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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

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.

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 life, from atheism or skepticism to belief in God. It’s often thought that belief in science excludes belief in God, that somehow they are not reconcilable, that one cannot be a serious student of science and be a serious believer in God. After all, Richard Dawkins once said Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. Many atheist thinkers over the decades have touted the story of atheism as the courageous scientific progress of man, overcoming primitive superstitions and make-believe gods, that we no longer need a god of the gaps hypothesis to explain what we are now seeing in the world and through science.

Has Darwin definitively ruled out the possibility of God, as Dawkins suggests. Or is it still possible to believe in God and evolution at the same time, as Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga and others contend. That evolution does not necessarily disprove the existence of God. Along with Dawn, we’ll also be talking today with Tim Stratton, someone who was quite influential in engaging Dawn on the issues of science and belief in a thoughtfully challenging, intelligent, and humble way. This should prove to be an intriguing story. I hope you’ll join in.

Welcome to the Side B Podcast, Dawn and Tim. It’s so great to have you both with me today.

Dawn: Thanks for having me.

Tim: It’s great to be here. Thank you for the invitation.

Wonderful. As we’re getting started, I’d like our listeners to know just a little bit about you both. So we’re going to introduce both of you one at a time. Dawn, why don’t you tell me a little bit about who you are now, and then we’ll get back into your story after Tim introduces himself.

Dawn: So my name is Dawn Simon. I am a professor of biology, and my specialty is actually molecular evolutionary biology, and I am at the University of Nebraska at Kearney.

And Tim?

Tim: Yeah. My name is Tim Stratton. I’m a professor at Trinity Theological Seminary and College of the Bible, teaching apologetics and theology. I run a ministry called Free Thinking Ministries. People can find me on YouTube under that name and also find my website, freethinkingministries.com, and yeah, I just have a passion for apologetics and theology and evangelism, and I think you’ll see some of that today.

Fantastic! And for those of you who are listening, we’ll put those sites and links in our episode notes. So let’s get started with your story, Dawn. Take me back to where you’re from, where you grew up. Talk to me about your family. Was religion or God part of your world growing up?

Dawn: So I grew up in a small town in eastern Iowa, so heavily Catholic. So we were a town of about 2,000 people, and we had two churches in town, both Catholic. And I come from a very large extended family, so my mom has a family of 12 and my dad has a family of 11. Everybody’s Catholic. My grandparents were definitely observant, and many of my relatives were as well. My parents were not particularly, though I did go to Catholic school and I went through all the sacraments associated with that. I would say, while I knew… I could win Bible trivia and I knew the rules. I don’t think I ever was a believer. Even though if you would have asked me as a third grader, “Do you believe in God?” I probably would’ve said yes because that was the right answer. That’s the answer I was supposed to give. My parents… we just didn’t talk about it. Ever. So, in general, my family left those kinds of ideas or beliefs about a higher being as personal. They’re not things to talk about. You believed or you didn’t, but you kept it to yourself.

And so I can distinctly remember having some questions at a young age. I had this Children’s Bible that had a picture and then one story per page that my grandma gave me for my first communion. And I liked it. I mean, I liked the stories. I definitely had the distinct impression that you just don’t ask questions.

Yeah. So you were growing up in a Catholic world, I guess, nominally Catholic, it sounds like.

Dawn: Yes.

You went through the motions. It was more ritual and perhaps rules. You were in a Catholic school. But you’re also telling me, even as a young child, you were inquisitive. You were what I would consider a critical thinker or even introspective or really thinking about the books and the beliefs that you were asked to believe. And you weren’t exactly buying it. It sounds like you were pushing back at an early age. That tells me a bit about you. So you went through Catholic school, elementary school. Did you go through middle school and high school?

Dawn: No. Our town only had Catholic school through elementary school, and then I transferred to public school, but we still had what was called release time religion class, where you would leave in the middle of the day, cross a parking lot, go to religion class in a building across the parking lot, and so I did that until I made my confirmation, I think in tenth or eleventh grade. So I wasn’t at a Catholic school but was still doing the release time religion classes.

So I’m curious. At that time you were actually confirmed in the Catholic church, how were you feeling and thinking about that? Were you buying into it at that point? Or were you feeling a bit conflicted about even going through the motions of that kind of sacrament?

Dawn: I wasn’t conflicted, in the sense that… I mean, it never really had a deeper meaning. It was just a thing we were supposed to do. And so… I remember that there were questions, like you had to pass some test, I think. I don’t know. The bishop asked you questions, and it was very nerve wracking whether you were going to get the right answers, and so I was really focused on just that. It was just like a thing to pass. And so I never thought too much about deeper meaning. I mean I was conflicted in the sense that I remember—I don’t remember it with confirmation, but around that same time, I really thought I didn’t believe in God. And I had asked my mom. I remember saying to her, “I don’t think I believe in God,” and it was super hard for me to say because I knew that was bad, and it made me feel like a bad person. And she didn’t have a thing to say about it.

So she had no response.

Dawn: No. Nothing. Nothing. Because we have a… My mom’s cousin is a priest, and I remember thinking. I don’t know if I said it to her, but I was hoping that’s what she was going to say, like, you go talk to him. But that didn’t happen.

So did you ever think, “Well, perhaps I should go talk to the priest?”

Dawn: I thought I should, but it was too scary to do it, because I wasn’t supposed to think that, so it was bad, and I thought it made me a bad person, and so I wasn’t going to do that. I mean, I confided in my mom. And it wasn’t like she disapproved. She just didn’t have anything to say in response. And that’s kind of how my parents are in general. They’ll support me, but it’s up to me to figure it out.

Well, I think it was really quite courageous for her to reveal that to your parents, but I hear you when you say that… It sounds like there wasn’t a real safe place for you to go outside of your home to ask the bigger questions.

Dawn: Yeah. Absolutely.

Yeah. So did you take on the identity of an atheist then? Or is that something that came later?

Dawn: No. Yeah. I was really reluctant to call myself that. Always. I never got over the reluctance to say that I was an atheist. Well, and one thing was I had learned very early… I mean, and I don’t even know if this definition is right, but what I had learned was that an atheist is that you know for sure there isn’t God and an agnostic is you’re not sure, and so I’m not sure about anything. And so I thought being an atheist… I mean I really thought, “Who would say that?” Certainly not me because I’m, again, not sure. I mean I might be 99% sure, but to me, in my mind, atheist was you’re 100% sure there isn’t a God. And for me, I think I was always hoping there was. I didn’t see any evidence for it. I thought that was probably wishful thinking on my part. And so I would have said I was agnostic, but I didn’t think there was a God. I just wasn’t sure. And so that actually never really changed, even though, by most definitions, I think people would call themselves an atheist. It’s just that, because I wasn’t 100% sure there was no god, I wasn’t willing to take on that label.

Dawn: And so that never went away. And I tried to do things. I remember, in college, in graduate school, I started going to church, Catholic church, and that I went most weeks. It was something to do, and I could say I was trying, but it didn’t do anything for me internally. Nothing about me changed as part of that experience, Well, growing up, the only thing I knew to do was to go to church, in terms of trying to have faith or trying to believe in God. That was the only thing open to me, I thought. And so I tried that, and that didn’t work for me.

You know, and again, I think that really speaks to who you are, Dawn, in your desire for intellectual honesty and integrity. Because a lot of people will just take on the identity of atheist and really not think what that means. Like you said, you defined that, in order to be a credible atheist, or to call yourself that, you really have to know everything about all of reality.

Dawn: Yeah, right, right.

And you understood that. So to be that self limiting, again, speaks to your integrity. And your desire not only, again, just to be sure, but you’re also honest in the fact that you’re continually skeptical.

Because you’re constantly searching for the truth, and that is something that I think all of us can take a cue from, is really continuing to search for truth. So as you’re moving along, you have this interesting kind of oxymoron that you’re telling me. It’s like you want to believe, you just can’t because it’s not intellectually credible to you, but yet you’re going through the motions of church, but that doesn’t… It’s just more of a social outing, it sounds like, for you more than anything.

Dawn: Mm-hm.

So that was college, and you pursued a degree in?

Dawn: Biology.

In biology. So you were heavily immersed in the sciences at that time.

Dawn: Yes, yes.

So I would imagine that your naturalistic worldview, that worldview without God, was being reinforced through your study of the sciences. Were you attending to any of that as how it related to the existence or not of God?

Dawn: I mean truthfully that didn’t play as much of a role as people think. I mean I specifically remember, in grad school, having this conversation with another person who, if he wasn’t an atheist, he was like me, agnostic leaning atheist, and we were both in the lab, and I remember saying to him, “People that think we have it all figured out don’t know anything about what we do.” I just remember saying, like, “There’s plenty of places for supernatural.” Not that I would be able to say exactly what those places were, but there’s so much unknown, and so I just remember having this kind of discussion. He was kind of philosophically minded, and we were having this discussion about the debate between intelligent design or creationism and then the naturalistic worldview. And we both thought that there was room to be a believer and an evolutionary biologist.

Dawn: So even though I was not in that category, I didn’t see inherent contradictions in general. Maybe specific claims, yes. But in general, I thought it isn’t as if we have things all figured out. We have 1% of things figured out. So it’s arrogant to claim that we don’t need anything else. And I was agnostic on whether we needed a supernatural being or not, but I knew there was plenty of unknown.

Yeah, I appreciate your humility there. Kind of a modest epistemology, if you will. That you understand our limitations of where we are, and there’s just so much that we don’t know. But we’re always looking to make the best explanation of the things that we do know, right? And experience.

Dawn: Right, right.

So you were moving along, and I’m curious, too, before we move too far. In embracing this agnostic, atheistic leaning direction, as the critical thinker that you were, were you looking at the implications of that godless worldview and what it meant for you in terms of your life, meaning, purpose, direction, any of that?

Dawn: No. So I wasn’t thinking like that exactly. I mean I definitely felt empty without God. But I wasn’t thinking in terms of bigger picture, like what is life without God like? Because that’s what life was for me. So I didn’t have to think, “What would it be if there was no god?” because I already thought there was no god. So I knew what that felt like. And, again, I would have to put that into, like, mystery category. Why do we continue to do anything at all? I don’t know. But there’s a desire to do. So even if there’s no implications later, there still is inherent kind of driving force to do good, be good. But I wasn’t thinking about that in a philosophical sense, just kind of one foot in front of the other, keep moving forward kind of thing. And I was struggling. It’s not as if I was comfortable with that idea. I was struggling.

Dawn: And I remember there was a podcast, actually. This was during my postdoc. So after you finish your PhD, scientists often do additional training called a postdoctoral fellowship, and so I was in Canada doing my postdoc, and I heard this podcast about how somebody lost their faith. And it felt very similar to me. They grew up in a Catholic home, and she talked about her brother dying, what that meant, and I just thought, “Well, this is it. This is really what I think, and I finally, finally admit it.” I wasn’t happy about it at all. It was like a punch in the gut. Yeah. But I just thought… I’d been trying really hard not to come to this conclusion, but that’s what I actually really think. And so that’s when—during my postdoc years was when I started, if not to other people, admitting to myself that I didn’t think there was a god.

So you were finally closing that door. And so what happened next in your journey?

Dawn: So I got this job, the job I currently have, in Kearney, Nebraska. And I came here, and this was a place different from any other place I had lived. Just in general, people are super friendly. I’m also an introvert, so I didn’t always, always appreciate that. I mean I appreciated the sentiment, but I did not appreciate needing to talk to people all the time, or people clear across the street waving, waving, waving, but you don’t know them. And they want to say hello. So extremely friendly, helpful community. And then the second thing is very open about religious beliefs. And that… I really didn’t like that part. So, for example, at the dentist’s office, they’re playing religious music. Go to the coffee shop, there’s Bibles on the table. And I just felt like it was everywhere, and people are so comfortable and so open with their faith. And I didn’t find it pushy in the sense that it wasn’t like people treated me different or were always trying to talk to me about it, but there was just evidence of it everywhere.

Dawn: And so I had this thing but the same people were super nice, some of the nicest people I’ve ever met, and so I had this issue where they’re obviously very religious, very, very nice people, seemed happy, had something I didn’t have, or it seemed so, and so then at that point I was like, “Okay, I’ll try church again. Let’s see. I’m going to really give it an A+ effort here.” And so then I started going to the Catholic church, and even at one point I was like, “I’m going to read the Bible straight through.” And so I started at Genesis. It didn’t go super well. I got to Noah’s Ark, and I was done. And so I was kind of in that, and I had stopped. I had stopped going to church. I mean I went, I don’t know, for maybe a couple of months. And there was something… Because I grew up in that environment, there’s something comforting about the ritual, but I didn’t feel any closer to God. What I felt like was I just… I gave it an effort. Like, “I don’t see what these other people are seeing. I wish I did. I don’t see it.” And so this is that point when I met, Tim, actually.

So, Dawn, as you’re moving along, then, and you’re in this community that’s very different than what you know, how does your story change? What is it that makes you want to really re-investigate seriously this issue of God?

There were a series of letters to the editor in the local paper about evolution. I don’t remember what instigated that exactly, but there was a series of letters and then comments about those letters, and I was just ashamed. I was ashamed by some of the responses coming from people at the university. And I should note that some of these people were using pseudonyms and were behaving very badly, just unkindly and very badly. And then there was this person, Tim Stratton, who was commenting on a lot of them but was kind. I didn’t agree with anything he said, honestly. But he was kind. And was offering… anybody that was writing responses, he was offering to meet with them and talk to them in person, and so I had this impression of this person, Tim Stratton, who I didn’t know who that was at all. That at least he was kind.

So, Tim, You were on an opposite end of those who were at the university. I guess it was on the topic of evolution? Is that what you were talking about?

Tim: I think that’s right and intelligent design in general. I was, at that point, really new to apologetics. I was a youth pastor at that time, and I saw that many of my students were losing their faith or becoming atheists in front of my face, because I kind of answered their questions. And so I went on a journey to see if there were good answers to their questions. What Dawn noticed was that I was arguing and trying to be nice and respectful and loving at the same time, and I think that got her attention. I do think some of the arguments that I was giving back then are horrible, and I wouldn’t give them anymore, and some of them are still good.  But I like what Dawn says. At the time, she didn’t agree with any of them, but she noticed something in my tone, I guess.

Dawn: Yeah, absolutely.

You know, that really says something, I think, that even though the content wasn’t exactly perhaps or anything that she agreed with, she appreciated the manner in which you communicated as particularly juxtaposed to those who were her colleagues, who weren’t putting their very best foot forward.

Tim: Yeah.

So, Dawn, his contribution and his tone, did it cause you to initiate some kind of discussion with him? Tell me what happened after that.

Dawn: I think because of this series of articles, my colleague invited someone to come to speak at what’s called a Science Cafe, so it was supposed to be outreach to the public, and the topic was on evolution, and so… before that I thought probably Tim would be there, and I Googled him so I knew what he looked like.

Tim: Really?

Dawn: Yeah, I did. And so I was on the lookout to meet him. And my only intention was to meet him and tell him I appreciated the tone of his arguments. I mean, I just wanted to thank him for that and to kind of also speak up that we all were not like some of the other people that were responding. And so I met him there, and then, I think within the week, we had connected on Facebook?

Tim: I ran into you at Qdoba, the burrito joint.

Dawn: Yeah.

Tim: Right after that.

Dawn: That’s right. We did. We did. That’s exactly right. Yeah. And so then he or I added the other one as a Facebook friend, and then this started a very long series of messages back and forth, like… I think at that point I said, “Actually, I’m closer to an atheist,” and so I was putting all my cards on the table there. And I think, if I go back and look, I bet several times I’m sort of trying to end it, saying, “Thank you so much for your patience!” Just because I didn’t have any kind of… I didn’t think somebody was going to be able to answer my questions. And I didn’t want to waste his time. But the other thing I appreciated very early was that it felt like give and take. So I would not have been as interested in those conversations if it felt like he was teaching me but I wasn’t giving back anything in return.

Tim: Oh, yeah!

Dawn: So I would ask questions. He would ask questions. And so we sort of came to understand each others’ beliefs that way. So that was kind of the initial part. And it was purely intellectual. I had no, no thought that this was going to lead to some kind of change in my life. And at one point, he said “Maybe God put us in each others’ paths for this reason,” and I remember thinking, like that’s so nice of him to say, but it’s just not going to happen.

So, Tim, talk with me about the way that you were… As obviously a thoughtful communicator and really appreciating this conversation you were having with Dawn, what kind of questions or topics or things were you talking about? Were you just question asking? Were you trying to present some kind of evidence or arguments? How was this conversation proceeding?

Tim: Yeah. The way I remember it. Like I said, this was when I first started getting into apologetics, and I think at the time I’d just enrolled at Biola University, started my master’s degree in apologetics. So as I was getting stuff from my classes, I was giving it right to Dawn, and so I was offering the Kalam cosmological argument and the moral argument and the ontological argument and the fine tuning argument, any argument I could get my hands on. As I was learning it, she was basically learning it along with me. And I was even trying to argue against evolution at that point, too, and then she asked me if I’d be willing to read some books on it, and I’m like, “Sure,” so she gave me some books to read. I remember one in particular from Jerry Coyne, right?

Dawn: Yeah.

Tim: And I was reading through that. If we’re going to be taken seriously, we better understand that which we are arguing against,” and I realized that I hadn’t done so. And so I really appreciated learning about evolution from Dawn, and I wasn’t just going to reject it. I figured if she was willing to listen to me, I’d better be willing to listen to her, and I learned a lot in the process. And while at Biola, then, I started thinking about, “Wow! Could an omniscient and omnipotent God create via evolution?” and it seemed to me that if God was both omnipotent and omniscient that He could. He would have the power to do so, and He would know how to do it. And I think you could even relate this to the fine tuning argument, the fine tuning of the initial conditions of the big bang or the early universe. So I didn’t see a problem there.

Not that I necessarily said I affirm this view, but I kind of had Dawn in mind. I wanted to see, could I come up with a model here, for Dawn’s sake,

Long story short, I was willing to learn from Dawn, and I think… So being willing to learn from her and listen to her and the fact that the tone was good, that we were respectful to each other and we weren’t like, “You stupid idiot!” I think those two things worked in favor of us having a really good conversation, and she was then willing to listen to me. Over a long period of time, I felt like almost daily we’d have some interaction, over Facebook Messenger most of the time, and argue.

Facebook is bad for tons of reasons, but I always point to this as something good that happened because of it. And I know it was definitely a very intense time, because I was really wrestling with big issues at that point.

It’s curious because it sounds like you started the conversation really not wanting to be convinced.

Dawn: Yeah.

But there must have been a tipping point at some point, where you actually found the person who was willing to engage in doubts and questions in a serious way and a respectful way, and so it was the first time in your life, I think, that perhaps you—you not only felt safe, I guess, to do that, but also somehow with a renewed interest.

It was initially just intellectual, and there were some of these arguments that I had heard a little bit of because of the class, because of teaching evolution, that sometimes we do this part where we talk about common objections at the end, and I try to just let students talk, and I try not to talk so much, but I needed to understand the objections, and so initially I thought, “This will be great for that. He’ll be able to explain some of these objections that I just don’t understand.” And so initially… And I had done some work. I had gotten some books to try and understand that, but I just couldn’t quite get it. And so initially that’s what I thought it was going to be, is that he’ll help me understand the opposing arguments and then that’ll be great and that’ll be that. But then we started going through… The argument that convinced me was when Tim was developing his Free Thinking argument against naturalism, so it’s kind of the early stages of that, so we were going through those premises and arguing a lot, and at one point it blindsided me.

Dawn: I mean, so it’s intellectual, intellectual, intellectual, and then one night, and I was getting ready to move, and I wasn’t sleeping. This was like 3:00 in the morning, and I was packing, and I was just thinking, “Gosh! I really think we have free will,” like, “I can’t be certain. I can’t be certain.” So this was one of the things also that would not have worked for me if Tim did not make clear that we don’t have to be certain, that you can have some doubt and still be convinced. So I was like, “I can’t be certain about free will.” I had tried and I was making myself crazy trying to think of, “What experiments could we do to show that there’s free will?” and just could not and had read scientific literature of people trying to show it and just couldn’t figure out a way to definitively know.

Dawn: But I had this revelation that, “Oh, I think we do have free will,” and then the very next thing was, “What does that mean?” That means there’s God. And then it was like… yeah. I get a little bit emotional talking about it because it was… Like I said, I felt blindsided by it because it was all intellectual until we had gone through the arguments, so I knew the argument well. I just was stuck on this… I thought either we think we have free will or we do have free will. And I just… I have to live my life with what I think is true, and what I think is true is we have free will, and if we free will, there’s a God. And I was just… I didn’t know what to do with that. I was crazed that night.

When you have that sense of… like this is profound and this is actually true and perhaps God does exist, I’m sure that’s a very sobering moment for you in many ways because you had, for so long, not believed. I mean really your whole life.

Dawn: Right, right.

Tim, for those who don’t know the free will argument, really that’s a novel thing for someone to think about. “What do you mean I don’t have free will?” or, “If I have free will, that means there’s a God.” Could you, in a nutshell, just tell us what that is.

Tim: You bet. So the free thinking argument is an argument that demonstrates… Well, the free thinking argument against naturalism. It starts out just by saying, if naturalism is true, that the human soul does not exist, right? Because the human soul would be a non-natural or a supernatural, immaterial, nonphysical type of thing, so if naturalism is true, the soul does not exist. And then I would say, but if the soul does not exist, then humans do not possess libertarian freedom because everything about humanity would be caused and determined by something other than humanity, namely the laws and forces and events of nature.

Tim: So yeah, number one, if naturalism is true, we don’t have a soul. Number two, if the soul does not exist, libertarian freedom does not exist. Three, if libertarian freedom does not exist, then important kinds of rationality and knowledge do not exist. That is, if something causally determines you to affirm a false belief about X, then it’s impossible for you to infer a better or true belief about X, and I think that hit Dawn hard because the goal of the scientist is to infer the best explanation from all the data. But if something else is causally determining her to affirm a false belief about X, then she can’t infer the best explanation of the data. She can’t do science, right?

Tim: But then the next premise is we can infer better and true beliefs. We can do science. So therefore you have some conclusions. Therefore, humans possess libertarian freedom. Therefore, the soul or some non-natural aspect of humanity seems to exist. Therefore, naturalism is false, and then I argue that the best—speaking of the best explanation, that the best explanation of all of this data, souls and libertarian freedom, is not just God but the biblical view of God, and that really starts a new argument.

Yeah. Thank you for explaining that. So then, Dawn, back to you. When you had this sudden awareness or realization that you actually believed, what happened then? Did you call Tim? Did you think, “Oh, I need to think about this,” or what next? Or what kind of God?

I’m sure I wrote to him immediately. And then I think… Again, he was still helping me know what to do. And so he suggested that I start with the book of John, that I read and also just pray to God, which was novel.

Tim: Notice that I didn’t say, “Start with Genesis.”

Dawn: No, you did not say start with Genesis.

Tim: I know that wasn’t going to be good for her.

Dawn: And so then the next part was kind of… So there is a God. Is it the Christian God?

Right.

Dawn: So Tim was, at that time, teaching a Sunday school class on apologetics, and so I started… I wouldn’t go to church, but I would go to that. And so we went through Dr. Craig’s book On Guard, I think, and went through all the arguments there, and then a pivotal moment or time was he showed this debate between Mike Licona and Bart Ehrman, and I remember, oh, boy, I was rooting for Ehrman. So he showed this… I just… I mean because I just… I don’t know what my deal is, dragging my feet every step of the way.

Tim: The resurrection in general.

Dawn: The resurrection, yeah. The resurrection. How can that not be true? And I again just… It’s not that I was sure, but I was more sure than not, so I was… Tim and I would often talk about percentage. What percentage sure are you?  And so I was above 50% sure. I don’t know how high, but the idea was that that’s the thing that I thought was true. Whether I was 100% convinced or not, that’s the way I needed to live my life at that point. So I think that was in the spring, so when we first starting talking in the fall of 2012, I think, and then in the spring was when I was going through the classes with him, and then we watched the debate during that time. And I still wasn’t calling myself a Christian yet. And then I had a question… Yeah, I had a question to Tim about the resurrection, like why did Jesus have to die? It didn’t make sense to me that there wouldn’t be some other way. And he gave a sermon at church about that, and so then after that sermon, then I started calling myself Christian. That was the final thing that I needed answered.

That is a really tremendous question. And I think it’s really a stumbling block for many people. Why did Jesus have to die? And I don’t know if you want to give a little 60-second response to that.

Basically it had to do with how our broken relationship’s restored. What does the offended party have to do? What does the offending party have to do? And really cached that out and connected a whole bunch of logical dots.

Dawn: Yeah.

Tim: And yeah, I think you can make a pretty good case that, “Wow, this is why the Creator of the universe had to enter into the universe to die for those who He loved within the universe.”

You know, as we are going on, it just strikes me how perfectly God placed you, Tim, in Dawn’s life as someone who is incredibly logical and analytical. And you obviously are made from the same cloth. And you’re able to think through things in such a way—you don’t just say, “Believe!” You know, “Why don’t you just believe?”

Tim: Right. That’s what I used to do. As a former youth pastor and a bad youth pastor, that’s what I did.

Yeah.

Tim: And I realized that doesn’t work.

Yeah.

Dawn: Yeah.

Because, for especially the skeptic, they just don’t take things just because you throw them out. You have to have a good reason. And it sounds like you were the perfect person in her life who—it’s not that you knew all the answers, but you’re willing to look and engage and learn alongside and you’re both searching for truth but in a very deep, logical, and analytical way, and there’s something to be said for that, and it’s really a beautiful thing.

So you came to a place not only that you believed intellectually, Dawn, that God exists and obviously you were convinced at some point that Jesus rose from the dead and perhaps that verified the claims that He, too, was God. But that it was more than an intellectual assent. It was something that you… Someone to whom you gave your life.

Dawn: Right.

And affiliated and you were willing to put on that label of Christian. That was a tremendous change.

Dawn: Yeah.

Talk with me about that and the change that has come in your life as a result of really becoming a Christ follower.

Dawn: Yeah. So this is a harder part to talk about for me. I think partially because of my personality and also because of my job, I was not super excited to use the term at all. And just the other part that was difficult, well difficult about, “What does this mean?” was that I’m not sure if my family are believers, and most of my friends are not believers, and so there was one point that… I mean, I was disturbed. I was distressed by my conclusion. So it wasn’t like all rainbows. I mean, I felt pretty bad about it for a while. Like you had said, for me it wasn’t enough just to say, “Believe.” It seems like for plenty of people it is, but for me, I needed more, and God gave me more.

Dawn: So there are so many gifts that I’ve been given, but I don’t often feel like I do enough with those gifts, but in terms of how it’s changed my life, I wouldn’t even be thinking like this. I would just… Let’s rewind to when I was saying one foot in front of the other. I’ve always tried to be a kind person, but there’s a different obligation to that, to helping others and living your life for more than just yourself, and that’s… It just changes, so I don’t know if it has changed my actions as much as the mindset of why I do things or what things I try to keep in mind as I live my life.

Yeah, yeah. It’s an ongoing process for all of us, Dawn, isn’t it? I mean, every day is a gift even-

Dawn: Yeah, yeah.

… and time is a gift and what we do with that, it’s a struggle for us all. I’m imagining that there are listeners who are curious about your perspective, too. It may be very much like Tim’s in terms of what would you say to the person who doesn’t understand how science and faith can go together? They look at you. You’re a PhD in evolutionary biology, or molecular evolution, but yet you call yourself a Christian, a believer in God. How do you reconcile those or put those together? Or is there a problem at all?

Dawn: I don’t think there’s a problem at all. I separated out, and I teach my students this, that in science we use methodological naturalism, such that, by definition, we’re studying the natural world. Biology is the study of life. So what’s outside of the natural world isn’t in science. Not that there’s no influence of supernatural but that, just by definition, the rules of science are we do not include that. So if I’m in a lab and I’m doing an experiment and I can’t figure out why, we can’t jump to supernatural influence. We wouldn’t make progress. It’s separate from whether or not you think there are supernatural influences. You can believe that there is and still not take it into account because the process of… We have a process that we use to make progress, and so, for me, not that they don’t intersect, but the way that I look at science or the way I do my job, it doesn’t come into it. I’m trying to be as objective as possible, making the inference with the best explanation.

Dawn: I mean, in my life, every single thing I do, I try to make the inference with the best explanation. And I’ve never really seen the problem. And I think also because I’m a scientist, I’m pretty used to ideas changing with more information, and so I don’t get hung up on on that.

And I think it’s arrogant to think that we will figure all this out. On either end, that we’ll know God’s mind or that, as a scientist, I’m going to be able to recreate what happened billions of years ago. I mean it’s arrogant to think we’re ever going to reach that step, but if you have a possibility, that should give you reason to believe that reconciliation is possible.

Tim: And I think Dawn’s exactly right. When she’s going into the lab, she’s, for lack of maybe a better term, assuming methodological naturalism. She’s not looking for supernatural everywhere.

Dawn: Yes. Right, right, right.

Tim: Even though she believes in God and that God created the universe and everything.

Dawn: Right, right.

Tim: I mean Psalm 19:1-2 says, “Day after day, your creation pours forth speech. Night after night, it delivers knowledge.”

Dawn: Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Tim: So God’s word is telling us, “Study nature. Do science,” right? That’s what the Bible is saying.

Dawn: Yeah.

Tim: Do science, study what God has created. So if you study the nature that God has created, it’s not necessary to look for… What’s the term that you like to use? Tinkering?

Dawn: Tinkerer, yeah.

Tim: The Tinkering God or whatever. No need to look for that once you affirm that He already created it supernaturally.

Dawn: Yeah. And actually that’s another thing, is that I think that’s one of God’s greatest gifts, to me personally but to humanity in general, is that He allows to figure some of this out. We get a glimpse. We can use our brains, and He gives us enough resources to be able to make inferences for the best explanation and understand how He created. I mean I just… That’s the part where faith comes into my work, that part, is that I’ll just be blown away just at what we’re able to figure out. It didn’t have to be that way. We didn’t have to have these tools to be able to make inferences. He gave us this gift.

That’s right. All the more reason to really appreciate that free thinking argument, right?

Dawn: Yep. Absolutely, absolutely.

Yeah. You have to have a grounded rationality because you can observe a predictable, rational universe and all of that.

Tim: That’s right.

So it all comes together. As we’re wrapping up, I think I would like to hear really from both of you in terms of advice that you would give to someone like yourself, Dawn, who is just a skeptic at heart. Someone who really is looking for truth and wants to have valid reason and rationality for their belief. They want to have grounded, warranted belief. What would you say or how would you advice someone like yourself? Or who might be searching with that kind of intentionality and thoughtfulness?

Dawn: I think one of the things that helped me a lot early is when I came to that conclusion, exactly that. I’m just looking for truth. Whatever way it goes is what I’m going to believe. I don’t have to be invested in there not being a God or there being a God. I can just simply say, “I’m looking for evidence, and I’m going to come to the conclusion that makes most sense to me.” And so that takes a lot of pressure off and takes a lot of emotion out of it, which I think often is a hang-up for that, so I mean if you have the idea in your head that you’re just looking for the truth… Also, you can think for yourself. So maybe you really admire one person, but that person, there’s part of the arguments you don’t like. Well, it doesn’t have to be the whole thing or nothing. You can look for pieces of evidence all over.

Dawn: I tell Tim this all the time, that there’s all of these arguments for the existence of God. I think about three of them are good. So I mean I’m not an easy sell, and I’m not convinced… I don’t care if there’s a hundred. If there’s one that is convincing to me, then I go with it.

Tim: That’s all you need.

Yeah. Anything you would add as advice to the skeptic, Tim? Anything you would encourage them?

To the skeptic, I’d say really evaluate your life and even in your innermost being and your subconscious thoughts, even, if you can. Are you resisting the Holy Spirit? Are you resisting the arguments? Are you resisting? I know many people who’ve said, “Look, I want God to exist. I don’t want atheism to be true,” but then when you start arguing with them, even in a polite way, they get very emotional and defensive, and it seems clear to me, “Well, you are not a nonresistant nonbeliever,” and Dawn seemed to me to get to the point where, at least I thought she is definitely a nonresistant nonbeliever, and if that’s the case, then she was going to be open. Some times more than others. Yes, she is the most skeptical person I’ve ever met! To this day! No matter what we’re talking about. Skeptical! And I think it’s a gift, though.

Tim: And sometimes maybe I’m too optimistic, and so her pushing back on my optimism with a little bit of skepticism is good, and I think we’ve been able to meet in the middle on so many things. And so then I would just say to those who are having conversations with skeptics or nonbelievers in general don’t wipe the dust off your feet too quickly. I see too many Christians just say, “Well, I had a conversation with them once, and I’m wiping the dust off of my feet and walking away,” to quote scripture. I just last week was with somebody who led his friend to Christ after 30 years of sharing the gospel and doing apologetics with him. Thirty years! This man finally accepted the truth and accepted the evidence. Followed the evidence where it was leading and gave his life to Christ.

Tim: And, Dawn, I felt like our conversation was a long time, but it wasn’t close to 30 years. I mean it was several years, though, right?

Dawn: The bulk of it was a year.

Tim: Okay.

Dawn: I had questions for a long, long time after that.

Tim: Right, right.

Dawn: So I mean it was several years, but from agnostic-leaning atheist to Christian was right around a year.

Tim: Okay.

Dawn: But hundreds of pages of texts.

Tim: Yeah, that’s right.

Maybe that needs to become a book. Yeah.

Tim: We have it.

Tim: We might have to publish that. We’ll see. I don’t know. We’ll have to edit it, that’s for sure.

Dawn: Edit it for sure!

Tim: Yeah. There are some things that I’m sure I said back then that I would be ashamed of now. But I’m sure God can use imperfect arguments at times, too. So just keep having the conversation and love each other and respect each other and don’t be jerks.

Dawn: Yeah.

Tim: And even some of Dawn’s colleagues, one guy in particular, we used to probably hate each other, but now we’ve even kind of developed a friendship with each other. We stopped being jerks to each other and are able to have these conversations. And so, yeah, just have fun conversations, and at the end of the day, trust God with it. But you gain friends and develop critical thinking skills in the process. For me, it strengthened. Dawn came to faith in Christ. My faith in Christ was strengthened, and it seemed to expand. I saw a bigger view of our Maximally Great Being through the process as well.

That’s wonderful! Wonderful advice both ways, both to skeptics and to Christians, Tim. And finally, Dawn, if you were to talk to the Christian, especially with the example that Tim was in your life, patient, kind, diligent, very thoughtful and intelligent, meeting you where you were, open, all of those things, how would you advice the Christian to engage with the nonbeliever, maybe perhaps the nonresistant nonbeliever.

Dawn: That may not be nonresistant?

That may or may not be resistant, I guess.

Dawn: I mean the biggest thing, I guess, was just to show humility and to show… You don’t have to be sure, you know? You can learn from each other not to… I don’t know… think less of a person that has doubts? And to make them feel like the doubting part is okay. That was huge, that I knew it was okay to doubt. I mean, if he would’ve said, “At some point, you’re going to be 100% certain,” I would’ve said, “Okay, we’re done.” You know? This idea that certainty isn’t the goal. I mean, we’re not trying to be certain. We’re trying to have a relationship. Relationship with God. It’s not about being 100% certain, and so those were the huge things. And just, yeah, to be kind. I mean it shouldn’t be so hard, but that’s… Think the best you can of the other person.

Yeah. I’ve heard… This is actually wisdom from my husband, that we have a hermeneutic of either trust or suspicion towards the other. And I think, to your point, I think that we do need to trust, really, that the other person is coming from a good place until they demonstrate otherwise.

Dawn: Right. Until they prove otherwise. Right.

Yeah. It’s kind of innocent until proven guilty. Because we really do want the best for the other. That’s what love is, and some of that’s just being patient, and it’s giving the benefit of the doubt.

So wow. What an amazing story this is, and how rich it has been to have both of you in the conversation today, to give life to your story, Dawn, and to Tim, just to bring such insight and wisdom in how you walked alongside—both of you. You’re walking together in this process. And I think that humility and that respect, mutual respect, really stands out a lot.

So thank you so much for, again, your time and just coming forward and telling your story. Like you said, it’s not an easy thing to do necessarily.

Dawn: Right.

Especially as a professional as an evolutionary biologist and someone in the academic world. So I applaud you, Dawn. It’s courageous. So thank you.

Dawn: I appreciate that. Thank you.

All right. And thank you, Tim, of course.

Tim: You bet. My pleasure.

Yes.

Thanks for tuning in to the Side B Podcast to hear Dawn Simon’s story. You can find out more about Dawn and Tim Stratton, as well as their recommended resources, in our episode notes. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can reach me by email at [email protected]. If you enjoyed it, I hope you’ll follow and share this podcast with your friends 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.

A strong atheist until he was 51, Mark Meckler felt no need for God until the influence of his personal relationships paired with deep intellectual curiosity led him to consider something more.

Recommended book: The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel

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 or skeptic but who unexpectedly became a Christian to learn from their perspectives, both as someone who once resisted belief in God and then as someone who changed their mind.

What we think and believe is a complex phenomenon. We often come to our beliefs because they’re part of our world growing up, the fabric of our family, the views of our friends. We seem to be drawn to what is familiar, at least at first. Sometimes we actually reject what we know and become drawn to other views based upon what we desire, or towards the beliefs of those who we like and admire believe. We can also be swayed towards strong beliefs by dominant voices in our culture at university and beyond, when exposed to different ways of thinking about and viewing the world, towards or away from God and religion. 

In our story today, Mark Meckler’s nonreligious cultural Judaism grew into a militant atheism, as influenced by the dominating voices of the New Atheists. As a young adult, he became convinced of the poisonous, immoral nature of religious belief and wanted nothing to do with it. Religion was for weak people who needed a crutch. Highly driven and accomplished in his life and career, over the years, he didn’t feel the need for God. He was happy on his own. But against all odds, he became a Christian after three decades of atheism. This begs the question, what would it take for someone like Mark to become open to consider the possibility of God? Even more than that, to become an impassioned follower of Jesus Christ.

I hope you’ll listen to find out the answers at least for Mark. Even more than that, I hope you’ll stay to the end to hear his advice to skeptics in considering becoming open to ideas that they may have readily dismissed and to Christians on how to live in a way that invites the skeptic to reconsider. 

Welcome to the Side B Podcast, Mark. It’s so great to have you. 

It’s really great to be here. It’s an honor. Thanks for having me today.

Wonderful. As we’re getting started, so the listeners can know more of who you are, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself? 

My name’s Mark Meckler, and I run a national political organization called Convention of States Action, about five million members. I’m trained as an attorney, but I am a political activist for a living and for my passion now. I married to Patty for 28 years. We live just north of Austin, Texas. I have two grown kids. My son is 26 years old, in his last year of law school in the Washington, DC, area. My daughter is 22, another political warrior, and she lives here in Austin, Texas, with us, and she runs the education reform project for the Texas Public Policy Foundation. Also, you might have seen my dog in the background back there. That’s Levi, and he is a 160-pound Great Dane. He’s a permanent fixture here in the office with me.

Wow! You couldn’t have a greater companion. I’ve got two Golden Retrievers, so I know what that’s all about. 

Let’s step back and lay a context for your story, your story that brought you to place of atheism and then to God. Tell me about your childhood. Where did you grow up? Tell me about your family, your community, culture. Was God any part of that world?

So I grew up in southern California, in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles, and I grew up in a very what I would describe as Judeo-Christian family from a value set perspective. I’m Jewish from both sides of my family. The whole’s family from Ukraine, grandparents on one side, great grandparents on the other side. Jewish culture was very important in our family. I would say, in my high school, 50% of the kids were Jewish. A lot of folks went to temple. I would now, in hindsight, call it ritualistic Judaism. Not much God involved. Really wasn’t much about faith, more about family, community, tradition. Those things were strong in my family, but there was no God in my family, per se. There was no prayer, there was no worship, and we as a family never went to temple.

So you didn’t go to temple, so did you practice Shabbat or high holy days? 

None of that. Once in a while, for Passover, for some of the high holidays, we might go to somebody else’s house, one of the older relatives who still practiced that kind of stuff, but we really didn’t participate in it, and I really frankly, as a kid, didn’t understand any of the meaning of it. We would read prayers that had been translated from Hebrew to English. Sometimes the older folks might say a prayer or two in Hebrew. I mean, to me it just sounded weird. My weird relatives who were into this stuff, and I love them dearly. It was fun for the kids, and we would get treats, and that’s pretty much all it was about for me growing up.

So you didn’t go to Hebrew school? You didn’t have a bar mitzvah or any of that? 

No, all that stuff was offered to me, but the way it really works in what I would call a really nontraditional Jewish community, non-orthodox community, is you get to be about twelve years old, and then your parents say, “Hey, you’re going to be bar mitzvahed,” and usually, you’re like, “Well, I don’t really want to, but I will if I have to,” because we were a part of a temple community. But for me, I didn’t want to do. And the main reason I didn’t want to do it is my friends who did it all got a bunch of money. This sounds weird, but cash is the primary gift that people get for their bar mitzvah or bat mitzvah, and I felt like, to me, that just seemed kind of weird and sacrilegious. I didn’t believe in God, I was not a practicing Jew, and I was going to have a big party where I put on religious garb, sort of pretended that I was religious so I could get money. And that actually felt wrong to me at the time.

I don’t know that I expressed it that articulately, but I told my parents, “I’m not really interested in this,” and my parents were okay with that.

So your parents were nonpracticing Jews. Did they have an expressed atheism or disbelief in God, even though they were part of a, I guess culturally speaking, of a religious sect? Judaism? 

Yeah. I mean in a sense there’s two questions wrapped up into one there that I want to address. First of all, it’s just my parents in particular. They had a decision they had made when they were younger and a philosophy that they were going to kind of turn it on us and ask us, “Well, what do you think?” as opposed to telling us what to think. And so we were raised in a household that was very open to whatever you might think but non imposing of any particular religious orientation. Again, important to remember the values were there. Everything that you would think about as Judeo-Christian values, we lived according to the commandments essentially, but it was not expressed in religious terminology. So that’s where we came from philosophically.

There’s a very different, I think, distinction that has to be made for folks who didn’t grow up in a religious home because, it’s hard to understand this, but being Jewish is both a race and a religion. And so I don’t have a choice, I’m Jewish. That is what I am. That will never change. Every day of my life, I wear a Star of David. Mine has a cross in the middle of it now, so that I understand where the heart is, right? But I’m Jewish, and that can never change. I can’t renounce my Judaism any more than I could renounce the fact that I’m a Caucasian person, right? That just is part of who I am genetically speaking, literally. And there’s a culture associated with being Jewish if you choose to participate in that culture. And I did. My family was very Jewish culturally. We ate traditionally Jewish foods quite often. Like I discussed a little bit, we went occasionally to Passover, things like this, and if you’ve been deep in Jewish culture, families behave a certain way, same as there might be an Italian culture or a Greek culture. So we were very culturally Jewish. My parents were very proud of that, were always very proud of being Jewish.

They were not religiously Jewish, so this is—even when I married my wife. She’s from an Irish Catholic family. She said, “Oh, it’s kind of like being Irish and Catholic,” and I said, “No, because it’s not a nation. I’m not Jewish because my parents or my grandparents are from some particular region of the world that had a particular political ideology. This is my genetic lineage. I’m from the line of the Jews,” and so it is an actual race of people. I always felt Jewish. I still feel very Jewish today. But I was never religiously Jewish. My dad, I came to know later in life, was a serious atheist. He still is. My mom is what I would describe as a deist. She absolutely believes in God. She believes that God has a role in our lives. But she’s not accepted Jesus Christ, and she doesn’t necessarily believe in the Abrahamic God in any sense of the word.

Thank you for that clarification. I think that it does make things clear to understand that there’s a cultural and almost genetic heritage. There’s a familial heritage of Judaism, and there’s also a religion associated with that. It sounds like, if 50% of the people in your high school were Jewish, you were really steeped in Jewish community. I’m curious. Were there any Christians around in your upbringing at all? 

Oh, yeah. I mean, there were lots of Christians in my high school and lots of Jews. I went to temple occasionally on a Friday night because I had friends who were Jewish, and it was really a social event, mostly, for the young people. It was a place to gather on a Friday night. And because I had friends who were Christians, occasionally I’d spend a Saturday night slumber party over at somebody’s house, and Sunday morning, I’d go to church with them. So I was exposed from a religious perspective to both Judaism and Christianity.

But for you, what was religion? Whether it was Christianity or Judaism, obviously it wasn’t something you believed that was real or true or worth your life or belief. What did you think it was? 

Yeah. As I became old enough to actually consider it, you know, which really as I got into high school and started thinking about these things, to me, I would describe religion, what I would’ve said back then is it’s a crutch for people who need it. I wasn’t offended by it per se. I just felt like, “Look, I’m a good person. I live a good life. My parents are really good people who taught me the right values, so that’s for people who are struggling to understand that there are things that are unexplainable, that we don’t understand the cosmos, and so they want to call those things that they don’t understand God,” or, “Things happen that seem like a wild coincidence or couldn’t possibly happen. They want to call those things miracles.” To me, it seemed like a crutch for people who couldn’t deal with the fact that there were unanswerable questions. And a lot of the stories that I’ve heard about coming to faith, people came to faith during times of trauma in their lives. And so that made sense to me. I’d think, “Well, when you don’t know where else to turn, you would turn to God.” I mean it’s so true now! In hindsight, right? But I thought it in sort of a negative way. Like, instead of just saying, “Hey, I’ve just got to figure out how to deal with this,” you’re going to turn to this invisible force that you can’t see or explain. To me, honestly, it just sort of seemed weak.

So it really wasn’t a rejecting. It was just an embracing of, I guess, a more realistic understanding of life? You didn’t need that kind of thing. You didn’t need God. You didn’t need the crutch of religion. At what point did you-

Yeah. A terrible mistake in hindsight, but that’s really where I was at as a high school kid.

Yeah. So when did you actually embrace the understanding or identity as an atheist? 

Really in college is when I came strongly to atheism. I was fascinated by religion in the sense that I love people, I’m fascinated by people. I’ve always loved history and politics and sociology, so if you look at the world and you want to understand the world broadly writ, then you have to understand faith and religion. Because it plays a role as far back as we can go in recorded history, and it always has and it always will. It plays a major role, perhaps the most major role. It plays a role in the formation of countries, in human being’s lives, in geopolitical realities, and so, if you don’t study that stuff, you can’t understand humanity.

So when I went to college I took religion classes, not because I was a religious person, but I wanted to understand. I didn’t know anything really about Christianity or Judaism or Islam, Abrahamic religions or any religions, for that matter. Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, you name it. I knew nothing about that stuff. And so I wanted to take classes to understand that. I went to San Diego State University, a pretty classic, regular, public-funded university in San Diego. I went because it was a great party school, to be honest with you. It was not intellectual rigor I was seeking.

But as I took these religion classes, what I found out in these classes was I was taught that the greatest force for evil in the history of humanity was Christianity, that more people had died in the name of Christianity than any other religion on the face of the earth, that the Crusades had been this incredible period of grotesque excess and torture and conversion at the point of the sword and all of the stuff that is, partially at least, true about the Crusades. Certainly all that stuff took place historically. But I was taught it without any context. There was no reason. Why did the Crusades happen? I was never taught what happened right before the Crusades, which is 400 years of Ottoman domination, Muslim domination, across the continent of Europe, the torture, the excess, the conversion, the rape, the pillage. I wasn’t taught any of that stuff.

So what I learned out of context was that Christianity itself, as a doctrine, had brought all this evil upon the face of the earth and that the earth would be a much better place without it. So I became a pretty strident atheist, and I would argue even further I became what I would call a militant and even a mean atheist. I refer to myself today… I’m Paul. I mean, from the bad side of Paul. I’m the worst among you. And I would’ve been a persecutor in the day, honestly. I can relate to Paul. I thought those people were stupid and crazy and frankly evil, that they fostered an evil ideology, and if they didn’t understand that, it was only because they were ignorant.

It sounds like you were influenced by the New Atheists thinkers. 

Absolutely.

Yes. And your professors must have been promoting the same. 

Yes. And that was really… I’m happy to say that, as you follow it today, the atheist movement has largely died out. The New Atheists thinkers, the great thinkers of the atheist movement, they’re not speaking anymore. Even the modern ones have realized that, whether they believe it or not is a different question, but it’s a moral dead end. It leads to nowhere good. And so they’re really not speaking out anymore. Back then, that was the heyday of atheist thinking. And it was being taught institutionally on campuses, and yeah, I drank a big dose of it from a fire hose.

Wow. So you graduated college. I guess you were still living with this mentality of the evil nature of Christianity and religion generally, that it poisons everything, as Christopher Hitchens says. 

Yep.

So how long did you live with this kind of mentality? Into your young adulthood? 

In hindsight, not just because I’ve become a believer, but in hindsight it’s horrifying because of how intellectually vacuous I would say I was. That here is, I think, the most important question that faces any human being. Why am I here? Where do I come from? What does all this mean? And I was providing for myself and in judgment of others around me the most simplistic of answers while actually doing no research. And I’ve always considered myself an intellectual person. I’m a reader. You can see my library behind me. I have thousands of books here. I love to read. I’ve always been this way, since I was a little kid, so to take this kind of position on the most important things in human existence, without having done any homework, without having really read the Bible, read the Koran, read the Hadith, read things like that. To take those positions. Frankly, to be honest, I wasn’t even reading the great atheistic thinkers. It was this simple, easy answer, like, “There’s no God. That’s for weak, stupid, evil people, so I’m an atheist.” And that was really the depth of my intellectual analysis. Pretty embarrassing in hindsight.

Well, you know, you were taught that by probably people you respected. It probably agreed with your desire to live the way that you wanted perhaps. I’m curious. In embracing atheism, you said you were intellectually minded, you loved to read, but that you perhaps didn’t read the great atheists in terms of truly understanding the implications of atheism, or that worldview, or even the grounding of atheism. Did you venture into that? Did you consider, as an intellectual person, where atheism goes? Other than it’s a rejection of religion, but what is atheism actually? 

Yeah, no. Not at all. No consideration at all. Again, this is why, in hindsight, I look back at that person, and if I was talking to myself back then, I would say, “You’re kind of an intellectual embarrassment. You don’t know anything, and you’re drawing conclusions, and your conclusions have consequences, and you’re not following your conclusions to their logical consequences.” If I were talking to old me, I would say, “What have you read? What have you considered? What comes of what you believe?” And there was literally zero consideration. It was very hedonistic to be honest with you. And I don’t mean that in the sense that I just wanted to enjoy earthly pleasures. I mean it in the sense that I was just indulging my own thoughts. Because my thinking was, “Look, I think I’m a pretty good person, and I think I lead a pretty good life, and so I don’t really need God. So why would I spend any time on this? I’ve made my decision. There is no God. I don’t need God.” And so it was very internally focused. It was me focused, I focused. It had nothing to do with any other consequences.

So you weren’t bothered by those existential questions, like, “What happens to you when you die?” “What about bigger purpose or meaning in life?” How to ground certain things, like your own free will or consciousness or even your own moral conscience? 

No. And again, I feel like speaking across the decades to a different person, which I was before I was saved. There was zero of that. There was zero intellectual curiosity. There was zero worry. For me, it was so simple. I didn’t need it, so it didn’t matter. I didn’t feel the need. I wasn’t in a dark place. I wasn’t seeking salvation. I didn’t feel like I needed to be saved, and so I would say, if I had been able to talk to myself back then, my response would be, “Why would I spend any time with that stuff? I know there’s no God. Nothing happens after I die. I live a pretty good life. I’m a good person. And I’m happy. So what does the rest of it matter?”

Yeah. It just is completely irrelevant. Not even worth consideration. 

Yep.

So as you’re moving along, walk us along your journey. What made you stop and reconsider, perhaps, your perspective? 

Well, I think a couple of big turning points in my life. So one was I got married straight out of law school. I was still absolutely an atheist, got married out of law school. That marriage lasted a year and a half and was one of the biggest mistakes I’ve ever made. There’s a lot of depth in that I didn’t understand anything about people, to be honest with you. My wife came from a badly dysfunctional, alcoholic family. There was a lot of that wrapped into it. And that was the first of what I would describe as any kind of a dark period in my life. My parents have been married forever. They’re past 60 years married now. And I was expecting I would get married and I would be married forever. My grandparents were married forever, and strangely, even in Los Angeles, most of my friends’ parents had been married lifelong marriages, so that was my personal framework. That was my own view of myself, was as a married person. So when I ended up divorced after a year and a half, it was really personally devastating. That was the first time in my life I’d gone through what I would describe as a dark place. And it has nothing to do… I didn’t seek God there. I didn’t feel like I needed that. It’s not what I looked for.

But on my way out of that, I met my wife, my current wife. We’ve been married, it will be 28 years on the 28th of this month, and she was a person of faith, and she had grappled with big questions, and she had studied her own faith, and she had been through much more stuff than me. She was six years younger and way more than six years wiser than I was, to be honest with you. And she sort of plucked me out of the rubble and started a little bit to open my eyes. And so that was the first turning point.

The big turning point in my life came after we got married and my son Jacob was born. And I remember standing in his bedroom one night, looking in his crib, as every parent does, and watching him just breathing quietly in the night and thinking, “That’s a miracle. That’s not just biology. That’s not just a sperm and an egg. That’s life! That doesn’t just happen. Something miraculous is right there,” and I had that feeling, and I would say now, in hindsight, that’s the Holy Spirit saying, “I want to show you something. I want you to see this, and I want you to acknowledge this.” I didn’t become a person of faith, but that started to open my heart to a journey of faith, realizing there’s things that I just don’t understand that I want to try to understand.

So it was humbling, in a sense, and who can deny almost the miraculous nature of a child? It really seems just so incomprehensible that something so beautiful, someone so beautiful can come from your own body. And I can see, and I’ve heard other stories similarly, that it just seems so beyond what an atheistic view could explain. But you said that your wife kind of picked you up out of the rubble. You had spoken of cultural Christians in the past, but somehow it sounds like the way that you’re speaking of your wife is qualitatively different. 

You said that there was something more thoughtful, something deeper or more profound in her faith that you had seen earlier that opened your eyes to perhaps that there’s something different? Or more? Or about Christianity that drew you in or at least opened you up? 

Yeah. I wish it was that simple and that fast. I’m a very slow learner, and she’s a very patient woman. It really wasn’t her faith. It was just her general demeanor, and her ability to love me despite my lack of faith was a big deal. I knew she was a person of faith, and she was willing to love me and to bring me into her heart despite my faith. Honestly, I could never understand that. Even today, I can’t understand that. It doesn’t make sense to me. It’s just a blessing from God. I think there’s a difficult place and a special place in the Lord’s heart for people who are willing to marry people not of faith. I don’t recommend it, honestly. I tell people you shouldn’t do that. She was willing to love me, and she’d never even met a Jewish person before, and she would tell you that, when she met me and started hanging out with me, she said to her friends, “I know he’s not a Christian, but I’ve never met a more Christian man in how he lives his life and his personal ethos and the things that he believes. Aside from knowing the Lord and loving the Lord, the entire rest of the framework is there more than anybody I’ve ever met.” So that’s what she saw in me was God’s plan, not necessarily God’s light because I hadn’t accepted God’s light.

And what I saw in her is a person who was just wise. She had a wisdom beyond her years. And I didn’t attach that to her faith. I didn’t think, “Oh, this is so great! There’s a good Christian woman coming into my life.” To me, it was actually a little bit a hindrance, like, “Is this going to be a problem for us?” because I’m an atheist, she’s a Christian. And because she was willing to accept me how I was, I just accepted her how she was, and so it worked out. So when we got married, I was not a believer. I was not a person of faith. I was an atheist. She was a believing Christian. And that’s how we formed our marriage.

I’m sure that there are those people listening who may have a spouse who doesn’t see life and belief in the same way. I’m curious, from their perspective… It sounds like your wife was very patient, not pushy, not pressing, gave you space to move along this journey on your own terms. Would you say that that was the case? 

Yeah. I would say that’s beyond the case. She honestly never mentioned it to me. She just practiced her own faith and went about her own business quietly. And her faith, to be fair, was very quiet, and what I mean by that is she had grown up in the Catholic church. She had left the Catholic Church and a big part for her was she always felt called to a personal relationship with the Lord, and she felt that the way that the Catholic church, at least the way she experienced it was organized, was that there was an intermediary. There was the priest, and there was the parishioner, and then there was God on the other side. And in a real specific sort of metaphorical sense, she used to sneak into church after hours and go up behind the Holy of Holies so that she could be close to God. Her heart was seeking today, and she felt like… If she was wrong about all the structural stuff, she had a direct heart for God, and God had a direct heart for her, but she saw this structure between her and God, and she was willing to do something that was essentially cheating, right? That she would go into church when no one was there and go to kind of a secret place where she was not supposed to be, so that she could be closer to God.

So when she left the Catholic church, she began a seeking of her own, which was just to have a heart for God and to have a personal relationship with God, and so that was very quiet. So her faith was very quiet and very steadfast, and it never impugned on me, and she never tried to impose it on me. And she just used to pray to God that I would come to faith.

There’s a pivotal instance in her life before we got married. Her dad said he was very worried that she was going to marry me, and he loved me. We had a great relationship. But he said, “I’m worried because I’m worried that your husband’s going to burn in hell because he hasn’t accepted Jesus Christ,” and she said, “I don’t know what His plan is. I don’t know how it works, but I have absolute faith that that will not happen.” I mean, it turns out she was right. Thank God! She didn’t understand how she was going to be right. It’s not like she foretold the future, but she had enough faith in God, and I would add something super important. She was patient. She was willing to wait on God, something I struggle with quite often. She was incredibly patient over a lifetime of marriage before I came to the Lord.

That’s really wonderful, and what a testimony to her and to her life. You had, as a militant atheist, such contempt for Christians and for Christianity. You viewed them in an extremely negative light. Obviously, those negative sensibilities or stereotypes of Christians and Christianity must have been broken down as you fall in love with someone who calls themself a Christian. It would be hard to hold those two views simultaneously. Did obviously living with her, loving her break down some of those negative understandings of what Christianity was and who Christians were? 

I wish I could tell you I was that insightful. Again, a lot of this is embarrassing in hindsight, but I just viewed her separately from that.

Okay. 

I knew she was a wonderful person. I never made the connection. “Oh, part of that is her relationship with the Lord.” I just knew her as a wonderful person. In fact, over my lifetime—and this still happens today and I try not to be this person. The hypocrisy of so many Christians is what really set me off on a personal level. Doing business, I would meet Christians, and I would call them Sunday Christians. They went to church on Sunday, and I used to say they’d go to church on Sunday so they could pray for forgiveness so they could put the knife between your ribs on Monday and Tuesday, right?

Wow. 

And so I met a lot of folks that professed Christianity, that talked about going to church, that talked about their relationship with the Lord. I did business with them, and I watched them do horrible, terrible things, that I would think, “If you’re a follower of this faith and this is what you do as a follower, then I don’t want to be part of that faith.” And so of course I didn’t see that in my wife, but I never… sadly… now I know, but I never thought of her as like, “Oh, well, part of the reason that she’s such a great person is because of her faith in Jesus Christ and her following biblical tenets.” I just never thought about that.

So you had this beautiful child born. There was something in you that became open at that moment or softened. Why don’t you walk us on farther from there? 

So what started to happen is, the older I got, the more I realized that it could not just be me. Everything can’t be about me. When we’re babies, when we’re born, everything is about us. That’s the only thing we know, right? We scream to be fed. We scream to be changed. We scream to be picked up. We want what we want as we grow up, and maybe we have temper tantrums to give us what we want. The entire universe revolves around us, and hopefully, if we get wisdom as we grow, if we learn from our experiences, we learn that it’s not all about us. There’s other people. There are other needs.

So after having Jacob be born and seeing that as some sort of miracle, I started to say, “There’s things I don’t understand. Maybe they’re not explainable by science, but maybe there’s something else. There has to be something else,” and so I started to think, “Well, maybe there’s just some sort of… like we’re all connected.” I think it’s called monism, right? We’re all one. Everything’s one. I started to think about that. In some way, there’s some universal force that connects all of us. So I started to seek. I didn’t seek Christianity. I sought everything but Christianity. I didn’t seek Judaism, either. Really what I started to seek is Eastern religion, Eastern thought, Buddhism, Hinduism. I have bookshelves full of books on Buddhism and Hinduism and going into more ancient religions, Jainism, which is the root of Hinduism. I literally went to India. I spent time in India. I was doing business in India, but I was fascinated by the way faith is integrated with everyday life in India. I don’t agree with most of the faith systems in India, but what I do agree with is, whatever you believe, if you’re a person of faith in India, it’s everything. It’s every day. You pray in the morning. You pray before you go into a meeting. There’s a shrine that’s prominent in your home, in the entry of your home. That’s true if your poor or rich.

I remember coming from India thinking… Patty and I were relatively newly married. Thinking, “Man! That’s how I would want faith to be in my life! If I believed in God, I would want it to be like that! Not like the Sunday Christians. It’s everything! If there’s a God, then He’s everything, and it should be part of every fiber of my being.” So going to India taught me that. I studied yoga a lot. Patty and I got really into yoga as a form of exercise but sort of then philosophically, does that make any sense? I went very deep into Buddhism. I think as a philosophy, Buddhism’s a great thing. How to live your life in a great way. It was never meant to be a religion. I think Buddha himself, if you look back in the writings, he’d be horrified that they worship him and made it into some sort of a religion. It was supposed to be a comfortable, nice, happy way of living.

So I studied all that stuff, and none of it resonated with me. It was interesting. I was fascinated by it. I appreciated the cultural impact it had had, the geopolitical impact that it had, but none of it made my heart sing. So I came out of all of that still seeking but not being fulfilled.

So that’s an interesting turn of phrase. It didn’t make your heart sing. So there was still something there, obviously, that you were searching for. So what was your next step? If it wasn’t Eastern religion. 

So I gave up. Essentially. I wasn’t looking anymore, but I’m always still intellectually curious. By happenstance, I started studying quantum physics. I know that sounds crazy, but I’m just a curious person. I love the science around quantum physics. I’m not a mathematician, so I don’t understand the mathematics, but I found it really fascinating that quantum physicists are seeking what they call “the god particle,” which is the origin of all things. Like can you go to the smallest particle and find the origin of everything? And from my thinking, I thought, “Well, that’s what faith is seeking. That’s what people who seek God, they’re seeking the origin of all things, so scientists and theologians are seeking the exact same thing. That’s weird.” And the more that I got into quantum physics, the more I realized quantum physics is actually as close as we’ve ever come from a proof perspective, starting to prove up God.

For example, in quantum physics, they’ve now proven that a particle of light can be in two places at one time. The same particle. They can identify the particle. Now, that’s impossible according to anything we understand in science. What I just said should not be possible. They don’t know how it’s done. And when I saw that, I said, “God can do that.” Like, “If there’s a god, we know gods can be everywhere, all at once, and is, including through all of time. So is that God? What is that?” And so that started opening my mind, like science and religion not incompatible, completely integrated. And then I got into politics just by a bizarre happenstance. I built this huge political organization. 23 million members of conservative political activists. Through that process, I started to meet dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of righteous Christians all across America as I traveled. That’s really what opened my eyes and honestly gave me that spark and made my heart sing.

So it was really a combination of things. Again, I love what you said about the compatibility of science and belief, because oftentimes there’s a sense of, “I believe in science, not God or religion.” And there seems to be a real I guess misunderstanding with regard to their absolute integration and being able to remain intellectually sober minded and intelligent and actually seeing how God grounds what we do in science. It’s a bit upside down. But it’s interesting that quantum physics paved the pathway for you towards the possibility of God! 

A little crazy, I admit.

But then you started meeting more… Like your wife, in a sense, more who were serious minded Christians from political activism. I guess they presented themselves as being more than Sunday Christians, and they were, I would presume, serious about their faith, serious about God and country. 

Yes, absolutely.

I’m also interested in the statement that your wife or the perspective that your wife had about you, that you seemed to be a Christian man but without… So you had the moral integrity and values, perhaps those ten commandments, those presumed ten commandments that you grew up with were instilled in some way. Somehow Judaism got into you even though you weren’t into Judaism. In some regard, that it held for you and your moral character, so that, when you met Christians and had a similar moral compass, I presume, that there seemed to be more in common than you thought. Was it surprising to you? 

You know, well first of all, I’ll credit to my parents, because that moral code was put into me by my parents very intensely, and when I started to travel… I have always loved people. I just deeply love people, and I always have, from the time I was little, I’m just a people person, and so when I meet people, like if you asked me, “What do you collect?” You could look around on my shelves or whatever. I don’t have collections, but I do collect relationships because I just love people. When I meet somebody I love, I just stay in touch. I’ll stay in touch for a lifetime. I’m the person who will call you after two years and say, “Hey, we haven’t talked in a while.” Because I remember that spark in your eyes that meant something to me.

And so, when I started traveling around, and I would sit with somebody and I would think, “Man, there’s something about this person.” I would always ask. And I would say, “You know, you seem well settled. Things are crazy right now. You don’t seem angry. You seem happy. What is that?” And I started to hear over and over, “Well, I wasn’t always like this. I wasn’t like this before I was saved,” or, “It’s my relationship with Jesus Christ,” or, “It’s not me. It’s my Lord and Savior.” And I started to hear this over and over and over from people. If you travel in conservative political circles, you’re going to meet a lot of Christians. That’s just the way it is.

And so this is who I was crossing paths with. And Patty will tell you that, while this was going on, people would come up to me all the time because I’m becoming a public figure. I’m going from being a private person to a public figure. And people would come up to me all the time and say, “I’m praying for you,” and I’ll tell you, if somebody had said that to me in college, I’d have probably said something offensive in return, to be honest with you. I wouldn’t have liked it. I’d have been offended by it. I’d have probably told ’em to bug off and said something nasty. And I started to just feel like, “Wow, that’s really nice,” like, “I appreciate that.” It didn’t have the meaning to me that it does today. It almost makes me cry with people say that to me. Back then, it was just kind of like, “That’s very nice.” It’s like somebody saying, “Hey, we care about you.”

And so all these people were saying this to me, and Patty would talk to them, and they’d say, “Hey, we’re praying for your husband.” She would say, “Hey, I appreciate that,” and they would say, “It seems like he’s already a Christian,” like, “We see the Lord working in him.” And she would say, “I’ve seen that since before I married him. He’s the most Christian man I know. He just doesn’t know it yet, and I believe the Lord’s working in him.” So a lot of people said this to her. I had beyond what one human being deserves. I can’t possibly deserve this. I had thousands of people praying for me all over the country who I would meet, many of them who I now know were. And they’re a big part of my path to salvation.

I met a family in Sacramento, they would stay after every event. Four home schooled girls, mom, and dad, and every event, they could come pray for me and with me after the event. And they knew I was an atheist. And they would just keep praying for me. They were patient and persistent and loving. And I love those guys. And they’re still good friends of mine. The girls are grown up now. They’re wonderful kids. Some of them are married and have families of their own. They prayed me through. They prayed me to the Lord.

Then I met Dr. Dobson. Most of your listeners will know who James Dobson is. I had a chance to go to a big dinner, a fancy political dinner. All these big round tables, and I was seated at a table with Dobson. And I remember watching Dobson and thinking, “How come he’s like that?” All these people are talking about all the things that they’ve done, and “When I met this person…” and, “When I worked for this President…” and, “When I did this incredible thing…” and all Dobson was doing was like, “That’s fascinating. How did you get to be there? How did you meet him? How did that make you feel?” And I thought, “This guy has ministered to millions of people! He’s ministered to Presidents and foreign dignitaries. He’s been on television. He doesn’t care about himself. All he wants to do is love on all of these people,” and I remember sitting at that table thinking, “Whatever that thing is, I want that. I want to be like that. I don’t want to be like them,” and so that had a profound impact on me.

He had no idea of the impact, what he put in my heart that night by being Christian, not by being famous, not by being powerful, but by walking like Christ, by acting the way that Christ asks us to act, he transformed my heart. Something opened up in my heart that night that made me seek whatever it was that he had. So that was a big turning point in my life.

That’s fascinating. We often don’t know who’s watching. And I’ve heard it said, “The city on a hill works both ways.” We can cause people to leave Christianity and the faith because of not taking it seriously or that hypocrisy that you mentioned earlier, but then there are those people like James Dobson or the people who took time to come and pray with you, that get your attention, that you can see that there’s something different. They live differently. They’re selfless, not like the child who’s just coming up. Like you said, everything is about them. The world revolves around them. And these people obviously had others in mind first. 

Yeah, absolutely. Then I met… This is the biggest break point of my life is I met a guy by the name of Tim Dunn, who has become one of my closest friends in life, a political mentor and a mentor in every way, and I largely credit him for being the guy that brought me across the finish line and accepting Christ, not by asking me to but by just teaching me, and the first thing Tim did—he’s a wealthy donor. He’s on my board of directors. And we just hit it off intellectually. We could talk quantum physics and theology and religion and sociology and geology, and we just were both interested in everything, and we’d be up late at night, talking on the phone, like new best friends.

And one night he asked me what I know about my own heritage. And I said, “What do you mean?” He goes, “Well, you’re Jewish. That’s a totally fascinating, amazing thing! Your people are the Chosen People. I mean you go all the way back to a covenant with the Lord. I know you don’t believe in that stuff, but it’s incredible, the stories that have been told about your people for over 2,000 years, and what do you know about that?” And I said, “Nothing.” He’s like, “You should know about that! It’s really cool!” Like, “Whether you believe or not, it doesn’t matter. The history is there,” and so he said, “Why don’t you read Hebrews?” And he had me read Hebrews, and that was honestly my first real introduction to scripture.

And we started studying together. And he never said to me—and I think this is so important. He never said, “By the way, Mark. What I’m doing here is you need to be saved, because I’m worried about your soul and you’re going to burn in hell.” If he had done that, I’d have just been like, “I’m done. I’m out. I’ve heard this stuff before. Not interested in this stuff. You’re judging me. I don’t want that.” But all he did was use my intellect, and like, “These are things that should fascinate you,” and the real crux point with Tim is he asked me one day, “When did Christianity and Judaism actually separate? They’re obviously two major world religions, both Abrahamic in origin, so how’s the separation happen?” And I said, “Well, I don’t know much about it, but Jesus is born, He lives, He’s crucified. If you’re a believer, He’s resurrected, and He ascends, and those who believe that that happened are Christians, and those who don’t, if they were Jewish before, they’re still Jewish. Those who now believe He’s the resurrected Messiah, those are Christians.” And he said, “No, that’s wrong.” And I said, “Okay, so what’s the story?” And he said, “I’m not going to tell you. Go figure it out. But your history’s horrible. You need a history lesson.”

And I love this kind of mentoring. I practice this now. “No, that’s wrong. Go figure it out,” right? So I did.

And for me, as a Jew, and I recommend this to anybody who is speaking to Jews about Christ, what that meant to me is like this door swung open, and I thought, “Wait! Are you saying that I can be a Jew and be a Christian?” And Tim laughed. He’s got this southern drawl. He’s like, “I’m not just saying it. I’m saying that’s how it’s s’posed to be!” He’s like, “That’s just the deal. This is what God was all about was God made a promise to the Jewish people that He would send a Messiah, and He did, and this is just the answer to that promise.” He said, “You couldn’t any more not be a Jew than I couldn’t any more be a 6 foot 3 guy,” like, “I just am what I am. You are what you are. And we just have to deal with that.” And that was fascinating and profound to me because Jews believe, even if we’re not told this, that it would be a betrayal to our Jewish heritage to become a Christian. And it couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s actually a fulfillment of our heritage. And so for me that’s what made me say, “Okay, now I’ve got to really look at this. Because I’m not betraying anything. I’m fulfilling something. That’s how it was supposed to be. That’s how it was in the Bible. That’s how it was after Christ came and walked the earth. So I’ve got to take a serious look.”

That’s when I started studying Paul. Paul says, when he’s in Rome, waiting to visit Caesar, under house arrest, the Jews come to him, accuse him of not being Jewish, and he says, “What! I’m a Hebrew among Hebrews. I keep the Jewish law!” And they don’t believe him. They challenge him. “Oh, well, come to the Temple and pay for our ceremonies.” He’s like, “Yeah, whatever. No problem. I’m still Jewish. What’s wrong with you guys? Don’t you understand this has nothing to do with whether I’m Jewish or not? The promise has been fulfilled. The Lord has walked the earth, and that’s all I’m saying.” “The good news has arrived. The law has been fulfilled. You don’t have to worry about that stuff anymore.” And so, for me, I mean, you can see my excitement. That’s when it sang in my heart. That’s when I heard the song. That’s when I was like, “This is okay. I can do this,” and then sort of the anticlimax is there’s no moment.

I never had a moment where I thought, “Okay! Lord, I give my life. This is it! I can see You. I can hear You!” It was just one day I just thought, “I can’t not believe. It doesn’t make any sense not to. And now what I’m believing is so obviously untrue. Why do I believe that anymore?” And I just said, “Oh, I guess I’m a believer.” And then I said, “Okay, Lord. I’m a sinner. I don’t know if You’ll have me. I hope You’ll have me. I’ve sinned gravely against You for a very long time, but I give my life and my soul over to You, and I ask You to cleanse me of my sins. I’m Yours. I’m all Yours if You’ll have me.” But it was not dramatic. I was not on a beach. I was not on a mountaintop. It was just kind of this logical, “I guess I’m there. I guess this is what I believe now.”

Yeah. I’ve heard it said that believing in Jesus is one of the most Jewish things that you can do, because He is the Jewish, the foretold Jewish Messiah, so you’re accepting the fullness of your Judaism. You’re not changing paths in a sense, like cutting off one. It’s like fulfilling everything that… all the feasts, all the laws, everything is fulfilled in Christ, and to see it from the fullness of that perspective, I can’t imagine how that must feel when really all of the pieces came together for you, how wonderful that must have been. You came to a place where you believed in Jesus as your Savior, and I’m sure Patty was thrilled. So how has your life changed since you came to that moment of belief and confession? And how long ago was that? 

So I’m 59 years old. That happened when I was 51. So it’s 8 years ago. And it’s completely transformed my life, in many ways. The first is I would just say, on a personal level, aside from the religious or the faith aspect of it, I’m a very driven A-type of a person. Whatever I do, I’m going to do it to the max. I’m going to accomplish the most. That’s just the way I work. There’s an incredible amount of pressure in that, right? Everything’s on you. It’s all on my shoulders. I have to make everything happen. If it doesn’t happen, it’s my fault, and there’s all this self blame, and so to realize that I was saved and that there was something much greater than me and that I had a Lord and Savior and that I really wasn’t in control of anything except for whether I choose to accept my Lord and Savior and that there’s a greater plan and that everything together for the good and it’s not all on me. It’s impossible to describe the measure of relief.

Now I still struggle with that because I put myself in the driver’s seat when I shouldn’t. That’s how I’m wired, and I work in that. That’s me fighting against my flesh, but it’s impossible to describe the level of relief. So I went from being a very kind of wound person, wound up tight, to being pretty relaxed all the time. It’s pretty easy for me to say, “Yes, that frustrates me, but God’s got that. I don’t know. That’s not big for God. It may seem big to me, but that’s not big for God, and God’s got that, and I’ve turned it over to God, so it’s all okay,” and interestingly, it’s allowed me, I think, to accomplish far more than I could’ve ever accomplished. Because when I realized it’s not up to me and I can only do what I can do, my job is to fight the fight and run the race and leave the results up to God. It allows you to do so much more. The stress, the anguish, the anxiety, the performance pressure don’t get in your way anymore. Because it’s not on me. He’s got it. I don’t have to worry about it.

So it transformed me in that way. It transformed a lot of my relationships. I said I’ve always loved people, but I also have the part of me… I’m verbally strong. I’ve always been this way. I’m an opinionated person. I’m trained as a lawyer. I used to take great joy in eviscerating people in verbal combat. It felt really good to me. I would always feel afterwards terrible. In the dark of night, like myself, like, “That was pretty mean. I made that person feel really bad,” but in the moment, as a lawyer, you’re really trained to do that. I don’t do that anymore. I don’t enjoy that anymore. I don’t like that anymore. So it transformed me in that way. It explained to me why I love people so much.

My friend Tim said to me one time, after I became a Christian, he goes, “You know why you love people so much?” and I said, “No.” And he said, “Because you always looked in their eyes and you always saw God,” like, “Before you even knew God was there, before you even believed in God, that’s how you were connecting. Each one of those people made in the image of God. You got that in your heart before you got that in your head. That’s why you love people.” So now I recognize that on an outward basis, and I openly seek that a lot more.

And I would say the big one for me was that I wear my faith on my sleeve boldly. I’m proud, and not only am I not ashamed, the greatest thing I’ve ever done in my entire life is completely surrender to my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. There’s nothing bigger that I’ve ever accomplished in my life. There can’t be anything bigger. There never will be anything bigger. And I’m happy to tell people about that.

So I say that from the stage, I say it in environments where people would normally say, “Well, you shouldn’t say that. This is a very political place,” or, “There are people who don’t believe what you believe.” I don’t care. I am boldly and brashly in love with God. I describe my love for God as like what you feel like when you fall in love the first time. It’s just so overwhelming, and everybody needs to know how awesome this person is! And I have to tell you. It’s not that I want to, it’s that I can’t contain myself. That’s how I feel about my relationship with the Lord. I can’t contain myself.

Wow! You are like Paul in so many ways, so many ways. That’s extraordinary! And coming to faith at 51. I imagine there were so many people, since you’re so well connected relationally, who were just stunned, having known you as the militant atheist that you were. 

Yeah. There were people who were mad at me and who really struggled with it. I have one brother, my younger brother. He was furious when it happened, and we were actually at a birthday party for my dad. I guess it would’ve been his 70th birthday party, something like that, 75th birthday party, and I remember him just cornering me and just going after me. Like, “I can’t believe you would do this!” and, “It’s just because of the people you’re hanging out with and just bad influences on you,” and, “You’re suspending rational judgment,” and he’s since come around, and we have a great relationship. I think he thought I was going to become something weird, you know? He had the perception I had, like all of a sudden I was going to demand that he be Christian, like I’m going to tell him he’s going to burn in hell, and I’m going to lecture him and judge him.

My dad was really offended. My dad was offended not because I became a Christian but because I didn’t consult him. Like why didn’t I ask him? He’d been my mentor my whole life. And I had to explain to Dad, “Hey, you’re my mentor. I admire you. I love you. I knew your position on this. I know you don’t believe in Jesus as your Savior. I know you don’t believe in God even generically, so I knew your position very thoroughly. I grew up with it. Why would I consult you if I’m seeking something broader and more?” And we have a fantastic relationship. We’re very close, both my parents, and we have a tight family. And so it hasn’t hurt any relationships in the long term, but in the short term, I think you described it correctly. It really threw some people off balance because it’s just not something they saw in me, becoming a Christian.

So when you were growing up and considering religion, you saw it in purely sociological terms. Your brother kind of brought that out, that he thought that maybe it’s just the people you are hanging around with. How would you, as a Christian on this side of things, answer that question? How did you answer your brother? Is it more than just belonging or sociological? Obviously, this has transformed your life, but as an intellectual person and people were pushing back, thinking they’re smarter, like you were, how would you respond to someone who pushes back to you on that? 

You know, I’m very understanding and very loving because, how could I not be. It would be the height of hypocrisy not for me to be loving and understanding of their circumstances, since for the vast majority of my adult life I believed what they believed, either agnostically or atheistically. So when I hear people are super critical of people like that, I don’t feel that way. I don’t understand that way. For me, the emotion that I feel, honestly, is sadness. It breaks my heart because… I have a friend that I’m talking to and mentoring right now. He’s Jewish, and I think he’s coming to the Lord. He’s definitely moving that way. He’s going to church. He feels an affinity. And he asked me, “Why is this so important to you?” and my response was, “I love you, and there’s no greater gift that I could give you as somebody that I love than the gift of knowing Jesus Christ, the salvation, the peace that comes from that, the strength that comes from that. There’s no worldly gift that even measures that can compare. There’s nothing on the same shelf. And so that’s what I want for you.”

And so when I’m talking to people who push back, that’s what I would say is, “Look, I have no judgment for you for not believing this. I didn’t believe this most of my life, so it would be foolish and hypocritical for me to judge you, but I do believe that I’ve learned something that you have not yet learned, and it would be selfish of me not to tell you that.” Like, “Why would I keep this most incredible gift I’ve ever received in my life? If I said, ‘I’m just going to keep that from you,’ that’s selfish. And am I going to keep it from you because I’m embarrassed what you might think of me? That’s selfish. Because you might judge me? Well, that’s selfish. So the only reason I would not tell you about this is because I’m selfish. If I’m embarrassed to tell you, I’m selfish. I’m worried how you’ll judge me. So I’m going to talk to you about it. And if you don’t want to hear about it, I’m fine with that, too. I still love you. I love you exactly the same as if you wanted to hear about it.

For those who don’t know what the gospel is, could you just briefly describe what this gift is? 

Yeah. I mean, for me, the way I define the gospel or the gift is the good news that it’s not about you. You don’t have to fight. You don’t have to be at war. You have somebody that already died for you and went through this for you. It’s an incredible thing to think about… I’m not sure. A lot of the Christians that I know that have been Christians their whole lives, in some ways I feel like they don’t understand the enormity of it because they didn’t disbelieve. When you disbelieve your whole life and then you learn the good news that Somebody actually was willing to go to the cross for you, to take your sin, to take everything you’ve ever done wrong in your life and everything you ever will do wrong in your life, and to suffer the most horrible imaginable death to cleanse you of your sin, so you don’t have to worry about that stuff anymore. You don’t have to stress out about that stuff any more. To me, that’s the greatest news that has ever been delivered to humanity. And that’s what the gospel is about, and so, to me, I just want people to know about that.

And I don’t care. You can think I’m foolish. You can think I believe a fairy tale. You can think whatever you want to think about it. I’m not embarrassed by that. I thought the same stuff! So it’s all fine, and thank God that when I thought that stuff, that there were people who didn’t care that I thought that stuff, who didn’t judge me for thinking that stuff, who loved me, who prayed for me.

So if there is someone, Mark, who is listening and maybe they’re on that edge of being open, what would you say to the curious skeptic who maybe listening in to you, to your story? 

Yeah. I would say the main thing, the first thing is just to open your heart. I’m not telling you to believe. I don’t think anybody can tell you to believe. I’m telling you to open your heart, to look around the world and acknowledge there are things that you just don’t understand, that don’t make sense, the universe, life, whatever it is that you look out, and you go, “That just seems impossible to me,” and yet it happens, to understand that there are things that are impossible that happen, things that you and I don’t understand, and be curious and be open to looking.

For me, as a person who’s a very logical person, reading apologetics mattered a lot to me, so I would recommend the best book that I read, the simplest, the easiest to read, the most convincing was Lee Strobel, The Case for Christ. Millions of people have read this book. If you’re a skeptic, you should read this book. Strobel was the ultimate skeptic, a lawyer, an investigative journalist. He went through it. I looked through this. I looked at the crucifixion. I looked at the resurrection. I looked at the historical evidence, what we call historicity of the Bible. And Strobel walks you through this in a way where he was telling a story of a person who moves from atheism to belief, and so I think that’s really important. There’s another book that I love called Letters from a Skeptic, which is letters between a son who is actually a minister, he’s gone through seminary, and a father who is a skeptic and who expresses everything that I expressed as a skeptic, everything.

There’s difficult questions that you have to grapple with. If God is good and just, then why is there suffering and evil on the earth. These are important questions that, as a skeptic, you should grapple with, but I would argue you should grapple with them. Just dismissing them and saying, “That means there’s no God,” that’s shallow and superficial. And this is the most important question you’ll ever look at. Is there a God? What’s my purpose? Am I created? Why am I here? Why are we here? So I would say, if those are the most important questions we can ask ourselves, and I believe fundamentally they are, then you as a thinking person have an obligation to answer those questions, and you do that by doing the reading, doing the research, talking to other people, and I would ultimately say praying for guidance.

That’s excellent advice. It strikes me that your life is very similar to Lee Strobel’s too, isn’t it? He was an attorney-

Absolutely.

… who had a believing wife, and he went to disprove it, right? So, through his journeying, found what he…. He’s a huge proponent, right? Of Christianity now. Now you’ve spoken a lot about how we as Christians can—and given beautiful examples, through Tim and through Patty and those… Dr. Dobson and so many who touched you in a way that caused you to rethink your position. How would you encourage us as Christians to live or to speak or to engage in those who are skeptical about our faith? 

Yeah. The biggest answer that I can give that’s the best, I think, is love. I mean I don’t know what else to say. Love people who are not lovable. Love people who are hard. Love people who are mean. Love people who are difficult in your life. When we read the Bible, one of the things that struck me, and I had somebody point this out to me, is the Bible does not tell us to go out and tell people to be Christians. I think there’s one spot in the Bible where it says to go out in profess in that way. What the Bible tells us is to go out and live out our faith, to walk the walk, to be Christians. Because when you do that, people will ask you, just like I looked at Dr. Dobson and that, “What is that? I don’t understand that. I want that.” People will do that.

Her daughter suffered from stage 4 cancer multiple times. She’s a beautiful young woman, a mother of now teenage girls, and last time, she was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer… Jenny’s a close friend of mine. I’ve watched her go through it. She’s a woman of deep faith. And I watched her go through it, and I thought, “Could I be like her? I don’t know that I could.” This was before I came to faith. She understood. She said, “Look, Mark, this is God’s path. It doesn’t make me happy, but I’m at peace that He is in charge, and I can live with that. I’ll pray more. I’ll hang out with the Lord more. But God has a plan. It’s just not always my plan.” And I remember looking at that and thinking, “She’s living it,” right? So it’s not just that she says, “I’m a Christian. I go to church. You should do these things.” I watched her, and I thought, “Man, if that kind of thing ever happened in my life, I would want the peace that she has.

So you said, “You never know when people are just watching.” You’re not saying, they’re just watching, so live the life that Christ sets forth for us to the extent we can. Of course, none of us live it perfectly, but live it as close as you can. Strive to live that. That’s what will draw other people to the heart of Jesus Christ.

That’s beautiful. Mark, you have been—like you say, you have a gift verbally of being able to express yourself and to communicate well, and you have told your story, your full character arc, moving from militant atheism to just a passionate follower of Christ in such a compelling way, with wisdom. I think that somehow what you saw in Patty, you have a piece in you, too, now, that the Lord lives in you, and it’s obvious. I’m so inspired and challenged in a good way, especially with your boldness in your faith. Thank you so much for coming on the Side B Podcast to tell your story, Mark. I know that so many people are going to be just as inspired as I’ve been. 

Well, thank you for having me. Any time I get to talk about the Lord, it’s a privilege.

Wonderful. 

Thanks for tuning in to the Side B Podcast to hear Mark’s story today. You can find out more about him and some of his recommended resources in the episode notes. For questions and feedback about this episode, please reach me by email at [email protected]. I hope you enjoyed it. If so, that you’ll 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 be seeing how another skeptic flips the record of their life. 

A brilliant thinker, Dr. Peter Harris lost his childhood faith in God at university when intellectually challenged.  After years of atheism, the problem of meaninglessness caused him to reconsider the reality and credibility of the belief he once left behind.

Podcast episode notes:  

Peter’s recommended books:

Peter’s recent articles in defense of the Christian faith at apologetics.com:

Webpage on his church’s website:

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 someone flips the record of their life. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has one been an atheist but who unexpectedly became a Christian. There are those who have never had any belief in God and embraced atheism from their youth, and there are those who once believed in God and then changed their mind, becoming an atheist. 

It’s not uncommon to hear from skeptics that belief in God is nothing but blind faith, that there is no evidence for God’s existence, but sometimes that’s also the way religious people talk and believe as well. When difficult questions arise, we’re sometimes told to, “Just believe,” or, “Just have faith,” in the midst of our doubts. By these statements, we are led to presume that there isn’t much more than our willed faith, that there is no evidence to support our beliefs or perhaps we shouldn’t even try to have a reasoned faith. For someone who is a thinker, an intellectual, who wants solid reasons to support his or her beliefs, this approach doesn’t work very well. It may, in fact, cause many to leave their faith behind, along with with other perceived childhood fairy tales. 

In today’s episode, Dr. Peter Harris lost his childhood Christian faith when confronted with intellectual challenge at university. He was hard pressed to find any substantive answers for his questions, other than to just have faith in faith. The seeming lack of evidence for Christianity did not satisfy his brilliant mind, and so he left it behind to become an atheist. What was it that drew him back to Christianity to now become one of its strongest intellectual defenders? I hope you’ll come along to find out. 

Welcome to the Side B Podcast, Peter. It’s so great to have you! 

Thank you very much for inviting me on. Thank you.

As we’re getting started, Peter, why don’t you tell us a bit about who you are, where you live, perhaps your education? 

Okay. I live in Gravesend, which is in the southeast corner of England. At the tender age of 18, I went to University of Cambridge to study history. I’ve since acquired two master’s degrees and two doctorates, one of which concerns the anti-theism of Christopher Hitchens, and the other was a study of the military service tribunals of the first world war, which essentially were committees set up to decide whether men who wished not to fight in the war could actually be allowed not to fight and perhaps do something else or have nothing to do with the war at all. And that took about 6-1/2 years to do, that one, whereas the other one, on Hitchens, took me about 3 years, because I’d already read and listened and watched so much of what Hitchens had put out on the internet and in his books about his anti-theism.

I’m married to Hasina, and we have two children. I work for Lucent University in Texas. I have created their online History of Christianity course, and I also work as a high school teacher as well. So yes, I’m very busy, but what I do, I really enjoy.

It sounds really quite fascinating. It also speaks to your depth of intellect and thought. You obviously like to think deeply about certain issues. You are driven by ideas, it sounds like. Very interested in issues of theology and history and I guess truth, I would imagine. I understand you study apologetics and those kinds of things as well. So I’m terribly intrigued by the story that you’re going to tell us today because you are really quite an extraordinary person in terms of just liking to think about ideas and issues and history, especially Christianity in the context of history. I think that would come into play when we hear more about your story. Because I know you didn’t begin on this side of understanding Christianity and its history and understanding and teasing out Christopher Hitchens’ anti-theism, that perhaps you were on more of his perspective, maybe not… It sounds like you share brilliance. Let’s just say that. You share brilliance, perhaps, but you perhaps also shared a bit of his atheistic worldview from the beginning, or somewhere along the line, and as someone who’s intrigued by your story, why don’t we start back at the beginning? Tell me… Obviously, you are from England. Did you grow up in England? Is that your home? 

Yes. I did. I’ve lived in England all my life. I have traveled fairly regularly abroad because my wife is French, and my children hold dual citizenship. They’re both French and British. And yes, I’ve essentially lived for 52 years in England. Well, this is my 52nd. I’m not yet 52; 51, so that sounds a bit better, doesn’t it? And yes. I mean I suppose in many ways I’m not only interested within my own culture but also in other cultures as well, and in particular, I’m very interested in the United States also, its American Christianity and its history that perhaps most intrigues me.

So yes, I suppose I do have a very British outlook, but I think I’m very cosmopolitan as well and very interested in other nations, cultures, and histories and how Christianity has played a role in shaping, forming nations and what they are today in their culture, their laws, their attitudes, and I suppose even their foreign policies.

You do have a very broadened perspective, it sounds like, very intentionally so. So back when you were growing up in England, what was that culture like? Was it a Christian-centered culture? Was your family religious at all? Why don’t you take me back to your roots? 

Yes. I think I would probably go back to the early 1980s, when I was about 11 or 12. Because I was in a church choir. I sang for a local Anglican parish church, and I don’t come from a Christian background. My parents never went to church. They never spoke much about faith or religion. My grandparents, I don’t think, had any sort of regular church observance. So I came from a very sort of secular, not de-Christianized context, but I suppose an indifferent context. People just didn’t worry about church. They didn’t seem to think much about God. They weren’t particularly hostile, either. In fact, they weren’t hostile at all. They were just indifferent to that side of life. And I would say that maybe Britain in the 1980s was more overtly Christian than it is now, but the slide away from Christianity really began in the 1890s, actually. There’s evidence of church ministers, at the end of the 19th century, complaining that they were losing congregants at quite a fast rate, and that decline has continued, and it really got going after the first world war, which I can only imagine is a consequence of people not being able to imagine God exists after having seen so much suffering in hospitals and on battlefields.

So there has been a steady, relentless drop away from church attendance in Britain. But we are still a very spiritual nation, because generally, when governments do censuses, they find that perhaps around about 70% of British people have a belief in the transcendent, the metaphysical, or some kind of God. And that figure has been fairly consistent over, I think probably the last 20 or 30 years, but it doesn’t translate into church observance, so probably maybe 3% to 5% in the British population is in church on a Sunday morning, but 70% will say they believe in God. So that’s the sort of context in which I grew up.

But the wonderful thing about my childhood is that my parents made some very good choices as to which school to send me as a child, and they sent me to a grammar school, and I had to pass an exam to get into this grammar school. And it was a school that had a Christian headmaster, or principal, and there were lots of Christian teachers. Now it was not a Christian school. It was a public school, a state school, but I became a Christian because I went to that school. That school had a Christian Union. There were many Christian members of staff. There was one particular member of staff who organized this Christian Union so that we would have prayer meetings before the day began. Students would gather to pray on a Thursday evening after school.

And I became a Christian whilst I was participating in a school production of a musical called Fiddler on the Roof, and as I’m sure everyone’s aware, in that musical there are Russian Jews living in the early 20th century who are awaiting the Messiah. And I like to think that I actually found the Messiah during that time. And the reason why is that I heard the gospel being explained by members of the school cast who were also Christians. And I was the easiest convert. I heard once, and I believed immediately. And I took one of the gospel tracts from one of these students who had told my group of friends the gospel. I took it home. My parents did not like me reading late at night. They wanted me to go to sleep. So I would use a torch, and I would hide under the blankets or the covers, and read, and I read that tract by torchlight. I said the prayer at the end and became a Christian. And I felt tremendous love and peace, and I wasn’t expecting that. No one told me that that would happen And I concluded that that was God. That I had been reconciled with God.

But my loss of faith occurred when I was 19. And when I look back on that time of my life, I had drawn some very serious lessons, and when I think back to that time in my life, to some extent, that shapes what I do now as an apologist. Because I lost my faith at university, and I think it’s tragic because I’m aware of some of the statistics regarding how many young people go to university or college as Christians and come out as atheists and agnostics. And they’re not prepared to be able to answer some of the really difficult questions that will come their way. I’m aware of a Christian apologist who’s also a biologist, and he said on the very first day of one of his lecture series, the lecturer who was teaching evolutional science said to the class, “Stand up if you are a Christian,” and he stood up. There were a few other people who stood up. And he said, “Well, by the end of this course, you won’t be, I can assure you,” which is appalling discrimination. If you had a Christian lecturer who did it the other way around, Twitter would be in uproar. So I’m very, very concerned about that particular age group.

So it sounds like as a child you came to believe quite readily and you experienced what you thought was the Christian life and you felt the love and peace of God, and that, I guess, was a very settled thing for you. Were you active in your faith during your teen years? I’m just curious. And were you taught more or discipled in any way intellectually before you got to college, how to think in more worldview or grander terms than the simple gospel? 

Yeah. That’s a brilliant question because it really helps me to elucidate my own experience. I left my Anglican church when my voice broke because I didn’t want to sing the harmony section. I quite liked singing the melody, which is what the treble, the sopranos do.

Right. 

So my voice broke just short of my 13th birthday. I had gone through that sort of croaking frog stage that many boys do as their voices break and then finally the adult voice emerges. My church essentially was my Christian Union at school for about four years.

That’s where I got my fellowship. That’s where I got my teaching from. That’s what gave me the opportunity to pray and to worship God. Because I was a little bit scared about going to church by myself, because I knew that no one else in my family would go. But when I got to the age of 16, I decided that I wanted to go to church, and I remember, in January of 1986, going to a local Pentecostal church, which was about two minutes’ walk from my house, and I fell in love with that kind of worship, although I’m not into Pentecostalism any more. I’m an Anglican again. But I have very fond memories of that church because the worship was very warm. It was very authentic. People always seemed pleased to see me, which is really important for a teenager. And I remember enjoying the preaching. I liked the people. The people were very, very welcoming. And that continued for two years, until I was 18, and then I went to university.

But your question, was I discipled? I would say no. People showed interest in me, but there was no one individual who spent regular time with me, which again I think is really important. And secondly, I certainly had no knowledge or understanding of how to defend the gospel against intellectual attack. For me, C.S. Lewis was a writer of children’s stories. He was not the author of Mere Christianity or The Abolition of Man or The Problem of Pain or whatever. He was not an apologist. He was a writer of children’s stories. And that’s great. I think everything he wrote is amazing, but it is hard to formulate an argument on the basis of fiction, although sometimes you can. I mean I know philosophers do write fiction to explain their ideas, like the existentialists, but I had no training.

So when I went to university, I was very lucky for the first year because I had two very good friends who were Christians. They were in their final year. They were two years older than me, and they really took me under their wing, and I ended up going to a Presbyterian church, so whilst I was at college, I was going to a Presbyterian church and dressing up smartly, taking a Bible, and going and enjoying hour and a half long sermons, which… I mean, I love long sermons, and so I loved my Presbyterian church, but in vacation, I would come back to my Pentecostal church, where it was just very different, and I suppose I drew a lot from both those Christian traditions. It was a true Reformed Presbyterian church. It was not a liberal Presbyterian church. And there was very faithful preaching of the gospel, very faithful preaching of the word generally, but again I did not have any sort of education regarding the defense of the gospel against skeptics. And that’s what basically undermined things for me.

In my second year, I made friends with an individual who was a real anti-theist. He had no time at all for Christianity. He had no time at all for any religion, and because he was studying philosophy, he knew all the arguments against religion, and so he would present to me David Hume’s skepticism regarding the teleological argument or the cosmological argument. He would present to me Hume’s argument against miracles. And I’d never heard any of this in my life. And I was defenseless in the face of what he was saying. But I do remember being tormented by this question of whether my faith was true. And I would say that there were intellectual and emotional forces working at the same time, in the sense that I had this desire to be an academic, an intellectual, and I had come to the conclusion that, to be one of those, I could not be a Christian. Because everybody I knew who was teaching was not a Christian or never spoke about any kind of faith. A lot of the very bright undergraduates with whom I was studying had no faith, either. They found it ridiculous to be a Christian.

And I remember one evening, it was a Sunday evening, and I get the impression from my memory that it was maybe a Sunday evening in November. I don’t know… You probably know a lot about the British climate because you studied in Britain, but Britain seems to specialize in really gloomy, dark, wet, cold November evenings, so that’s why I think it’s November.

Yes. 

And I decided I was going to answer this question once and for all, and I decided to call upon an acquaintance of mine who struck me as the most spiritual person I knew, and he emanated peace and love and gentleness and all that sort of thing. He seemed to me to be a living saint. And I thought, “If anybody knows the answer, he does,” and I remember calling on his lodging, as he was renting a room outside of college. So was I. So I was on my way home from studying in the library all day. It was a Sunday evening. I went and knocked on his door, and he opened his door, and he looked rather perturbed at seeing me because I had gotten the impression that he was going to have an early night because he had a week of lectures and seminars and experiments to do. He was studying natural science. Yet he was a gentleman. He invited me in. He made me a cup of tea. And I remember, in the course of the conversation, saying to him, “Can you give me a reason why I should be a Christian?” And I believed that he could give me the answer. And I remember he looked rather startled because the conversation now had become very serious, and he sat there and he thought for a few moments, and he said to me, “Peter, it’s faith. You just have to believe it.” And that was the last answer I wanted.

Right. 

If there was an answer I didn’t want, it was that one!

Yes! Yes. 

So I remember leaving. No, actually. I remember saying to him, and I’m pretty sure I must’ve said it very robotically because I didn’t mean a word of what I was saying. I said to him, “Thank you for your answer. You have put my mind at rest.” Actually, the complete opposite was the case, and when I left his lodgings and cycled home, I decided, “Yes, I am now an atheist. If that’s the best Christianity can do, I’m not a Christian anymore.” And my faith sort of flickered on and flickered off over the next four years, but by the age of 23, I was a pretty hardened atheist. I mean I probably would’ve defined myself as an agnostic, but I behaved like an atheist. I didn’t pray. I didn’t read the Bible just in case God was there. I didn’t investigate any other religions, either. But I do remember being very hardened in my skepticism. And at times being quite aggressive in my response to Christians, which I don’t like to think about now.

I remember when I was in my hometown of Chatham, there was a man with a megaphone preaching the gospel outside a McDonald’s restaurant where loads of people were. And he was a member of the Salvation Army, and I remember shouting out at him, “Why don’t you shut up?”

Oh, my! Okay. 

So it got that bad. So here I was, very easily saved at the age of 12, and here I am now being rude to a street preacher, and he ignored me, of course. I walked on. But that was my attitude at that time. Yeah.

I can see how that would happen, but disappointing to lose that one thing you had that gave you peace. But you were doing it in an honest way, though. I would imagine, as someone who was an intellectual, who wanted to pursue life as an intellectual, that you had to be honest with your beliefs, and there was no other option for you. If at that time you felt that belief was blind, that it was just a matter of faith, almost in faith. That that wasn’t sufficient. I guess, especially, too… I mean all of those to whom you looked up in academia were all nonbelievers. So I can see why you would move that direction, but I imagine you felt a loss. At least at the beginning. Because, like you say, it kind of flickered on and off. So I presumed you kind of just moved into that understanding and more sobered understanding. “This is the way life is.” Again, as an intellectual, that’s how you pursued your reality and pursued your education and whatnot. 

Yes.

I’m curious, at this point within your atheism, did it change the way you lived your life? Were you intellectually honest enough to really look at the underbelly, as it were, the logical implications of your own worldview as an atheist? 

Well, again, that’s a really, really interesting question. When I look back on that time, I don’t see any significant drop in the moral standards of my life. I think that I’ve always had a pretty good moral compass, and so from the age of 23 until 27, when my faith was restored, I basically lived for myself, which I suppose in itself is not right, but I don’t remember my life going off the rails. I mean I was teaching at the time. I was enjoying my work as a teacher. I had my life all mapped out. I would go for drinks with friends at the weekend. I would go to the gym a lot. I’d write and publish poetry, so I don’t see any sort of catastrophic decline in behavior.

In terms of whether I thought much about the implications of my atheism, the one that really did worry me was the fact that I couldn’t now believe in any sense of an afterlife. And I suppose I was very young and very healthy, and there was no immediate chance of my leaving this mortal coil, as it were, but every now and then, I would stop and think, “Well, what happens when I die?” Because one day I will, no matter how strong and healthy I feel at the moment. No matter how much life is enjoyable, I’m going to eventually leave, and what is there? And I sort of clung onto the thought that there could be an afterlife. Now, there was no God in this afterlife, but this afterlife would somehow be a continuation of what I was doing on earth, which is impossible because my body would be dead and I would be some sort of disembodied fragment.

That was one thing that troubled me. And I think that the major problem that I had was a sense of meaninglessness. Now, the problem of pain and suffering, or the problems of pain and suffering, have never been a problem for me. In the sense that I can see a struggle between good and evil in the world, and even as an atheist, I never really used that argument against Christians.

My concern as an atheist was whether life had any meaning. That’s why I was drawn to the existential philosophers and Soren Kierkegaard. He was a Christian existentialist. And Martin Heidegger, who actually argued he wasn’t an existentialist, but Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Simone de Beauvoir. And their solution, or Sartre’s solution and I assume de Beauvoir’s as well, was that you create your own meaning. There’s no transcendence.

And in my bravest moments, that made sense, but every now and then, I would think, “Well, actually, I wouldn’t mind having a transcendent meaning attached to me,” and every now and then, I would have a feeling that I had been created. I didn’t like that feeling because, of course, I had adopted the notion that I am an evolved creature, that I am physical matter that’s highly organized but nothing more, but every now and then, there was a sense that I had been created as well. And in my bravest moments, I would… Let’s say I’d be walking home, and one of the symbols of meaninglessness was the stars. Now, that sounds really strange, but I had come to the conclusion that life was meaningless because it was predetermined. There was nothing you could do to change the course of your life. It just happened to you. And you just had to be brave and try in some way to resist, even though ultimately you’re going to lose.

I would defy the meaninglessness of my life by trying to give it some sort of meaning, but that didn’t seem sufficient. I had this need of something beyond this world actually giving me my purpose, and I didn’t like that thought, that that’s what I wanted. I thought, “How can I think this? This is undermining my integrity as a human being,” but still there was a desire for that. And it was not being able to cope with that meaninglessness that brought me back to Christianity, so in a sense, it was both an emotional and an intellectual movement at the same time that brought me back at the age of 27.

So you say it was an emotional and intellectual movement. That existential angst, as it were, and then-

So how did you make that movement? Obviously, you were… almost like Lewis’s argument from desire. There was something in you that wanted more. And that there had to be a source underlying that. And so how were you able then to move from this place of wanting and desiring something more but knowing that it didn’t exist in reality? How did you bridge gap from nonbelief towards belief? 

Okay. Well, during those I suppose four years of really quite hardened atheism, I never once heard the gospel. The only people who showed any sort of interest in my soul, as it were, were two sets of Jehovah’s Witnesses who knocked on my door, and I was happy to engage them in debate, and I argued from an atheist point of view. But they seemed to be genuinely interested in the state of my soul, but I didn’t have any Christian contact at all. I had two colleagues who were Christians. One was a rather sour, bitter individual, and I thought to myself, “He’s not a very good advert for Christianity.” He had a book on his desk which was titled How to Reach Your Colleagues with the Gospel, and I thought, “Well, you haven’t done a very good job, because no one will listen to you because you’re so unpleasant to talk to.”

Yes. 

But the other individual was the head of RS, Religious Studies, and he left after a year. He went on to become a Baptist minister, and I was very impressed with him both professionally and personally. I sensed he was a man of integrity. And so that started to make me think again. Maybe there is something to this. But I never attended church. I never heard any gospel proclamation at all. I had not thrown my Bible away, which is interesting. I still had my little red pocket miniature Bible that I’d bought as an undergraduate years earlier. And I didn’t throw it away because I felt that, even though I didn’t believe it, there was something wrong in throwing the Bible in the bin. I couldn’t do it. It was too sacred, as it were, and I couldn’t explain to myself why I felt that way, but I just couldn’t do that.

What happened was… I remember standing in my kitchen, and I remember looking up at the clock on the wall because I had to go to work that morning. I was making sure I wasn’t going to be late. And I remember saying the following prayer, I said, “God, if you exist,” — and I do remember saying, “God, if you exist,” — “Would you help me? Would you tell me why I’m here? What am I doing? What is my life for? Where is it going?” So it wasn’t a prayer of repentance. It wasn’t a prayer to say sorry for all the things I’d done wrong or the good things I hadn’t done. It was actually a prayer that was asking God to be a philosopher on my behalf. And to sort out this problem of meaninglessness. And I did not get an answer from God. I didn’t hear a voice. I didn’t see a piece of paper floating down from the ceiling, saying, “Peter, this is your purpose.”

What I got instead was what I hadn’t had for a long time and that is a sense of God’s presence and His love again. And my heart started to soften towards Christianity. Now, I didn’t go back to church. I still had no Christian contact. It was as if there were internal forces that had brought me to that point. It wasn’t any sort of external encouragement from friends or acquaintances. It just happened, and I can only imagine that there was some sort of seismic shift within my thinking and my feeling. But again, I couldn’t tolerate this question of meaninglessness or this issue of meaninglessness anymore.

And I remember walking to work. I did not drive to work. I liked to walk to clear my mind and think about the day ahead. And I remember feeling someone was walking alongside me, and it felt like Jesus. And I’m not prone to spiritual mystical experiences, but that was very strong, and I thought, “This is becoming real again to me.” And luckily I had a local library where there were some very good commentaries on the Bible, and I remember getting a book out. I can’t remember the name of the author or the name of the book. I can still see his picture, though. He was an elderly man with thick spectacles. But in his book, he wrote about the historical reliability of the New Testament, and for the first time, I came across an actual formal defense of Christianity, and I thought, “I have been wanting something like this for so long!” And I remember reading that book and marveling at this man’s intelligence, his ability to present Christianity as true, and all the thoughts I had about the Bible being a plethora of legends and make believe and superstitious and nonsense, gibberish basically, started to melt away. And my trust, my intellectual trust in Christianity, started to be recreated again. Well, I never had it. It was being created for me.

But I didn’t go to church for a year. I stayed away from church. My faith was a very private thing, but it started to grow again. I fell in love with the Bible again. I really like the book of Daniel. I really like the book of Romans. I really like the book of Ruth. And the notion of hell troubled me. I thought, “Well, if people are not repentant, God will put them out of His presence,” but the thing that helped me overcome that was I thought, “Well, look what God has done to stop people from going there. What more could God do?” So that was an important apologetic for me regarding God’s judgment.

And it was only when I moved back to the southeast, because I had been teaching in the Midlands, the middle region of Britain. I was living in Lincolnshire, and I moved back to Kent, the southeast, and that’s when I rejoined the church. And I started again to read and explore what apologist Christian philosophers and scientists and writers had to say, and it was a steady education. And I found it to be absolutely vital, and that’s one of the reasons why I get quite irritated if people dismiss apologetics, because that was my lifeline. That’s what reignited my faith. And when people dismiss that and say it’s not important, it’s rather like someone saying, “Well, you were rescued at sea by the Coast Guard, but the Coast Guard is not really important.” “Well, sorry,” you know?

Yes! 

My salvation is quite important.

Yes! 

And the salvation of other people who come to faith in that way.

So it was a steady movement back. I think what I heard from you, though, is that not only was there a longing but there was a willingness to see, which allowed you to begin not only experiencing a palpable presence of God but also to really actually look at the data, at the, like you say, philosophy and intellectual writings, the substantive writings that really substantiate the Christian worldview. 

Yes.

I can hear a skeptic in the back of my mind saying, “Well, you just wanted it to be true.” I don’t know. You may have encountered this, but, “You just wanted it to be true, so you see what you want to see, and you wanted Christianity to be true,” But what I know of you is that you are not someone who… Again, intellectual honesty is incredibly critical for you-

Yes, it is. Yeah.

… as a thinker. As someone who is true to yourself. So I would imagine that, when you began looking at all this material, whether it was the Bible or whether it was philosophy or apologetics, that you looked at it again with a fairly honest and sober perspective. I guess as neutral as one could be. We’re always biased. I mean we cannot escape that. But in a way that was intellectually honest to the material itself. Whether they were presenting adequate arguments and evidence and logic. Whether it was making sense with what you understood about reality. How would you answer someone who might push back on you a little bit about that? 

Yes. Well, I’ve thought about this a lot, and I would say that I may have wanted it to be true, but even if, let’s say, my emotions or my heart is driving me in a certain direction, my mind is the gatekeeper and if my mind says no, then the heart stops, as it were. The emotions stop. So I had a drive towards Christianity, but I would not have become a Christian if I had not come to the conclusion that it was true. So I may have wanted it to be true, but I would not have become a Christian if I didn’t think it was true, because in a sense, my mind has the last word on these things. So that’s how I would answer that.

And I’d also say that there are atheists who want atheism to be true. They’re equally subjective. I think Thomas Nagel, the famous atheist in New York, has said, “I don’t want God to exist, and I’ll be honest about it.” So I think any atheist or skeptic who wants to make that line of argument, perhaps also ought to consider whether he or she has the same inclination. “I want atheism to be true because I don’t want to have to deal with a metaphysical being or give an account of my life or even lay down my life,” hopefully picking up a new life, an authentic life, but I don’t want to have to take into account somebody or something, an entity or deity or whatever, who in some ways is interested in me. So that’s how I would answer that question. Yes.

That’s a great answer. 

Thank you.

Yeah. And I presume, because of the nature of who you are and your intellectual path and your studies and your teaching pursuits, that you yourself became fully convinced by what you read, whether it was philosophically, biblically, theologically, that the pieces, as it were, kind of came together and gave you a fully orbed understanding of the world, understanding of reality that made sense to you, to your mind, that is the best explanation for what you see and experience, both I guess in the universe out there with regard to historical nature of Christianity, as well as… It sounds like it was fulfilling for you as a person. I presume that you found the meaning, the source of meaning and meaning itself, that you were seeking. 

I did, actually. Yes. It’s interesting, because when we think about what is the meaning of life, sometimes it’s very hard to say what it is, but I would say that my worries or concerns about that have been quelled by my knowledge of God.

And in a sense also, there’s an element of mystery to this as well, because I obviously… Once we become Christians, everlasting life has already begun, even if we go through the valley of death and we are temporarily separated from our bodies. We are still on that everlasting trajectory. It’s like the potential infinite. And what manner of challenges and developments and excitement lies ahead of this, I think we can only say we have glimpses. I don’t think we fully now what God has in store for us. We know a lot, but we don’t know everything. And there is meaning in that as well. But love has its own way of answering that question, “What is the meaning of life?” Because when a person experiences love for God and experiences God’s love for him or her and then is able to communicate that love to others, that in itself is an answer to the question, “What is the meaning of life?” It’s not a philosophical answer necessarily. It’s not the sort of thing that you could put into a philosophical journal, but it’s an existential response. It’s your manner of living that gives you that sense of purpose. And it’s the most satisfying thing of all.

I remember reading somewhere Soren Kierkegaard wrote in one of his journal entries, not long before he died, I think, that he found it amazing that so many people could go through life not realizing that they were loved by God, and that sort of is the tragedy, and that’s why it’s so important to tell people about the love of God, so that they are reunited with their Creator. Some won’t be, unfortunately. I don’t believe everybody will be saved. I’m not a universalist, but thank goodness and thank God for those who are, who are drawn into His kingdom.

Peter, now you have mentioned the gospel, referred to it a few times throughout your story, both in childhood, both in your time where you were away from faith, and now you’re speaking of love from Creator. And I wondered if just, in a nutshell, you could describe what the gospel is and how that relates to the love from a Creator? 

Yes. Well, I believe that God has given humanity free will, and every human being has chosen to disobey God. We have all fallen short of the glory of God, as we’re told in Romans. We are all sinners. We are described by reformed theology as depraved and degenerate, not because we are totally evil but because every area of our being is infected by sin, and that sin is a law in a sense that people are, in a way, almost… because it’s so ingrained in their personality and character, they feel they are under the compulsion of sin, and the gospel is the recognition that every human being stands guilty before God, because God is a holy God. And the means by which humans are reconciled to God and become God’s children, rather than individuals who face God’s judgment, is through the substitutionary death of Jesus. Jesus, who is God as a human being, the God-man as it were. However you’d like to say it. God the Son assuming human flesh in the form of Jesus of Nazareth, dying of crucifixion, paying the penalty for our sins, and so then we are declared righteous. Our status is righteous. If we so choose to believe and trust in that death, but obviously there’s more to it, in the sense that Jesus is resurrected by His Father. He’s resurrected by his Father’s love, and that means therefore that we are, when we are united with Christ, we are in a way resurrected into a new life. To use perhaps now a rather cliched phrase, we are born again.

Now that doesn’t mean to say that we suddenly become perfect, but we are in the process of being sanctified we cannot save ourselves. There’s nothing in us by which we can be saved. It is purely by His grace, which is unmerited favor, that we are saved. It’s His righteousness imputed to us. And that is a covenant that God has with us everlastingly. God will never go back upon what Christ, God the Son, in human personality and form, has done for us. And that invitation is to everybody, so Christianity makes that claim, makes that call to salvation to every single person.

And I would add also to that every human being’s made in the image of God, which is one of the most revolutionary doctrines of Judeo-Christian thinking. And the Bible makes it very clear. It says, all are made, male and female—it’s almost as if the writer was anticipating all the rude things said about women and their status. No, no. Everybody. Male, female, whoever they are, wherever they come from, they are all made in the image of God, and we all have that potential to respond to God in a way by which we come to him through salvation.

Yes, yes. So, like you say, everyone is loved by God and can be united with their Creator through that love, through the Person of Jesus. Thank you for that. 

No worries.

And as we’re closing our conversation, I always like to end, particularly with these two questions because you understand, you know, you have lived what it feels like, what you think as an atheist, what it means to be on the other side of things, raising a skeptical eyebrow. But there may be those who are listening who, as you did at one point, perhaps were willing to consider Christianity. What advice would you give to a skeptic or someone who’s curious about Christianity? 

Well, I would say I’d consider Christianity at its strongest points. The atheist turned deist philosopher, Antony Flew, said whenever you are criticizing a worldview or a philosophy, take it on at its strongest points. Don’t take on straw men or don’t take on that worldview at its weakest points. Look at what the very best spokespersons are saying on behalf of that worldview, and if you can overcome their arguments, then the rest of the worldview will collapse. It’s rather like Quine’s web of beliefs. There are certain strands within the web upon which the whole web hangs, and if you can cut those, the web will collapse, but if you can’t cut those, then the skeptic has got a lot of thinking, then, to do. “Why am I not able to overturn the evidence for the resurrection?” for instance. “Why is the Kalam cosmological argument so good?” That would be the first thing.

I think the second thing is I would say to a skeptic, “Don’t get too caught up in New Atheism,” the Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett, Harris brand of atheism, because they do go after the worst examples. It’s very important to look at the very best of what Christianity has to say, and don’t listen to the New Atheists, who specialize in attacking Christianity at its sort of, I suppose its worst parts, in terms of individual Christian behavior and whatever. What I mean by that is I don’t think there are any intellectual weaknesses in the Christian case, but you can certainly point to Christian individuals whose behavior can be imprudent.

The other thing I would say is please don’t expect Christians to be perfect in their behavior. No Christian, I think, should be saying that they can be perfect in this life. We are being sanctified. We still make mistakes. We still do wrong things. I believe that habits, sinful habits and patterns, are broken, but certainly Christians can fall into sin. It’s an exception, I think, but they can still do it, and therefore, the skeptics shouldn’t be looking for perfection in us.

So those are the three things that I would say. Another thing is, you know, I’ve met quite a few skeptics who criticize the Bible, but they haven’t actually read it, so I would suggest that skeptics, perhaps one weekend, make a nice cup of coffee or tea, put your feet up, read the Bible, have a commentary at hand so you can understand some of it, because I think there’s a bit of laziness going on with some skeptics, who will say, “Well, the Bible’s a load of fairy tales.” “Have you actually read it?” “No.” “Okay, so I think you need to go and read it first before you can come to a conclusion on it.” So those would be the four things that I would say to skeptics from my own experience.

That’s some great advice. 

Thank you.

And, Peter, for the believers, for those who have a heart for those who don’t believe and want to engage in a meaningful, perhaps an intellectually credible way, what would you say to them? 

I think I have more to say to the Christians than I do to the skeptics. I would say to Christians, “Please don’t think all atheists are the same.” I mean, I am aware that the atheist philosopher John Gray, in his book, he says that there are seven types of atheism historically. And so therefore when we’re dealing with atheists and skeptics, they do come in different categories. I’ve sort of identified, in my own experience, three. There are the anti-theists who really are adamantly opposed to the idea of God and religion, and Christopher Hitchens fits in that camp. There are the indifferent atheists who would say, “Well, whether God exists or not, my life carries on the way it’s going,” and then there are the theistic atheists who want there to be a God but can’t see any reason to think there is one, and I’ve encountered a few of those in my time. And they’re a very interesting group of people. There’s a novelist in England called Julian Barnes who has gone on record as saying, “I don’t believe in God, but I miss Him,” and I thought that was a very interesting statement.

So we need to take the atheists as they come. I think also I would say that, for me and for many other skeptics—well, when I was a skeptic and for other skeptics, often we are the only evidence they have of God. The messenger and the message can’t be separated. So 1 Peter 3:16 talks about giving a reason for the hope that’s within you, but it does say sanctify your hearts and do present those reasons with meekness and fear, or respect and humility in some of the more modern translations. So the reason why the message and the messenger go together in the gospel is because we are saying God can transform us. God can take a rotten personality and start to create a work of art. So if the skeptic can’t see evidence in our own lives of that proposition, then he or she is going to ignore us. And it’s so important that we watch the quality of our lives. I mean, for example, I led an Alpha course at a local church a couple of years ago, and I remember saying to this group of skeptics—I had all the hard bitten atheists in my group. The other Alpha leader, she had some really nice people, but I had all of the obnoxious hard skeptics who wanted an argument with me. And I don’t know why I got them. I can’t imagine.

But anyway, after a couple of weeks, when I had sort of gained their trust, I said to them, “Is it the case that you want me to present evidence of God’s existence?” and they said, “No. It’s not that. And I didn’t press them on it, but I realized that I was the evidence, that they were assessing me. They were trying to work out how authentic I was. “Does this guy really believe what he’s saying? And if we’re sort of pretty harshly skeptical with him, will he still welcome us? Will he still be kind to us? Will he forgive us?” So I felt as if I was going through a personality test. That’s really important.

And the other thing I would say is that the church really generally needs to grow up in its behavior towards doubting Christians. I think doubting Christians need to be handled very carefully and gently and to be restored gently, and people shouldn’t be treated as if they are carrying some sort of virus because they are in doubt. There has to be… I’m not going to use the phrase “safe space.” I can’t stand it. Let’s use the good old term sanctuary or refuge. There has to be a sanctuary, a place where they can air their doubts and for people to listen to them and then say, “Well, have you thought of this?” “Have you considered reading this?” “I can’t give you a straightforward answer at the moment, but I’ll come back with something,” because I’m aware of some very high-profile people who went to their ministers with questions and doubts, and they were told, “Well, you’ve fallen into sin. You’re a terrible sinner. You are doubting the truth,” rather than saying to them, “Okay, let’s sit down, and let me to listen to what you’re saying to me. And then let me tell you some ways in which you can rethink what’s happening,” and perhaps ease the doubt out of them.

And just very quickly—I’m aware of the time. One other thing is, in particular, before young people go to university or go out into the world of work, they may have grown up in a Christian cocoon, but they’re going to go in an environment where people are going to be quite merciless with their faith. I mean, some people will respect it. Others will be indifferent to it. But as I found out with my friend in my second year, there are people who will take you on, so what are we teaching these young people about the reasons why their Christians. I know of a tragic case recently of an individual who went to university to study a science subject, and she went as a Christian and she came out as an atheist because she could not square evolution with Christianity. And that’s so profoundly sad.

Yes. 

And I know that her parents are distraught about this.

Yes. 

And this is what’s at stake here. So those are the things I would say.

Those are excellent. Again, Peter-

Thank you.

We have been the recipients of a rich not only story but also wisdom based upon your years of deep consideration and living and thinking and really working out what is true, what is meaningful, what is real. And so I just want to express deep appreciation to you for your very thoughtful and articulate story, as well as all of the wisdom that you’ve given to us today. 

Thank you. Thank you for the opportunity to speak. That’s much appreciated. Thank you.

Well, I know that many will be blessed by listening to this, so again, thank you. 

Good. Good. Thank you.

Thanks for tuning in to the Side B Podcast to hear Peter’s story. You can find out more about Peter and locate his writings by looking more closely at the episode notes. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can reach me by email at [email protected]. I hope you enjoyed it. If so, subscribe, rate, 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 someone else flips the record of their life. 

After skeptic Rick Allan was presented with Christianity and its effects on his family, he began to investigate the evidence for God and Christianity.

Rick’s website: askepticsjourney.com

Greg Koukl: Tactics – A Game plan for Discussing Your Christian Convictions

J. Warner Wallace: Cold Case Christianity: A Homicide Detective Investigates the Claims of the Gospels

Unbelievable? podcast with Justin Brierley: https://www.premierchristianradio.com/Shows/Saturday/Unbelievable/Episodes

Justin Brierley’s book: Unbelievable?: Why After Talking with Atheists for Ten Years I’m Still a Christian

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 someone flips the record of their life. There is a general presumption among atheists that there is no evidence for God, so they do not look, and they find what they do not seek, disbelief. But what happens when someone actually challenges that presumption and decides to investigate the evidence for themselves and that genuine search changes their minds?

That is the story of Rick Allan. He was a self-professed skeptic and former atheist who turned Christian. He challenged himself, pursued the truth, and discovered that there was a substantial amount of evidence for both God and Christianity. Today, he’s here to talk about his journey from atheism to a strong belief in God. I hope you’ll come along and listen to what he found.

Welcome to the Side B Podcast, Rick! It’s so great to have you here today to tell your story.

Well, thanks a lot. I’m really excited to be here and share it.

Wonderful. As we’re getting started, so we’ll know a little bit about you, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Sure. I live in the US, Midwest US for all my life. I grew up in Milwaukee and then moved to Minneapolis about 25 years ago with my wife, and we’ve been married for 27 years now, and two kids. They’re twins, a boy and a girl, and they are 19 years old and just starting college.

We’ll you’re from the cold country. I’ve spent some time in Minnesota and in Wisconsin myself in different jobs, but you are from Milwaukee. You said you grew up there. Tell me what your world was like growing up in Milwaukee from the sense of your culture, from your family. Was there any sensibility of God in that world?

There was. But it didn’t really affect me very much, I would say. We attended a Methodist church, I remember, growing up. And at some point, I don’t know, I was probably 10, 12 years old, something like that, my mom and dad moved to a nondenominational church. I don’t really know why. I remember my brothers and sisters were really angry because they had to be confirmed in the Methodist church and I got out of that because now we’re nondenominational.

Right.

Really, though, we went to church occasionally. I don’t remember any sermon or message from that time. It was really just something I had to do because we went with my parents. So I didn’t really have a lot from that perspective. I would say when I became a teenager, I didn’t even go to church anymore, and I kind of became… I don’t know. When I went to high school anyways, they were called freaks and jocks. And I kind of went the freak way, which just meant I partied and did things in the culture that some people don’t think you should do, with alcohol and all that kind of fun stuff. So there was really no religion at that point or God or anything. It just wasn’t even in the cards. It wasn’t a thing.

So did your family accept your unwillingness or your decision not to participate in any kind of a church activity?

You know, we didn’t even talk about it, to be honest. There was a lot of things going on with my family. My brothers and sister both had some problems, and my mom had some problems, and we moved out to Utah temporarily and came back after a couple of months. It just wasn’t a good time for the family, so I was pretty much on my own as a teenager, and there just wasn’t anything about God or religion in the picture.

So when you stopped going, did you just kind of release that part of your life without much thought? Or was it something that you decided to take on a nonreligious identity, like agnostic or atheistic? 

I’d have to say I was agnostic. There literally was not any thought put to it that I can remember.

So did you even consider what belief in God was? What did you think that religion was, apart from something that you just left behind?

Back then, I mean, it just was such a non-event. It just wasn’t there.

It just was not on the radar?

Not at all.

Yeah. And so what happened next in your journey? You were a teenager, you were partying, you just were being an average, I guess, teenager, high schooler around that time, and you didn’t think about God or religion much. What happened next in your life?

Well, I did go to college, and somehow I found a way to do well in my studies, which I didn’t in high school. And still maintain that lifestyle. So things were pretty, I would say, fun in college. Not knowing any different way. And then I had an internship in Milwaukee in my last semester, and that’s when I met my wife. She had an overlapping internship. She was going to Eau Claire in Wisconsin, and so that’s where we met. I actually interviewed her for the job, which was kind of fun. She was a believer but not a follower, I guess is the best way I could put it. She’d go to church sometimes, but she pretty much joined me in my lifestyle. We have kind of a joke that, during that time of life, that I didn’t force her to do anything. I just kind of showed the yellow brick road, and she just walked along with me on it.

But the fun, if I want to call it fun, started after college. Some time after college something happened to her. She had a drive to Milwaukee from Minneapolis with her sister, and her sister basically told her—I don’t know exact words, but ‘Did you know you can have a relationship with Jesus? Did you know it can change your life?’ kind of a thing. And she started to change. She went to church on Sundays without me. She became part of a small group which, at the time I didn’t even know what a small group meant. And I just really wanted nothing to do with it. I was afraid religion would take away the fun that we were having. I don’t know if you’ve heard—you’ve been around the Midwest here, so you probably know who Jesse Ventura is?

Oh, yes.

He was governor of Minnesota right around this time. And he did an interview for Playboy magazine, of all magazines, and in that interview, he has a quote, and I use this a lot in my talks. It’s, “Organized religion is a sham and a crutch for weak-minded people who need strength in numbers,” and I really, really resonated with that. So that’s where I was at that time. That was when we had moved to Minneapolis. There was a good side of it for me, is I could get a lot of stuff done. She was off doing her church thing, and I was doing projects. I’m a handyman, so I was doing a lot of projects. So from that perspective, I didn’t mind it too much.

So you didn’t resent her for having moved more towards this seemingly religious life?

Well, I wouldn’t go that far. There was some resentment there. I didn’t want her to do it.

Because, again, at that time, you just thought it was a crutch. It was for weak people, weak-minded people?

Yeah, I thought she was going to become a Bible thumper, and you know, some of the things that our lifestyle included, I knew were not included in a Christian or in a religious fashion.

How long did you all move in this direction where she was moving towards God and you were not?

Yeah. It was for quite a few years. So this was probably around the year 1996, or somewhere in there, and our kids were born in 2001, and she started taking them to church, and again, it was nice. I would have Sundays pretty much, in the mornings, to myself. I finished our basement and did some other things. But when the kids were like four or five, my sister once talked to me about, ‘You know, you really should go to church to support her,’ and my wife asked me to start going for our son because our son was like, “Why? I don’t want to do this.” So I started going with her to church to support her. But I think this is probably when I’d start labeling myself an atheist.

Hm.

Yeah. Church really turned me off. The whole idea of the Bible being a fairy tale, kind of made up. I really thought it grew over time, like the telephone game. And the thing about church was I never once remember any evidence being provided, about God, about Jesus. It was just Bible verses and talking about the Bible, and I always thought the worship just went on forever, and of course, at the end, then they always asked for your money.

Right.

So yeah, I was going the other way by going to church.

Interesting, interesting. As you were going the other way and embracing more of an atheist identity, were you looking more at the foundations of your own atheism? You had mentioned there was no foundational evidence for the Christian worldview being presented, but what about your atheism? Were you thoughtfully moving in that direction, like from an intellectual perspective? Or was it more because Christianity seemed rather anti-intellectual and just very off putting?

It was just off putting. It was all emotional. I didn’t know anything. I’ll just be honest. I didn’t want this, and I didn’t like it. I thought it was made up. One year, I went with my wife to a youth retreat. She had gotten involved in the youth group, and she asked me to go. It’s an extended weekend. And that really turned me off, too, because I just thought, “Now we’re trying to get these kids to believe this, too.” The ironic thing is, some years later, my wife and I actually ended up being directors of that youth retreat for about 200+ kids, so things did change.

Yes, they did! But at that time, it was adding more fuel to the fire, I guess, for you to turn away from all of that, towards atheism.

Yes, yes.

So I’m curious, were there other atheists in your world? People who believed similarly to you that reinforced your views? Or were you pursuing atheism more strongly on your own?

Yeah, I wouldn’t even call it pursuing. I wasn’t trying to be an atheist. That’s just where I was. And I’m a big introvert. I like being alone. So I don’t have a lot of friends outside of my marriage, but none of them that I did hang out with even, the ones I talked to from college, none of them—there was never religious talk. We just never really went there. That wasn’t part of our culture.

In the upper Midwest, it seems to be a nominally Christian or Catholic culture, is that right? So there’s a presumption of God somewhere in-

Yeah. I think that’s true. Yeah.

Yeah. So I would imagine you would find yourself in many ways a bit alone, in terms of your identity, just because of your circumstance and your personality.

Yeah.

Yeah. So your wife is continuing on in a Christian pursuit. She’s bringing your children. And getting indoctrinated, I guess, in your view. So what then happened next?

Well, so my first inkling that maybe something… I should start looking at this. It was the year 2006, and I had finished my first triathlon, and it wasn’t an Iron Man Triathlon by any means, but it was a triathlon, so it took a few months to train, to build up to do that. I hadn’t been a big exerciser before that. So I was working pretty hard at it. And I’ll never forget the feeling I had when I crossed the finish line. My kids and my wife were there, cheering me on, and I expected this accomplishment. And as I went across the finish line, the thought that came into my head was, “What’s next?” And I was like, “What is that about?” And I realized I had a really good time filling up my time. I had a lot of hobbies, and some of them are kind of unusual, so I was a volunteer firefighter, EMT, a lot of the civil service kind of stuff. Ambulance driver, weather spotter, and even a sheriff’s reserve deputy, and all of that took up my time, and I was just filling up all my time with stuff. And it started me thinking, “Well, what’s life about? What’s our purpose? Am I just going to keep… What happens when I can’t exercise anymore? And what happens when this stuff goes away?”

That was probably my first… started me just thinking. I really didn’t do anything about it. It just started me thinking. And the real catalyst then for the change was about a year after that. There was an organization called Life Action, and it came to our church, so I went with my wife, and I think it was four nights in a row. And our kids were about six years old, and what really hit me hard was the message that they talked about with morals and teaching your kids good morals. And I realized, “I’m going to have to start doing that even more so with my kids as they get a little older,” and I told you about my story. I wasn’t a good kid. I didn’t want my kids… I got lucky. I got really lucky to get out of that. And I didn’t want my kids to go down that path, but if I told them that and they could find pictures of me or whatever, they heard the stories, I would’ve been a hypocrite. I would have been saying, “Do as I say, not as I do,” and I didn’t think that’s a very good way to teach. And it occurred to me that—I’d been going to church now for some years, not liking it, but it occurred to me that Christianity was actually a really good standard, what Jesus taught was a really good standard. Of course, if it’s applied correctly, right? Because a lot of Christians, including myself, aren’t always the best at applying it correctly.

But that’s what really started me thinking. I’m a real big skeptic, a self-professed skeptic. And I’ll question everything. Even if I want to buy something from Amazon, I’ll research it so much because I don’t want to be wrong. But I realized I never… You asked this earlier. I never questioned atheism. I never even thought about it. And so this is when my journey started, that I realized I probably needed to start figuring this stuff out.

I know you say you really hadn’t questioned atheism. When I think about that, I think of not only the foundations for atheism or the grounding of it but also the implications. Like you mentioned a moment ago that you were wondering about what’s life all about, meaning, purpose, where do I ground morals? Did you realize at the time that your atheism didn’t provide some sense of objective grounding for those things? Or were those just more existential things that you felt and you really hadn’t associated them with your atheism?

Yeah. Really the latter. I really hadn’t associated. And actually I did about five years of intensive study on this stuff, and morals, believe it or not, were actually towards the end of really understanding that and putting it all together, that atheism and naturalism, you can’t really ground morals, but that was actually pretty late in the journey, where I kind of put that together.

Ah, I see. So you came to a point of realization, then, in your story that you said you never questioned atheism. What does that mean to you in terms of… How did you pursue that skepticism, that questioning, that question of atheism? What did that look like?

Yeah. For me, it was mostly podcasts, debates, and books. I just started reading and thinking, and I listened to a lot of podcasts on my commute. Now, back then I don’t remember all the technology, but I remember I always had to burn them to discs the night before to put them in my car. So I was burning CDs to listen to podcasts, and I don’t even remember all the podcasts back then, but that’s a lot. I just kind of immersed myself in the realm of this and listening to those kind of things.

At one point, the youth pastor at my church, he knew I was going through this journey, and he would just slip me little things. If you’ve heard of Greg Koukl and putting stones in your shoes, yeah, I think this youth pastor did that really well. I mean, he knew me and he knew he couldn’t just tell me this is right or whatever. I had to figure that out myself.

So yeah. So I listened and read and learned, and I was actually quite astonished by what I didn’t know. So, for example, even where I lived or how I grew up, I actually didn’t understand that Christmas was about Jesus Christ and that Christmas songs were about Him and about the story and things about hospitals and universities and relief organizations, they’re Christianity based. And I’d like to say I was deceived, but I think I was more ignorant than deceived. I was shocked. I was just shocked by what I learned.

So you started putting some pieces together, and I presume, along the way, you started asking some of the big questions, like, “How do we know that God exists?” and those kinds of big philosophical, theological questions?

Yeah. I’m an evidence person. So I started with God. Because I figured, “Well, if there’s no God, I don’t have to look at anything else.” So I started looking at the evidence. What evidence could I find that would potentially convince me of God or not? Is there good evidence of naturalism? Is there good evidence of the creation kind of view. So that’s where I started. And then I went to Christianity after I went to God. I would say I first became a deist. Deism is actually kind of easy. If you look at the evidence and you think there’s a higher being, which I think the evidence is pretty good for, obviously, getting to deism’s really easy, because now I can just say there’s a god, but he doesn’t really actively play in our world or anything, and so I could just stop there. And that seemed too easy to me.

So I did pursue the religions and looked at least the main religions to finally come to a conclusion of God and Christianity being the truth.

I’m going to back up for just a moment because the whole idea of evidence, especially in the world of atheism, is that you often hear the claim that there is no evidence for God, right?

Right.

So I’m curious what evidence you found that convinced you that God exists, that He’s not a product, a man-made product. He’s not the end of a legendary tale. But rather that there is truly an ontological essence in reality to the Person of God. There is Someone really there outside of the universe. What evidence led you to determine that that was true or real?

Sure, sure. Part of it’s a cumulative case. There’s a lot of, I think, lines of evidence that point to it, and when you’re looking at a picture, it may not be complete, but is it more complete than the other option. So that’s a lot of what I believe, but by far the most convincing thing for me was DNA, was the complexity of life. The code that is in the DNA . I cannot understand looking at that, how you cannot think that there is something behind that. There’s intelligence behind that. Any time you have codes, any time you see some pattern like that, it’s from intelligence. The alternative was naturalism, and the theory of evolution. If it was evolution, then it was orchestrated by something. If it was creation, then it was orchestrated by the Creator.

There’s machinery in our cells. I do believe in the irreducible complexity of some of these things. And just the complexity of the cell itself. And back when Darwin made his theories, they didn’t know any of this stuff. That is by far what immediately pretty much convinced me there had to be something more than just chance and random mutations over millions of years.

That there was a mind behind the immense information in the cell?

There’s always a mind behind information. We don’t look at anything else and say, “Well, that just happened by chance.” We don’t look at machines and say, “That just happened by chance.” If I went to the moon and there was, “Help,” scribbled on something on the moon, we wouldn’t say that just happened by chance by the nature. We wouldn’t have any idea who did it, right? But we wouldn’t say, “Oh, yeah. That was just made up. That just happened because nature must’ve done it because we can’t explain it other ways.”

So the God hypothesis is really, for you, the best explanation behind what we see in the intelligent complexity of the cell and that naturalism on its own, with its just random variations and mutations, isn’t sufficient to explain it. Is that what you’re saying basically?

Yeah. Yeah. And then you add on things like near-death experiences and the afterlife and fine tuning of the universe, and then you do come to the moral argument, and you just start putting those together, and the better explanation—it’s not airtight. I’m not going to ever be 100%. But the better explanation is certainly a God or a supreme being of some sort that created all this.

So you came to a place where you were confident that a supreme being exists.

Yes.

Like you say, you moved towards deism and that that was a rather… it was a step in a direction towards belief, certainly a belief in a higher being, but not necessarily in any particular religion. So then you mentioned that you started looking at the major religions. So if there was a god, then which religion worships the right god? How did you tease that out? How did you pursue that?

Yeah. I think again more from an evidential standpoint. So looking at the history of the religions, looking at their artifacts, if they have writings, looking at their leaders, and I don’t remember much about all the details back then, but it seemed that Christianity was evidentially better. I still didn’t understand the relationship and all that kind of stuff, but I got to a point where I believed it enough that I started moving forward. But as I’ll mention in a little bit, I actually kind of came backwards for a while. In 2011, when I knew I had changed and kind of figured enough out is I was camping. I used to camp every year with a college buddy, and that was back with the hedonistic kind of lifestyle, and I’d relive that on weekends camping sometimes, even though I’d changed for the most part at home. But this one time, we were up late at night, Saturday night around the campfire, and I ended up defending why I thought God and Christianity was true. I became an apologist that night.

Wow!

Yeah. That’s when I knew, “Okay, I think I’m probably moving in this direction. I need to keep going,” so I ended up becoming baptized. I kind of went all in. I attended Alpha at our church. I became an Alpha leader. I threw away all of my magazines. I changed all my playlists. I like to say I used to choose my movies by the content, and then I filtered it by them. And I was kind of all in. But I actually kind of changed my mind twice. I use hiking as a metaphor . When you hike uphill and you’re hiking up a big mountain, there’s a lot of switchbacks. You don’t just go straight up. And for a skeptic like me, it’s really hard to believe this stuff. And so I was doing these switchbacks, and then sometimes you get up almost to the peak. You can even see the peak. But weather turns you back or whatever, and you have to retreat. So I ended up retreating.

This was about five years ago, 2015, somewhere in there. I started doubting again, and I kind of kept it a secret from most people, but I was like, “Did I really look at all this stuff impartially?” I have so many Christians around me, and as you mentioned, Minnesota’s got a lot of religion. The US has a lot of religion to it. So did that influence me? How impartial I was. So I went back to the drawing board. I started listening to things and reading things again, and I got to the point where I had just found myself saying, “I’ve heard that argument. I’ve heard that.” It started becoming repetitive. And then, I downloaded a book called Cold Case Christianity by J Warner Wallace. And that book was a game changer for me. I’m sure you’re familiar with that book.

Yes, yes.

Yeah. That was a game changer for me because it’s so law enforcement based, and I have some of that in my background, and law enforcement evidence, it’s so tangible. And when he described the disciples as eyewitnesses and the Gospel being eyewitness accounts, that’s another thing that just blew me away. All this time, I had never really heard that. I’d never seen that. And that was a game changer for me, along with the reasonable tests. The whole “beyond a reasonable doubt, not all doubt,” all that kind of stuff. And that put me past the hurdle again. That book was really good.

Yes. J. Warner Wallace for those who aren’t familiar. He was, still is, a cold-case detective, and so he knows how to look at evidence, especially from a historical past and long past and look at what evidence is viable and what can be held as evidence, and then applies it to actually the events surrounding the person of Jesus, and you can draw conclusions based on what he brings forth in that book. And obviously it was convincing to you, right?

Absolutely.

Okay. Well, I’m curious. You mentioned the first apostles as eyewitnesses, but what role did the Bible and the Gospel, both of those, play in your conversion journey, if any?

Well, they did once I got to the evidence of those as well. So I was also astonished by the accuracy of the Bible, from the archaeology to everything in it, the stories, the people, the titles that they used, the geography, the town names, everything is so accurate. It became pretty evident to me that it was a work of nonfiction, not a work of fiction. And if all of that is nonfiction, all those archaeological and towns and all those things, that was a clue to me that the story actually didn’t grow over time. And when you think about the telephone game, if you tell a story, and somebody whispers it, all the way down the line, and then at the end, the story is completely different. What occurred to me was, if the Christian story… It’s not just part of the story that gets corrupted. It’s the whole thing. Nothing is like the beginning. So you can’t say that the Bible and all its accuracy is good, but the Christian stories must’ve grown over time. It doesn’t work that way. Everything grows over time. So that tells me that the stories are… Now they may or may not be true, but they are at least the stories that were told from the beginning. Because they didn’t grow over time.

But then you look at the character of the eyewitnesses that wrote these stories and the radical change that happened because of what they say they saw, not because of what someone told them or something that happened in the culture. It’s, “This is what we saw,” and it radically changed their lives, and some of them were Jews and they convinced other Jews, and something amazing must’ve happened. And there’s lots of theories of why… wasn’t the resurrection, you know, hallucination theory and all these other theories, but it all boils down to me that these eyewitnesses did what they did because of what they saw. What they say they saw. And all those other theories don’t work because they say they saw a resurrected Jesus. So those were the things that really drove me to, “You know what? This is a pretty accurate story, and I can’t think of any other reason for why it happened,” and I looked at miracles and things like that and came to the conclusion that miracles are possible and still can happen. That’s what really convinced me on the Christianity thing.

So it became intellectually convincing to you that it not only provided the best explanation for what you were seeing in the physical world but then the evidence for Christianity seemed to be solid historically, archaeologically, even textually, and from the words of the eyewitnesses and those kinds of things, including the resurrection.

Yeah. And put those same tests to the other religions. They don’t do so well.

Yeah. There aren’t very many religions that are grounded in historical time and space, that are factually oriented and can be tested.

Yeah. And the ones that can be tested don’t test very well.

Right, right. But there’s a difference between believing something intellectually, in your mind, that, yes, this could’ve happened, yes, this could’ve been true. This is relatively convincing. But then there’s the Person of Jesus and there are the claims of Jesus, not only that He is God but He is truth and that,  He offers something for us, and we call that the Gospel. It’s good news.

There must’ve been a point at which you, as your wife did, said, “Okay, there’s more to this than religion. There is something relational about it.” Can you talk about that? How that related to your own life?

Yeah. And Warner Wallace talks about “belief in” versus “belief that,” and so a good analogy he uses is a bulletproof vest. You can have belief that it’s going to stop a bullet, but until you’re willing to stand in front of a gun and test it, you may not have belief in. And so it’s that believing in, and I mean I’ll just be perfectly honest, it’s a struggle for me, as a skeptic, just in that nature of mine, to give in that way. But I’m always working on it. And what I do is I believe that God talks to us in our conscience. So that’s kind of how I live my life, is going where I feel He wants me to go. And that’s kind of my relationship with Him and how I go about it.

Yeah. It sounds like your intentionally tuned in, as it were, to His role in your life and following God and Jesus. So that’s amazing. Would you say that your life has changed a good bit since you moved from atheism to Christianity? I’m sure your wife is probably pretty happy about it, so that you are both on the same page.

Yeah. She was praying. A lot of people were praying for a long time, but she also knew she couldn’t push it. But yeah, night and day, from a life perspective and life-living perspective, it’s night and day. My mentality, too, of seeing other people and that they have a viewpoint, that they’re hurting, that I have to look at them, it’s an outward versus an inward kind of viewpoint, that God created that person. That person has worth.

But everything else has changed, too. Like I said, movies and how we live our life and how we brought up our kids. And it’s been great from that perspective.

That’s wonderful! Now you had mentioned one of the things that caused you to question your own atheism was when you were living your life, and it seemed that you had temporary purpose and meaning and hobbies and accomplishments but they didn’t seem to satisfy. You’d be having to look for what’s next. Would you say that, in some sense, Christianity has changed your perspective or your understanding of what your life’s meaning and purpose is?

Yeah. And I’ve read The Purpose Driven Life a couple of times and tried to apply some of that, and I think what comes out of that, for me, is going back to my purpose is to do what God directs me to do. I don’t know exactly what that’ll be. Right now, He’s directed me to speak about this, to present this to other people, to use what I’ve learned as a skeptic to present it. And that consumes a lot of my time now.

Well, it sounds like you are a life driven by purpose now, if you’re consumed by it, and that’s a really wonderful thing.

Yeah.

So if there are curious skeptics listening into your story today and you wanted to give them some advice based on your journey and as an ongoing skeptic, I guess in some sense you are-

Oh yeah.

… continuing to pursue the questions of life and evidences and how to answer those and what worldview provides the best explanation, those kinds of things. What would you say to someone who might be listening, if they are curious skeptics. Perhaps they’re a little dissatisfied with their own worldview.

As a skeptic, realize you may not have all the answers. I don’t have all the answers. I still doubt sometimes. I mean that’s okay. It’s okay to have some doubts. I have problems with things, like prayer that’s not always answered and all don’t go to heaven. I really struggle with the fact that I’m thriving and some people are just surviving. There’s a lot of problems with the world.  But not liking something and not liking the way things are doesn’t make something untrue. When my daughter started dating, I didn’t like it at all, but it didn’t mean it was untrue. So be open as a skeptic. Things you may not like may still be the truth, so you need to look at that.

From a social media perspective, I personally say no, don’t even go to social media. People are just so mean. I don’t like going there. I would say look for truth and look for both sides. There’s an explanation usually for both sides. Atheists give it and Christians give it. They have the same evidence they’re looking at. They don’t have different evidence. They just come to different conclusions. And they can be extremely…I mean I actually thought that Christians were not very educated or easily persuaded, maybe deluded kind of a thing, and I came to realize that there are some really educated and intelligent Christians, way more than I am, so be open to that. Listen to the experts, but ultimately you have to be the juror on the case. You have to look at the evidence they’re looking at, just like you would in a court of law. Here’s the evidence. I have prosecutors telling me one way. I have the defendant telling me to look at the evidence this way. Which is more reasonable? That’s what I did, and I ended up changing my mind. So that’s what I would say to nonbelievers.

That strikes me, that in that posture of your own search, you were trying to be as neutral as you could and allowing the evidence to lead you where it did, rather than having a predisposition or a closed offness. Is that a word?

I think so.

That you weren’t closed to what you were seeing. That you actually were open to consider the evidence, even if it wasn’t something that you really liked. I liked what you said there, that just because you don’t like it doesn’t mean it’s not true and that we need to be honest enough to go where the evidence leads.

Yeah, I think that’s really important when you’re looking at evil and suffering. That’s a hard thing to look at, and an easy thing to say there can’t be a God because of evil and suffering, but if, to your point earlier when you talked about it, is naturalism, if you apply it honestly. If you really look at atheism and naturalism and materialism honestly, then you can’t ground evil and suffering. There really isn’t evil and suffering. So yeah.

Yeah. Yes. So thank you for that. And as we turn to those believers or Christians who are listening who really want to help others to understand the truth of God’s existence and the reality of Jesus and the Christian worldview, how would you encourage them to engage with those who really don’t know?

Well I think you first have to look at the person. Because we all have different personalities. If they’re a skeptic. If they’re like, “I don’t believe any of that. It’s not true,” don’t start with the Bible. And don’t start with Jesus quotes and pray about it and, “Well, just have a relationship.” That is actually a turn-off to most skeptics. They’re like, “Yeah. That’s why I’m not going there.” Be prepared to have evidence or at least point them to the evidence, point them to books or point them to something to say, “There’s something out there evidentially that you can go look at.” And let them research themselves, as Greg Koukl said. Put a stone in their shoe. But don’t try to convince them with the Bible or any of that stuff. Because they’re not there yet. Maybe turn them on to say, “Did you know the Bible’s really accurate?” and them go try to figure that out themselves. That’s what I would say for skeptics and how to approach skeptics.

Well, that’s good. I think you’re leading with questions, right? To, like you say, put a stone in their shoe, referencing Greg Koukl’s Tactics book, if anyone’s interested in that. You’ve referenced that a few times. It’s really excellent in terms of starting conversations with… Putting something in their mind, like a stone in the shoe, for them to think about. For them to consider. Something that bothers them in a good way.

Right.

Yeah. So I think knowing resources is really good, and I think what you’re also saying is that we don’t have to know all of the answers in order to engage, although it’s helpful to know something, but also at very minimum, to know where someone can look to provide resources to help those who are really interested in things of evidence, but yeah. This is fantastic. Yes.

The other podcast that I’d recommend people point to… Obviously, this is a really good one because you hear people’s stories. The other one that really I liked was the Unbelievable? podcast by Justin Brierley. And the reason is because it really usually is a very civil conversation between an atheist and a theist or a Christian, so you can hear both sides of the story in a nice civil way. I really liked that podcast as well.

Yes, that’s my top podcast. I listen to it without fail every week. I think it really is… As you say, it’s not only the content between juxtaposing two worldviews, it’s really excellent because it has high-level guests on there who are extremely knowledgeable, but also the way in which they’re able to engage. I think in a very civil and diplomatic way, really listening to one perspective and responding, rather than just coming at the other person.

Yeah.

We’ve lost the art of civil discourse, and I love Unbelievable? for that. Of course, it is the British way, but Justin Brierley does truly an amazing job of moderating, sometimes in potentially contentious perspectives. So I am in total agreement with you on that recommendation. All of the-

And his book is pretty good, too.

Yes!

I mean, if you’re a skeptic, it’s interesting to read a book from someone who’s heard all the arguments for ten years and goes a particular way.

Yes. I think his subtitle is something like… I think the title of the book is Unbelievable? Why after Ten Years of Listening to Skeptics I’m Still a Christian. Something like that yes.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, so it’s been great. I will put all of the resources that you’ve mentioned in your story in the episode notes, in case someone is interested in that, but as far as you, Rick, thank you so much for coming on today and telling us your story. I appreciate your transparency, especially really letting us know who you are as a skeptic and that you always will be a skeptic and that that actually is not a bad thing. I think we all need to be thoughtful about our own worldviews. Like Socrates says, the unquestioned life is not worth living, and so I think we need to continually be thinking and rechecking and seeing where we are and making sure that we too are responsible for finding and adhering to those truths which we find are supported by the best explanation of evidence and the reality of what makes sense, to what not only we understand but what we experience, and it sounds like the Christian worldview has really brought a lot to you in your life, and I’m so happy about that. Thank you again for coming on board today.

You’re welcome, and I’d just like to say, too, I am presenting this information. I like to give the case for God and the case for Christ, so if anyone’s interested in having me speak, I’d love to do it, particularly in the Midwest, but I’m open to other options as well.

That’s perfect, and why don’t you give us the name of your website and address so that they can find that.

Yeah, it’s A Skeptic’s Journey, so it starts with just the letter a, askepticsjourney.com.

Perfect. And I will put that in the episode notes as well, so anyone who would like to get a hold of Rick or have him come speak with you or to you or even virtually I presume, I’m sure he would be happy to do that. All right. Thank you again.

You’re welcome. I really enjoyed the time talking about it.

Thanks for tuning in to the Side B Podcast to hear Rick’s story today. You can find his website and his recommended resources on the podcast episode notes. For questions and feedback about this particular episode, you can reach me by email at [email protected]. If you enjoyed it, I hope you’ll subscribe, rate, 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 will see how someone else flips the record of their life.