learned about evidence for Jesus’ resurrection in seminary, I realize that there are so many questions I actually didn’t ask. And I was surprised that I didn’t. I thought, “Well, why did I go back to Christianity so soon?” I wonder if some of it has to do with my upbringing, but a lot of was that I really—at that point, I thought that the Judeo-Christian view of demons and the devil was real, so the rest of it must also be real, and I needed to ask Jesus for help really soon so they wouldn’t get me. You know, an interesting thing is, ever since I prayed, I did do that sinner’s prayer and I accept Jesus as my Lord and Savior, I haven’t had one of those sleep paralysis episodes with the dark figure standing over me. That’s interesting.  And since then, that’s been something that’s just really blowing me away. And I don’t know, maybe some people might think it’s completely psychological, but all I can say is that’s what I’ve experienced. Religious experience is difficult to get across to somebody, but that’s what I was seeing, and then I prayed to Jesus, and it has never happened to me again. In all these years. Yeah. I think that is a powerful testimony in its own way. Granted, it is your own experience, but it is a very convincing experience for you. I can listen to the skeptic who may be listening and saying, “Oh, he was just imagining Or, “He just got scared or something, and he just believed,” but I have a feeling that you, as a thoughtful person, like you said earlier in your story. You wanted to believe, but you didn’t think that there was enough compelling evidence for you to believe.  Right. But at this point in your life, you didn’t want to believe, but you were searching and then found something compelling, both intellectually and experientially. Once you accepted Christ and  you were able to, I guess, look at the doubts and the hard questions through different eyes, I guess you could say, were you able to make sense intellectually of all of those questions that you had before? Was this new worldview philosophically—as a philosopher, as a thinker, was it something that gave you meaning and hope beyond death? But more than, from a human perspective, was it something that made sense of reality as a whole? Both what you were thinking about, say cosmologically with the origins of the universe for example, as well as in  your own humanity that the Christian worldview seemed to put the pieces together? How did that work? I mean you came a long way from just agreeing or praying the sinner’s prayer, the plan of salvation, to now being a PhD philosophy professor. There must have been something quite convincing to you beyond mere experience.  Oh, yes. For sure. Now, you know, the rest of the story, there’s a lot of grace, a lot of providence I think. That’s what I think is so amazing, you know? And I still don’t think I went and talked to my family and asked them hard questions, but it was a slow process. After I became a Christian, I think I started reading the Bible a little bit. Never read it all the way through. I started praying. But not really going to church. When I was an undergrad, I joined a social fraternity, and we had a GPA requirement, but to be honest, most of the guys in my fraternity joined so we could go to parties. So I was drinking a lot back then, and looking back, sometimes I wonder if I was drinking a lot because of some of my experiences in the military, but I didn’t have… I basically came to Christ because of a book and the Holy Spirit. So I didn’t have someone guiding me through all this. What I think was a turning point for me was when I met my wife. At this point, I was surrounded by people who drank, and that’s all I did. But then I met her. And we started dating. She didn’t drink, and really, it was interesting to me, because when we would talk or hang out, I realized that you can have fun without drinking, basically. But also she was someone—because I was wanting to date her. She didn’t tell me not to drink, but she’s just one of those people. She was definitely a mature Christian. And she’s just one of those people that you just want to act better around, you know? You just want to be a better person around them. So I wouldn’t drink around her, and we got serious really quick. We both met in our late twenties. We were both looking for something serious. And we got married within a year of knowing each other, and she was just this lifeline to a world where I wasn’t surrounded by people drinking. And like I said, she was a mature Christian. She started getting me in church. I started reading the Bible more. But also, one day, we had this conversation asking each other what we would do if we had a billion dollars. And she asked me what I would do, and I said, “Well, I would go back to school and learn all this stuff I’ve always wanted to learn about. I hear these things in the sermons, and I understand it for the most part, but I want to know the why of it all. I want to know how this is even possible,” so she actually talked me into following my dream. At first I thought I would just get some high paying job, or hopefully a high paying job, and work my way to retirement, so I could go back to school, but she talked me into going to seminary just right up front and then hopefully doing something like that as a career. So I did. And I went to Southern Evangelical Seminary, started going in 2014. She laughed because I was so excited I was ordering books on Amazon for my classes when we were on our honeymoon. Besides my wife’s sanctifying influence on my life, going to SES was great for me. I was required to read through the Bible in the Bible survey courses. It was the first time I’d read through the whole thing. But I knew that I wanted to learn about philosophy. I wanted to learn about why Christianity is true, I also wanted a place that was grounded in the Bible and seemed to be pretty orthodox and conservative. So I went there, and that was what was kind of an eye opener to me, is when I started learning about all of these philosophical arguments for God’s existence that I hadn’t even considered, when I started learning about the historical evidence for Jesus’ resurrection, when I started learning about all philosophical arguments for the existence of the soul and all these arguments against atheism. Well, some of the stuff on Jesus’ resurrection surprised me because I thought back and I thought, “You know, I didn’t even ask these questions, but there’s all of these answers and all this evidence for Jesus’ life and all these answers to objections from skeptics,” and I hadn’t even considered that. But I think it really had a lot to do with me thinking that demons were real. But at this point in time in my life, I’ve seen so much. For one, it does make sense out of pretty much all of reality, the Christian worldview does. Whether it’s the beginning of the universe or us always seeking some kind of good, whether we believe that God exists or not, our rationality, our sense of right and wrong. But I’ve seen so much evidence for Christianity at this point that I just… It would take more faith for me to be an atheist. I tell people if they dug up Jesus’ body tomorrow, and they were able to somehow conclude conclusively that Christianity is false, I still would be at least a theist. I’d be confused, but all the evidence for God’s existence, philosophical and scientific evidence that kind of helps confirm that, I just… At this point, I’m so convinced that there is a God, and of course, with all this evidence for Jesus’ resurrection and all the evidence for the reliability of the Bible, I just think that Christianity stands alone as the true religion. And that everybody needs to take a good, hard look at their life and a good, hard look at the evidence and make a decision. You know, sometimes, despite all the evidence that seems extremely obvious to those who’ve studied the evidence for a long time on a Christian perspective, oftentimes the skeptic will say there is no evidence for God. How would you respond to that, especially in light of what you just said, that there seems to be an overwhelming amount of evidence?  It reminds me of me back whenever I was in that position. Because there were so many books written on apologetics before 1999. It blows me away how many people were speaking and writing about the truth of Christianity at that point, and I had no idea about it. But I have journal entry assignments in my classes at work, in my philosophy class, and we get to a philosophy of religion portion of the class, and students are asked to write about their opinions and their thought on whether God exists, and I’ve had several students say things to that effect. “There’s absolutely no evidence for God’s existence,” and it always puzzles me, because in these debates on whether God exists or not, the theist is saying that the entire universe is evidence for God’s existence. Basically, to me, when someone says that, it would be like someone being in a murder case and the prosecutor has provided a lot of evidence, pointing… maybe circumstantial, but pointing to the guilt of the offender, but then one of the people on the jury says—they don’t think he did it, but they wouldn’t say, “There’s absolutely no evidence for it,” right? They would just say, “I don’t think this evidence means that he murdered that person.” So if someone says, “There’s absolutely no evidence for God’s existence,” I think either they don’t know about all of these philosophical, logical, scientific arguments that Western philosophers and theists have been making for thousands of years, or what they really mean is, “The evidence doesn’t convince me.” So that’s what I would say to somebody. If you think there is no evidence, then you need to start reading up on apologetics. If you’re really interested in this topic and you’re really searching for truth, there are a lot of books that provide logical, evidential reasons for believing that God exists and that Jesus rose from the dead. Yeah. I think that might be a little bit key there, in terms of either they are not convinced or they haven’t been exposed, but what you said there is if they’re really looking. And I think that has a lot to say about all of us, in terms of what we’re looking for. We have a tendency to see what we seek, and so sometimes our desires prevent us from seeing perhaps what is true.  Yeah. if I had any more, other advice to a nonbeliever who was seeking in some sense of the word, I just think of my younger self, really. That’s one of the reasons kind of why I do it. One reason why I’m a philosopher is because I’ve always just thought about these hard questions. And I really was one of those people at work daydreaming about, “Does God exist?” and all these things. But thinking about my younger self, I had all of these objections to Christianity, but like I said earlier, the more I learned about systematic theology, the more I learned about philosophy and all these Christian ideas that the church fathers and all the major leaders of the church in the medieval and modern and ancient period have argued for over thousands of years and the more I understood what Christianity really means, the more I realized that all of these objections I had to Christianity early on weren’t objections to Christianity, because I was basically… I had these straw man ideas about it, and I didn’t believe in something that wasn’t even Christianity. So I know it sounds crazy, but I almost wonder how many atheists or people who once were Christian or have never been Christian, but if they would just sit down with an open mind with someone who knows what they’re talking about and have them explain it to them, I wonder how many would find it more compelling. Another thing is that I was asking all these questions, but no one had the answers, but the more I’ve thought about it, I tell people… Let’s say that I wanted to know about something, some really deep scientific concept, so I want to learn about relativity theory, and the only people I ask about relativity theory are my family members, who aren’t scientists, or my high school teacher. And none of them can explain it really well to me, and in fact, when they do explain what they do grasp, it doesn’t sound right. But the thing is I wouldn’t reject relativity theory based off of just asking my friends and my high school teacher. I would need to go to a professor, a PhD in it. And in the same way… I’m not saying that someone has to have a PhD to understand what Christianity is. I’m just saying that, if someone has asked their parents and a few other people and maybe their pastor, who hasn’t been taught apologetics maybe, and those people don’t have the answer, that’s not good reason for rejecting Christianity. You need to go to theologians. You need to read systematic theology, read some philosophy, read some works of apologetics, because those are going to be written by people who know what they’re talking about, and there is a lot of material out there on this stuff. If you had a chance to recommend one book, say someone said, “I really would like to read something substantive from a Christian writer, philosopher, theologian,” can you think of a book that you might recommend for someone to pick up?  Yes. The book I usually recommend is a book by William Lane Craig. It’s called On Guard, Student’s Edition, so it’s written by a Christian philosopher and apologist, written with an unbelieving audience in mind, and he covers a lot of ground in that book. He covers the meaning of life, whether or not God exists. He presents several arguments for God’s existence, and then he moves into the resurrection of Jesus and presents all of the historical evidence for Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. And that’s one of my favorites. It’s written for a beginning audience, so I think it’s pretty easy to understand for beginners. And that’s one of my favorites to recommend to people. Yeah. That’s excellent. And for the Christian, how would you recommend them to really consider talking with those who were as you once were, are engaging with those who don’t believe or the skeptic?  Yeah. So as an apologist and a philosopher, obviously I put a lot of stock in and emphasize 1 Peter 3:15, that says that everyone needs to give a reason for the hope that is in them when they’re asked. I think obviously different Christians are gifted with different gifts, right? And I don’t think that everyone is going to be gifted in a way that they’re going to be interested in apologetics. I know many people who just know Christianity is true, and they don’t really have to dig into the evidence. They just know it’s true. And honestly, I think that’s okay. But I would say that everyone needs to at least know a little bit of good theology. Try to learn a little bit more about why they believe what they believe, whether it’s learning a little bit of basic systematic theology but also maybe reading at least one book on apologetics and looking at the evidence for Jesus’ resurrection and God’s existence, in the very least that you could point someone to that. You know, since I became a believer, I’ve discovered that there are a good handful of people like me who needed to see evidence that it was true before they got on board, but I’ve also discovered that, in churches, there’s a lot of people who aren’t into that, and I’ve seen some Christians who were actually… They’re against apologetics in some sense, whether they think it’s just kind of a waste of time or they think it’s not very pious to say that you have to defend the truth of Christianity, and so yeah… For one, I think when engaging with nonbelievers, we need to at least know a little bit about what we believe so you can point nonbelievers who do want to see evidence to these resources, but also, as believers, we need to realize that not everybody has the same experience we do. Because I’ve had some people say that we shouldn’t do apologetics because it doesn’t work. But I’m living proof that it does work. I know there were some experiential things going on with my conversion, but also a huge part of that was through philosophy and through apologetics and me being—one day I wasn’t convinced that God existed. The next day I read a philosophical argument, and I was convinced that there was a beginning to the universe and God had to be the cause of that. So I would just tell people that apologetics is okay. And God can and does use it to bring people to the Kingdom of God, so to have an open mind about it, and just because someone else is…. We’re not all gifted with the same gifts, so it’s okay for other people to do it, whether you’re interested in it or not. Yeah, yeah. Thank you for that. Apologetics is something I think both you and I hold close to our hearts. I have, as you have, seen the value of it, especially in a world increasingly skeptical about Christianity and its truths.  Yes. So it’s good to know why we believe, what we believe, and all of these grounding arguments for it that are really, really quite substantive when you take look at them. I think, too, I love your story and what you’re saying because I also believe that, just as you had constructed straw men and arguments to take Christianity down, I think there’s oftentimes a misconception of what Christianity is and who Christians are, and oftentimes, we’re given a very negative stereotype, and one of those stereotypes is that we’re not intelligent people. And I think your story really counters that, your journey really counters that. You’re a thoughtful, intelligent person. You have asked questions since you were a boy, and into your adulthood, you’re spending your life still considering the big questions of life in a very thoughtful, intellectual way, not only for yourself but for college students and high school students as well. And that’s pretty wonderful, that you’ve gone through this whole journey in your life, both intellectual, as well as experiential, and spiritual of course, and that you’ve found the worldview that seems to make the most sense of reality, but you’re not keeping it to yourself. You’re sharing that with others.  And that’s why I’m so happy that you’re on the podcast today, Kyle. Because I’m thinking about those who are going to be listening to your story and really benefit from your journey, so thank you for coming on board today.  Thank you so much for having me, Jana. It’s been wonderful.  Thanks for tuning in to to hear Kyle’s story. You can find out more about him with the links in the episode notes, as well as the book On Guard that he recommended by William Lane Craig. If you enjoyed this episode, I hope you’ll subscribe and share this podcast with your friends and social network. It’s always great, too, if you give it a good rating. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll be see how someone else, another skeptic, flips the record of their life.

Former skeptic Adrienne Johnson embraced anything but God in her life until her drive to discover truth led her to belief. Resources Prager U, Stories of Us, Adrienne Johnson: Why I’m No Longer an Atheist https://www.prageru.com/video/stories-of-us-adrienne-johnson Max McLean, Fellowship for Performing Arts, https://fpatheatre.com C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity Learn more about the C.S. Lewis Institute Fellows Program at https://www.cslewisinstitute.org/Fellows_Program Visit www.sidebstories.com to explore more resources and stories of atheist conversions to Christianity. Episode Transcript Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to the Side B Podcast, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist but who, against all odds, became a Christian. Everyone is different. Every story is different. Everyone has and holds beliefs, yes, based upon intellectual reasons, but it’s usually more than that. We all have good and bad experiences, influences, emotions, desires, and disappointments. We have people in our lives that shape our expectations and thinking about what we should believe to be true or good or real. We are complex and complicated, but oh, so interesting. Every story of an atheist moving from disbelief to belief is nothing short of fascinating. This huge paradigm shift occurs not merely in the mind of someone in their expressed beliefs, but it also affects an enormous transformation of life and living. After all, what we believe dramatically effects how we behave, how we see and live life, or at least it should. If not, your beliefs are essentially meaningless.  But when you see a remarkable shift in someone’s life, it causes us all to look more closely at what happened, to step in. One thing I can say from listening to story after story of conversion from atheism to belief in Jesus Christ is that an extraordinary change occurs, an exchange of life so undeniable that it captures the attention of all who’ve observed the before and after, so to speak. We stop in our tracks, and we want to know why and how it happened. What was so profound that turned someone from resolutely walking one way to changing course to a nearly opposite way of thinking and living?  Today, we’re going to hear another one of those incredible stories. As an atheist, Adrienne Johnson couldn’t remotely conceive of God as a possible reality, much less anyone she wanted in her life. Now, she can’t imagine life without Him. I hope you’ll come and listen to her story and be encouraged by her courage, inspired by her change of belief and change of life.  Welcome to the Side B, Adrienne. It’s so great to have you with me today!  Thank you so much for having me. So, my name is Adrienne Johnson. I’m the chief of staff at PragerU. And we have a series called Stories of Us that features Americans from every walk of life and their amazing stories of transformation. We recently released an episode featuring me and my story, about how I was a lifelong atheist. In fact, I was a chain smoking, tattoo covered, sexually promiscuous, suicidally depressed atheist that was transformed by Jesus. Wow. You have set the stage for us, Adrienne! I’m so intrigued to find out your story. Obviously, you’ve come a long way. Transformation is probably the right word to use for your story. So let’s start at the beginning of your story. Tell me about your childhood, where you grew up, your culture. And was there God in the picture? Did your family have any beliefs? Just start us there.  Sure. So I grew up in Santa Monica, California. I grew up with two very loving secular parents. We really didn’t have any religion in the home. We didn’t have a whole lot of moral structure or guidelines, and my dad was basically an atheist. My mom was sort of a New Age hippie, and any time that I was exposed to any kind of religion or spirituality, I rejected it, even at a very, very young age. I thought it was all make believe and fairy tales. It didn’t make sense to me. It wasn’t logical. I was a very rational, logical child. In fact, when I was about four years old, I came to my dad, and I was so earnest, and I said, “Dad, I just want you to tell me the truth. Okay? Just be honest with me. Is Santa Claus real?” And he was so taken aback by my directness that he said, “No, he’s not,” and I was relieved, because, to me, that whole thing didn’t make sense. How could one person fly all over the world in one night? So even as a little four year old, I wanted everything to be rational and make sense, and when I heard things about Adam and Eve and Noah’s Ark and the parting of the Red Sea, it just sounded like Santa Claus to me. It just sounded like fairy tales, and so I rejected it, and we really didn’t have any kind of religion or spirituality in the home? Did you ever talk about religion or belief with your father and his atheism? Did you have any discussion? Or did you just come to this conclusion on your own?  A little bit later, when I was in college—high school, college—my dad and I would talk about… That was really when I started coming into my own with my intellectual thinking, and we would have philosophical discussions about history. And I remember him telling me things about The Selfish Gene, which was a book that was written by a prominent atheist. I don’t know if it was Richard Dawkins or someone else, yeah, and he was saying how the only reason humans exist is because we’re really good hosts for DNA and that sort of sums up our entire existence. I guess I was a college student maybe at the time, and I thought, “Oh, that’s really interesting.” And I remember saying to my dad in the car—I went to college at UC Santa Barbara, and so we would drive back and forth often. I would go home on the weekends and then drive back to college, and so my dad and I would spend time together in the car, talking about the world and economics and politics and philosophy and all of these things that I was just starting to learn about as a young woman. And I remember saying to him once, “Religion is something that man created back in the ancient times, when we needed purpose and reason and something to make sense of the world, and now we don’t need it any more, but it’s this ancient holdover that we still have. And one day we’ll be rid of it. We’re just sort of in the middle transition phase right now.” And I really believed that, and in fact, when I was in college, I was an adamant atheist, like an angry, cynical, hard, harsh atheist. And any time I was exposed to religion or spirituality, I was very hostile toward it. What do you think informed that contempt?  That’s a good question. I mean, now I have sort of my own opinion about it, which is that there is so much truth and power to God and Jesus, that it is so offensive to people who don’t believe. I suppose there are some atheists or some agnostics who just sort of shrug and say, “Oh, I don’t really believe anything,” or, “I don’t care what other people believe,” but I know from my personal experience, it was incredibly offensive, and now I think—it’s sort of like when you’re in the dark and you are exposed to the light, and it’s so harsh and blinding. It’s very hard to be indifferent toward it. You either can accept it or you reject it, and you have to fight it, because it is so offensive to your worldview and who you are, and that was how I felt. So as you were growing up, you obviously had this very pragmatic view of life, but you observed your mother practicing some form of spirituality. What did you think that was? Obviously, she believed it, or did she talk with you about her New Age beliefs?  A little bit. I mean I was definitely exposed to it. I definitely saw it. I don’t think we discussed it that much. I was sort of more in line with my father, who was very intellectual, very cerebral, and we would have these discussions, but I saw my mother dabbling in all of these different sort of New Age spiritual practices, especially in Los Angeles. She would go to these different organizations, different… I guess you would call them churches but sort of New Age versions of churches or spiritual centers. There was definitely a seeking about her my entire life that I witnessed. She’s always looking for something to make her happy, make her whole, make her complete. And I didn’t quite understand this as a child, but it seems to me that she’s always been sort of seeking for something. And I was intrigued. She would have a room in the house with her paints and her canvases when I was a child, and she also had dream catchers and rain sticks and crystals. And I was very interested in that stuff, probably just because it was my mom’s. It was like “my mom’s neat stuff,” “my mom’s neat room,” that I thought was interesting. But it didn’t have any meaning. It didn’t have any spiritual meaning to me. During that time as you were growing up as well, I know you’re in LA. Especially, you’re young enough that there were some forms of Christianity around you. Did you ever have any touch points with those? Any people who called themselves Christians in any kind of orthodox sense?  I love that question because Christianity is actually such a huge part of our culture. It’s very easy to be exposed to things around Christianity, and I was, and yet it never penetrated. For example, I didn’t really have Christians in my life. I didn’t have Christian friends or Christian family, but I was very much exposed to it with things even like Christmas cartoons. I loved Christmas cartoons. I loved the Charlie Brown Christmas special, Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown, and in it, Linus quotes Luke. He quotes several verses of Luke, and I must have seen that cartoon a hundred times as a child, and so I even probably had some of it memorized, but if you asked me what it meant, I would have no idea. Hearing terms like the Son of God, died for our sins, Jesus is Savior, you know I heard things like that because it’s part of our culture, but I didn’t know what any of that meant. I certainly never, ever knew that Jesus was God. No one ever said that to me, explained that to me. I thought He was a special person in the Christian faith. I didn’t really understand who He was or what Son of God or Son of Man meant. But it is really interesting that you could grow up in America, and even in Los Angeles, and be exposed to parts of Christian culture and still never hear the gospel, never really know what it means, and that was my experience. So as you were moving along and you were becoming this adamant atheist. I like the way that you say that. There’s a certain worldview that that entails. Atheism itself, atheists would say, is not a worldview, but there are certain worldview implications to that, where you’re embracing, whether it be naturalism or materialism, those kind of worldviews where the natural world is all that exists, or the material world, that there is no supernatural world. Were you, as an intellectual person, aware of the implications and what those worldviews entailed in terms of meaning and purpose and value or free will or consciousness or those kinds of things that go along with embracing those kinds of ways of thinking?  I think it all made sense to me at the time. At the time, it was the most rational, cohesive worldview that I saw out there. It definitely made the most sense. And I actually found comfort in things like, “We are a speck of dust hurtling through an infinite, vast universe with no meaning and no purpose. There’s no explanation. We don’t know why we’re here, how we’re here. We can never know. We will never know. We can just sort of throw our hands up and say, ‘It just is.’ It just is, and it’s all random, and there’s no meaning to any of it,” and somehow, when I was a young person, maybe in my early twenties, that was enough for me. And it brought me some weird sense of comfort. I think it came from an intellectual arrogance in a way. I really thought that I knew best and I knew more than other people. I definitely held myself above others, and I think maybe that’s part of being a young twenty-something. I thought I knew. I had it all figured out. I understand. I understand the way the world works, the way the universe works, and I don’t need meaning or purpose, and I thought that that served me just fine, but unfortunately it left a huge, huge void in my heart, in my life, and I was trying to fill that void with other things. Now if you had told me that at the time, I would’ve said, “Screw you. You don’t know what you’re talking about,” and I wouldn’t have believed it, but now, of course, looking back on it, I can see how that meaninglessness really affected me and left me thirsty, wanting more, and then very painfully trying to fill that void with things that could never and would never fill it. You say you have a God shaped… or a void in your life that you were trying to fill. So in a sense, your intellectual beliefs were having an existential kind of connection to your life, the way you were living it out. You were searching because, I suppose, if there is a God in the picture, there is a sense of source of meaning and purpose and value and identity. But without that, on your own, did you feel a sense of kind of grappling or grasping for, “What is life all about?” “How do I make sense of life?” I presume, based upon your introduction, that it was affecting your choices.  100%. And that started at a very young age. That started at age twelve. Twelve, thirteen, fourteen is when I started trying… Now, I didn’t realize I was trying to fill this void, but that is what I was doing. Because I wasn’t comfortable in myself. I didn’t have confidence just because I am me and I am human and I exist. I needed approval and affirmation, this feeling of really wanting to be good enough and wanting to be liked and wanting to be popular and wanting to be cool. And that meant, at the time, being a twelve, thirteen year old, middle school student in southern California, that I would start drinking and smoking and doing drugs and being sexual with boys because that’s what the cool kids did and that’s how you get approval and affirmation and how you feel good about yourself and how you build confidence, is by being a cool kid. So I really went at that full force. And I enjoyed a lot of it. I had some fun. But I also really damaged myself. And I also did things that I didn’t really want to do, but it was more important to appear a certain way, to look a certain way, to do certain acts, than to say things like, “I don’t want to do that.” “I don’t like that.” “Please stop.” As a thirteen, fourteen year old girl, I basically gave in to things that I didn’t really want to do because I thought it would somehow benefit me or elevate my status. And it’s just pretty heartbreaking to think about, that that’s what I was doing at such a young age because I didn’t have a better sense of self and love and acceptance, even though I was in a loving family. My parents adored me. They gave me a lot of praise. I still was seeking and longing for something else. The only thing that I can make sense of now is that there was something that was lacking that I was trying to fill with those other things. So you’re going through adolescence. You get to college. You’ve become quite hardened against the idea of God, and I presume organized religion and Christianity. Why don’t you take us to that place and walk us forward from there?  Okay. So it’s funny. I remember—you bring up this memory when I was in college, and I was very much the way you describe. I was at a coffee shop, and this sweet older man started talking to me and my girlfriends. We were there studying for class or whatever. And I thought he was just so pleasant, and I was so surprised that this nice older man would just strike up a conversation and start talking to us, and then maybe about five or ten minutes in, he dropped the, “Well, I just want to tell you that Jesus loves you,” and I don’t remember the exact words he used, but it was basically—he was being so kind and generous, and the reason he was doing that was because of Jesus. Because he loves Jesus, and Jesus loves him, and Jesus commands him to love others, and he just wants to spread Jesus’s love to us. I was livid. You could see the smoke coming out of my ears. I thought, “How dare you?” I didn’t say this to him. I just got very cold and turned a cold shoulder. But I was so offended. “How dare you pull this bait and switch on me? Here you are pretending to be this nice man talking to me, and then you drop the Jesus!” And I was so offended. I wish I could somehow tell that man what has happened to me since. And maybe there was a seed that was planted there. Maybe all along the way, all along my life, there have been seeds that have been planted, even though I was very clenched and very hardened to them. Only God knows what those little interactions and encounters have done to me throughout my life. So God bless that man! Yes. For having that conversation with me. I wish I could tell him what’s happened to me since. College, I basically came out of college. I felt the whole way through college. I was still constantly trying to fill this void. I mostly did that through relationships, jumping from one relationship to another. I was pretty much never faithful in my relationships because my relationships couldn’t satisfy me. I would get into a relationship, and then it still wouldn’t make me happy, so then I would need to find another person that would make me happy. If I wasn’t in a relationship, I was engaged in a lot of one-night stands, being sexually promiscuous, again trying to get that attention and approval and affirmation from other people. It felt good in the moment and then would quickly wear off and not last very long. I met my ex-husband when I was, I think, 22. I was very young, and we were in graduate school and dated for a few years. We thought it was very romantic to be sort of these tortured artists who had a lot of emotions and a lot of pain and a lot of struggles, and we were very intellectual, and we wrote poetry. I thought that that was really beautiful and romantic at the time. And I thought that, by us getting married, that that would make me happy and make me whole, even though I had been unfaithful while we were dating, and he warned me and said, “If you ever do this to me again, I will leave you. I cannot let you do this to me again.” And I said, “I won’t do it again,” and at the time, I would mean it. I would cry and say, “Of course. I’m so sorry. I’ll never do it again.” He married me, and very shortly after our marriage, I really plunged into the depths of depression. I started struggling with depression shortly after college. I was in my early twenties when I first had my real first bout of depression, of feeling completely meaningless, wanting to end my life, needing to get help, starting to see a therapist, see a psychiatrist, get on medication, and that went on for many, many years. It would kind of ebb and flow. I would have some good periods and then bad periods, and shortly after we got married, I went into a pretty deep, dark depression, where it was very hard to get out of bed on a daily basis. I couldn’t really find meaning in anything. I really just wanted to end my life. I would fantasize about killing myself all the time. It was a terrible, tortured place to live in, and my poor ex-husband was right there alongside me for all of it, and I certainly was not a pleasant person to be around for all of that time. And then eventually… I couldn’t stay in that place. It was unsustainable, being that depressed and that far gone and wanting to kill myself, so I really think I had three options at the time. One was that I could get healthy, which my ex-husband was begging me to do, which I honestly had no interest in whatsoever. Really taking responsibility for myself and making a change and saying, “I’m going to get healthy.” No, thank you. The second option was to kill myself, which I really thought about doing all the time. And the third option was to act out and to blow up my life and to totally go crazy and just burn it all to the ground, which is the choice that I opted for. So I was unfaithful in my marriage. I just created a lot of chaos. At this time, it felt like needing to escape from this prison that I was in, which was really a self-imposed, self-induced prison, so that’s what I did. I was unfaithful, and my ex-husband and I had a business together. I completely blew all of that up. And my ex-husband, after many months of really trying to work things out and wanting me to get healthy, said, “I told you. I can’t let you do this to me anymore, and I’m leaving you.” So he left me, and that’s when I really, really hit rock bottom, and that was when I finally made a change. Yes. Tell us about that. It sounds like you were in a really, really hard place.  It was awful. It was. I mean hitting rock bottom was so terrible, but the one good thing about rock bottom is that it finally got me to admit that I needed help, and that I needed to do something different. I had basically been doing the same thing for many, many, many years, and even though I was in therapy for years and on medication for years, I was stuck in this cycle, and it just got progressively worse over time. Every time I was unfaithful, the stakes were higher, and I caused more damage. Every single time. And I kept doing it. With the same result. And finally when I hit bottom, I said, “I have to do something different.” So I basically crawled in on my hands and knees to these meetings, these support groups for people struggling with sex and love addiction. I was incredibly ashamed. I was now approaching thirty, I was going to be divorced, and I was going to these support groups for people struggling with sex and love addiction. This was not in the plan. This was not the life I was supposed to lead. And I would go into these groups, and I would just sob. I would just cry the entire time, and I was so angry and so hurt and so broken. But I was also so desperate that I was willing to try basically anything. And so in these groups they said, “You have to get some kind of spiritual practice. You have to have some kind of higher power.” I don’t care what it is. It doesn’t matter. Try a bunch of different stuff. Try New Age stuff. Try Buddhist stuff. Try Jewish stuff. Try Christian stuff. Whatever. You know? And so I did. As uncomfortable as it made me. I mean, you’re telling an atheist to pray to a god that she doesn’t believe in. This is ridiculous. Right.  But fine. “I’ll just do whatever you tell me.” So when I first started… I couldn’t even pray out loud. It was so embarrassing. Even when I was alone in my apartment or in my car, I would turn all hot and red, and I couldn’t bring myself to say anything out loud. And then finally I started, at the direction of my mentor, I started saying, “This is stupid, and there’s no one here, and I’m only talking to myself, and I’m doing this just because I was told to.” And that is how my prayer life began. That’s how I started praying. My prayer life now is really different, but that was how it started. That was honest. That was honest.  Yeah. It was very honest. Yes.  So, for months, I was going to these groups, and I was trying all this different spiritual stuff. I would try basically anything and everything that was presented to me. Now, being in Los Angeles, there was a lot of New Age type stuff that I tried. I went to some churches with some friends. I went to synagogue. I tried Kundalini yoga. I tried Buddhist chanting. I tried Sufi healings. I was basically open to anything and everything, and the more I did this God stuff, the more I saw it having a positive effect on me. It was very uncomfortable to go through it, but I could see that it was starting to affect me. I was still in a great deal of pain. I was still crying on a daily basis, but for the first time in my life, I wasn’t acting out. I wasn’t doing the unhealthy behavior that I had done for so many years. I was doing something different. I was spending time with healthy people, journaling, praying, meditating, writing, being alone for the first time in my whole life, and it was a very, very painful process, but it got me to a really seeking place. I sort of became a spiritual seeker, but then it became clear to me that I didn’t want to just be a spiritual seeker. I wanted to be a spiritual finder. I wanted to find it. I wanted to find the truth. And it was after going through that whole experience—the timing was just amazing—that a friend of mine invited me to a play of The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis, and I had never heard of it. I didn’t know what it was, but I loved theatre, and I just thought it would be a fun thing to do with my friend, so I said, “Sure, I’ll go with you to see this play.” And so we go, and it completely, completely changed my life. Yeah. That’s a powerful production of Max McLean. It’s a very sobering production. For the listeners, can you tell what The Screwtape Letters is? Tell us what that is and what is based on?  Absolutely! Yeah. So I go to the theatre, and I open the program to see, “Oh, what is this play about?” and it says who the characters are, and it says God and the devil, and I was like, “What?” Like, “What is this play? What am I about to watch?” And it turns out that it’s essentially this production with Max McLean that was put on by Fellowship for Performing Arts. It’s like a 90-minute monologue essentially, where Max McLean plays Screwtape. Screwtape is sort of a high-ranking demon official in the underworld, and throughout the play, he’s writing letters to his apprentice, to his nephew, named Wormwood, who’s sort of a junior demon. And he’s teaching Wormwood, this junior demon, how to be a proper demon and how to properly torment his patient, which is a human. And so the book and the play are sort of that idea that you see in popular culture, when there’s like a little angel on your shoulder and a little devil on your shoulder. It’s like, “Oh, that’s a real thing!” The whole concept of these little devils do exist, and they do torment you, and they do plant lies and deceptions into your thinking, and so the whole play is really about spiritual warfare, spiritual attack, about these dark forces that want to keep us hurting, doubting, alone, separated from God, and even comfortable. They want to keep us comfortable and separated from God, right? And so I’m watching this play, and it’s like watching a mirror. Some of the things that Screwtape is saying about how the demons torment the patient is just… it’s what I had been living for so many years, for so long. It felt so true. It just resonated so deeply within me. And for the first time in my life, this thought occurred to me. And I always saw myself as messed up, like there’s something wrong with me. I’m tortured, and I’m this, and I’m that, and it was the very first time in my life that it occurred to me, “Maybe that’s not me. Maybe there is a dark force that is doing that to me, and that’s not actually who I am.” And that, “God actually wants me to be pure and happy, like truly connected to him, and full of joy, and there’s this dark force that doesn’t want that for me.” And it just really blew my mind and opened up my eyes, especially after I had been on this year-long spiritual journey of trying all these different things, and then I see this play. It just completely shattered me. Now, considering Christianity as an atheist was ridiculous and extremely uncomfortable, but I just kept putting one foot in front of the other, as I had been doing for an entire year, sort of just taking the next right action and doing the next right thing. I actually ended up reaching out to Fellowship for the Performing Arts to let them know what an effect they had on me, and Max McLean himself said that he was so moved by my reaching out to them, and he actually even became a spiritual mentor of mine because of this whole interaction. Wow! That’s amazing!  Yeah. Max is absolutely fantastic, and he has literally watched me transform from being a very broken, not even a Christian. I mean, when I first started talking to him, I was still just a seeker. I was still just sort of curious and interested and still very, very broken and hurting. And then God was so amazing in this time because He kept putting person after person in front of me. My friend who took me to the play, she actually was somebody who had not been a Christian who then became Christian and actually became Catholic, and so I said, “That’s crazy! That’s a crazy story. Can I talk to you about that sometime?” And I went over to her house, and we ordered Thai food, and we stayed up until 1:00 in the morning talking about Jesus, and I was crawling out of my skin, and it made me incredibly uncomfortable, but there was something about it that felt right. It felt like truth. It felt like a bell ringing within me, like I was being covered in water, you know what I mean? And then she introduced me to someone else. And God just kept putting all these people in front of me, and every time I talked to someone, I went to coffee with someone, I read this book, it was like God was wooing me, you know? He was pulling me, lovingly, gently closer and closer to Himself. And I just kept exploring Christianity, and one morning, I was getting ready for work. This is probably now a few months in to exploring Christianity, and this thought occurred to me. I was listening to Christian worship music, getting ready for work, and this thought occurred to me that, if somebody asked me, “Are you a Christian?” I would have to say yes at this point. It wasn’t just like a moment. It wasn’t like a white light, road to Damascus moment for me. It was a gradual transition, and I became a Christian. And after that, I found a church that became my home church. I got baptized. And that is church where I met my husband, my current husband, my new husband, who’s also a Christian and who loves Jesus more than he loves me. That’s an amazing transformation! And it all started with The Screwtape Letters. Of course, C.S. Lewis himself was a former atheist, so he, in writing that narrative, understands the struggle. Not only in becoming a Christian but also in the Christian life still. There’s struggle. But through that process, as you talk about your exploring. You were reading books, and I presume that you opened the Bible, maybe for the first time.  Yes. As a former atheist who probably had never even been exposed to the Bible, what were your thoughts when you started reading it? As an atheist, what did you think the Bible was? And then I’m curious the perspective of when you actually opened it and read it for yourself, the first time or thereafter.  Yeah. That’s a really great question. I certainly did not read the Bible before then. I had no interest in reading the Bible. So after I saw The Screwtape Letters, and God kept putting all these different people in my path, one of the people He put in my path was a pastor psychologist who was in Chicago who very, very graciously offered to talk to me, sort of counsel me, once a week if I wanted to. And my initial reaction when that was offered to me, it was offered by my friend who took me to the play. I really wanted to say, “No, that’s okay. No thanks, I’m not interested in talking to a pastor once a week,” but it was so clear that it was one of those next right actions that God put in front of me that I just had to say yes to. I said, “Okay. I will talk to this pastor once a week on the phone,” and so I started talking with him. He was a wonderful, wonderful mentor, a wonderful guide, and he said to me, “Why don’t we start by reading the Bible? Why don’t you start by reading the Gospel of John? And just take your time and read through it, and whenever questions come up or things you want to talk about, we’ll just talk about it on the phone once a week.” And so that’s what I did. I actually started—I had a drive. I was driving from Los Angeles to Sacramento to go stay with a friend for the weekend, and I decided to listen to the audio version of the Bible, read by Max McLean, and so I listened to Max, in my car, read to me the Gospel of John. And I still remember the experience completely to this day. It was… I was alone. The sun is shining, and it’s that same feeling, that same feeling of just being washed with water, this bell ringing inside of me. There’s something about this truth. It’s just resonating. It just feels so right and so true. And in fact, once I got all the way through it, I was so thirsty for me, and at the time, I didn’t know there were Bible apps and different things, so I’m driving and trying to find… “I need to find more Bible that I can listen to in the car!” I’m frantically scrolling on my phone while also driving, which was not a great idea, but it was like I was so thirsty! I listened to the Gospel of John and then I just wanted more. I just wanted to consume more of the Bible. And I had a very interesting experience this entire spiritual journey of simultaneously going through what I was going through and then also watching myself in total disbelief. “I cannot believe this is who I am.” I still feel like this on almost a daily basis, like I pinch myself. I look at my husband, and I’m like, “Who are you? How did this happen? How is it that I’m a Christian? How is it that I have these two children with you? How did this life even happen?” It’s just so mind blowing to be called to goodness and truth and then still have that very dear former self part of me that sort of judges all of it and questions all of it and is a skeptic about all of it. It’s a really amazing dichotomy that I get to live out on a daily basis. Oh, I’m sure! And I bet there are some people listening who are saying, “Yeah, you are a rational, intellectual, skeptical person.” So you mentioned that you had been reading some books. I wonder if… Not that the scripture isn’t intellectual in and of itself, but I wondered, did you read beyond that in terms of intellectual grounding of the Christian worldview? Or to support maybe that what you’re reading in the Bible is actually true and reliable text? Did you wrestle with any of those issues?  Oh, very much. The entire process was a wrestling match. And this pastor psychologist who counseled me, one of the things that he said to me that was the most powerful, that has always stuck with me, is he said, “Faith requires doubt. Faith is not the absence of doubt. Faith is not 100% certainty. If it was, it wouldn’t be faith. Of course you doubt. You will continue to doubt. You doubt, and you take a leap of faith, anyway,” and that was a real revelation to me. Because I always wanted to have 100% certainty, and that’s just not available in human existence. You’ll just never… Even in atheism. Sorry. I would never have admitted when I was an atheist that atheism is a stance of faith. It is a belief system. You believe that there’s nothing. You believe that life is meaningless. But that’s the case. And so, at the time, I really struggled. I read Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis, which was also incredibly enriching because C.S. Lewis had been an atheist, because C.S. Lewis was such an intellectual and so well read. I mean, he spoke to me very, very deeply. He got me, right? He understood me. He knew that God had to prove himself intellectually to me, and He did. I was very lucky, in that my initial exposure to Christianity, having been a former atheist, was C.S. Lewis, Timothy Keller. Max McLean had recommended to me Tim Keller’s sermons, and I think I consumed nearly, and have consumed nearly every single Tim Keller sermon that exists in the world on the internet. I find him incredibly intellectual. I never knew that a pastor could talk like that. As a former atheist, I thought that Christians were either sort of what I’d call like a used car salesman, where they have a like a really cheesy smile and they’re like, “Praise Jesus!” Or like a very somber, Catholic, pageantry Mass. Neither of which appealed to me as an intellectual atheist. Then I find these sermons, and I think, “This man talks like a college professor. This is meeting me intellectually, where I need to be met,” and so our God is so amazing, He can meet anybody where they need to be met. For some people, it is a very spiritual experience. It’s like that white light experience. And for other people, like me, it’s a methodical intellectual breaking down of ideas, reformatting my mind and my thinking, and that is what God did with me. That’s wonderful! Now you’ve spoken about your journey, where you came from, and then you found yourself saying that you believed you were a Christian. Talk with me about how your life has changed since you became a Christian. And what of that question of meaning and void in your life? Has it changed at all? Has God met you there?  Yes. 100%. My life has changed. Now, that does not mean that my life does not have struggle. That doesn’t mean there aren’t things that are hard or challenging or difficult. I still cry. I still have anxiety. I still have stress. But it’s not like it was before. It is not this meaningless, hopeless, debilitating depression. I now am married to a Christian man. We both love Jesus more than each other. Jesus comes first, before anything else, comes before my marriage, comes before my children, comes before my career, my success, money in the bank, how I look, whatever. Because I know that ultimately all of those things will fail me. Even my husband will fail me. My kids will fail me. My body and my health is eventually going to fail me. Everything is going to fail me. The only thing that is not is God. And realizing that, realizing that I don’t have to strive and strain and struggle, that it’s not all up to me, which it always used to feel like it was. “It’s up to me to find the thing to make myself happy and to give myself meaning.” And now it’s like I can let go and just let God take over, and we’ve been very, very blessed in our Christian life together, my husband and I. We’ve had struggles. We’ve had very painful losses in our family. We’ve had tragedies. We’ve had things that we’ve had to deal with, but we also know that this world is not the end all, be all. This is not the ultimate. There’s something greater. For now, we’re here and it matters, and it’s important, but it’s all going to fade away eventually. It’s all going to fade away eventually, and so we get to keep our eyes fixed on Jesus, knowing that that is our ultimate hope and that is our ultimate meaning, and it has definitely, definitely served me well. Well, anyone who’s listening can see the obvious, or hear the obvious, change in you, that it is night and day from where you used to be. As we’re kind of turning the corner here, you have a voice of wisdom because you understand what it means to think and live as an atheist for a long time and in a very deep way. I guess you could say you lived it out to its fullest. But you also found Christ. And I think one thing that’s really beautiful about your story is your willingness to seek. That you were not just a seeker but you wanted to find. And you did. You found.  Yeah. So if you were speaking to someone, a curious skeptic who’s listening in today, how would you speak to them?  Yeah. That’s a great question. For anybody who’s struggling out there, I would just say that it’s never too late. It’s never too late, and you are never too far gone. There’s truly always hope. I know, for me, it was very, very hard to believe that there was hope. It was very hard to believe that there was any way out of the dark that I was experiencing. And it really felt like it was going to kill me. It really felt like the darkness and the depression was going to destroy me. And for somebody who’s in that place, I would say it won’t. It may feel like you’re going to die, but it cannot take you unless you let it. And I’ve heard so many stories from people who were at the very, very, very end of their rope and said, “Well, I might as well try this Jesus thing, and then if it doesn’t work, I’ll kill myself, anyway,” and that was their coming to faith moment. I would just encourage someone that, if you’re in pain, to try something different. If you’re so far gone, if you’re so desperate, if it’s so bad, you might as well try something different and just give it a chance. That is what I did, and I couldn’t do it myself. I was powerless, but God is not powerless. He can do it, and so I let Him. I let Him take over. And I have been following him ever since. And I would just encourage anyone to honestly and earnestly look into it and give it a try. Or just like you did, just that honest prayer. I love that honest prayer. “I don’t believe you’re out there, but if you are,” and it looked like the Lord really answered your prayer, like you say- Yeah. Come to Him as you are, you know? You don’t have to get good or get clean. You just come to Him exactly as you are, wounds and all. You are totally accepted. You come to Him with your doubts. You come to Him with your skepticism. You can curse Him outright to His face if you want to. Don’t worry. He can take it. He is God. You know? I used to have this note that I had on my mirror that I would look at every single morning, when I was early in my spiritual journey, and I loved it so much, and it said, “Good morning. This is God. I will be handling all of your problems today. I will not need any of your help, so have a nice day.” That’s terrific! So, turning the corner then, now as a Christian, you see things freshly, with new eyes, and I’m sure, thinking back to the man who came up to the table to you, you know, and he approached you saying, “Jesus loves you,” and it was so off putting to you. I wonder, as a Christian now, how would you best invite us as Christians in terms of engaging with those who don’t believe. Maybe not like that, but maybe. It sounds like he was a little bit of a touch point, even though at the time it wasn’t what you wanted or expected.  Yeah. I mean, when I share my story, not just with you here, but just with friends, with friends and family, because I come from a family where I am the only Christian. Nobody in my family believes, and when I talk about it, I don’t try to convince anyone. I don’t try to argue or anything. Really I think the most effective thing I can do is speak from my own personal experience. And share my story. I know that it’s true, that it is objectively true. It’s not just subjectively true. It’s not just my truth. I know that it’s true, but I also know that you do have to approach people with a certain stance and a certain posture, and coming up and saying, “This is true, and you should believe this,” may turn some people off. So when I talk to people, it is my truth, and it is my experience, and I gladly and willingly and openly share it with people. And I think just going back to… We were talking earlier about the Stories of Us episodes at PragerU. I mean that’s one of the reasons why they’re so effective, is because they really are people’s personal stories of transformation, where they get to just speak authentically. And it’s a way to not only change minds but to change hearts, too, and I really pray that my story would change some hearts and minds and maybe bring even just one person closer to God. That’s beautiful! Like you say, it’s like someone may not be convinced by a story, but it might open the door for them to seek for themselves. And we can hope for that, right?  Yeah. What a beautiful story, Adrienne. What a beautiful life you’ve lived. It’s been tragic but beautiful. I mean, when you think of the word redemption and a redeemed life, that’s what comes to mind when you tell your story, that you moved from kind of a darkness to light and from a fragmented brokenness to such wholeness. Not perfect. Like you say, none of us are perfect, but it’s beautiful. It’s so beautiful. So thank you for… Oh, yes? Anything you want to add.  I was just going to say thank you so much. And even though I did a lot of work, I really don’t take credit for this change. It really wasn’t me. The only thing that I did was that I became willing. I became willing to make different choices, but God is the one who did the change. Jesus is the one who did the change in me. That was all Him. That was all His doing. And He is the reason for my life now. That is why… Anything good I have is because of him. And I just want to encourage everybody out there to go watch this story. If you just go to prageru.com, you can watch my Stories of Us episode, and I’m just so grateful to get to share this story and hope that it affects some people. Yes, yes. Praise God that you were willing.  Yes. Because the result is glorious, really amazing.  Thank you so, so much. Oh. You’re so welcome. And thank you for coming on.  Thanks for tuning in to the Side B Podcast to hear Adrienne’s story. You can find out more about the books and resources she recommended in the show episode notes. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can reach me by email at thesidebpodcast@cslewisinstitute.org. Please rate, follow, and share this episode with your friends and social network. We would greatly appreciate it. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll be seeing how someone else, another skeptic, flips the record of their life.   

Raised in a secular country, Alex embraced an atheist identity into adulthood when a surprising encounter with Jesus Christ dramatically changed his life. Alex’s Website: Faith Thinkers https://faiththinkers.org/about-us Recommended Resources: The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus, Habermas and Licona The Case for Christ, Strobel To learn more about the C.S. Lewis Institute Fellows Program, visit www.cslewisinstitute.org Hear more Side B Stories and learn more at www.sidebstories.com Episode Transcript Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to the Side B Podcast, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who once identified as an atheist who became a Christian. Oftentimes, they grew up in a world where there are no apparent traces of God, no reason to believe in God, no experiences of God in their lives. In my research with former atheists, the number one reason they gave for disbelief in God was that there was no subjective, no personal evidence for God in their lives. They didn’t see or feel God both in their lives and in the world. In many Western, secularized, European countries, there are traces, artifacts of Christianity, of its historical presence and the remaining relics of architecture and its rituals and holidays, but there seems to be little apparent belief in the lives of people. The vibrant faith or hope that once was has been replaced with a settled independence and autonomy, for some a felt isolation, emptiness, and darkness. Atheism then seems a natural response to what is seen, what is felt, or perhaps what is not seen and what is not felt. Although it may not be existentially or emotionally desirable, it must be true, or so it is thought. But what happens when someone is driven to press beyond their culture, beyond their circumstances, beyond their personal despair to look for something more? And in their journey encounter unexpected life and joy and a real God who they believed to not exist. Alex’s story is nothing short of fascinating. It is truly a story of moving from darkness to light, from depression to life.  Alex moved from a world bereft of hope to someone who cannot help but tell almost everyone he meets about the God who saved his life. He wants others to experience the joy and love he now radiates. I hope you’ll come along to hear his amazing story of transformation and be inspired or challenged. I hope you’ll also stay to the end to hear him give advice to curious skeptics towards seriously considering the possibility of a real God, as well as advice to Christians on how they can best engage with those who don’t believe. Welcome to the podcast, Alex. It’s so great to have you! I’m so happy to be with you. Wonderful. Alex, as we’re getting started, so the listeners can know a little bit about you, why don’t you tell us about your life right now? Yes. First of all, like I said, I’m really happy to be with you. I always enjoy talking to you and seeing you at different events. I feel like I haven’t seen you in a while. But I live in southwest Florida, in a city called Fort Myers, and I love living here, and I’m a full-time financial advisor, and I have some Christian ministries on the side. But I feel like I’m a Christian minister 24/7 because we’re called to be ministers and sharing the gospel of life with everyone. Oh, that’s wonderful, Alex! I can tell that you’re not native to Fort Myers, Florida, though. I hear a very distinct accent, and so I’m very curious. Of course, I’m familiar with your story, but for all of us, take us back to where you were born and where you were raised. Talk us through that world. What did it look like in terms of religion, God, your family. How did you grow up? Yes. I was born in France in 1972, in Paris. My parents were immigrants from the former Yugoslavia, and they grew up—that was a Communist regime, and by the grace of God, even though they were not strong believers, they wanted freedom, and my dad was in his twenties, and so he was very fortunate to be able to leave the former Yugoslavia and go to France, which was—when I was born and before I was born, in the sixties, it was a wonderful country, very welcoming to immigrants, very loving. The neighborhoods, even in Paris, were big families, and so I grew up in that environment. And I had a fairly normal childhood, even though my parents were not wealthy. They always provided, and I had really nothing to complain about. The only thing is that I didn’t like school very much, and the reason was because politically I didn’t see eye to eye with my teachers. My teachers, a lot of them, were Marxists. They were actually promoting the ideology that my parents had fled from. So most of my friends were from a Muslim background and from north Africa. So I learned a lot about Islam with them, but I was not very religious to start with. And we were what I call CEO Christians, Christmas and Easter Only. We went to church only twice a year, and so I was not very religious to start with, but then around the age of 13, 14, my dad had a heart attack, and that really shook my world. And I dealt with a lot of internal pain, seeing my dad suffering and knowing that one day he would die because he was a heavy smoker and he had health issues. That really shook my faith. I didn’t have much faith in God to start with, but then I made the decision that there was no benevolent God, no good God who cared about His creation because that’s what I thought, because otherwise why would He do that to my dad? You see how the roles get reversed. The responsibility’s not on people and how they live their lives but rather it’s on us blaming God and shifting the responsibility to God because we don’t want to accept our own. So that’s the environment I grew up, and I lived in France until the age of twenty, from birth to twenty, and I failed high school at the age of twenty. So I had a really difficult childhood because I didn’t care for school. I didn’t have any direction in life. I didn’t have any foundation. I didn’t have any peace or joy. And I’m a fairly happy person in general, but it was very hard for me. Okay. But that’s pretty much in a nutshell how I grew up. Okay. Well, good. It sounds very interesting and challenging, especially in a culture where Marxism was becoming more prevalent, in a world that your parents were trying to escape and then they found again. I’m wondering, especially as a Marxist worldview was entering into your culture and the nominal religion that you were experiencing really wasn’t that meaningful, what did you think that God and religion and belief—what was all that? Was it just some kind of a social activity that people went to but it wasn’t real or true? What were your perceptions of religious people then? Yes. In America, a lot of people perceive religion as a social activity or things of that nature because a lot of the churches are social clubs, or organizations are social clubs, or charitable organizations, so that’s how people perceived it, but in France, France being one of the most secular countries in the world, most people, including myself, perceived religion as being something for people who were ignorant, who were uneducated, and people who were anti scientific. So there were two spheres. And you can see that happening again. Everything that’s happening in France is happening now, forty years later, in the United States, where you can see how those who are atheists in America are trying to push people of faith into the sphere of uneducated, anti scientific people, right? And so that’s the way I perceived religion, for people who are fragile, people who are weak, and of course, I was always one of the more successful, because I’m a fairly driven person in general. When I came to America, I started becoming successful in my business. Then that only made things worse, of me seeing myself as a person who is not a person of faith, being much stronger than any people of faith. And seeing people of faith as being weak and fragile mentally and needing a crutch, not realizing that faith actually is, and Christianity more specifically, is based on evidence. It’s not devoid of evidence or devoid of intellectual belief. To the contrary. And you know that all too well because of apologetics, which you and I really respect and like. But that was my thinking of religion, was that you had to be really weak to believe in a God and that you needed a God to believe in, versus I needed no one to believe in because I was my own man, and I was strong enough to control my life and do things—instead of you praying for God to do something for you, I was actually doing it while you were praying about. But that’s very common of people, thinking that way, right? And this false view that somehow people of faith are weak and fragile and need a crutch because they’re not strong enough on their own. So that was pretty much my view of religion in general. Yeah. That’s interesting, that perception of people who believe in God, that it is anti-intellectual in their eyes, but yet you made a decision to finally reject God because He didn’t show up for you and for your father, that He wasn’t there, that He allowed, somehow, your father to become in poor health. So it was a real mixed bag, wasn’t it? It was not social, it was not scientific, and it was not intellectual, and yet there was this subjective reason, too, existential, that He just didn’t do the things that He was supposed to do. It’s true that it seems like many people reject God not for intellectual reasons actually, because if they were seeking intellectual reasons, they would actually find God if they were genuine, but there’s always… it seems like, not always, but many times or most of the times there’s some kind of emotional element to the equation, where they were hurt. Yes. And that certainly can at least be a significant part of many people’s story. So, Alex, here you are twenty years old. You are in school or getting out of school. You’re still living in France, but it’s not necessarily where you want to be at the moment. Talk us through that. Give us the next step in your story. Yes. So I’m twenty years old. I just failed high school in France, which most kids fail at eighteen, and then they’re given another chance at nineteen, and usually they pass high school at nineteen. Well, I failed it at twenty. And so I really didn’t see the point. So that added to the depression, too. But by the grace of God, because God is so good that He knew my life from before the foundation of the world, He knew where I would be, where He would take me, He had His hand on my life, and I didn’t know any of it, but He sent me—my dad’s assistant at work, she overheard that I wanted to leave Europe and go to the United States. I don’t even know why United States. I have no idea why I kept saying the US. I didn’t really know anything about the US. Maybe because I wanted to make money, maybe America was rich. I really don’t know. I don’t remember. But I kept telling people I wanted to go to the United States, and my dad’s assistant at work overheard that, and she said, “How are you going to leave? How are you going to go there?” I said, “I really don’t know. I don’t know anybody there. But I really need to leave. Otherwise, I don’t know how I’m going to end up here. I may commit suicide because I really hate my life, and I hate being here.” She said, “We have an American missionary from Kentucky, and she organizes trips for kids to go to America for a few months. You should meet her because she’s leaving next Tuesday,” so you’d better believe it, I woke up on Sunday and went to church, not because I wanted to meet God, but because I could meet somebody who could help me. Because it was all about me, right? It was all about me, and I was going to do whatever it takes for my wishes and desires to be fulfilled, even if it meant telling people that I’m a Christian. Because all that mattered was me getting ahead. So I met this lady, and again by the grace of God, she helped me. Well, she helped me because I expected—see what happens, when you think a certain way, you project your thinking onto other people. You think that everybody else is like you, right? So because I was all calculating and only doing things that benefit me, I would never do something for you voluntarily because it doesn’t help me, then I projected that onto her. I’m like, “Why would she help me? What’s in it for her?” So my expectations were very low, but then a month or two later, I got a letter in the mail, and I picked it up, and I read it, and she said that she had found a family for me, and I just want to cry right now because it brings so much memories to me and how she found a family in Illinois and that they would welcome me for a year to go to high school. I cried, and I ran, and I ran… I could’ve run a marathon. I had so much energy. I ran through Paris. I probably ran through a third of the whole city. I was so excited. And I couldn’t stop crying and being so joyful, so happy, and so anyway. So that was the beginning of my journey, and I came to America on October 2, 1992, and that was an interesting day, because I came. I didn’t speak English. I had $200 in my pocket. I had not met any Americans besides this lady. But when I landed at the Indianapolis airport, I honestly felt like I’d come home. And, like I said, United States is not perfect, and I didn’t understand why. Why would I be so excited? But then I found out later on that it was basically the Judeo-Christian roots of this nation. There was something in the air. There was the Holy Spirit, and I could sense the Holy Spirit, but I didn’t know what was going on. So I went to school and was supposed to go to high school for one year, and during that year, I learned just a little bit of the language after three months, and I said, “You know, I’m wasting my time in high school. I’m not going to get any degrees. How about I go to community college, so I asked my parents. My parents were poor because, after my dad had a heart attack, he also lost his business. He did business with former Yugoslavia and put a lot of money into it, and then Yugoslavia went into civil war. So he basically lost everything. But my parents borrowed, and they always said yes to everything I wanted. And also I want to mention that I grew up, and the two things that I’m really proud of that happened in my parents’ lives is that my mom was always, me growing up and before I was born, was a fortune teller. And when my dad lost his job, she was cleaning houses, and he was a breadwinner, but then when he had a heart attack and couldn’t really work much, she went to a profession of being a fortune teller and won all kinds of prizes and things of that nature, but God always protected, and He always protected me, and I never was interested in any of it because, as an atheist, I was a hardcore atheist. To me, all of that was quite silly, and thank God I did not dabble in that stuff. And then my dad got really, really into Masonry, the Freemasons, and was moving up the ladder, because my dad was looking for brotherhood. He was looking for that kind of solidarity, for that kind of family, right? And he found it initially in the Masons. So my dad was moving up the ladder and was so proud to move up the ladder. He finally found something that he could invest himself in, give himself into, brothers and moving up the ladder. He was really proud My dad was very disappointed with the Masons at the end of his life, and he felt like they were all in there for themselves and they were not interested, really, in investing in other people, but they were there to get something out of it. So he was very disappointed. But here’s the thing I wanted to tell you about my parents. My dad. In 1996, on his deathbed—he had open heart surgery, and he got an infection. Eleven people died from the infection. He was the last one to die. He was there eight weeks, getting dialysis every day. He was on his deathbed. Eight weeks before he died, he had an out of body near-death experience, and he met Jesus face to face, and that, to me, is so incredible. And I talked to—of course you know, Dr. Gary Habermas, and I don’t know if many people know who are watching your show, but I imagine many do, but Dr. Habermas, if you don’t know, is one of the lead experts, if not the lead expert, on the resurrection of Christ and has written some books on near-death experiences. So I went to Dr. Habermas, and I said, “Gary, is this a near-death experience of my dad?” And I explained how he met Jesus. He said, “Alex, not only is it a near-death experience, it’s the most common near-death experience that people experience, when they meet Jesus.” And that is crossing a body of water. Because the water, I imagine, signifies the Holy Spirit. But, anyway, so he came back to his body, and he was instantly born again, so everybody who walked into his room, he would say, “Sit down. I want to tell you about Jesus,” and of course all these friends who were secular… so they would say, “I don’t want to hear about Jesus.” He would say, “I’m sorry. If you don’t want to hear about Jesus, then the door is right there, so you can just leave right now.” And they said, “No, but I want to see you.” “Well, then I’m going to tell you about Jesus.” So he told everybody about Jesus before he died. So obviously, as an atheist, I didn’t believe my dad’s experience. I thought it was from the drugs, that he was hallucinating, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And that was seven years before my experience, ‘96 to 2003, yeah, seven years. And then my mom, after, became a Christian. she gave up fortune telling, got rid of her cards, and stopped doing that and started reading her Bible. So I started working. After four years of university, I started working for a company, a major company, as a financial advisor. So I’m an atheist. I arrived in 1992. I finished my studies. Now I got hired to work as a financial advisor in 1997. So I’m still unhappy with myself, but I’m telling myself, “You know what? That’s because you’re poor. Once you become rich and you can afford buying anything you want, then you’re going to be happy. Obviously. Right now, the stress of life and not having funds to do what you want to do, that’s what’s keeping you from being happy.” So I started moving up the ladders. I worked very, very hard. And then, in 2002, my ex-wife left me, and she left me, and that really destroyed my world. Because she was my god. She was my everything. Not even money. Money was secondary to her. She was my idol. And when she left me and left me for good, my whole world fell apart. And I went through six months of severe depression, and in April of 2003, I decided to finish my week, go home, and commit suicide. And I was still in the same place where I’m at now, in southwest Florida. So I finished my affairs and went home. I’m making a long story short. Because there are a lot of details. But I went home to commit suicide, sat down and started contemplating on my life, contemplating how I was going to commit suicide, and the only thing I could think of was my mother and my nephews and my sister, and how tomorrow, when I’m not there and the news is brought to them that I committed suicide, how they would react, and I knew they would suffer for life. So now, for the first time in my life, I felt like I was not in control of my life anymore. I was at a dead end. A moral dilemma that I could not come up with a solution with. One, I didn’t want to live. I did not want to wake up another day to face life. Life was evil. People were evil. I was the only good person in the world. That’s how delusional I was. That I was the best person in the world and the whole rest of the world was evil. But at the same time, I couldn’t commit suicide because of my mom, my sister, and my nephews. So that moment I was going to turn—without even knowing, I decided—the only solution I could think of was that I was going to turn over my life to the devil. Now, I didn’t think of it in those terms, but I decided, “You know what? I’m just going to live like everyone else. I’m just going to take advantage of every single person. Financially, sexually. In whichever way, I’m just going to live for my own self.” Because I was already selfish, but I didn’t see it that way. I saw myself as a moral human being, but I was going to turn my life over completely to a devil. And that moment I cried out out of anguish, because something in me was ignited, and I cried out, and my soul left my body, and I saw my whole life come in front of my eyes and how Jesus had walked with me from the beginning of life, when I was born, and how He protected me, and I saw my whole life. It was more beautiful than a Hollywood movie. It was so vivid and so beautiful. And then I came back to my body. And people tell me, “I don’t believe you, Alex.” I said, “I really don’t mind you not believing. I don’t care. Because I wouldn’t have believed myself. I didn’t believe my dad having the experience. So why would I expect you to believe it?”  But one thing you cannot explain is how, after I came back to my body, I went from total depression to total joy, total depression to total love. I felt like I had so much love in me I had to unbutton my shirt because I thought my chest was going to explode out of love. And since then, I’ve carried that joy of the Lord, and no one can truly explain that. So that’s when I met the Lord, and then… It was around 11:00 PM at night, so I’m like, “Who do I call to tell what happened? To explain and tell them what happened,” and of course it was too late to call Europe. So I called my Muslim friend, a local, and I said, “Well, he’s religious, and I know that the most religious people I know are Muslims, because they give the appearance of being the most religious,” just like the Pharisees, they give the appearance of being religious, but again, that doesn’t mean that they are born again, that they have the Holy Spirit in them. So I called my Muslim friend, and I said, “You have to help me.” He said, “Come over, and I’m going to explain everything that happened to you.” So I went to his place, and he said, “Alex, everything that happened to you is in the Koran. You have to read the Koran. Everything.” I said, “But why the Koran? This is Jesus. I felt Jesus. I didn’t see him, but I felt Jesus. Jesus is Catholic. He’s not Muslim.” He said, “No, no, no.” That’s how much information I had. That’s how much knowledge I had. That he was Roman Catholic. And he said, “No, no, no. He was Muslim.” I said, “Jesus was Muslim?” “Absolutely, he was Muslim. Yes, you’ll see it all in the Koran.” I said, “Wow!” He said, “Yeah. It’s just we don’t believe that He’s God.” And I’m like, “Well, that makes sense. Maybe He’s not God. Why would he be God? He’s just a human being.” So, anyway, I started reading the Koran before I read the Bible, but I read it with the Holy Spirit, and what happened, within days if not minutes. I can’t say minutes, but I would be willing to bet minutes. But within days for sure, I could tell this was not a religion from God. That it was not a revelation from God. And I started going back to my Muslim friend and friends in France, and they all started telling me. “I don’t know which Koran you’re reading, but you’re reading the wrong Koran.” I said, “Well, this is the Koran I bought.” They said, “No, no, no. Here, I’ll get you the right one.” I said, “Okay.” So I have seven Korans, and all seven Korans say the same thing, but they didn’t know that what I was showing, pointing out to them, was in the Koran. That’s how ignorant so many people of faith are. They don’t even know what’s in their holy books. Including Christians. Yeah. Right. People who claim to be Christians don’t know what the Bible teaches. So I went back to my friends, and when I went back to France, I did the same thing with my best friend that grew up with, Kamal, and I said, “Kamal, look what it says in the Koran.” And I was not a Christian per se yet. I was seeking. Even though I was born again and it was just a matter of time, but it had to make sense intellectually. And that’s why apologetics is important. That’s why Paul speaks of renewing the mind in Romans 12:2. Because just because you’re born again, you still have to work on renewing your mind and reading the Bible and work on loving God with all of your mind, because if you don’t, you’re going to start believing things. Even as a born again person, you could believe things that are false. Anyway, so that’s what I was doing, and I told my best friend in France, and when I showed it to him, he was really shaken. And then later on I baptized him, and he became a believer, so that was really beautiful. So I studied for a year and a half, and what really helped me was apologetics. And that’s why I like apologetics so much. Specifically one book, The Case for Christ, and of course you know that book. Lee Strobel. And that really, really helped me. And I was like, “Wow! There is so much evidence!” And then I started reading people who… I was like, “Christianity is based on evidence. It’s not devoid of intellectual belief or reasoning.” Then I started reading people like Bart Ehrman and things of that nature. And then I started realizing how weak his arguments are and how even sometimes, and I know many people are friends with him, Christians, and they don’t want to use these words, but how dishonest some of the arguments are. So a year and a half later, finally I knew 99.999% that Jesus was who He claimed to be in the Bible, and the Bible was the word of God. And then I always remember my Jamaican friends, that asked, “What are you waiting for?” “Well, I’m waiting for 100%.” They said, “No. Alex, please. If you wait for 100%, you’re never going to get 100%. You’re at 99.999%. I think that’s enough, so tonight you should give your life to Christ.” And I did. And even though I was born again, that was a commitment. It’s like loving a woman and wanting to marry her and marrying her. Yes. The love is there. The love is there. The passion is there, right? But still making that commitment was quite important for me, and when I did, I regretted immediately that I had not done it a year and a half earlier. But I had to go through what I had to go through. That’s part of life. But then what I did, I went and got a master’s degree at Biola University online in apologetics, and I learned so much, and I loved it. I met some great people. Great professors. And I learned so much. That gave me a foundation for apologetics. My mission, not God’s mission, my mission was to be a prophet or a minister to America. I absolutely did not want to go anywhere else because I still love this country so much, and I didn’t like the rest of the world. So why would I want to go elsewhere? Well, that was my thinking, but my plans are not God’s plans, so I went to France one time, and I met a man that God told me, told me his name, and when I met him, it was a confirmation that I was supposed to meet him. So I explained my testimony, like I did to you, but just in five minutes, and he looked at me. He said, “Alex, next year I’m organizing the first public debate in France between Muslims, radical Muslims, and Christians. You will be the Christian. And I looked at him and said, “No. Absolutely not, Sir. Absolutely not. I appreciate you trusting me, but, A, I haven’t spoken French in years, and my French is really rusty, B, my whole theological training in apologetics and Islam is in English, so I don’t even know the translation, the words in French, and C, my ministry is to America, not to France. I don’t like France.” So he said, “Sorry. God told me. You’re going to have to do it.” And I’m like, “Okay. Sure. I understand you think you heard from God, but I assure you you didn’t hear from God.” So I had one question for him. I said, “Sayid, what if I lose? What if I lose? I’m not an expert. What if I lose?” And I love his answer, and that answer stayed with me ever since, because sometimes we are our own worst enemies. We will say, “Oh, I’m not equipped. I’m not good enough. I’m not this. I’m not that.” And we don’t do the things we should be doing, instead of just jumping in faith and letting God be God through us, right? Yes. So he looked at me. He said, “Alex, you cannot lose because we won 2,000 years ago.” And he said, “You go and open yourself to God, and I promise you good things will happen.” I’m like, “All right. Now you’re putting it on me and my conscience,” so I said, “Okay, Sir. I’ll try my best.” He said, “You’ll be fine.” So I did the debate and more debates and more debates looking back now, people either converted that I debated, so I baptized an imam, the second-most influential imam in France. I baptized him. He’s thriving now, preaching the gospel all around the world. The one person I debated the most, who, according to me, would never come to Christ and is still not confessing accepting Jesus, but he should, because he, a couple of years ago, came out and publicly said that the crucifixion of Jesus and the resurrection of Jesus are the two most sure historical facts from antiquity. So for a Muslim, it would be—supposedly Muslims deny that Jesus was crucified and thus resurrected. So God has been really using me, and by His grace, and I’m still surprised when I’m on your show or when I’m speaking about God, because it’s not like I was the best candidate for those kind of things. God has opened some doors, and I’ve been able to minister to people in power, and that’s been really quite amazing. Amazing that God has opened those doors. And so that’s my prayer request if people are watching your show, listening, that they would pray that God would send more souls in my life, because I love seeing people—when somebody comes to Christ, my faith gets multiplied. It’s not in addition. It’s a multiplication. And when we see people coming to Christ, it’s just the most beautiful thing. And then you realize that what you’re doing is worth it. It’s completely worth it. But even if we don’t see it, we still should be doing it. Because that’s what we’re called to do. And the harvest is plentiful, as we are told, but few are the workers, right? Right. So the things that are important is discipling and preaching the gospel. Those are the priorities, and when we do those things, we know 100% that God is on our side, that that will always be in His will, and He is going to honor our efforts because He will bless those efforts by the power of his Holy Spirit. Those are powerful words, Alex. And it’s an amazing, amazing testimony. Talk about going from darkness to light, or depression to joy. I love the way that you really spoke to that. Your life really shows, demonstrates that contrast of just lostness, I guess you could say. And just looking and then finding in such a profound way the person of Christ. So unexpected, really. I mean, you said you were actually calling out for darkness, and you found light and said Jesus showed up, like He had done in the life of your father and even your mother. Showed up to you. It’s just incredible. It’s incredible, and I think your story may surprise some people, in terms of the spiritual experiential nature of it, but for me, I guess, having heard your story before. I’ve spent some time in France, with the church in France. And hearing, really, if I can say this, the oppression, the spiritual oppression and the darkness that is being experienced there and the power of spiritual darkness there, and hearing more stories like yours, where darkness is broken by powerful spiritual experiences. So, for me, it’s not a surprise, but for our listeners, it may be. But you’re one among many, and I want to make that really clear, that the Lord works in very powerful and personal and experiential ways even today in the West. It’s not just in unknown parts of the world. It’s where God needs to be revealed, and He reveals Himself in ways that cannot be denied. Obviously, in your life, your life took just a complete change immediately, just like your father, to where you cannot help talking to others about Christ. And that is your mission in life. It’s so, so very clear. It’s compelling. And inspiring. I’m wondering now, for those who may be curious about your story who are not believers, who are skeptical, willing to perhaps look, maybe open, because obviously they’re intrigued by your story and the complete life change that you’ve had, based on what you believe to be true and real and good. And very relevant to your life. What would you say to the curious skeptic who may be listening in? Yes. Very good question. Yes. You’re not alone. Most people have questions. And many people have actually good questions. And so just because someone you ask, someone who believes in God, doesn’t have the answer. It doesn’t mean the answer is not there. A lot of people are not trained to give answers. That’s the sad part. All of the Ivy League schools were founded for students to be trained to give answers to those objections, but the church today, sadly, has gotten too comfortable for too long and does not train people to give answers, because what is a church? One is to go and be in communion with the body and to worship together and be with the body, but two is to train us, to prepare us to go to the world. And that’s what the church is about, and sadly, the church has not trained its people to go and answer these objections. So if you have questions and objections, please reach out to us, because there are answers. I promise you. Answers to every objection. Now, are the answers always specific? For example, if your question is why did this specifically happen to me? We’re not God, so we may not know why specifically something happens at a certain time, but if it is an intellectual objection, some kind of objection to God, His existence, or the Bible’s veracity, or Jesus’ crucifixion, or His deity, whatever it is, the Christian faith is based on evidence, and you can see that. Luke, when he opens his gospel, his first chapter, he tells us that… And he’s a physician. He was not an uneducated person. He was a very educated man. He tells us that the accounts were written, it’s a historical account of what eyewitnesses and those who were disciples or companions of eyewitnesses, what they saw with their own eyes. So the evidence of Christianity is based on evidence, and so if you have objections, if you have questions, please reach out to us. Seek, because we’re promised in the Bible, if you’re seeking with the right kind of attitude, not seeking for the sole objection to attack Christianity or to deny it. If that’s your sole priority or objective, then you’re not seeking with the right mind and with a right heart. But if your objective and if you’re seeking, like, “I truly want the truth. Wherever the truth takes me, I will be willing to go,” I promise you, you will get the answers. I promise you. Because the answers are there. So reach out to me or to Jana or whomever it is. Please reach out to us, because we are there to help, because we have been helped. The reason I’m here, where I’m at, is because, I wanted truth. I didn’t care about people’s personalities or character or what they did, whether they’re sinful, sinless. I wanted the truth. I had questions, and I wanted answers to those questions. So you should have the same attitude. Sadly, many people reject Christianity because they’ve had a bad experience, and I remember one time one guy said, “Oh, I stopped going to church once I saw my priest buying a lottery ticket.” What does that have to do with your relationship with God? Relationship with people. We are to be seeking God, not seeking people. Our faith is not in people, but if you have questions and objections, seek the answers to those questions and not people. Because many people join Mormonism or Islam because they’re looking for community, the same reason my dad joined the Masons, because he was looking for community. He was looking for brotherhood, right? So he found it initially, but that does not make Mormonism or Islam or Freemasonry true. So seek the answer to questions. Remove emotions. We’re emotional beings, and trust me, I’m one of the most emotional people you’ll meet, but remove emotions from the equation. When you’re seeking truth, you’re removing emotions from the equation, and you’re looking for answers to your objections. And you’ll find them.   That’s wonderful. And I wonder if you have a word for the Christian, too. I’ve heard you speak about the need for training, preparation, the encouragement to be on mission for God, to be prayerful. I wonder if you could speak to any of those things or whatever’s on your heart for the Christian. We need to help one another, because we need one another. No one is an island. We’re not created to be lone rangers. We’re created to be a body. That’s what the Bible speaks of. It compares the church to a body, where I may be the arm, and then you may be the eye, and the other person is the ear. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. But how is one part of the body going to function without the rest of the body? And how powerful is the whole body when it comes together? When we come together and we’re united, nothing can stop us. Absolutely nothing can stop us. But the enemy wants to divide this body. So that’s the work of the enemy. So if we come together and we train one another and we help one another, you don’t have to go to seminary. You don’t have to go and get a PhD in apologetics. Just go to a group of men, and you will learn so much, one from the other, and then maybe do some ministry together as a group, and go preach the gospel or minister to the poor or orphans and the widows. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. You do something, and you’re going to see a result, and it’s going to be quite visible, and it’s going to be quite powerful. Thank you for that challenge. Your story truly has been completely inspiring, Alex. Just your person, the way that you radiate Christ, and your passion for Him. Not only your intellect but also your mission. You have found life abundant, and you want to give it away, and you’re looking for the best for the other. It’s incredible. Truly incredible. So I thank you for coming on to share your story with us today, Alex. Thank you so much. And all glory to Jesus, all glory to Him, because I was blind, and when you’re blind, I cannot choose to see. I was blind, and He’s the one who gave me sight. So all glory to Him. Yes. Yes. Absolutely. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you for tuning in to the Side B Podcast to hear Alex’s story today. You can find out more about Alex by looking at the episode notes and his contact information there. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can reach me by email at thesidebpodcast@cslewisinstitute.org. If you enjoyed it, follow, rate, and review, and share our podcast with your friends and social network. We would really appreciate it. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll see how another skeptic flips the record of their life.

We are excited to share with you some special news about the podcast and a new phase of ministry for the newly named Side B Stories. Website www.sidebstories.com

Former atheist Jim Warner Wallace embarked on a personal investigative journey and eventually became convinced of the reality of God and the truth of Christianity. J. Warner Wallace’s website: https://coldcasechristianity.com Books by J.Warner Wallace Person of Interest: Why Jesus Still Matters in a World that Rejects the Bible Cold-Case Christianity: A Homicide Detective Investigates the Claims of the Gospels God’s Crime Scene: A Cold-Case Detective Examines the Evidence for a Divinely Created Universe Forensic Faith: A Homicide Detective Makes the Case for a More Reasonable, Evidential Christian Faith Episode Transcript Well, welcome to the Side B Podcast, Jim. It’s so great to have you with me today.  Well, thanks so much for having me. I appreciate it. Before we get started into your story, why don’t we start with where you are now, so the listeners have an idea of who you are?  I worked homicides, cold case murders mostly, in Los Angeles County for a number of years, and most of my work ended up on Dateline, so there are several episodes out there that will illustrate the kind of work we’re doing. They’re unsolved murders. There’s no statute of limitations on a murder. I was not a Christian most of my adult life. Now it’s been 25 years, I guess, I’ve been a Christian. I was 35 when I first walked into a church. And somebody described Jesus as really smart, and that’s what really started the journey for me. So today, I write books, I still have a couple of cold cases that are open that I need to tinker on a little bit, and for the most part, I get a chance to talk about Jesus a lot, which is what I love doing. That’s fantastic. Well, let’s get started back early in your story because, like you said, you were an atheist probably for most of your life, so I’m very interested in how those views towards atheism got started. What formed that kind of belief? What was the culture that that was fostered? Your family? Did they have any kind of religious belief? Start me in your childhood.  I think my mom was raised definitely as kind of a cultural Catholic but not somebody who ever opened a Bible, really was familiar with scripture. If we had a Bible in the house, I wasn’t aware of it. I think she has one now, but it was not the kind of thing we had in our house. And I didn’t know any Christians. I really didn’t even know any Catholics as a kid growing up. But I think I would have identified my Boston Italian side of the family, her family, were definitely raised within kind of a Catholic ethos, but really uninformed kind of view, and it was the kind of thing that we might go, when I was younger, much younger, like elementary school age, I remember we would go to church on Christmas, for sure on Christmas. Easter not so much. But by the time I was maybe in junior high or maybe upper elementary, I just told my mom I was done with it. “I don’t want to go on Christmas. I’d rather not go.” And I had a very sarcastic view, largely because… You know, my parents divorced when I was pretty young, and my mom was not allowed… She talked about… I wasn’t even sure what the heck she was talking about, but there were certain privileges that the church offered that she was no longer going to be allowed to take advantage of. That’s how I saw it. That’s all I really knew. I didn’t know there was a sacrament issue or any of that, I just knew that, “Really? So now you’re in a different status because my dad left you?” So I just thought, “All of this is such a bunch of nonsense,” and I was growing in the ’60s and ’70s, when, you know, this is the Star Trek generation that lands on the moon and eventually thinks that science will have the answer for everything. And I was in southern California. I was in Los Angeles. So I was in a relatively secular environment. No one around us that was Christians. Never got invited to church by anybody. Just saw no place for it. So at first… I could be relatively patient with people who are believers, unless they try to aggressively assert what they believed. Then I’m going to call it out for the nonsense that it is. And that was pretty much my view. And as a detective, I often would encounter Christians… We had a couple in the department who were officers who were not really good at articulating what they believed or, more importantly, why they believed it to be true. They were just raised in the church or they had an experience that changed their minds, and I’m not a big believer in experiences, so… I mean, everyone has an experience, so I just didn’t think that that was worth considering. So, to me, it just seemed like a bunch of nonsense, but I would, for the most part, not say much about it until I encountered one of these Christians who would be outspoken, and then I was quick to knock it down. And that was my view. So I would say I was a thoughtful atheist, because I really thought… and part of it is it’s not hard to be thoughtful if the people you’re encountering who say they’re Christians are not able to defend what they believe at all. All you have to do is give a 10% effort, and you’re going to exceed the other side by ten times. They just weren’t able. They were not equipped to… Like, “Why do you trust the Bible?” “Do you have the originals of the Bible?” “No.” “So if you don’t have the original document, how can you even trust that you have anything close to the original document?” And a lot of the folks I would push back even… and I’m just hearing this stuff from other nonbelievers. This is a little bit before the proliferation of the internet. So there’s a lot more skepticism out there today than there was… I just would hang out with other atheists, and we would mock these Christians together, and then you start picking up on their way of mocking, you start adopting that yourself. Before long, you all sound like each other, and that was really where I was for a number of years. And I can point to… I watched a guy do a bank robbery, just to have him tell me he was a saved Christian on the way back to jail. So I was not impressed. Yeah. Yeah. It sounds like there were a lot of reasons for you not to be impressed really, between the hypocrisy- Well, yeah. I would’ve probably said that, anyway, but the arrogance in me… And a lot of us think we know better than anybody else around us, especially if you’re in a position on a job where you’re constantly called to solve the problem. They call us to come in as an authority figure to settle this thing. Well, if you start to take that too seriously, you start to think that basically you’re the source of information, rather than somebody else. And I think it’s probably not uncommon amongst people who do that kind of work to kind of think that they can’t be taught anything. That’s an interesting insight, really, and sometimes we’re not aware of our own blindness in that direction, right? You were in a position of authority, and I think that that would really feed into your understanding of yourself as knowing more than.  Not only that, you kind of feel like you’re the good guy. Yeah!  So you’re the atheist who’s not doing a bank robbery- That’s true!  … talking to the Christian who is. That’s true! Absolutely!  Yeah. So that’s part of it. Yeah, no, yeah, I totally get that. So there were a couple of things that you raised there that interest me. One is you said that you were a thoughtful atheist, and I’m curious did you understand the implications of where atheism goes, in terms of the big questions of life.  So I would’ve said it this way: I would’ve said—this is the old Jim now, okay? I would’ve said that moral truths are grounded in groups that make decisions about what is the law of the culture, and those things change and evolve over time, and you Christians ought to know that, because at one time you affirmed polygamy and slavery and a bunch of stuff that you would say is not good now. So clearly it’s not grounded in the nature of your God. It must be grounded in the nature of the time in which those groups lived. That’s what I would’ve said. Okay. And that typically would stop the conversation right there. But again, as a logical, analytical, obviously very bright person, did you pursue the logical endpoints of your atheism? In terms of where that headed, whether it be how you explained the origin of the universe. I would’ve said, “Well, look, I’m not quick to jump to God for those kinds of scientific quandaries or mysteries that we have since solved. I mean I could have easily jumped to God, I guess, when I thought that Zeus was the thrower of the lightning bolt, but at some point we discovered where lightning really comes from, what causes lightning in the atmosphere, and so I don’t have to attribute it to an act of Zeus. I can actually find a naturalistic explanation, and so for every other thing you want to quickly attribute to God, I would say, ‘Be patient.’ The way we were patient with lightning. You will eventually have an answer from a naturalistic perspective. That is the trajectory of human history. It’s not toward theism, it’s toward naturalism,” and I would’ve said, “Just be patient.” Oftentimes you’ll hear an atheist say, “Well, there’s no evidence for God,” right? There’s just no evidence for God. Dismissing out of hand without consideration. Did anyone even try to bring any logical argument or evidence for you to even seriously consider?  Well, yeah. I mean I’m sure that a couple of these guys who are Christians in our department would make claims that they thought were well supported historically about the Gospels, but I had bigger problems in terms of even believing that… I mean I would give you there’s some form of Jesus maybe, but there’s not the miraculous form of Jesus. That’s just stupid. I mean why would we believe that anything in the New Testament that describes a miracle is reliable? The minute you enter a miracle into your narrative, you had made a genre change. You’re no longer doing history. You’re now doing mythology. That’s the genre in which miracles occur. You’re not doing science if you’re going to interject a miracle of God, either. So I would have said, these are two, by nature, by definition, naturalistic disciplines, and you cannot do science or history if you’re going to start including miraculous explanations. That, to me, was the foundational groundwork that we started, so I would say, “You were talking history for a second there until you mentioned that, and you just switched over into mythology.” I would’ve said the same thing that people say to me today. “Look, are you going to go solve the next crime by assuming that there’s a demon out there that is equally as responsible as the suspect you’re looking for? No, you’re not even going to consider supernatural explanations. You’re only going to consider naturalistic explanations because you know in your heart of hearts there are no such things.” That would’ve been my response. Yeah. And so when you think of Jesus and the miraculous as mythology, then I would imagine that your view of the Bible or any kind of religious text would fit in that genre.  Yeah. And I’ll tell you why. So part of this for me, too, was growing up with a divided family of atheists and Mormons. So I don’t really have any Christians. I wouldn’t call my mom a Christian growing up, even though she would’ve said she was baptized as Catholic. I mean it just was not part of our life at all, and she was not reading scripture, she was not ever talking about this stuff. It was just like, “Well, you know, I’m a Californian, and in that way, I’m also a Catholic.” So because you happen to live here does not mean you know anything about California, and that’s kind of where she was. The other side, though, I had a group of very well-informed Mormon believers, because my Dad’s second wife because a Mormon pretty early on in their marriage, and then they had six kids, all of whom they raised LDS. My dad’s a very committed atheist. He will tell you why he thinks Mormonism’s false. So I’m watching all this, and I’m thinking, “Okay, all of you nut jobs think that your religious view is true. You think yours is true. The Mormons think theirs is true. They think you’re wrong, by the way. That’s why they’re out knocking on your door, to try to convince you that Mormonism is better than Christianity. Well, why would I believe any of this nonsense?” Right.  “It’s just all different levels of nonsense.” And so that’s where I stood for many years as an atheist. So you’ve painted a very clear picture of where you were.  Pretty dismal, right? But I’m just being honest with you. People will say, “What kind of atheist were you?” Yeah.  Susie will tell you that, when I finally walked into that church with her and this started to change, she saw just a change. Years later, we did an episode on 700 Club, and they wanted to come out and interview her, and I had never really heard her talking about it, and as I’m watching this interview with her, I realize, “Oh, wow! She saw that entire thing as a miracle.” Because while she was open and neutral, she saw that I was completely closed. And so something had to happen in order to change that. Right. So let’s step into that. So you were a detective, and you had no desire for God or anything to do with religion. It was complete nonsense, and even, obviously, you had some kind of antipathy towards it as well. For good reason. For good reason.  Well, I’m not sure it was a good reason, but it was the reason I held, anyway. You can embrace an atheistic worldview without ever having to bend your knee to God. But this worldview requires you, as a first step, to do this thing we call repentance. Right? To repent. To change your mind. To trust in Christ. To confess your sin. To bend your knee. Every tongue will confess. And I think that’s just a really hard step for a lot of us. Our atheism has never asked… As a matter of fact, our atheism has elevated us, whereas Christianity puts us in our proper place. It’s a hard thing to bite off. It is. And you raise a good point for me because, in looking at all of these stories, one of the most interesting things for me is to see what moves someone from a closed to an open posture towards God. Now you mention your wife Susie. So obviously, she has something to do with leading you, perhaps, in another direction. Why don’t you walk us through what moved you from a closed to at least a curious perspective?  Well, Susie and I met in 1979. We were together about 18 years before we walked into that church, and during those 18 years, I can honestly say we never talked about God’s existence. Was she an atheist?  She was raised as kind of a cultural Catholic also but much more open. And so, because I knew her before we got married, once we were married, this was just not part of our relationship. It was something we did on Christmas. If she was with her mom, she might go to a Mass with her mom. And if I was there, too, if I wasn’t working that night, because I worked as a police officer. Sometimes you’re working on holidays. Murders almost always occur on holidays. So you’re always working holidays. But I would go if I was available, kind of the same way you would sit down for a Thanksgiving dinner. I didn’t like turkey, but I’ll sit down for the Thanksgiving dinner because it’s part of that traditional holiday. Right.  So in the same way, I would go, “If you want to go to a Mass, great,” so when we had kids, she said, “Well, do you think we…” because she had been… She said, “Even you, your mom was a cultural Catholic as a kid. Should we start?” I’m like, “No!” I mean, “If you want, I’m… I want to do what pleases you, so if you think we should do this, then we’re going to do this.” My dad, even today, will go to church as an atheist. He thinks that the world is a better place, the country’s a better place, if it holds to Christian ideals, even though he thinks they’re based in a foolishness, they’re based in a delusion. He says the ideas that emerge from that delusion are still powerful, and, “I would rather live in a country that is under the shadow of Christianity than one that isn’t.” And I’m, very honest, the same way. “Yep, I can agree with that.” It’s a relatively law abiding, conservative worldview? Okay. I’ll be happy to go if you want to go. But I also knew that if I wait long enough she may just forget about it. She may not push it. And for three years, she didn’t. She would mention it. Like when we moved into this neighborhood, I knew right away that our kids were school aged, and she was thinking, “Should we take them to church?” And I just avoided it and always had an excuse, every weekend. But then, about three years into living here, it came up again, and I said… For whatever reason, I said—and this is where I think God works. I said “Okay, I’ll go if you want to go.” I assumed we were going to go down to this Catholic parish, but somebody had invited us to a big evangelical church, so we ended up at this big evangelical church. And we walked in, and I’d never been in an evangelical church, really. Not for a church service, for sure. And I’d never seen anything like this on top of it all. This was a megachurch. And I was pretty sarcastic. I went with a partner of mine who had invited us, so he was there, and he kind of played off my sarcasm a little bit, so that was good. It made me a little more comfortable. But I can remember Susie—her only experience ever going into any kind of setting like this was a Catholic setting as a kid, so she was like, “It doesn’t seem very holy here.” Because it was like a big warehouse! Right.  And it was like a big stage presentation, you know? And so I was just willing to sit through it. I really didn’t think we would ever come back to it. I figured we’d probably go someplace else maybe next time or whatever. But the pastor pitched Jesus in this way that was provocative, saying that he was the smartest man who ever lived. He said a bunch of other related… You know, “He’s more important than any other historical figure,” all kinds of other stuff. Some stuff that he said was biblical that I just didn’t really care about. But the idea that He was smart did provoke me to buy a Bible to see if that was true. Interesting.  And I got a pew Bible, and I still have it. And I put the tabs in it because I started to pour through this, and I started to look at the gospels, and I thought, “It’s clear these people who are writing the gospels think that this stuff actually happened. They want me to believe that it happened in this order. They’re acting like they’re eyewitnesses of this. John even says, at the end of his gospel, “We could say a lot more than we’ve said so far, but it would fill up a lot of books.'” So I started to look at these gospel accounts as eyewitness accounts, and one of the things you do to test eyewitnesses is something called forensic statement analysis that’ll help you test deception, deception indicators, things like this, So I started first in the Gospel of Mark and worked my way through all the gospels, and when I got done, I told Susie… This took some time. And I told Susie, I said, “You know, they seem like they would pass the… If I was doing this… Take out the miracles. These pass the test.” The only thing that’s in there that bothers me is the miracles. But at some point I did start to reexamine my biases against the supernatural, and so when you’re talking about, for example, the beginning of the universe, you have to ask yourself, “Is there anything inside of space, time, and matter, that can cause space, time, and matter, or are those two mutually exclusive cause and effects?” So in other words if you can’t cause yourself to come into existence, that means whatever causes space, time, and matter has to be outside of space, time, and matter, and there really is a problem. So you already believe in something extra natural if you just seriously consider the beginning of the universe. So I just tried to learn to drop my innate biases against any… Because if there’s a God who’s powerful enough to blink everything into existence from nothing, well then every New Testament miracle is a small potato miracle. You can probably walk on water if you can create the water to begin with. So I had to at least kind of open the door to that possibility, that reasonable inference, and that’s where I started to see my change in my own view of the gospels. I bet that was surprising to you. I mean, having considered the Bible myth or mythology as a genre. Delusion, I think you used the word. To suddenly, as an investigator, a serious investigator looking at the eyewitness testimony and saying, “There’s something really valid here. There’s something historical and accurate here that I can’t dismiss.” I suppose those things were breaking down the wall of resistance, I guess you could say, because it sounds like you were willing to actually look at it in a serious way, rather than just dismissing it, and so- No, that’s true. And a lot of that for me was—even though at some point I told Susie, “I think these are probably going to test out okay, but I don’t know why God would have to come this way when He came this way. Why would He die on a cross?” I didn’t understand the gospel even as I was confirming the claims of the gospels. So at some point I was like, “By the way, if this thing happened. If Jesus actually rose from the grave, it’s game over.” Everything changes because the authority of people who rise from the grave is different than those who don’t. So I have a tendency to trust people who come out of the grave. So that gives Him an authority that would change the way I see everything He said. A lot of this was us trying to make that transition. So just for clarity, you said you were willing to take with credence the things that you were finding in the Gospels except for the miracles, but then you just described the greatest miracle apart from creation, and that is-  Yeah. So this is why when people say, “How clean was the investigation?” I wrote a book called Cold Case Christianity. Well, actually, it was my investigation that’s in Cold Case Christianity and the one that’s in God’s Crime Scene, and the one that’s in this new book, Person of Interest, that was happening all at the same time for about nine months, and what I mean is that I had to stop at some point and say, “Well, what’s keeping me out? The miracles.” So then I’d say, “Okay, do I have really reasoned, substantial reasons to reject miracles?” I knew that this was always bugging me from the Star Trek days, like, “How do I explain the beginning of the universe?” The standard cosmological model is still a big bang cosmology even today, and that’s still the standard model because most physicists and astrophysicists and cosmologists think that’s how the universe came into being. Everything came into being from nothing at a point in the distant past. And we’re talking about nothing. There is no space before space, no void before the void. All space, time, and matter came into existence from true nothing, the stuff that Aristotle says that rocks think about, nothing. So that means that I already had a belief in something outside of space, time, and matter that could have that kind of causal power, so that’s when I returned to the Gospels and said, “Okay, so if that’s the case, and if they check out every other way, am I supposed now to believe that He rose from the grave?” Now that would explain certain things that I see in history. That’s the stuff we’re talking about in Person of Interest. In other words, if he really did rise out of the grave, wouldn’t you expect there to be a ripple effect on human history that goes beyond the four authors of some little gospels in the first century? This is a huge rock that someone’s throwing in a lake. I would expect all kinds of ripples. But as a guy raised in southern California, I wasn’t educated on what impact Jesus of Nazareth had on human history. I would’ve said it was probably very limited. It was probably whatever Christian history you want to dig up. I had no idea that literature, art, music, education, science, and other world religions were standing on the shoulders of Jesus of Nazareth. And that’s what we’re trying to do in this book is to show… Once I started to look at that, I go, “Okay, this makes sense now.” Given the possibilities, three possibilities: One, He’s a myth. It’s fiction. It’s all fiction. It’s always been fiction from the very beginning. Would He have this kind of impact on culture? Would you be able to reconstruct every detail of the myth from these weird aspects of human culture? I don’t think you could. Number two, He’s another… just a guy. A guy who lived. What other person who’s ever lived has had this kind of impact? I mean unless you don’t know the kind of impact Jesus has had. You won’t find anybody else who has had this kind of impact on history. In the most important things, that were important to me as an atheist, literature, art, music, education, and science. How about this? He’s God incarnate, entering into His creation. Well, now all that impact makes perfect sense! Right? That we, as humans designed in the image of God, eventually encountered God, and then we can’t stop talking about Him. And He provides the catalyst and the igniter for all the things that matter in history! And that’s really what we’re looking at in Person of Interest. So it was a very ugly kind of… I was lucky. I was assigned, at the time, as undercover detective in undercover division, and a lot of that is down time. This is before the internet, but it was just early enough. I didn’t have a computer. So I asked my sergeant, “Hey, if I come in every morning and I pay for the ink and the paper, would you let me print out everything I can find about Jesus?” And he said, “Yeah, as long as you bring the ink and the paper,” and so I did. And I had these huge binders of stuff I was trying to dig up, plus all the books I could find, and I kept them in my unit and my car. It was an undercover car. And I just had them in the passenger seat, and they were all stacked up, and so I would just sit for hours digging through this data, and that’s what is in these different books. So what was this process like in terms of time? How long did it take for you to kind of move through this process of your gradually moving from being totally unconvinced to being convinced that there was something real and true about the person of Jesus and the story and the Bible?  Well, I think it started in the middle of… was it ’95? Maybe ’95. And I think by the middle of ’96 I have a name tag where I’m serving in the children’s ministry. And I did that, really, before I was a believer, but not much before I was a believer. Believe it or not, I was in this huge megachurch, and we were going now more often toward the end of that first year, and our kids would not sit still in the children’s ministry, so one of us would sit with them usually, So we were asked to lead it, and I remember saying, “Well, I don’t know anything about scripture. I’m learning, but I don’t feel like I’m equipped to teach students.” They said, “Look, we’ve got curriculum. So I started serving in children’s ministry even when I didn’t know anything. So yeah, I just don’t know when. I wasn’t keeping track of it back then. I didn’t know it was going to lead anywhere. I should have a spiritual birthday, but I don’t because it was a process for me. It wasn’t an epiphany moment. It was a series of events, and at some point, I’m serving in the church, and I’m sure by that time I was probably pretty convinced it was true. So, as you were becoming convinced that it was true—you had spoken earlier about Christians who really didn’t know how to answer your objections and who didn’t seem very well informed. Your understanding of Christians were they were uneducated. As you were reading through this material, obviously some substantive material that you were reading through, perhaps Christian writers or thinkers or apologists who obviously were educated in some way. I wonder. Obviously your perception of Christians and Christianity was being changed. Were you discussing any of these things with other Christians who were more educated as you were moving through this process?  Well, I mean I wish. There were people I was listening to, I started to listen to, on air. One of them was Greg Koukl at Stand to Reason. He had a local radio show here in Los Angeles, and I was listening to him. He had a couple of hours a week, two or three hours a week. I can’t remember how long it was. And I was not always convinced at first, but I was impressed that at least there were other kinds of Christians out there. Right. At the beginning, when you were talking about, as an atheist, you saw God basically as a God of the gaps, that it was just an excuse for explaining what we don’t know quite yet in science, but science will know, or naturalism will know, at some point. But obviously, when you came to believe that God exists, how did that affect your understanding of the reconcilability or the compatibility of science and God and thinking about comparing that with your earlier explanation?  Well, sadly, when I first started looking at this DNA and the information in DNA and how you explain information in DNA, it was not something that was on the forefront yet, so a lot of this has been a process, too, of getting to a place where you’re looking, “Okay, what is the best inference for the things we see in the universe?” which is the approach I took in this book called God’s Crime Scene, right? It’s kind of an inside or outside the room principle. Not every death scene’s a murder scene. If I can explain everything that’s in the scene, that’s in the room, by staying in the room for an explanation, it’s not a murder. It’s going to be a suicide, a natural, or an accidental. So if I get there and there’s a pistol, but it’s your pistol. There’s one shot fired. Well, you can fire one shot. There’s no one’s fingerprints or footprints in the room other than yours. Well, this is probably a suicide. On the other hand, if I get there and it’s not your pistol and there’s bloody footprints leading out of the room, well now clearly the best explanation is not in the room anymore. It’s outside the room. Now I shift to murder. Well, the same thing can be true of the universe, okay? If I can explain everything I see in the universe by staying inside the natural universe for an explanation, space, time, matter, physics, and chemistry, then there’s no intruder. But if the best explanation for the stuff in the room is somebody outside the room, you’re going to have to go outside the room for an explanation. And that’s exactly the approach I took as a new investigator of scripture. I’m like, “Okay, so which is the best explanation? Is it inside or outside the room?” Well, it’s really… The origin of the universe, the fine tuning of the universe, the origin of life, the appearance of design in biology, your consciousness, your free agency, your moral intuitions, even evil is best explained by a moral standard, a creative force that’s outside of space, time, and matter, outside the room. And so, in the end, that’s still the best explanation for the stuff we’re seeing in the room. So it’s not a jump, right? It’s that I’m trying to find the… You go to any crime scene, there’ll be evidence in the crime scene. And each of your partners will develop an inference. They’ll say, “Oh, I think this is best explained by the girlfriend.” “No, it’s best explained by his wife.” “No, it’s best explained by his coworker.” We’re just trying to figure out what’s the best explanation for the evidence in the room. Same thing with the universe. And so I think it was a reasonable way to approach it, and I do think that, today, to jump to science to say… in all those eight areas I mentioned, science is relatively quiet. How did life originate in the universe? “We’ll figure it out someday.” Well, that’s just science of the gaps. It’s just the equivalent of God of the gaps. Someday God will tell me. “Well, some day a scientist will tell you,” is the exact same approach. So we have to be careful. In all of those eight areas, it’s really just science of the gaps. That’s quite a juxtaposition from where you’ve come. It sounds like, Jim, that you took a real intellectual journey and you found a worldview that is not only true with regard to eyewitness testimony in the scripture but also gives you a comprehensive worldview for how you can look at all of reality. I’m curious. You mentioned one other thing I want to explore, and that is you said that you were investigating or researching the Gospels, but you separated out the gospel, apart from that. I know that belief in Christ is not only intellectual belief that He existed at a certain place and time in history, and all of these things led up to Him and have fallen out in history in terms of seeing the amazing effect of Who that Person is. But I know that to call yourself a Christian is really more than that.  Right. That’s “belief that.” That’s not “belief in.” Yeah, so- The demons believe that. Right.  But they aren’t saved. Right. So, for those who are listening, especially maybe a skeptic who doesn’t understand that it’s more than just an intellectual belief, that there is something called the gospel, how would you put all that together?  Okay. So I think even my acceptance of the gospel—so the gospel, what I mean by saying the gospel, is the plan of God in which He can reunite Himself to us, or us to Him. Because we have separated ourselves from God by our fallen nature and our rebellious nature. And we all know this even if you’re not a Christian. You know you don’t teach your kids, your infants, to be impatient. That’s their default position. You don’t need to teach them to be jealous, teach them to be prideful. That’s their default position. We are fallen by nature from the moment we emerge from the womb. That’s just the nature of who we are. The question is how did we get there? Why is that the case? And how do we get reconciled? If there is a Being that is powerful enough to create everything from nothing, well that Being has the power to eliminate imperfection. You’re trying to unite yourself not to a good God, to a perfect God, to a morally perfect God, and you might have good days, but you never have morally perfect days. You’re not a morally perfect being. How do you ever expect to be reunited to a morally perfect Being? Well, you’re going to have to adopt the perfection of some—you’re never going to be practically perfect, but you could be positionally perfect, and that’s about the gospel. That’s about what is it that brings us back to God? How is it that God forgives who we are? How is it that we can repent and change? And who’s nature can we adopt if our nature is never going to be good enough? And it’s not. There’s the one perfect Man, right? And this is the gospel. Now, I will tell you that, in order for me to make those kinds of claims I just made, those are thoughtful claims. Those aren’t feelings. Those are intellectual propositions about the nature of God, the nature of humans, and the nature of reconciliation. These are actually intellectual claims. So I think even to understand the gospel, you’re going to have to use your mind to do it. This is why Paul doesn’t talk about the renewal of your feelings or the renewal of your emotions. He talks about the renewal of your mind. This is a thoughtful worldview. We have always been people of the book. We are a teaching worldview. The first thing Jesus says is don’t go out and make converts, “Go out and make disciples, teaching them what I have taught you.” That means, right away, you’re going to be establishing monasteries and cathedral schools and universities. You’re going to have to teach people how to read. You’re going to have probably create alphabets. You’re going to have to translate everything because you’re a teaching culture. Well, that’s the culture we are. The difference, though, for me was you can read everything there is to know about Jesus and you can research everything there is to research about Jesus, and you can get to believe that Jesus is who He said He was. That doesn’t make you a Christian. But I needed to move past that and start to read the New Testament, not for what it said about Jesus, but for what it said about Jim. And I trusted it for what it said about Jim because I first tested it to see what it said about Jesus. And once I determined it was telling me the truth, I started to trust it for what it was saying about me. And what it said about me was really true, that I’m not God. I don’t have a right to even put myself in that category. And I am that fallen person who seeks after his own selfish gain, who is always, by comparison to God, depraved at best and in need of a Savior. Lucky for me, I already knew there was a Savior, so I just put those two things together, and that’s how I gave my life to Christ. So I’m a Christian because it’s true, not because it works for me. I say that all the time. Because I honestly think that’s what you have to ground this in. Because there’s going to be lots of days when I’ll say God is good but I’m having a terrible day. Outwardly, I probably could make a case that God is not that good. But I know that God is good, that God is love by nature because I’ve thought through the evidence, and even on days where I don’t want to believe it, it’s still true. Yeah. That’s powerful. As we’re coming to a close, you’ve… That’s really some excellent advice, even for the Christian to push towards understanding the grounding of their belief, to investigate it seriously, to take the Word seriously, to look into the reasons and the arguments why God exists and why it’s true and it’s worthy of belief and to be able to give good answers. I’m not sure if you want to add to what you’ve already really encouraged and really admonished the Christian to do, but is there any other word for the Christian before we move to advice to the skeptic?  So I would say this: There’s already something that you have much more robust knowledge of probably. Even those of us who call ourselves Christians. Now look, you have a great podcast that examines these issues every single episode, so maybe the audience that’s listening to us right now is already… like you’re preaching to the choir on this, okay? Because they already get this. But most of our friends who are Christians know far more about the NFL rule book than they do about this playbook we call the Bible. They know far more about the H&R manual at their business, or what the rules are, if you’re a cop, what the law in California is. You can do the penal code. You can probably recite portions of that. No problem. But you can’t do the Bible. And you even call yourself a Christian. So what it comes down to is that we have the capacity to do this. We just don’t do it. We just do it in other areas. And that gives away what we really worship. That gives away what really matters. Now I’m as guilty as anyone. I was a Christian for a number of years before I left law enforcement. I still have a couple of open cases, but I am officially retired. And when I drove off that compound for the last time, it struck me that my identity is still in my work. I say my identity’s in Christ, but I wouldn’t feel the way I’m feeling right now if that was true. I’d be celebrating the fact that I get to now live my identity more robustly because I have more time. Instead, I was mourning the loss of my identity. Because in the end you can say all these things, but how we live is often very different. So my advice to all of us who call ourselves Christ followers is let’s show it. Now I’m offering not as somebody who’s saying, “Be like me.” No, no. Don’t be like me. I can’t do this, either. I have the same problems, the same limits. I find myself still having the same hesitation, the same distraction, the same sinful inclinations. I’m Paul in Romans 7. I’m still doing the stuff I know I shouldn’t do, and I’m not doing the stuff I know I should do, and that’s just the nature of what it is to be human. So don’t take this as, “Well, you could be more like me.” No, I need you to be less like me. We need all of us to be less like us. So that’s my advice to those of us who call ourselves Christ followers. Now when it comes to advice to atheists, let’s just consider the outcome of where this all heads. Think of it as a thought experiment. It used to be C.S. Lewis, I think it was, the idea of liar, lunatic, or Lord. Jesus is either a liar, a lunatic, or a Lord. Well, I think there’s another trilemma that we can look at that’s a little bit different. He’s either fiction or just another guy who lived in the first century or the God of the universe. If you look at how history has panned out, the fuse and fall that we talk about in any crime scene. Before the crime occurs, there’s a fuse that burns to the detonation of the bomb. Then there’s a fallout afterwards. The same thing happens with Jesus in the first century. A fuse that burns up to the appearance of Jesus, this explosive appearance of Jesus, and then fallout of history. The Person of Interest book I’m talking about just examines the fuse and the fallout. But if you ask yourself a question. He’s only one of those three things. If He is mythology, then how do we explain His impact on history? If He’s just a mortal, how do we explain? But if He’s God, now this impact makes sense, so my suggestion, my encouragement for those of us who are wondering which of those three it is. He’s either a complete lie. He’s either just a regular person living in the century. Or He’s the God of the universe. It turns out that the history the way it shaped out with humans on planet earth, it’s far more reasonable to believe the third option than it is the first two. And so I would say know your history, know the impact that this sage, this ancient sage from this obscure corner of the Roman Empire. How in the world did that guy change everything? Why are we calling it the first century for that guy? Well, we are because He’s not just a guy. I am just so overwhelmed with all of the wisdom and insight you’ve presented, not only through your story but just along the way. I’m also—I guess I just want so, for those who are so closed or so dismissive of the faith to really take an honest look, like you did. And I’m hoping that this story sparks at least the curiosity that it did in you. Because I’m confident, as you are, the detective who’s devoted years to looking at the evidence now, that you’re more convinced than ever that this is true, that God is real, that Jesus is who He says He was and He’s worthy of following. So I’m hopeful that, at the end of the day, there will be someone out there inspired to actually just stop and really be willing to take an honest look.  Thank you so much, Jim, for coming on today. This is an extraordinary story. You’re an extraordinary man and follower of Christ, and we have all benefited from your work, and I just want to thank you so much for coming on to tell your story, so that when people read your work, they can even know more of your background and who you are as an author, and more importantly, as a follower of Christ. So thank you so much for coming on.  Well, thanks so much for having me. All of those nice things you said, I feel embarrassed, because none of them are true, but what is true is that we worship a God that’s so big that He can take every one of these broken stories, every one of these people that think that they’re so full of themselves that they actually matter, and He can take our gifts that we give back to Him, which much look like the crayon drawings of your children being offered back to you as an offering. And all of this work, all of these podcasts, everything we do is just another version of the crayon drawing that we’re giving back to Jesus. And luckily, you know what? He smiles. With what little we’re able to give Him, and so I’m just glad to be on the podcast with you. Thanks for having me. Thanks so much.