eX-skeptic

Can the thinking person believe in God? In today’s episode Bruce tells his story of moving from atheism as informed by science to a rational Christian faith that informs both science as well as the most profound questions of life.

You can find out more about Bruce through his blog Philosophical Apologist at https://philosophicalapologist.com

Episode Transcript

Welcome to the podcast, Bruce. It’s so great to have you on the show!

Thank you for having me.

As we’re getting started, I’d like to get to know you a little bit. Why don’t you tell us a bit about yourself, your background. I know you have quite an impressive academic background. Why don’t we start there?

Okay. Your listeners will probably think, “Wow! This is someone who’s just spent far too much time at university.” To start with, out of high school, one of I guess my first loves, as it were, was mathematics, so out of high school, I did a degree in mathematics and physics and became a high school teacher and taught in high school for a few years, mainly mathematics and physics. This is in Australia. After probably about four or five years of that, I got I guess a little bit bored of teaching the same thing, and I was always interested in computing, so part time, I went back to university and started a degree in computer science and eventually, after a year or so, I grew to like that quite a lot and quit my teaching job and spent a year full time finishing off that computing degree and then got a job in a research center at a university doing programming work. So that was, I guess, the start of my career in computing, which I’ve been doing for many, many years now.

I worked for a few years in that, and I was working in another research group in a large private computer company in Brisbane, Australia, and I got the idea of doing a master’s degree by research, so I spent the next year and a half doing a master’s degree in computer science, kind of combining some of the research work I was doing for the company with research for the master’s, and so I did that for a couple of years. Finished that off. Had a long stretch of over a decade without any formal study. Got a bit, sort of itchy feet again, so, “What am I going to study?” And I was always interested, having been a Christian for quite a long time by that point, I was interested in Christian apologetics and had done a lot of reading in that area.

Eventually, I came to the conclusion that, to be a good Christian apologist, to defend the faith as an apologist, I needed to understand philosophy better, and so, for me, that meant going back to university and doing a degree in philosophy. Which I did from the University of London. I was in Australia at the time, but University of London has a great international program, where you can do degrees by distance, and so I spent five years in total doing my bachelor of arts degree in philosophy through the University of London, Birkbeck, which I really enjoyed. And towards the end of that, I started thinking, “Well, what am I going to do with this?” and I’d met a friend who’s been interviewed on this podcast before, Daniel Rodger his name is, and we’d done a lot of talking about bioethics, and I think he and another friend convinced me that I should go on to do a PhD in bioethics. And that’s what I’m doing now. I’m probably in the last third of my PhD, and that’s at the University of Birmingham in the UK.

Wonderful school. My alma mater.

Oh is it? Really?

Yes, yes. That’s where I received my PhD.

Oh, okay. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

I’ve been on campus. I’m doing that by distance as well. I’m in Australia right now, but I actually started while I was living in London, and I have been to the university campus a number of times now, and it’s a great spot. I really like it there.

Well, good, good. You’re in good company with William Lane Craig.

Yeah. That’s right. He did his PhD there as well.

Right. In philosophy.

Or one of his PhDs.

Exactly. You’re right about that. So you’re obviously extremely well studied and continue to have obviously an active mind and pursuing really rich and deep truths. Particularly, I’ve noticed that you have quite a resume of academic publications in the area of bioethics, so even though you’re actively in a PhD program, you have published prolifically in that area. I would say quite impressive. So it sounds like you have… You’re currently in Australia, right?

That’s right. Yeah. I moved here in December last year from the United Kingdom, where I spent the previous six years.

And that is your home, so why don’t we kind of take your life now back towards the beginning? Because we want to understand what your thinking was earlier in your life. Did you grow up in Australia?

I did. I was born in Brisbane in Australia and mainly grew up in Australia. Interestingly, though, one of the big influences on my life was actually in the United States. My parents were both atheists or agnostics. They don’t really have any belief in God at all. They’re both scientists. My mother, when I was a child, in primary school, she did a PhD in animal behavior and became a lecturer in animal behavior and quite a well-known one. My father was a physiologist, and he studied reproduction, and he worked for many, many years at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, so I come from quite an academic background, and it’s kind of been a natural thing to go on and do more study myself, just because of the example of my parents. My grandfather was also an academic as well, so yeah, there’s quite a long line in my family from that regard.

But my parents didn’t have any belief in God, and growing up, I didn’t either. I naturally took the sort of view that if you can’t prove it with science then it’s not really worth anything. And I guess one of my earlier memories in that regard was… My dad spent a sabbatical year in St. Louis, Missouri, in the United States. He was at Washington University there. And I can remember I started a year of school in St. Louis, Missouri, at a school called Brentwood, in a place called Brentwood in St. Louis. And I can remember in the classroom the teacher asking who believed in God and who didn’t, and I was the only person in the class who didn’t believe in God, and they asked me what I believe, and I said, “I believe in science,” so that’s one of my very sort of earlier memories of not being a believer.

The culture that you grew up in as well, beyond your family… Was there any reference to Christianity in your culture or among your friends? Or was it-

No. Australia is not like the United States. I guess people worship the weather and sport and things like that, so I didn’t set foot in a church in Australia until I was a teenager. I didn’t go to Sunday school. I didn’t do anything in that regard. It was quite easy when I grew up to completely avoid church altogether. It wasn’t something that ever even occurred to me to do or anyone I knew would… No one I knew would go to church. So no.

It just wasn’t on the radar.

It wasn’t on the radar. And that’s fairly normal for a lot of people in Australia, I think.

So, during this time, it just wasn’t a thought for you. It was totally irrelevant. What did you think God and religion and religious people… what was that for you? What did you think it was?

It wasn’t really anything at all. I guess unusually I grew up without a television set. My parents were keen on kids wasting their time watching TV, so I didn’t get a television set in the house until I was about 16, so I did a lot of reading, but I was a little bit ignorant in other ways. Any of the more popular TV shows, I didn’t know anything about them. I didn’t really have any, or very little, thoughts about God whatsoever. Probably the only thought I remember as I was a young boy was wondering what happened when I died and thinking of the world without me in it, and I think I found that a bit of a disturbing thought, that I would die and the world would go on as if I’d never existed and no one would really care too much. So that was probably the only thought I remember on those kind of lines.

So, as you’re moving along, you found yourself at church one day. It seems like there’s a pathway from not thinking about it at all to being in a church building. What happened between those two things?

Well, when I was living in the United States for my dad’s sabbatical year, in the summer holidays, just to keep the kids busy, mom and dad packed us off to a vacation Bible school for a week. And that was my first time I had ever read the Bible, had it taught, and there was something about it that really rang true to me, and I think, from that point… I guess maybe I wasn’t a believer, but from that point, something really resonated with me, and I thought, “This really feels as though it’s kind of true,” and I was pretty young then, but I think in some way, looking back, I think God had His hand on me from that point in particular. Something changed at that point, and when I came back to Australia, I didn’t have any capacity to do anything about it. I didn’t even think about it.

But it was a couple of years later, maybe three or four years later, when I started high school, I ended up going… There was a Christian group at school which I got drawn to, I think, a little, but my brother ended up going along to a youth group on Friday nights at a church, and when I got to high school age, I was eligible to go as well, and so, not having much better to do, because there wasn’t really too much to entertain myself with in Brisbane in those days, I went along to youth group on Friday nights. And that was run by a church in Brisbane.

I’m curious what your parents thought about that at that time. Obviously, you were a high schooler and a teenager, but knowing that… I guess if you worshiped science in a sense, or your family did, or that was the way of thinking at the time for your family, were they taken aback? Or disconcerted in any way for you going to something like this?

No, they weren’t. No. They were quite happy for me to go along. I think they… In their view, it would probably keep me out of trouble as a teenager. And I had a sister who got into a little bit of trouble during those years, the teenage years, and so… yeah. I think they just thought it was a fairly safe place for me to be.

I guess safe in some regards, perhaps not in others, in terms of the way that they were thinking. What were you hearing? Or was there something that was drawing you in even as you were at this youth group?

I think… As far as the youth group was concerned… I mean, God had His hand on me in a way that I look back and see now, but at the time, it was the most interesting thing going on my life. The guys that were running the youth group were very outdoorsy types, so we would do interesting activities. We would have what they called car rallies, where we’d race around in cars, and we would do rock climbing. We would go on hikes. And the guys who ran that youth group took a real personal interest in the kids that they were looking after. And it wasn’t just the youth group that they ran. They kind of involved a lot of the kids in their lives in other ways as well, so when they went out and did something like go on a hike on a weekend, they would invite us along with them, and so… yeah, we had some really important Christian role models from that point of view who became my friends.

So you were developing some meaningful relationships. It was more than just merely a social activity that you attended. you were developing a sense of community and friendships with some people, I guess, that you, like you say, respected in a way, that they were role models.

That’s exactly right.

That is a really beautiful way, I guess, to show Christianity, in addition to just telling you about it. So what was it about them or their lives that was attractive in a sense, that was something different or other than perhaps what you had experienced outside the Christian community?

They were nice guys who really cared, who really, really invested some of their life in the kids in the youth group, including myself. And, even today, that’s not that common a thing, I think.

Yeah. We are in such a culture of isolation at the moment, especially with COVID, but yeah, that is something quite wonderful in terms of investing in the other and feeling known and belonging. But I know, again, as a thinking person, that satisfies some kind of existential need in us, that need to know and be known and to belong, and that’s very attractive. What else were you learning about Christianity that was drawing you more towards that?

I think I was doing a bit of catch-up in a way. I knew very little about the Bible, didn’t really know the Bible stories or anything like that, and so there was quite a long period there I was just becoming familiar with what was between the covers of the Bible, reading it and being taught it. And I think part of that was people I respected believed it. They lived it. They were very consistent in their Christian faith, and so I could see it at work in their life, and I think, over time, I began to think, “Well, this is probably for me as well.”

So what were you finding in the Bible that rang true for you? What was it that was making sense, that you felt like it was something that you wanted to adopt in your life? Was it just the moral principle? Was it something deeper, more spiritual than that?

I think it grew into something more spiritual as the years went on. During my teenage years. And I began to see that I could make sense of the world through the story that it was telling, that I could understand now why we were here, that when I died there was actually meaningful life after death as well, and yeah… all the pieces started to fit together in a way, particularly for the questions that I could see science couldn’t answer.

It’s often said that science and belief in God are irreconcilable, but obviously you’re a scientist and a Christian, and how were you, at this point in your life, reconciling those two things?

Well, I should correct that you that I’m not actually what I’d call a scientist. I did a bachelor of science degree, that’s all. If anything, I’m a philosopher and a software developer, not a scientist, but having grown up with scientists and had a lot to do with science, I guess I do understand the scientific mindset a little. I don’t see any necessary conflict between the two at all. I mean, science is a tool for investigating our world. It operates by certain rules, and using those rules means we discover the natural laws that govern our planet, and we can learn a lot about the life on our planet, but I don’t see that there’s any inherent conflict between science and faith.

So that was not as an issue as you were embracing this religious understanding of the world, that it was making sense for you and it was answering some big questions, but they were different kinds of questions than perhaps the mechanics and the how, as compared to the why.

Yeah, that’s right. One of the leaders of our youth group was studying science at university and doing an honors project, a research project which I helped him quite a bit in. It was to do with the introduction of exotic fish into local waterways, and I spent a lot of time traipsing around with him, helping him catch fish and things like that, and… Yeah, I couldn’t see any conflict between what I was learning about the Bible and faith with what he was doing as an early budding scientist.

And as you were reading more about the Bible and Jesus and what the Bible was saying was ringing true. It was making sense of your life and of the world in the way that you knew it and experienced it. Were you questioning it at all in terms of the historical nature of the Bible? How do I know that these events are true? What about the person of Jesus? Was He a real person in historical time and space? Was the resurrection true? Were you having any of those kinds of questions?

I was, but the church I was going to at the time, it’s called the Wesleyan church, which I’m no longer attending a Wesleyan church nowadays. I go to a Baptist church. But in those days, they had a leader who was very much into Christian apologetics, and there was a strong camping movement, so at Easter, the local churches would go away on a youth camp, and we’d have a series of Bible teaching and things like that. And there was quite a bit of apologetics presented to us at the time, so I think, as I grew up as a teenager, it was all presented to me in a way that was not anti-science, that clearly could reconcile science and Christianity, and presented the evidence for the Christian faith. And so that was quite a strong component of what I was taught, and so a lot of the questions I had were answered in that way.

They were also quite keen on training people, and so they had a Bible college down in Melbourne, which is quite a fair way south of where I lived. They used to run summer Bible study courses, Bible college courses, and those courses were run by a lecturer in Brisbane, who would present all the material. There was a lot of opportunity for question and answer. And so I used to engage in that quite a lot and get my questions answered or raise new ones and get them discussed. So it was quite an intellectual atmosphere at the time. Certainly a very open atmosphere to ask questions and challenge assumptions and things like that. So I think that was really, really helpful to me.

I’m so happy to hear that you had that kind of… especially as a thinking person, a place and a space to study and investigate and ask questions and push back and that you had those who could actually give some good answers and guidance to finding what was true. So as you were moving along and you’re in high school and it’s all making sense, both existentially and intellectually for you, and spiritually, did you come to a place of belief at a certain moment? Or was it a process? Not a particular place and time? Or that you came to see that perhaps the Christian worldview is true, the Bible rings true, that everything seems to come together Yes. It all kind of came together. A friend of mine invited me along, I think when I was about 14 or 15, to I guess an evangelistic crusade meeting, and at that time, he encouraged me to sort of make some kind of Christian commitment, and I felt that that was the right time to do so, and that was, I guess, a moment of decision. It didn’t feel as though it made any difference to me, but I think, from that point onwards, I took a more serious view of Christianity and became more committed to following Christ, and I guess that point, I would say, was my real conversion.

And your parents? I’m just curious. As atheist agnostics, how did they accept your Christianity?

My parents were always very good about that. They never gave me a hard time. They just accepted that’s what I believed and were never derogatory towards my faith. They didn’t encourage it particularly, but they liked my friends who were Christians. They, I guess, liked that as a teenager I wasn’t out getting drunk or anything like that. I was with a clean crowd, and to them, I guess that was a good thing.

Yes.

Yeah. They’ve always been quite supportive. Eventually, I started to do a little bit of preaching, and occasionally, they would come along and listen to it, as, I guess, an encouragement to me. So yeah. They never stood in the way at all.

That’s great that you’ve had that kind of encouragement from your parents. You obviously have been pursuing Christianity since you were 14, 15 years old.

Something like that, yeah.

And it’s even influenced the direction of your life, not only in your life, as it were, in your perspectives, in the way you live and the way that you think but also academically even now, how would you say that your view as a Christian, in the Christian worldview, has shaped your life and your trajectory?

That’s a good question. Certainly with what I’m doing now, the PhD. My PhD is in the ethics of abortion, and that’s from very much a pro-life perspective. So I’m spending a great deal of time, effort, money in developing defenses that are basically in favor of abortion being immoral, something that shouldn’t be done if at all possible, and so that comes, I think, very much from a Christian perspective. I have been very pro-life for as long as I can remember, but I think my pro-life views came out of my Christian commitment. I don’t remember having any views really one way or another before I became a Christian, but certainly afterwards I saw life as something that’s special, created by God, and it’s important to defend that life from being unjustly ended.

That’s wonderful that you’re a champion for life.

And also, in terms of your life as a Christian, I imagine, in Australia, you’re moving against the flow of culture. Do you feel the pressure or tension of that? Is it difficult to live as a Christian in a predominantly secularized culture?

Well, certainly during COVID times it’s not, because I hardly go out of the house, but a lot of my interaction, being a kind of computer nerd, is online, so I do engage in philosophy groups with atheists quite a bit, and so that’s probably the biggest way I interact with people out there in some ways you are putting yourself on the front line, having discussions online with those who are skeptical about the faith. And you said you’ve moved into really study of Christian apologetics and philosophy. How would you say that your Christian worldview has informed philosophy and your understanding of those bigger questions? Especially even at a secular university where you’re studying.

Yeah. Studying philosophy is interesting. Some people find it diminishes their faith. Some people drift away from their faith studying philosophy. Others don’t really have a problem. I’m one of the latter. I’ve found philosophy hasn’t undermined my Christian faith at all, but I think it has taught me to be more critical of some of the arguments Christians put forward, especially in apologetics, and to realize that some arguments are stronger than others and that the apologetics that I had practiced before I started studying philosophy was not as rigorous as it should have been. There were always deeper questions to ask, and sometimes, as Christians, we don’t want to do the intellectual work of formulating arguments properly and deeply and really considering what the other side might think, so philosophy has, I think, taught me to try and be a little bit more evenhanded, to consider objections to things more seriously, to… yeah, try and look at all sides of a question and not solely come at something from, I guess, a Christian point of view but to try and understand what someone opposing that view might think, the reasons they might have for that, and how reasonable those reasons might be.

You are obviously a very intelligent, rational person, and oftentimes, Christianity is given the caricaturing that if you’re a thinking person that you shouldn’t be a Christian. Or Christians are uneducated people. But you are a living counter-example to that. Do you feel a sense of that kind of caricaturing of Christians as unthinking, non-thinking, non-rational kind of people?

I mean, certainly that caricature’s out there. Being part of, I guess, the worldwide philosophical community, in regular contact with many Christians who are philosophers and some of them, as far as I can see, are much smarter than what I am, and so I think there are intelligent, rational Christians out there. It’s just that, you know, perhaps… Like any faith, there’s people who hold onto it for different reasons, and… Yeah. There’s certainly people out there who don’t want to look at the intellectual questions of faith, and the faith they have might be enough for them. There’s all types of people out there, aren’t there?

There sure are. Yeah. In every worldview, it seems like there are those who are more drawn towards really considering their worldview rationally and some are not. I think, too, just from what I know of the United States, is politics and religion tend to get a little bit intertwined there, far more than they do in Australia or the United Kingdom. It’s quite normal for Christians to be on either side of politics in the UK or in Australia. People don’t normally feel too stigmatized by voting on the left side of politics, but in the United States, it seems to be much more polarized, and I think that kind of leads to a bit of caricaturing as well, especially with the whole political scene there at the moment.

Oh yes.

And so that doesn’t help.

No. It sure doesn’t. I really appreciate your just kind of studied, thoughtful sense of Christian faith that not only informs your mind but obviously your life and the way that you approach it, the way that you think about it, and it is just a beautiful example. I think of all of the parts of us coming together. It infuses the entirety of your perspective and your life because ideas have consequences, right? And so you’re a big advocate for things that are ethically good and true and beautiful, like life, and I love to see that.

As we’re wrapping up our conversation, Bruce, if someone was, say, a curious skeptic who was listening to the podcast, who didn’t think that Christians could be thoughtful or scientific or intellectual, or they just didn’t think that it was worth considering, do you have a word of advice for someone like that? Well, the internet is a wonderful thing for finding out that that’s not necessarily true. There is no end of resources to go to. My personal favorite, as we’ve mentioned earlier, William Lane Craig has the Reasonable Faith website. He’s got a huge, huge realm of material there, podcasts and articles and things like that that explore a huge range of Christian apologetics, philosophy, so that’s a really good place to start. There’s other philosophers out there and scientists who are worth investigating. The fantastic thing about the internet is that all these people are right at your fingertips. Tim Keller. You search for Tim Keller. Look up some of his podcasts, his books. Some amazing apologetics information there. Who else? There’s no end of guys. John Lennox. John Lennox is a mathematician who does apologetics, a guy, beautiful accent, from northern Ireland, and he’s got some amazing debates and talks you can listen to. So all the resources are out there. Go and check them out. See what you can find. Don’t write Christianity off as anti-intellectual or not wanting to grasp hold of difficult problems, because there are Christians out there doing that hard work right now.

Those are excellent resources, and I’ll include those in our episode notes, just some websites and things to connect with those resources. And finally, if you could speak to Christians in terms of how they approach their faith or what you might encourage them to do in terms of strengthening their faith or their apologetic for the Christian worldview, how would you encourage them?

I’d encourage them to do so in a similar way, to start finding out the resources that are out there, start thinking of… If there’s any questions they have unresolved, like the question of suffering, which is probably the most difficult question out there, start listening to these guys. Listen to Tim Keller’s talk on suffering and how different cultures, different worldviews, approach suffering and other resources out there. The answers are there, and people have sorted through these things, and it’s really important to educate yourself on these things, not only for you but for particularly the young people in the church, people in their teens and going through university. Apologetics isn’t that big a thing in churches, and young people are, almost at an unprecedented rate, leaving the faith as they go to university and shortly afterwards. They need these questions answered, and there need to be people in the church who are willing to work with them to find those answers, and so, for anyone who’s not a teenager, who’s a little bit older, think about learning a bit of apologetics, coming to grips with these questions, not only for your own sake but for the sake of the young people in the church. And if you have children of your own, you’re going to be wanting to teach those children about these answers.

Absolutely. If you could… For those who aren’t familiar with the term apologetics, and there are those who call themselves Christians who really have no idea what apologetics is, can you describe what that word means?

It sounds like it’s apologizing for the faith, but it’s not really. It really means defending your faith, as the Apostle Peter meant. Having an answer for people who ask you about your faith. If someone says, “Well, why do you believe?” what kind of answer are you going to give them? That’s probably the very first thing. If you think, “Wow, if someone asks me that, what am I going to say? Why am I a Christian? Why do I hold onto this? Why is it important to me?” And we need to have answers to those kind of questions when people ask us. And that’s what apologetics is, having a reason for the faith that you have.

Very, very good. As we’re ending, Bruce, I just appreciate all that you have brought to this podcast today. Is there anything else that you’d like to add before we close? Any other thoughts?

Sure. There is. Christianity isn’t just an intellectual thing to me. Satisfying the intellect is extremely important, but it’s also important not to let the intellect take away from your own relationship with God, and I know, for me, that’s always a temptation, to spend too much time studying about God and the reasons for God, without encountering God Himself, and so that’s an important thing not to lose hold of. Nowadays, I identify with a charismatic tradition. I think God does miracles now. I’ve seen God do some amazing healings. I’ve seen some amazing prophecies, and… Yeah, God is not just a God of the textbook or a God of the rational mind. He is active in the world today, and He’s out there, and we can encounter Him.

That’s a great word. Thank you for that. And thank you for your time, again, Bruce, in coming on and from all the way across the world, in Australia, but you’re as clear as day. And I so appreciate, again, your spending your time with us. So thank you again.

Thank you very much. I enjoyed talking to you.

Wonderful.

Former skeptic Ashley declared herself an atheist as a young woman. Dissatisfied with atheistic nihilism, she turned to psychedelics and mysticism in her search for something more. Her longing eventually led her to reconsider God.

Ashley Lande‘s blog: www.ashleylande.com

Episode Transcript

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

Thank you. I’m so very glad to be here.

As we’re getting started, before you tell your story, I would love to know, and I would love the listeners to know, a bit about there. It seems like you have a lot going on in your life that you love and the things that you love to do, and I’d love to hear about that now.

Okay, sure. I’m an artist and a writer. I live with my husband and two children, a boy and a girl, in a little town near the Flint Hills of Kansas, and I home-school my two children, and my husband works on a wind farm. And we have chickens. That’s something I really enjoy. And I have a website displaying my art and a blog on it as well at www.ashleylande.com. Yeah. And that’s what I do.

It sounds like a really intriguing, almost idyllic, place to live these days, outside of the city in the rural country. Wow. Living somewhat of a simple existence. It sounds very wonderful in a way. That you have that space. And chickens! That’s very interesting. So I presume that you collect eggs, and you probably grow a lot of vegetables and do all that kind of thing with regard to sustainability and living. That’s terrific!

We do love the chickens. I have yet to master gardening, but one day. Someday.

Okay. Yeah, yeah. Me, too. I tried my hand a little bit at gardening, but just a few flowers here and there.

Yeah.

[1:55 But I understand, from your story, that it’s a little bit different than many of the stories that we’ve heard so far, that many start with… Okay. Ashley, I’m going to start that over again. Mark, X that out. Okay.

Okay.

All right. Okay.

So, Ashley, as we’re getting to know you and your story, let’s start back at the beginning. Tell me about where you grew up. Did you grow up in Kansas? Is that where your home is? And what was that like? Your family, your friends, your community. Was God anywhere in the picture?

Yes. So I actually grew up in a suburb of Kansas City, on the Missouri side. Us Missourians are very emphatic about that. The bulk of Kansas City is actually on the Missouri side, and I grew up in a suburb called Blue Springs that was about 20 miles from the city. I grew up kind of in a unique situation. We were in a suburb, and we were in the city limits, but my dad had… He was from southern California, and he met my mom, who lived in the Midwest, and decided to move back here with her because he could own land, whereas in southern California, near the coast, that’s an impossibility unless you’re a millionaire. So he bought the land and was actually grandfathered into the animal ordinance, so we had all kinds of animals. We had horses, and we had a cow at one point. We had a llama. Chickens and ducks and kind of tucked back in the woods, even though we were in a suburb, so my childhood was wonderful in many ways. I had a sister. She was about 2-1/2 years older than me. She passed away in 2017, but I grew up with her.

And faith was—it was kind of a peripheral part of our lives in that season. We went to church—usually two or three times a month we’d go to church on Sundays, and I remember going to vacation Bible school and Sunday school, and my dad was very busy with his business. He was a commercial interior designer, and he built his own business, had a business in Kansas City, so he commuted every day. He was very busy with that, very consumed with that, and he was also very strong in his political identity, and so the church we went to was a Methodist Church, which was the tradition that my mother had grown up in, but for my dad, the Methodist Church was too quote-unquote liberal, and so he kind of phased in and out of going to church.

Bible reading was not necessarily a big part of our lives. Faith just seemed like something that we participated in on Sundays. And I don’t say that to criticize my parents. They were doing the best they could. They both grew up in highly dysfunctional families. I do remember having conversations with my dad about infinity and the nature of God in a very abstract way, and I just remember trying to contemplate infinity, and it was so mystifying to me that I just could not wrap my head around the idea of infinity. But I remember Jesus was just kind of represented in my mind as kind of a gentle, passive figure, and I know I must’ve heard the gospel at some point. I remember singing Jesus Loves You in Sunday school, but somehow it never really sunk in.

And around the time I was, just getting into trouble at school and with the police here and there, and so that was a, and church attendance kind of dropped off at that point. My sister had started refusing to go, and my dad didn’t go very much, so I thought, like, “Well, why should I go? Why should I have to go?” Because it. It didn’t seem substantive. And around that time, I was probably, I don’t know, 14, I remember very reluctantly going to church camp with one of my best friends, and I just realized at that church camp, “I don’t believe any of this.” And I knew—sorry, I’m kind of just jumping into the story.

No, that’s great!

Yeah. And so that was my family background. So there was some foundation, but it just didn’t—I don’t know. Yeah.

So it was a really—as a child, at least, there wasn’t a sense in which you took hold of that in a personal way. It wasn’t like you had belief or felt belief, it was just some ritual that you did, some activity on Sunday, but it’s something you never really truly believed.

Right, right. Exactly.

So you wouldn’t have considered yourself really a Christian at any point in your life really prior, at least in your preteen days before you stopped going.

No, no, I wouldn’t have. I think I took the existence of God as kind of a given, and I remember I had a half brother. I have a half brother who’s quite a bit older than me. He is 15 years older than me, and so I didn’t grow up with him really, but we would see him fairly often, at least once or twice a year, and I remember when I was probably 9 or 10 and we were riding with him… We were visiting him in California, and my sister and I were riding with him in his car, and this song came on the radio called, “Dear God” by a British pop band called XTC, and the lyrics were all about, “Dear God, I can’t believe in you. I won’t believe in you,” and it was just describing this man’s… all his grievances against God and how he would not believe in him. And I just remember being scandalized, thinking, “I didn’t know people were allowed to not believe in God,” so it’s interesting. On one hand, I wouldn’t say I had any kind of personal encounter with Jesus Christ. I’m always a little envious of people who say that they had moments in their childhood where they felt God’s presence really strongly because I don’t remember ever having that. Yet, at the same time, I feel like there was. So yeah.

Yeah, so that moment in the car, when you were 9 or 10, that actually opened the door to the possibility that perhaps that isn’t an assumption for everyone and that it gave you the freedom, I suppose, when you are at that church camp, to say, “No, I really don’t believe any of this.”

Yes. And that possibility felt dangerous, certainly, but it also was exotic and a little enticing, and yeah, and then at that church camp, I just realized—and I remember I was bold enough at that point, I guess, to announce my atheism. We were having this little gathering around a campfire and sitting on those benches that are made of half of a log, and I said I just didn’t believe, and there was just dead silence. And one of the counselors took me aside afterward and encouraged me to read the work of C.S. Lewis, and he said I should start with the Chronicles of Narnia, and I kind of just said, “Oh, okay. Yeah. I’ll look into that.” I didn’t at the time, but I remember being really confused because I remember watching a cartoon version, an animated version of the Chronicles of Narnia when I was a child, but I literally had no idea, until I was an adult, actually, that Aslan was supposed to represent Jesus. It just went completely over my head. And so that really made me stop and think, “Oh!” And even at that point, I don’t think I realized until I was an adult, so yeah, I did have some influences like that, but I don’t know. They just never took hold.

It just intuitively seemed not worthy of belief. That is, it’s not as if you went on this intellectual journey and said, “Oh, Christianity isn’t worth believing.” It was just like it just didn’t feel like something that was worth believing in. Was it, do you think, more intellectual at that time? I mean, I know you were a preteen or you were an early teenager, 13 and 14, but at that time, was it just, “Man, it just seems like…” What did you think Christianity was if it wasn’t true?

You know, I look back now, and I can see that I was just out-of-hand dismissive of it and also around that time, I started—I’ve always loved to read, and around that time, I started reading some very adult things that were very… like existentialist, nihilistic, just about the absurdity of life. I read The Plague and The Stranger by Albert Camus, and one of my favorite books around that time was Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, which is kind of all about the absurdity of war and, by extension, the absurdity of life and the futility of life, and I started reading the Beat Poets, like Allen Ginsberg, and Gregory Corso was someone I was really into, so I was introducing myself, I guess, to these really cerebral writers, and I was attracted to that, that intellectualism. I was very attracted to that, and I had never been introduced to any kind of intellectually robust Christianity. I didn’t take that guy’s recommendation to read any C.S. Lewis, and I just didn’t even know it existed. So I think I just dismissed Christianity out of hand as something that was shallow. It was delusional. It was for… just all the stereotypical… you know, it was for weak people, weak-minded people. It was for stupid people. Yeah, yeah, so I think there was that seduction, I guess, by those existentialist, kind of nihilistic writers going on at the same time.

Well, that’s curious. Especially, again, for someone in your teens to be delving into substantive writers like that. I wonder, when you were reading this existential material, or these novels or writings, did you believe that nihilistic worldview? And if so, also, did you embrace that kind of outlook on life? Did it affect your life in any way?

Yeah. And I think I thought I did. Looking back, I can see I had such a shallowness of experience, being, you know, 14, 15, 16 years old.

Ashley? Mark, obviously, there’s a pause here. It looks like she’s offline. Okay, there you are!]

Okay. I’m sorry. I moved myself into the other room, closer to the WIFI router.

Okay, good, good.

So hopefully, this will go better. I’m sorry about that.]

No! No problem. I don’t know if you heard my question. I was asking whether or not reading this existential material caused you to believe in nihilism and existentialism. Did it affect your life in any way?

Yes. I think at the time I would’ve said that. I just thought, to me, they seemed, which now it just seems so bizarre to me. But yeah. I mean, and I think that certainly had an effect, that I was reading all those things and embracing all that kind of thinking, but I think, as far as thinking through the logical consequences of there being no meaning to life, I think I didn’t think that far.

So I presume that you, with this kind of outlook, I would imagine that you created whatever life that you wanted to create? Because life was nothing but this reductionistic understanding of making your own reality? I presume that probably gave you a lot of freedom, but I wondered how long did you embrace this kind of philosophy or go along this pathway?

Yeah. I think… Gosh, for quite some time. And looking back, I can see there was a lot of emotional pain over the… Those years were very chaotic in my family because of everything that my sister was going through, and so I think that probably also some of it was a little bit reactionary to what was happening with her, and also, I had always felt like a rule follower up to that point. I always got good grades. I never did anything dangerous or risky, and so I guess, and of course I was, at that time, too, listening to the… I would have been that it can be casually enjoyed, and I think I went along with that and drinking, too, in college. In college, I really kind of crashed and burned as far as the drinking went. I recovered a little, though, and I was able to finish college, but I would say into, I very much embraced, I guess, a kind of even if I didn’t necessarily follow it all the way to its logical consequences or its logical outcome.

During any of this time, did the issue of God ever come up? Did you ever reconsider that at all as even a possibility? Did you run into any Christians? Were there any influences like that in your world through any of this?

Yeah. I remember, in college, I really. I was drinking a lot, and I had actually known a young man who… There was a summer in college, I think it was between my sophomore and junior year, and I had known a young man who was in an illicit relationship and had gotten murdered, actually, by the man that he was involved with. And it was just such a dark, dark time, and I was having and I remember I started going to an actually, and I only lasted for, gosh, probably less than a week, but sitting there and listening to people, these people who… most of them were a generation older than me and had completely hit rock bottom in their lives, and just listening to them talk about, and of course, AA is not necessarily a Christian organization, but there are, and so that, for sure, even though I kind of wussed out after a little while.

And I remember, too, around that time, going to a church. There was one Sunday morning. I’m sure I was hung over, and I just was so miserable and so I remember I went to a Methodist Church service, and I went inside and I sat down, and shortly after, the pastor just kind of greeted everyone, then, he invited everyone to greet one another, and I remember there was. I was just filled with shame. I think because I just and I actually… as soon as the greeting time was over, I fled. I just ran out.

And so there were moments where I look back and think, “Wow! If I had just surrendered to what I think God was trying to do at that point, that would’ve made my life so much easier,” but I did not at that time.

So you continued on. I guess you said you were in young adulthood at this point, and you were still, I presume, moving along in this way of living and thinking and perhaps difficulties in life and a little bit of despair. I presume at that point you would have considered—you mentioned that your worldview at that time really gave you no help, no savior, no recourse. So that was a situation or a circumstance or moment in your life where you actually were forced, in a way, to look at the implications of your own nihilistic worldview, that there was nothing there for you. It didn’t offer, perhaps, what you needed or what you were looking for. So even though you weren’t, I guess earlier, looking at the logical implications, in some ways, existentially, your existentialism kind of came to roost and to show its true self and your point of need.

Yes. Yeah, absolutely.

So yeah. Which they inevitably do, don’t they?

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. That our ways of thinking have a way of finding us in our lives. So tell me then what happened next in your journey?

So I, and I lived with my parents for a few months, and then I got a job and was out on my own. And I remember I felt—and I can’t remember if there was something that triggered this. I don’t remember having an encounter with a Christian. Maybe it was just my own discussions with my dad. And I would, and so at one point—I think I was 23—I decided, “Gosh, I really need to be able to rationally argue this. If this is what I believe, I need to be able to prove it,” and it’s interesting. For me, it was never even a matter of, “Oh, maybe I should investigate the other side.” I just dismissed that out of hand. I was like, “No, I need to read atheist authors and be able to prove my worldview.”

And so I remember I read Richard Dawkins. I think The Blind Watchmaker was the one I read. And a lot of the science just went over my head, but I trusted it. I trusted he knew what he was talking about. And I believed all his conclusions. And then someone loaned me, I think, Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris and that—he was a little smug, and that kind of got under my skin, but I guess I agreed with everything he was saying. And then I also really liked Christopher Hitchens. He was, of course, one of the big New Atheists at the time, and I really liked him, just thought he was so clever and so smart, and so he had a book coming out around that time called God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, and so I remember getting that book and thinking, like, “This is going to be the key. This book is going to really codify this belief system for me, and I’m going to be able to indisputably shut down anyone that I encounter.” And I remember lying on my bed in my apartment reading it, and I read about half of it, and I just had this cold, hollow, empty feeling, and I distinctly remember throwing the book down on the floor, and eventually it got kicked under my bed, but I just felt like, Because there was this very hard certainty in his writing and in the New Atheist writing, and it just felt like…

And that was really a cracking point for me, thinking, “I don’t know if I can abide in this worldview.” But I still… At that point, but around that time, too, I guess I was just, and I had taken psychedelic mushrooms before in college, and it was just a fun time. It was just kind of a party. And I had a friend later on, at this time that I was reading Christopher Hitchens, I had a friend who had some, and he asked me if I wanted to do it. I said, “Sure. Why not?” And I had a really—and I just want to be very clear before I go into talking about this that I do not condone drug use whatsoever, which will become clear as I keep talking. But I had And it’s been difficult for me to reconcile. And then after that, so it’s been kind of difficult. I’ve asked God to help me reconcile these experiences, because you can, And so this experience I had, I certainly think, in time, God has used it for good, because He uses all things for good in those who love Him and are called according to His purpose, of course. But it really shattered my materialist atheist worldview. I just thought, “I can’t believe that anymore.”

But I still—and I feel like I became spiritually open to anything except Jesus. Yeah. I was open to anything! And I had friends who were just complete stoners and would talk about dolphins being from outer space, and I was open to anything except Jesus. I was still so closed off to Jesus, which I look back and think, “That’s just extraordinary how Satan can blind you.” But yeah. And I, so sometime after this. And I was very into psychedelic drugs. He was very into psychedelic drugs. And we fell in love very, very fast, very hard, and we got. So it was very fast, very intense. And around that time, with him, I would have some psychedelic experiences that seemed very transcendent and seemed very spiritual and then I had some that were utterly, utterly terrifying and actually traumatizing, but I just hung on because I felt, for me, this was the only way that I had ever experienced something transcendent or even something demonic, something that was outside of my realm of experience to that point. So I was very immersed in that whole world for years.

And like I said, I was open to anything spiritually. I was very, very into yoga as well. I practiced yoga almost every day. Was very devoted to yogic philosophy, which, in America, yogic philosophy, it’s just kind of a mishmash of… oh, gosh. It’s just kind of a grab bag of Eastern religions, but I was very devoted to yoga as a spiritual practice. I would say, at that point, it was my religion, along with psychedelics. So yeah.

So it sounds like that was an amazing period of your life, extraordinary, and what I mean by that is that what I appreciate about that part of your story is that it seems to me that sometimes, when those who are atheists encounter something supernatural or beyond the natural, they don’t necessarily really appreciate the reality of that supernatural reality. I know that sounds redundant, but it’s something that there, but it doesn’t cohere with a naturalistic, materialistic worldview that says matter and physicality is all there is. But you, at least, you were willing to—like you say, you were open to more. Especially after that shattering experience. That you did realize that there was something beyond just this physicality. Beyond what the existentialists and the atheists were saying, that this world is all there is, so in a way, I applaud you for that, but it sounded like you embraced it fully. I mean, like, really fully!

Yeah.

For several years. Because it was obviously giving you something beyond what you had had before.

Yes.

Like you say, it’s almost as if that dangerous kind of life that you had chosen in your teens, then it almost accelerated in another place of your life. It was exhilarating. It was exciting. It was dangerous also.

Yeah.

In your young adulthood. But you were looking… It sounds like you were looking for something.

Yes. Yeah. I definitely was. I absolutely was. And I think… I look back, and the philosophies I embraced were very much self-salvation philosophies. They were enlightenment, practices that supposedly would lead to enlightenment. I remember, just in the New Age circles in which I ran, there were so many platitudes that would just be thrown out, like people would always be saying “love and light, love and light,” and I remember there was the idea that we are god collectively, like, “We are god, and I am god.” That was a big thing that I entertained for a while, and I remember one night just thinking about that and thinking, like, “Oh, my gosh! If we are god, that means we’re all alone!” And it really struck me, and it was a really terrifying thought. Like, “We are all alone. If there is nothing supernatural, if we collectively are god, and there’s no transcendent being, that’s terrifying.” And so there were definitely times where, if I actually carefully thought about what I was embracing, I feel like there were holes. There were cracks that would emerge and things that didn’t add up and things that didn’t make sense.

And I remember I got to a point where I could not have a good trip anymore on psychedelics. Immediately and I decided that,  and I thought, “Oh, if I can just put the right energy into them. I can speak the right words over them, and I can cultivate them lovingly. I will have a good trip. The problem is the source,” you know the source where I’m getting these things. And so I remember I grew them, and I would check on them religiously, and I would—whatever kind of—I don’t know—like Sanskrit patois I would know at that point from my yoga classes I would speak over them. And so one night, my husband and I, we blended them with orange juice, and we drank it, and I remember… I had a horrible time. And just feeling like I was and my husband, he’s a very steady person, and he said, “Of course, everything has meaning.” But I just felt like…

And we had our. That was a difficult experience. I think I just wasn’t prepared for it. Learning how selfish I was with a newborn, and I had some pretty significant postpartum, and so that was difficult working through, but then we got to a place where our son was, when he was an older infant, things just felt really wonderful, really steady as a family and our family life, and around that time… Let’s see. I’m trying to remember what happened first. I think when my son was 15 months old—we were not planning on having—at least my plan was not to have another child because I said, “I am not doing that again.” And of course I loved my son intensely, but I said, “I just can’t ever do that again.” And surprise! I got pregnant. And I just was so upset. My husband started smoking again. He hadn’t smoked in a year, I think. And he’s since quit again. Thankfully. Thank God. But it was very stressful. And we were very hand to mouth. This was when we were still living in Kansas City. We were very hand to mouth, and I remember I was just so upset. And I think at one point my husband even said, like, “Well, we can’t get an abortion.” And I said, “Oh, no, no, no, no,” so even though, with my belief system then, I still was like, “No, no, no, no. I could never do that.” But I just felt despair.

And around that same time, just a few weeks after I had learned I was pregnant, one of my childhood friends who was a devout Christian—I should have mentioned her before. Periodically over the years, well since my son was born, I had lived about 30 minutes away from me, but periodically, I would go, and I think Steven and I, my husband and I, and Izzy went over there for dinner one evening, and it was interesting. She would always… I would blather about whatever New Age thing I was currently into, and she would always…And looking back, I can see and anyway, after I discovered I was pregnant for the second time, with our daughter, Carrie, and at first they couldn’t figure out what it was. She was just really lethargic and had bleeding in her mouth, and it turned out it was leukemia. And so one of her friends sent out an email, had organized a meal train for Carrie and her family, and so you could sign up to bring a meal, and I signed up for a date that was, I think, a few weeks out, and then I remembered… a couple of days before I was scheduled to take her a meal, I got an email from the same woman, a friend of hers, saying, “Joella’s service will be on such and such a day at this church,” and I thought, “Service? What is she talking about?”

And She had lived for three weeks after she had been hospitalized, and oh! It was just so… It was so heartbreaking and so devastating, and I remember… I look back and see this as really a turning point for me, because Here I am pregnant with a baby I don’t want and then my friend, who’s very devoted to this Jesus guy, is losing her child, and she’s such a good person. And so we went to Joella’s funeral, and it was just heartbreaking. It was so heartbreaking. And I was sobbing, and my friend came up to me, and she and her husband just had a peace about them that just did not make any sense. It was so baffling to me. I kept thinking, like, “If my son died, I would jump off a cliff. How can they have this?” And of course they were grieving and mourning, but they just had this peace that was just befuddling to me. And I remember that really started me wondering.

And a few months after that, she and I had emailed back and forth here and there, and she told me that a hymn that had really been sustaining her and her husband was and she shared with me the story of the man who wrote that, who, of course, lost his entire family at sea, with the exception of his wife, I believe. And I put that song on a playlist on Spotify, and one day, it was springtime, and my children and I were out on our front porch, and I put that playlist on, and “It is Well with My Soul” came on.

And it’s interesting because, up to that point, you know, the music was just background music. I wasn’t actually listening to it, but when that song came on, I feel like the Holy Spirit just grabbed me and made me listen. And tears just started pouring down my face, and I realized… Sorry, I still get emotional about it. I understood what Jesus did for me, and I understood… I feel like I had really just come to my breaking point of feeling like none of these self-salvation things work. I cannot make myself any better of a person by going to yoga three times a week. I cannot make myself any better of a person by meditating. I can’t make myself any better… I had an icon of the goddess Kali, and, like, I can’t make myself any better of a person through any of this. And I had just really come to a breaking point. The verse that I always think of is Paul, in I think it’s Romans 8, he said, “Oh, wretched man that I am.

Yes.

Yeah. And I just… And that night, when my husband got home from work, I said, “We need to throw away all of this.” We had a little Ganesh icon, which is a Hindu elephant god. We had a little Buddha icon. And we had all kinds of New Age books and drug books and certainly the icon of the goddess Kali, I was like, “This all needs to go,” and he, at that time, had actually been really interested in Orthodox Christianity and the early church, and I was very, very resistant to it. I was like, “I don’t want anything to do with Jesus. I don’t care. I don’t want anything to do with that,” and so when he got home and I said that, he said, “Yes, you’re right. This all needs to go.” And so we just filled up a trash bag, and we talked about it, and I think neither of us fully understood everything. We still had a lot of questions.

Well I should say another thing that was happening at that time—it was just an intersection of so many things that God orchestrated. Which was just down the street from us, just a few blocks down, and I had said, “No, I’m not interested. I’m not going to a church,” and so he would go by himself, and he would take our son, and so I went a few times. I agreed finally to go with him, I think, when I was eight months’ pregnant with our daughter, and I remember, but I just remember sobbing, and we sat near the back in a pew, and I just remember sobbing during the worship segment, just sobbing, and so all these things together, I just began to think, “Okay, maybe there’s a lot more to this Jesus person than I ever dreamed or imagined.”

Yeah. So you actually did start going to church, and you became open to who this person of Jesus was.

Yes.

And what did you find out?

So I feel so blessed. It was a really wonderful church community, and they were really nonreactionary when it came to some of the things that I would say or some of the questions that I would ask people. They were just a very gentle, loving, Christlike community. And I think it was—initially for me it was definitely an emotional surrender to my need for a Savior, to the person of Jesus Christ. I just felt so emotionally drawn to Him. And then I feel like the intellectual confirmation kind of came afterwards and came slowly. I started reading the Bible, first of all, which was difficult at first. I just felt like there was a lot I didn’t understand. Despite my having something of a childhood foundation in Christianity, I just had no knowledge at all. I didn’t know who Paul was. I felt like I was starting over completely because I felt like the scales had fallen from my eyes, whereas I felt like before I was just blinded. Nothing got in. Nothing penetrated my heart or my soul. And this time it was just fascinating to read what was actually in the Bible. This book that I had just dismissed out of hand as anti-intellectual and regressive my whole life, to read what was actually in there and to read the words of Jesus and just feel so pierced by them. And just so fascinated by Him. He’s so fascinating. Endlessly fascinating. So yeah.

Just for those who are listening. To understand what you mean by emotional surrender to Jesus, you spoke of the self-salvation philosophies, but somehow when you say you surrender to Jesus, I presume you mean that in a sense of salvation or saving.

Yes.

What would that look like for someone who really doesn’t understand what you mean by that?

Okay, yeah. Let me think about that. I think I realized how miserable and wretched I was. I realized that I was desperate and I needed forgiveness and I wasn’t a wonderful person and I wasn’t full of love and light, like all the New Age platitudes said. I wasn’t completely whole already. That was a big thing, too, in New Age, that you’re already whole and you’re already complete, and you just need to realize it. You just need to be enlightened, and so I think I surrendered to my own sinfulness and my own wretchedness, and in that, discovered how desperately I needed and wanted a savior. And also I think, like I said, that point on the porch of understanding what Jesus did for me and understanding why it had to be that way and why it was necessary and just being so overwhelmed with… Gratitude seems like an inadequate word for what Jesus did for us. But it’s the only word I can think of at the moment. But just being overwhelmed with gratitude and love, and like I said, just being pierced by the idea of Him being pierced for me. It was just so… The magnitude of it was so overwhelming, so overwhelming.

So all of the, I guess, again, just in very simple terms, then that all of the inadequacy and the lack you felt in yourself, He, Jesus took on for you?

Yes.

You know, you said He was pierced for you. I presume you mean a reference to the cross on which He died so that all of those inadequacies and the lack of wholeness and the dirtiness you felt and all of that, He took all of that on Himself, and then He gives you His forgiveness and His righteousness in exchange, is that-

Yeah, absolutely.

Is that what you mean by that?

Absolutely. Absolutely. Yes. Yes.

Yeah. So it was something, coming to the end of yourself and saying, “I can’t, but You can.”

Yeah.

“I cannot do this for myself, but what You’ve done for me is what makes me whole,” I guess and clean and forgiven and given life in exchange.

Yes, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.

Go ahead.

Yeah. Even understanding the fullness. I feel like I had an emotional understanding at that point of what He did for me, but understanding the fullness of salvation and exactly what He did for me and that He made me completely clean and that He gave me eternal life and that… yeah, and that He clothes me with his righteousness and my life is hid with Christ in God. That’s a verse I love, and I’ve been thinking a lot lately. I’m completely safe in Him forever because of what He did.

And just the reality of… I think, at the beginning, my husband and I both kind of tried to… My husband was ahead of me at that time, you know? As far as his interest in Christianity, but we both kind of tried to come at it impersonally, like this is yet another belief system that we are going to sample and try out and see what works for us and see what doesn’t. And I think there was also a profound moment for me of realizing this isn’t just another in my grab bag of philosophies and religions and belief systems. This is the ground of reality. And this makes a claim on me. Christianity is not subject to me. I am subject to Jesus, and what Jesus did demands a response. I have to decide. And that was really a profound moment and humbling moment for me as well.

Yes. To make the statement that this is the ground of all reality, that Jesus is the ground, that’s a pretty profound philosophical statement about what is true about what we know and what we experience in the world, as well as in ourselves. And that is also quite an intellectual statement. So I’m presuming from what you’re saying there that you read the Bible, you understood more as the scales fell off, and you understood the grandness of the narrative and that it really is something so much bigger than you and that you are not God, right?

Yeah.

There is a God, and it’s not you.

Right.

But that there’s a grand narrative to reality. I wonder did you ground this understanding that Jesus Christ and God are the ground of all reality, did you get that only through reading the Bible? Or just as you read those intellectual atheists and other books, did you read any apologetics or anything that helped you form this understanding of the grandness of this worldview?

Yeah, for sure, and I think I probably heard that in a sermon at some point. And I really would tie it to the beginning of the Gospel of John, like, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God. The Word was God. Through Him, all things were made,” and I think there’s also a verse in Colossians that’s one of my favorites, and I’m probably going to be paraphrasing here. I should just memorize it. But I’ll say the clause in the middle of the sentence. He’s talking about Jesus, of course, and he says, “in whom all the treasures and mysteries of knowledge are hidden,” and I remember that really striking me, like, “Wow! Jesus is it!” And things that were really… I’m trying to think of what was really seminal for me. Certainly just reading the Bible was a big deal to me. Also Timothy Keller is someone that I really love, and he does some apologetics, and so I think reading him and realizing, “Oh, I always thought my atheist mindset was just kind of the default mindset,” and realizing, “Oh, I’ve actually been formed in such a way that this is how I think.”

Oh, and another author that I really love and one of his books was huge for me, Lesslie Newbigin. He was a missiologist and a theologian, and he was a missionary in India for many years, so he was very acquainted with Eastern ways of thinking, with Eastern religions, Eastern mysticism, so it was really invigorating for me to read his work, and one of his books, called Proper Confidence, was really huge for me. He just talks a lot about how every worldview is based in faith. Like the scientific worldview is based in faith because it’s based upon this foundation that the world is knowable. It’s based upon centuries of scientific exploration and assuming that we’re looking at the right places and we’re asking the right questions, so that is very much an article of faith. And so that really helped me to understand these ways of thinking that I had thought were just rational ways of thinking were also, in fact, articles of faith. So that was really big for me.

Right. So it sounds as if, Ashley, that you have—even by the language that you’re using and the things that you’re saying, that you have encountered a tremendous life change associated with your conversion to Jesus. Can you tell us about how your life has changed? I mean, you’ve been through a lot in your life, and you went through a lot of, not only difficult circumstances but a lot of despair and lack of meaning and that was your biggest fear, right? That nothing had meaning. So how would you say that your life has changed, especially with regard to those big questions of meaning and purpose and truth and knowledge and those things?

Oh, I mean profoundly. Night and day. I can look back and see that didn’t have hope before. Like I said when I was younger and I would have a crisis, there was no recourse. There was no help. And I have hope now. And I know that Jesus never leaves me. He never forsakes me. He promised. And I went through a really difficult period of loss several years ago. My sister and my dad both died within eight months of each other, and I look back and think—and my sister’s death was very sudden and unexpected. And I just clung to Jesus. And I remember thinking… I remember talking with my mom afterward, when the smoke had cleared a little, because of course my mom was going through all this profound loss as well, and we have talked a lot about it since, but I said, “Can you imagine if this had happened before I was a believer,” and she said, “Oh, I have thanked God in prayer that you were a believer,” because I don’t know what I would’ve done. I don’t know how I would have grappled with death. Like I said, that’s why, when I was young, I don’t think I actually thought things through to their logical conclusion, because if asked, I would have said, “Oh, death is the end. There’s nothing beyond that. I don’t care.” I would have had a very laissez-faire attitude about it, but I can’t imagine losing someone I love and genuinely holding to that belief.

So my faith in Jesus gave me so much hope during that time, and I felt His presence so closely, and actually have some really beautiful testimonies from that time, but that’s another story. But yeah, I have hope. And I can see now, too, that God has enabled me to truly love people. Not perfectly, obviously, but

That’s really beautiful. That’s really, really beautiful. As we’re coming to a close here and just thinking about all of those who are listening, who may have pushed away God just like you, thinking it was just not intellectually tenable, for whatever reason, emotionally or intellectually, what would you say to someone who may have found that moment of openness like you did, like perhaps there’s more. What would you say to someone like that, who might be actually looking or open?

Yeah. I would say listen to that. It’s really scary to step into that. I think I had so much resistance. And I was scared. I mean, I think sometimes we need to have a fearful experience of God. Like Hebrews said, it’s a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. It’s also a very wonderful thing. But there was and I would say also examine your assumptions because I think a lot of what people think are default modes of thinking or are just rational modes of thinking have, in fact, been shaped by their education, by their life circumstances. So yeah. But I would say… it would be hard for me just to not say, like, “Please. Jesus is so wonderful! Believe me,” and grab someone by the lapels. I don’t do that in real life, but sometimes I feel like it. But yeah, yeah. I think that’s what I would say.

Yeah. Jesus is so wonderful! Give Him a chance, right?

Yes.

Give Him a chance. Just really consider it.

Yes.

Especially, like you said… I’ve spoken with a lot of people who actually, as you did, started reading the Bible for the first time and were just overwhelmed with the person of Jesus that they actually found in scripture. It wasn’t a caricaturing of who they thought He was. It was actually the profound love and authority and compassion and the strength and just so many things that are hard to put words on.

Yeah.

But actually looking into it and reading it for yourself and reading about the person of Jesus and actually seeing Him for Who He reveals Himself to be is worth it. Yeah. So now, on the other side of things, as a Christian, you’re obviously passionate about your faith. You obviously want other people to believe. Sometimes, we as Christians… I’m impressed with your friend, Carrie, and how she painted an embodied picture of Christianity that was so enticing and filled with peace, even at her daughter’s passing. Being selfless at that moment where she should have been the one receiving. I mean, those are really amazing ways of seeing an embodied Christianity, which oftentimes people don’t see or experience. But I appreciate your bringing her into your story. I wonder if her influence on you has anything to do with what you would tell Christians in terms of how we can best demonstrate Christ and engage with those who really don’t know how wonderful Jesus is.

Yes, yeah, I absolutely think so, and like I said, she has just such about her, anyway, but I think… just how she would. She would not be reactionary, but she would So yeah, that made a huge impression on me obviously. She was really instrumental in me becoming a Christian. So yeah.

Yeah. What a beautiful example. We can all learn from Carrie. So thank you, Carrie.

Yes.

Thank you so much, Ashley, for telling your story today. It has so many twists and turns and in unexpected ways. I appreciate your transparency and your boldness, your vulnerability in the way that you actually portrayed your life in an extremely vulnerable way.

Yeah. I so deeply appreciate being given the chance to speak about it and to speak about Jesus and how He’s changed my life. I really appreciate it.

Wonderful! I do hope that many people listening to this will come to find out more, not only about Jesus but about you, and go to your website and see the beautiful art and artist that you are and your wonderful writings and blogs and just learn more about your chickens.

Thank you. Yes.

Thank you again, Ashley.

Thank you so very much.

Believing that science provided better answers than religion, and faced with the problem of evil in the world, Erik viewed Christianity as just a pleasant myth. But after becoming dissatisfied with his conclusions, his search for meaning led him to affirm the truth and reliability of the Christian faith.

If you’d like to know more about Erik or his apologetics work, you can follow him on:

Erik mentioned these resources on the podcast:

Episode Transcript

Hello, and thanks for joining me today. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to the Side B Podcast, where we listen to the other side. We all want to make sense of the world around us, of the world within us. We want our lives to mean something, to be going somewhere. We want our lives to be valuable and satisfying. When life doesn’t seem to offer that and we don’t know where to find it, it can leave us feeling a bit confused and conflicted, wondering if there’s anything more to life than we know or experience. Is this all there is?

This existential dissatisfaction can prompt a thinking person to reconsider where they are and who they are in life. It can cause them to take a closer look at their own beliefs, because ideas have consequences. They affect not only the way we think but also the way we live, and even whether life is worth living at all.  Cognitive or emotional dissidence, while sometimes uncomfortable, can become unlivable. This tension can spark a desire to search for truth that brings real meaning and satisfaction to life, that helps us make sense of the world, of others, and of ourselves. That’s the story we’ll be listening to today, but it also rings true for many stories, perhaps for your story, for we all want to make sense of our lives to find out what, at times, seems so illusive.

So I hope you’ll enjoy listening to Erik Manning. He’s a former atheist who’s been down this path but finally found what he had been looking for in the place he had been avoiding for a very long time. Hello, Erik, and welcome to the Side B Podcast.

Yeah. Thank you so much for having me.

Erik, as we’re getting started, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself, where you’re from, what you do, where you live perhaps?

Sure. My name is Erik Manning, and I am a freelance website designer. I also have a website, IsJesusAlive.com, which is like a blog dedicated to providing information about the Christian worldview and mostly historical apologetics, like reasons to believe that the New Testament is historically reliable.

That sounds very interesting, and obviously you’ve come a long way from atheism, so I’ll be interested to hear more about that as we go, now that you have, it sounds like, kind of a public apologetics ministry. That’s really fascinating. So let’s go to the flip side of that, and I want to hear the beginning of your story. Because you weren’t always into a apologetics or Christianity. You were more along the atheistic understanding of life and worldview. So tell me how your story towards atheism started. Take me back to where you grew up, perhaps your family, and any view of God there.

Sure. Well, I was raised in the Roman Catholic Church, actually, until I was about seven or eight years old. I went to catholic school. My father actually taught at a catholic school. My grandparents were very heavily into Catholicism and made sure that they took us to Mass every Sunday, and I even had my First Communion. And then we moved away. They lived in Michigan, and we ended up moving to St. Louis. My parents took jobs there. And my parents… Well, my grandparents were very religious. My parents weren’t really as religious at all, and my dad was kind of more agnostic, I would say, and even had some kind of hostility towards God. He’s not that way now. He has become a Christian since then. And then my mom was just very—oh, I don’t know. She just kind of thought that there was many ways to God and kind of relativistic as far as religion goes, and so, once we moved away to St. Louis, we barely kept up with our church attendance at all, and so it just wasn’t something that they were any longer interested in. As a child, I remember at times praying and talking to God. I wasn’t closed off to God.

But things really changed as I became a teenager, and so what happened is I just started to observe the world around me a little bit. My parents were into alcohol, and that kind of made things rough growing up, and then a lot of my friends also came from pretty broken homes as well. A lot of single-parent homes. Around this time in St. Louis, there was a huge flood that got a lot of national attention, and so you see these disasters and then—you just look at the history of the world and all these wars and pain and suffering and looking at my own life and my friends’ lives and just seeing all this pain and suffering, and that’s when I began to become very skeptical of God and religion. And along the way, too, I mean you’re going to school and you are hearing things about like Neo-Darwinism, and that seemed to explain human origins to me a little bit better than a couple in a garden talking to a snake or something like that. I remember reading those stories as a kid and then hearing these things in my science class, and I’m not saying they had some sort of anti-God agenda by teaching me that, but it just brought me to a conclusion that maybe science has better answers than religion and also if God exists—it’s just kind of the typical problem of evil. How could He allow all of these things to happen, so He just probably doesn’t exist, and so that’s how I eventually became an atheist.

So just a combination of a lot of different things, the observation of the world around you, inside of you, just things seemed to be rather broken, plus science had a better explanation.

Right.

So you had had some kind of positive experiences of God as a child, but that obviously faded away as these doubts arose and you became kind of, I guess, more informed in terms of things of the world and things in education, and it just didn’t seem convincing to you anymore. So I just wonder, even as a teenager, as you were drifting away from “the God thing,” in your mind, what was belief in God or Christianity or religion—what was that to you? Was it some kind of a fairy tale or mythology?

Yeah. I would say so. It just seemed to me like it was like a pleasant myth that people wanted to believe, maybe really wished very strongly to believe, but to me, it just seemed like those people were just kind of blinded and duped and deceived, and if they really were as thoughtful as other people, they would’ve obviously realized this. And so that’s just basically how I viewed Christians and Christianity. I didn’t really have a whole lot of interaction with too many Christians. I’ve had, like, a friend across the street from me that invited me to a church lock-in one time, but it didn’t really make much of a difference to me. I was probably there more for games and free food.

Yeah.

So this was just at a younger age. This was around 14, 15 years old or so. And so there was that. I just kind of thought that these people were, like I said, just wanted to believe something to maybe give them hope or feel better about their lives or feel comforted, but I didn’t think that it had any sort of basis whatsoever, and I just kind of thought that they were just going by what everybody else had taught and just didn’t really think these things through for themselves.

I’m curious. As you, again, were becoming more and more skeptical of belief in God and Christianity, did you ever ask any questions to any kind of church leader or any other Christian that you knew of, how they could perhaps answer questions about the relationship of science and belief in God?

No.

How would they… No?

Yeah, no. I just… I never sought anybody out to ask the questions. It’s strange because a lot of times people become an atheist or a Christian because somebody really reached out to them one way or the other and tried to persuade them. In my case, I just mostly… I was just, on my own, thinking through these things, I guess. Of course, as I became a Christian, I wouldn’t at all downplay the role of the Holy Spirit. Without Him, I’d definitely wouldn’t have changed my mind, but I was just really on my own. I didn’t really know who I could ask questions to. I didn’t really know who I could even really reach out to, and no Christians, aside from, like I said, a friend who invited me to church, really reached out to me a whole lot. Or even tried to talk to me about these things.

So as you were shedding, I guess, the superstition and the delusion of Christianity behind and you took God off the table, as it were, did you understand or really think about what you were embracing, in terms of a naturalistic, atheistic worldview and all the implications of that?

Yeah. I would say so. As an atheist, I thought right and wrong couldn’t possibly exist. I was very morally nihilistic. Because if there is no God, I just believed that there was no real basis for morality. And there was no point of just being moral for the sake of convention. I would just act in pretty much whatever way served my best interest at the moment. Not that I wanted to be the worst person in the world, but I just had a very kind of grim outlook on life. I got involved a lot into drugs and different things like that. I got into a crowd of people that were not necessarily a great group of people. A lot of high school drop-outs, a lot of people that lived out of kind of like a low-income housing project that were involved in some things that weren’t necessarily great. Although I never got really involved into all of the things that they got involved in, I very much could have gone down a path that they did. A lot of these kids that I knew, these friends of mine, got arrested, ended up in juvenile hall. One of the guys that I’m friends with out of this group just got out of prison not that long ago.

Oh, okay.

Yeah. And so just running around with a group of people that weren’t necessarily the best influence on me. And like I said, I wasn’t trying to necessarily be the worst person in the world, but I just figured right and wrong are just a matter of convention, and so if lying here might benefit me or not hurt somebody else’s feelings, there’s nothing objectively wrong with that. And I just felt like life was very meaningless. It was kind of pointless and depressing, and I think that’s probably where some of the drugs and distractions of hanging around with the wrong people came from. And so yeah it was just a pretty grim outlook. And it was really hard to be consistent with that, because one moment you’re saying, “There’s no real right and wrong,” but the next minute, if somebody wrongs you, you’re like, “Hey! Something bad has happened. There’s been an injustice,” you know? And it’s like, “Okay, well where does that idea come from?” It’s hard to be consistent and just go, “Well, I guess that’s just my feelings,” and so… yeah.

Just a lot of involvement in some of the wrong things, and again, I don’t think that everybody who is an atheist and is even a moral nihilist is going to go that route. It’s just the route that I ended up drifting off to, but I think part of that, too, just came from being in a home that wasn’t the most secure and searching for acceptance and belonging in the wrong kind of group.

So that inconsistency that you’re describing, that sensibility that you know in your own worldview you don’t have perhaps grounding for moral facts or why you’re sensing that something is really right or wrong, but yet you know that that seems to be an inherent part of the way you think and act, and so I wonder: Did that inconsistency cause any dissonance in you? I mean, was it something that was disturbing enough for you to resolve? Or was it just something that you kind of lived with?

It was mostly something that I kind of lived with. And maybe I didn’t always see that inconsistency, but it was kind of like a stone in my shoe at times, because it just didn’t seem to jive with the way reality really is. And so that was a problem. I would say that the other things that caused me to reconsider was, while I couldn’t understand maybe where humans came from—and I told you that science seemed to tell us origins of people and all the life that we see, seemed to explain that. It was kind of hard to explain, you know, “Where did the universe come from? How is it just here for no reason at all and completely un-caused and have this appearance of beauty and even purpose and design. How are all of my intuitions about all of these things, and everybody else’s intuitions about these things, seemingly wrong? It just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

And so these things started to bother me, and eventually, I sort of became more like an agnostic, I guess, but I would lean towards maybe deism. I thought, “Well, maybe God created the universe, but He’s not really involved. He’s not really active in the universe.” And so I began to become open.

And then there was also the fact that there were kids I went to school with that were involved with an accident and had died at like 16 years old. They were just at work, and I think there were some downed power lines, and something tragic happened there. I had another friend who was just in the wrong place in the city, in St. Louis, and was—well, I’d call him more of an acquaintance, I guess, than a friend, but he got shot. A classmate. And so I started to think about mortality, and is there life after death, and if there is possibly a God, then life after death isn’t something that would be implausible, and it would be something absolutely desirable. And so this caused me to become a little bit more open. And so I would say I would’ve leaned towards a deism, but even then, that didn’t make a lot of sense to me, either. Because if God just created the world and gave us these moral intuitions, why doesn’t He do more? Why doesn’t He step and at least say hello?

So that’s when I became a little bit more open to the possibility that maybe there could be some kind of a religion that could be true.

So I’m just curious in terms of the timeline how long you lived in an atheistic worldview and then moved towards being a little skeptical of your own skepticism. Did that turn around in short order? Or was that a prolonged process?

It was a couple of years. And so I think I spent a lot of that time just not even thinking about it, just being busy doing the dumb and irresponsible things I was probably into. And then just as time went on, I just felt very dissatisfied with that. And just began to reconsider these questions. As I was nearing the end of high school, I started thinking like—you know how it is. You just start to think, “What am I going to do with my life? What am I going to do after I get out of school?” And just seeing, again, these broken homes around me and seeing my parents and my friends’ parents just living kind of boring, miserable, mundane lives that they feel like they have to kind of self medicate themselves with alcohol and things like that. I just was like, “I don’t want life to be like that.” And just so many people, they get up, they go to work, and they put food on the table, and they entertain themselves and maybe go on vacation and then hope to retire. And I just thought, “I don’t want my life to be like that. I don’t want to live a boring life like that. I hope that there’s more meaning than this,” and I don’t think that you’re going to find meaning in some of these other ways that other people try to find meaning, maybe through fame or some sort of popularity, or different things like that, and so just seeing the meaninglessness of life and the absurdity of life just made me kind of hungry and hoping that there was at least more.

So obviously you were then more open towards considering another perspective. So when you became open, did you start looking at God in a Christian sense because that was your childhood reference, in a sense?

I had hoped Christianity wasn’t true.

Oh, okay.

So I wanted there to be something else besides Christianity to be true, and so I didn’t start there. It sounds funny, but I actually started with Islam a little bit. And this sounds kind of immature and silly, but Spike Lee’s Malcolm X movie was very popular at that time, and I didn’t really… At first it seemed like it was all this racial stuff, but towards the end of the movie, he made his pilgrimage to Mecca, and he had kind of an enlightenment experience about things, and I don’t know, that just sort of stuck out to me. And I know it sounds maybe kind of immature, but it was impactful to me, and so… Now, I’m going to tell my age a little bit. I’m 41, so at that time I couldn’t just go to Google and start researching Islam or other religions, and so I had to go to the library, and I would look at… And my dad had a book on Islam. And so I would read some of that, and I would try and study it, and I just didn’t get very far before I realized that this just didn’t have the ring of truth, and it just seemed a little archaic and odd and strange, and I’m sure if I kept reading I would’ve found some of the troubling passages that seem to incite violence, and there’s just a lot of inconsistencies with Islam. But anyway, I didn’t really get that far. I just got far enough to realize, like, “I don’t think this appeals to me very much, and I’m going to at least put it on the shelf for now and look at something else.”

And so then I started looking at non-canonical Christian scriptures, from the library, just wondering if maybe some sort of off brand of Christianity could possibly be true, which, again, I was just a 17-year-old kid. I didn’t know a whole lot. Nobody had taught me these things. But I tried to read through that, and that stuff was just woo woo. I mean it just didn’t seem to be very historical or interesting to me at all. And so I remembered that my grandma, when I had my First Communion, she gave me a Bible. And it was buried in our basement after 10 years of it probably sitting there, and I went and I dug it up, and thankfully I was able to find it, and I just started reading the Bible. I started reading the Bible almost every day after school. I mean I still was involved in some goofy stuff with my friends, but I probably would read the Bible sometimes several hours a day.

Oh, my!

And so I just was interested and hoped that maybe there were answers there, and I just wanted to at least give it the time of day before I made a decision.

So again, I’m just curious. In your life, you were reading the Bible, and you were reading these stories in the Bible, but there was no one in your life that really embodied Christianity in the way it was being lived out? That you could read the Bible and go, “Oh, yeah. I see. I know a person like that who calls themself a Christian who actually adheres to or believes in what I’m reading in the scripture.”

There was finally one person that I also helped maybe to become a little bit more open. And he was my favorite teacher. I always—no matter how my grades were in school, history was always something that I just loved and enjoyed. And that’s probably why I do have so much of a focus on historical apologetics in the New Testament. I’ve always just been drawn to history. And I had a teacher, Mr. [Hollam 24:58], which one of these days I need to reach out to him and thank him, but he was a Nazarene man. His dad was a pastor, and he would talk about his personal life and just tell stories. Somehow it would mix in through sociology class or history class or something. And he was just a really down to earth guy. He was funny. He was extremely kind, extremely nice. If I needed mercy for some reason. Maybe I forgot a homework assignment. He was always merciful. He was also very intelligent, and I just thought, “Well, he’s an intelligent guy, and so if he believes this stuff, then maybe it isn’t just for the unthinking, unwashed masses. Maybe there is something to this.” And so I think he was a real light to me, and I’m very grateful for the influence that he had on me.

It sounds like he really did have an impact on your life in terms of creating an openness towards the Bible. Especially if he taught history and you were interested in history. And I’m curious: As you were beginning to read the Bible, considering you had read these other religious texts. I know that the Bible has different kinds of literary genre in it, but did you find a sense of history or historical reality in what you were reading?

Well, that was part of my problem, at first at least, but yes eventually I did. The problem that I had when I would read the Bible is the miracles. Because I had never experienced a miracle. I had never seen a miracle. I didn’t know anybody else, at least in my circle of influence or friends, that had ever experienced a miracle, that I knew about, at least, and so when I would read the stories in the gospels about Jesus healing people or feeding 5,000 people with five loaves and two fish, I thought, “Well, what kind of a weird story is this?” I’m reading the Sermon on the Mount, and I think, “These are really profound ethical teachings that are just very interesting and very fascinating, and something that I would imagine would be something I should try and strive to live my life after,” but then I’d get to the miracle stories, and I thought, “Well, is there a lesson that’s trying to be taught here? What is going on?” And no, they were actually trying to give us historical reports, and I just thought, “Well, these have to be legends or these just have to be some sort of weird lessons that I’m not understanding,” but when you read the healing narratives or the miracle narratives, they just read like, “This is what happened, and we’re not embarrassed to say it.”

And so those would trouble me. Those would kind of stick out to me, and I just had a hard time dismissing those. Eventually I’m sure I came to Paul’s writings where he talks about resurrection appearances, and the way that he reported those, as if like, “Yes, these really happened,” and I thought, “Well, that’s a bit strange.” And then, reading 1 John, the first few verses in the First Epistle of John, where he talks about that which we’ve seen and handled with our own hands, and I just thought, “Okay, well this is a supernatural Jesus from start to finish. There is no really watering this down, and so I have to come to these claims that this is really what they believed,” and I couldn’t just dismiss it.

So then I guess it wasn’t off-putting enough or too uncomfortable that you didn’t continue to read, actually. So what was compelling you to read, despite the fact that you were, in some ways, pushing against it intellectually?

Well, I would read the Psalms, and I really would see David’s fearlessness towards death. He would say things like, “The Lord is my light and my salvation. Of whom shall I fear?” and again I had that fear of death that I think every human being, whether they’d like to admit it or not, it does drive them, and I just thought, “Well, that’s really awesome, how he’s just so bold and unafraid,” and that really would stick out to me. I thought the practical wisdom of the proverbs were very interesting to me. It was a lot of the moral teaching that actually really stuck out to me. Like I said, reading the Sermon on the Mount. It’s just like, “Well, whoever this Jesus guy is, one thing I can’t really say is that he’s not a very strong moral teacher,” you know? And so I just thought his personality and what he taught was very interesting, even though there were some times there would be uncomfortable sayings that I didn’t always fully understand.

I would read occasionally the epistles, and sometimes I wouldn’t understand it, sometimes I would, but the teaching on love and different things like that. It just seemed to me like, “This is a very high ethical way to live, which is very different than what I have been living,” and it just felt like a meaningful way to live. And so there were existential reasons that I was really drawn to it. Even though my head was bucking against all the miracle stuff. And I also read Ecclesiastes, and when he’s talking about “meaningless, meaningless, everything is meaningless,” I’m like, “Yeah. I can resonate with that, Buddy.”

Yeah! Yeah.

And so that really stuck out to me. But at the end, he concludes that, like, “Hey, fear God and keep his commandments, and this is what’s important and what every man ought to do,” and I’m like, “Well, even he’s concluding that this is the way to live after all of that ranting about there is nothing new under the sun and it’s all vain and meaningless. And so those things kept me hooked, I would say, enough to keep looking. At least hoping that it could possibly be true, and so yeah, I would say that my feelings changed from being hostile to at least sort of hoping that it was true, even though I knew I’d really have to radically change my life, and I think doing that was still a bit scary to me.

I’m sure. I’m sure. Because when you believe the claims of the Bible as true, there are, in a sense… There’s a certain demand on your life if you accept that truth. So there was something attractive about a life that you found there. Morally, ethically, existentially, it provided a lot of meaning. That there would be no fear of death. All of those things were seemingly attractive to you. So what happened from there? How did you resolve this intellectual kind of existential tension that was going on?

Yeah. Well, as I said, it did seem like they were really reporting genuine miracles, and so, even though I didn’t understand them, I thought, “Well, they at least believe they’re giving historical accounts,” and one day I did get to 1 John, and it just stuck out to me, and I thought, “Well, I’m going to read this.”

Well, let me back up real quick. Before I say that, one thing that also kept me going—and this is kind of a side journey, and then I’ll answer your question. I was working. I worked at a restaurant, and somebody handed me a little bag with some Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, which is still my favorite candy to this day. I could probably live off of a diet of peanut butter if I had to, but anyway, in that, there was a little gospel tract by Billy Graham. That was the very first time that I heard the Gospel presented, a message of… Man is sinful, that we’ve all fallen short of the glory of God, that God so loved the world that He gave His son, so that, if we believe in Him, we could have everlasting life, that He solves the sin problem, that He reconciles us to God, and even though I didn’t believe it or accept it at that point, it was the first time where I was like, “Oh, I actually understand the logic of the Gospel.” Finally. Even though I went to Catholic school for however long. And I’m not badmouthing Catholics whatsoever, but I’m just saying I was a kid, and I probably just didn’t remember. But that was the first time I really heard it. And that was my bookmark. That tract became my bookmark in my Bible.

But for whatever reason, I kept reading, and after months and months and months, I started to really read the First Epistle of John, and I got to the part where he says, “Do not love the world. All the things in the world, the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh, the pride of life, those things will pass away.” But he who lives for God, basically, who does the will of the Lord, shall live forever. And I don’t know why, but that just really hit me like a ton of bricks, and I just thought about, “I have loved the world. I have just kind of lived for the pride of life and the lust of the flesh and all of this stuff,” and as I read it, there was this Presence in the room, and at first I was like, “What is going on? It feels like there is somebody else in this room with me,” and it just felt very palpable and really hard to deny, and it was very, very overwhelming. And I was kind of nervous and kind of scared, and I thought, like, “Am I delusional or something?” and as I was sitting there thinking about it, I’m like, “This is God. I have prayed along this time and said, ‘God, if You’re real, I’m open. You can show me.'” And this overwhelming sense of God was suddenly in my room.

And I don’t remember what I said. All I know is I got down on my knees because I was raised Catholic, and that’s the position you pray in, I guess. But I got down on my knees, and I just—I don’t know what I said, but I repented and believed, and I just felt this huge weight lift off me, and I was just surrounded in this bubble of peace and joy, and I just knew I had been accepted and that God loves me, and I have this surreal peace, and it was just very overwhelming almost and hard to deny, and so I guess a lot of people would just call this a religious experience.

And so that just kind of overwhelmed my sense of doubt because it was like, “I don’t believe in miracles,” and I know this wouldn’t qualify as a miracle. I didn’t see water get turned into wine or something, but it was just this palpable sense of the presence of God that just pushed me over the edge, and that’s how I became a Christian.

So you believed that God was real and that He wasn’t hidden, that He was actually in your room.

Yeah. Absolutely. And it was just really, like I said, just so hard to deny, and so this experience was just overwhelming, and so yeah. It just kind of overcame whatever objections that I may have had in my head. Not to say that I haven’t taken the time since to look at those things and find answers for those things, but for where I was at at the time, as an almost 18-year-old kid, that was definitely enough for me at that moment.

Wow! That sounds like an amazing experience. So convincing for you at that moment. I’m impressed, too, by the reality that you actually prayed to God that you were open and for Him to show you, and I guess He answered that prayer.

Yeah. Absolutely.

So then you considered yourself a Christian after that point. And you went on to, I guess in some ways, resolve those preexisting intellectual doubts. What did you do with miracles? I guess after you experienced the reality of the presence of God, perhaps the reality or the possibility of miracles becomes possible, I guess.

Well, yeah. If God does exist, and He wants to reveal himself in a way that would be unmistakable, or just reach out and help somebody, then miracles would absolutely be possible. Yeah. That was basically my line of thinking. It was like, “Well, if He wants to reveal Himself, who am I to tell Him what he can and can’t do?” And even those problems of evil that kind of stuck out to me before, I just thought, “Well, He would definitely be in a better position than I am. Epistemically, there’s a pretty big distance between me and God.”

And so I think the problem of evil got resolved for me that way, and then just realizing, well, if God does exist and he created the universe, then Him healing somebody or raising Lazarus from the dead or being resurrected himself just doesn’t seem like it’s all that far fetched now.

So you were also then able to integrate your understanding of science and your belief in God? That those two things weren’t necessarily opposed to each other but actually perhaps complementary?

That happened much later down the road. I was trying to talk to a couple of people that I worked with. This was, oh, I don’t know, maybe 15 years later, and so I had been to Bible school since then. To me, the evidence for God that I had, at least at that moment, was I’ve had other experiences with God or maybe I felt like He has led me down certain paths and helped me make certain decisions in life or answered certain prayers, and so I felt like that was enough evidence for me at that particular time, but I was at work with a couple of skeptical friends, and somehow the subject got turned to religion, and I started to kind of share with them, because I thought, “Okay, well here’s a good opportunity to maybe be a witness.” And they just shot me down. One of the guys was very educated. He was very much into science and engineering and all kinds of different things like that. That was his jam. That’s what he did in his spare time was just learn more about science and physics and all of this other kind of stuff, and he just shot me down, said the Bible was totally incompatible, and that really pushed me into apologetics. I just felt really like I had failed.

And so I began to search on YouTube and through Google and all these different things, and I came across ministries like Reasonable Faith and William Lane Craig, and I came across other ministries that seemed to be able to help me resolve these issues, and I began to see that really good science leads us to understand that God is the best explanation for the origin of the universe or the appearance of design in the universe. And I was able to share some of these things with them, and I was surprised. He kind of became open to the idea of intelligent design, and so I don’t know if he had already seen some of these things and was already becoming open previous, but that was something that helped me resolve some of those tensions for sure, and if anything, it just really strengthened my faith, but because I’ve always been really drawn to history, I also started looking at a lot of the historical stuff, particularly the resurrection. I think the very first time I heard Gary Habermas give a presentation on the resurrection on YouTube, I was just enthralled. And I just thought, “Wow! I believed in the resurrection, but I didn’t understand that there was so much good historical evidence to back up my belief in the resurrection,” and it just kind of married an interest of mine to my faith, and from there, I just really started digging into that kind of thing.

So you developed, I guess, what you would call a much more integrated understanding of reality, whereas as an atheist, there were certain things that you couldn’t make sense of in your world, in your worldview, but it sounds like, as a Christian, you were able to pull all the parts together, whether it’s the way you live existentially, the way you think about history and science, the big questions, the big questions of the origin of the universe, the design, and even the resurrection, which a lot of people would probably think you just believe that on faith, but no, there’s actually historical grounding for that. That must be, in a sense, very intellectually satisfying, as well as existentially satisfying, that all of these parts come together.

Yeah. For me, it was like just this extra… What’s the word that I’m looking for? Just another kind of peg in the stool to help support what I had already believed, and so I felt like I had very good experiential reasons to believe in God, from, like I said, times of answered prayer or a sense of guidance or a sense of maybe spiritual experience, and I felt like I had good existential reasons to believe in God because I felt like it made the most sense, of sin and death and some of the meaning and purpose and value and different things like that. But when that faith was challenged by people when I tried to share my faith and I didn’t know how to answer, that became very frustrating to me, and so, like I said, that just really pushed me into seeing, like, “Okay, well are there good intellectual reasons to believe this?” And I came to find out that, yeah, there absolutely are. And so that’s really become a quest of mine, to help arm Christians to be able to better defend and articulate their faith in an intelligent way, because in this day and age, in order to do any sort of evangelism whatsoever, you have to be trained in apologetics of some sort.

While I think being able to tell your testimony and your experience is powerful, you could also support that with evidence for the resurrection, or maybe you can give people arguments for the existence of God. When I sat and looked back at my testimony, for example, and I thought, “Well, even though nobody sat and told me the moral argument, the moral argument reasoning, the reasoning behind that argument, helped me get back to theism eventually,” and so that was another argument that just really stood out to me and is something I’ve endeavored to master. And so, once I saw those intellectual reasons, it just increased my confidence more in seeing that there are good defenses against the problem of evil or objections against miracles, like what Hume articulated is kind of what I was thinking as a teenager, but seeing that those objections can be readily met just increased my confidence so much more, and that’s what I endeavor to do with my website now, is to help equip and train, like I said, believers in seeing that there are good answers out there.

That’s fantastic! And can you tell us the name of your website again, please?

Yeah. It’s IsJesusAlive.com. And also on there there is a link. I have a YouTube channel I’m starting. It’s kind of a little bit of a fledgling YouTuber at the moment, but I am putting some of those answers in a video format as well that are out there, so yeah. People are free to check that out.

Well, that’s fantastic! I guess that would be really beneficial, not only for Christians who are looking to substantiate their worldview or their faith, but it would also be interesting for perhaps a curious skeptic who wants to see if there could be intellectual grounding for the Christian worldview.

Yeah, absolutely. Pretty much, my aim is to… There are doubters in both camps. There are people who were like me, that were kind of doubting their skepticism, and then there are Christians who might be doubting their own faith, and then there are believers who want to help somebody else in those two categories, and so it would be beneficial for anybody in those three different groups.

That’s fantastic. This is a wonderful story, Erik, and I’m curious: There’s not many people that you meet who were once atheist and are now Christian and understand it from both sides, but because you are and you’ve actually heard both sides and lived both sides, I wonder what you would tell the curious skeptic if they were perhaps open towards another point of view. If you had a moment to tell them something, what would you advise them?

What I would say to the curious skeptic is stay curious. I prayed, as I said, and said, “Well, God, I don’t know if You’re real, but if You are real, I am open.” And be genuine. So many skeptics I meet are almost looking to disprove, and so be open. Think about the existential reasons and give those deep consideration. I wouldn’t encourage them to want to believe something and therefore put their blinders on and just come to belief for bad reasons, but just be open and be honest with God, and again, say, “God, if You’re real, help me. You know what my doubts are. Help me to find those answers, and help me to find maybe the people or the resources that can help me overcome these things.” And just read the Bible. Give it its day in court like I did. Just keep reading and stay open, and if you have questions, again, there are so many resources. I wish I had the resources that are online today than when I was younger.

And so find the best answers, and I’m not at all intimidated by the other side and what they have to say. Listen to what they have to say, too, and weigh it out, but I believe if you are sincere, God will absolutely reveal Himself to you, to that curious seeking skeptic.

Yeah, it’s amazing to me, in all of the stories that I’ve heard in my research, the number of people who’ve called out to God or prayed to God or opened themselves to God in some way, and God did show up. In different ways for different people. Certainly, He showed up for you in a very profound way. But yeah, there’s something to be said for that, just being open. And to the Christian, Erik, what advice would you give to the Christian? I know you’ve already given some with regard to just preparing.

Yeah. I would say definitely prepare. Again, in order to do evangelism, you really do need to have some basic understanding of apologetics. There are so many good resources out there on YouTube, podcasts, books. There’s really just no excuse anymore not to be trained. But also reach out. I had one person hand me a tract, and I had one high school teacher just be kind of a good character witness, and that was about the most interaction I had with Christians that I’m aware of. Maybe people were praying for me behind the scenes, and I definitely wouldn’t understate the importance of that, so possibly that had some effect, but sometimes I just think back, and I’m like, “I know there were Christians at my school. Why didn’t any of them come talk to me?” And so… Do something. Say something. In my case, somebody handed me candy and a Billy Graham tract. That might be enough to help sow a good seed into somebody, but too many Christians are so tight lipped and just don’t even think about it and are so oblivious that there really is a world around you of people who, like me at that time, felt pretty hopeless and that there wasn’t much meaning to life, and if an intelligent, thoughtful Christian came by and talked to me sooner, maybe I wouldn’t have wasted as much time as I did. I don’t know.

So don’t be afraid to reach out. And I think one reason why so many Christians are afraid is because they are afraid of those objections, and so train yourself on that. I know, for me, that made me so much more of a bold witness to people and unafraid to share the gospel with people, because I can anticipate objections and have a good idea, at least, where to go, and that definitely… Knowledge does give confidence there, and so that absolutely is key as well. And so there’s the boldness aspect and of course prayer, the spiritual aspect, and then just the mental preparation aspect of being prepared in apologetics.

That’s some terrific advice. One thing that strikes me as I’m listening to your story, so many times the narrative for people excepting Jesus or coming to faith is because they’re just part of a culture or a family that does that and so that just becomes part of the hobby or the movement of the family, or it’s just cultural, but what’s interesting about your story is a really counter narrative to that. You were very independent, really, throughout your journeying, whether it was towards atheism, towards agnosticism, or even towards Christianity, although I must say perhaps not all alone, because it seems to me that God was showing up in different places throughout your journey and pointing you as He was drawing you to Himself, and you, at some point, became willing to see. So it was really a beautiful journey, though, and I’m so grateful that you’ve come on our podcast today to share that. So thank you so much for coming on, Erik.

Yes. Definitely. Thank God for His grace and patience with me as He slowly led me along the way and yeah, it’s absolutely been a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

Thanks for tuning in to the Side B Podcast to hear Erik’s story. You can connect with Erik on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and his website, all of which I’ve included on the episode notes. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can reach me at email at [email protected]. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please consider subscribing and sharing 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 listening to the other side.

As an atheist, Rob Oram presumed God didn’t exist until unexpected circumstances caused him to reconsider. Trained as an investigator, he began to look at the question of God more closely.

Episode Transcript

Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to the Side B Podcast, where we listen to the other side. Side B is that side of the story that you don’t usually hear. Growing up, I used to buy vinyl records and listen to side A, the popular song that everyone knew and loved, but oftentimes, side B would just get ignored. It just wasn’t as well known, perhaps not worth listening to. Occasionally, I’d turn the record over and give it a chance. Every once in a while, I’d find a song that I rather liked and began listening to it even more than the song that I’d bought the record for in the first place. In the same way, we’re naturally driven towards the songs of people that we like, the ideas that we believe, side A, and we don’t often give the other side, side B, a chance, and when we do, we sometimes find ourselves a bit surprised by what we hear. We might even come to like it.

We become more open to a different idea, a different way to think about the world and our lives. At the very least, listening to other perspectives helps us understand and relate to each other better than to distance and to stereotype and ignore.

That’s the purpose of the Side B Podcast, to hopefully interest you in listening to ideas and perspectives you may not have heard. For Christians, it’s to help you understand the lives and perspectives of skeptics and the various reasons they may push away from God, and for skeptics, it’s to help you see how and why intelligent, thinking people may actually turn from disbelief to belief in God.

Welcome to the podcast, Rob. It’s so great to have you on the show!

It’s lovely to be with you, Jana.

As we’re getting started, why don’t you tell me a little bit about yourself. Obviously, I hear something very English in your speech. Where are you from?

Yes. So I’m in Hereford, England. You might detect a Cockney twang. Some people sometimes accuse me of being from Australia, but no, I’m from London, England. Yeah, so I moved out to Hereford four years ago, which is in the west part of England. I’m 46 years old. A former policeman. I was a policeman for nearly five years, and then I basically left to become a legal advisor in criminal defense, so in a sense, I went from arresting people to defending them, and then you could say, or someone said to me a few years ago, which I quite liked, “So you’ve gone from arresting people to defending them to now trying to save them,” because I’m now in the ministry with the Church of England. I’m a vicar, or in America you might say a pastor, with the Church of England, which I’ve been doing for the last six years, I suppose, if you include the training.

Well, since this show is about talking with former atheists, now that you are a reverend, you really have gone full circle. I’m eager to get into your story. That’s quite a change over a lifetime. So why don’t we, at the beginning, just set the context for where your beliefs in atheism arose? Tell me about your understanding of God and religion and faith growing up. What kind of community were you in? What kind of family were you in? Did anyone believe in God? Or not? Why don’t you talk with me about that?

Yeah, sure. I came from a loving but very secular household. So I grew up with… I’ve got two brothers, a foster brother, a sister, so we lived in a large house, a large household. But we never went to church or anything like that. I had loving parents, but certainly God was never part of things, really. We grew up interested in various sports and all the rest of it, and I certainly grew up very much as a practical atheist, I suppose. I never really thought about matters of God, and I very much lived… Certainly, as I grew up, as I got older, I lived for myself, so now I would look back and I can look back, and you’re probably, if I go into different parts of my story, you’ll hear why, I lived very much in rebellion towards God and very self centered, and it never occurred to me that there’d be a reason to do otherwise. Well, no, it’s not that it didn’t… It seemed to me the only way to logically live was for yourself, but actually the strange hypocrisy of that, if you like, as I grew up and got to my late teenage years, and especially at university, it became even more abundant, “What’s the point?”

So I never took the trouble of investigating God until later on, and I’ll explain when and why that happened, but to me, it was just a given that… It just seemed natural, it just seemed innate that you’d live for yourself. What’s the point in doing anything else? And then actually, more than that, what’s the point of anything? And I became increasingly basically an apathetic hedonist. Those are the words I would use. My atheism was basically just borne out by a deep sense of apathy and hedonism. And there instinctively didn’t seem to me any greater point, meaning, purpose, or value in life than beyond those things. Now, I can look at Paul in the Bible, in, I think it’s 1 Corinthians, you know, “eat, drink, for tomorrow we die,” if there is no God. These sorts of things. So I just lived by that presumption, as if there was no God.

Right. I guess there weren’t any other pictures in terms of Christianity, embodied Christianity, other Christians or religious influences around you that even made you question whether or not God existed? Or if you didn’t or didn’t have anything like that, what did you think that God and Christianity and all of that was?

Yeah. I thought it was… Secularism has obviously been fairly rampant in the West, especially England, probably even more, a lot more so, actually, than America. And so you’re kind of indoctrinated from an early age, because everybody else tends to think the same, where within all of the media, within all of popular culture, at least the majority of it, it’s as if we’ve grown beyond that, and without making any effort, one is indoctrinated to believe that there’s no more truth to Christianity. Jesus Christ is no more real than Father Christmas, to give a silly example. Which now is bizarre when you actually stop and look at the evidence, but to me, it was just the cliched types of things when I looked at or came across Christians.

I remember, at university for example, arguing with Christians on campus on a couple of occasions, and that was where I was clearly an atheist and would come across as an angry atheist to them, because my presumption, and these were no more than presumptions, was just that Christianity was a strange crutch for deluded people. I remember seeing a documentary in which Peter Atkins, an Oxford… great friend of Richard Dawkins, just said that anybody… “What do you think of people who believe?” he was asked, and he just said that they’re stupid. And I think, back then, I just assumed the same thing, that people were giving some attachment to some delusion because it made them feel better. Or more than that, I just suspected that people became Christians because they were just selfish, and so I remember challenging them, saying, “So why are you a Christian?” and basically suggesting that, “Well, you’re just a Christian because you want some deity to take care of you. Because actually you’re obsessed with your own salvation,” and I knew enough to know about Christianity to know that supposedly it was a route to salvation, and therefore, by default, my assumption was that these strange weirdos, these strange Christians, were just deluded people who needed a crutch who were just obsessed with getting themselves saved. And therefore actually it’s not a religion of love and charity and all the rest of it, but actually, deep down, Christians were just selfish people who wanted some mystical deity to save them.

Does that make sense? I mean now as I try and say this stuff, it sounds nonsense, but this was kind of the way I thought back then.

Right, yeah. You describe yourself as somewhat of an apathetic hedonist, but perhaps that was a little bit later on, in the sense that, if you had so much anger and contempt, that doesn’t sound apathetic to me. It sounds like you had a rather strong sense of self about your atheism and a strong opinion otherwise about Christianity.

Yes. I was very suspicious. Regarding myself and how I lived, I lived with enormous apathy and hedonism, so together. But in terms of how I viewed Christians, because I never actually looked properly into Christianity, but I viewed Christians with great suspicion for kind of the reasons that I just mentioned.

Right.

So yeah, I was a strange mix.

We all are. We all are.

Indeed, we are.

Right. So you lived this way, with this sense of apathy and really a sense of self pursuit in your own way because you didn’t see any meaning or purpose in life, and I’m impressed with that statement in the sense that, as an atheist, you must have been somewhat thoughtful about what atheism was or what naturalism brought or did not bring. It seems to me that, when you absorb atheism within secular culture, oftentimes, you just go with the flow and really don’t think about the implications of that worldview, but in a sense, you had really considered atheism in some regard, in that… Did you really think through those implications of there’s no real objective meaning, purpose, value, morality, those kinds of things? At all?

For me, it was on a subconscious level. One of the things maybe we’ll get to shortly that was a big trigger was a William Lane Craig essay, when he wrote, “Is there meaning to life without God?” or something. I think he ended up putting it in one or two of his books, but it absolutely shook me to the core, because he brilliantly articulated everything I’d always kind of assumed and lived by, and so I was confronted with it, but before I read that—and a lot of things happened before I did read that—I had just lived with a sort of subconscious… Everyone lives with a subconscious awareness that life is fleeting and that they are going to die, so I always had a strong sense of my own mortality. It’s just this inescapable end. The inescapable destiny that we all face. And I also had enough awareness to know how long this universe had been here, how brief and, you know, within 250 years, nobody is going to know anything about you. So even today, for example, we see more and more humanist funerals where people talk about people living on through other people’s memories and stuff, and it’s really a sham. I knew that life itself ultimately was absurd because, relative to what we know about time and the universe, our lives are just a grain of sand.

So therefore very quickly, growing up, as a teenager and then especially when I got to university, I found no desire or enthusiasm or anything. All I lived for were the things that gave me immediate pleasures. So I went to university just to play sport. And I never did anything. I never did any studies whatsoever. I basically lied and cheated my way through just to manage to get through university. And just lived a very hedonistic lifestyle. And to me it was just obvious. Why would you bother to do anything else?

So it was just an obvious reality to you. You’ve painted quite a picture. I think we understand where you were and the way you were living and what you were thinking. Walk me a little bit farther along and tell me what began to change for you. Or what opened you to the possibility that God exists or something might be different than you thought it was?

So, in a way, my conversion if you like, or my testimony, is a story of three prayers, in a sense, and it’s the story of two women and three prayers, okay? What happened was… When I was at university, so I was about 20, 21 at the time. Bizarrely, I made this—and I remember these things very clearly in my head—I made a bizarre transactional bargain with inverted commas, big inverted commas, God, right? And this sounds bizarre, and it was, because I didn’t believe there was a God, but I basically made this prayer one day. No, there’s no way I’d call it a prayer. It was a bargain, but let’s just say… And it was basically… I saw this female that I desired, right? And she was with somebody else. And I was with somebody else. And I basically said, and this reflects a lot of what I was like at the time… Anyway, I won’t… I said, “God, if You’re real, if You’ll give me this girl, I promise You I’ll be faithful to her,” and then a little while later, we got together. Now, we were together for about two years, and I was a lot better. I think, for a while, I could genuinely feel I was happy. And this was a really fine individual.

Have you heard of the Alpha course in America?

Yes, yes, I have heard. But for those who haven’t heard of it, why don’t you tell us what that is.

So the Alpha course is something that originated from a place called HTB Church in England, in London. A big church in England. And a guy called Nicky Gumble took on this course, which basically was a way of introducing people to Christianity and exploring questions of life through the lens of Christianity and Jesus Christ basically. And it’s basically become a global, worldwide phenomenon, this course, and it’s superb.

So this lady that I was with at the time. Her name’s Jeanette. She went on an Alpha course, and to cut a long story short, she became a Christian, and she wanted to live like one, and although… So basically, when I say she wanted to live like one, it meant she no longer wanted to have sex before marriage, if I’m being blunt.

Yes.

This wasn’t really ideal for me, and I know that basically she was just waiting for me to propose and to marry her, and I didn’t do that. What I did was I basically tried to crush her faith. I thought, “How can you choose this mystical, bizarre God that you’ve sort of invented or that’s just been from this strange course that you’ve been on… How can you choose this bizarre God over me?” And so I was angry, and basically, I broke her heart. And I really broke her heart. And I was, in a way, trying to break her faith as a means of revenge for her betrayal, because she chose this nonsense mystical God over me.

Eventually, everything I say will relate to each other. So just stay with me.

Oh, absolutely.

I thought I was going to be free, so as I did this, I was also aware that I was breaking my own agreement agreement with God. So, rather than marry her and this stick to this bizarre agreement I’d made with inverted commas God, this bargain, this higher power that I tried to make the strange bargain with, I thought, “Stuff You, stuff her, stuff this stupid superstitious nonsense! I’m going to go back and live for myself,” and so, in a sense, I betrayed this agreement I’d made with God. I’d obviously betrayed her in that sense. Because I was trying to crush her spirit and crush this newfound faith. I thought I’d find some more freedom. I thought I’d go back and find a sense of freedom, and I just threw myself into a major hedonistic lifestyle, far more than ever before. I really was living by the week, by the day, on a cocktail of drink, drugs, etc.  Conquests. I was a serving police officer at the time, but I was going out most nights of the week with pockets full of this, that, and other. And it really was… yeah. Drink, drugs, sexual conquests with absolutely no regard to who I was hurting along the way. It was the optimum of rebellion.

Now, a few years of living like this, I then met another girl, funny enough on a dating site. It probably won’t surprise you to know I was on a few of them, but… To cut a long story short, a whirlwind romance basically began. This was someone who lived in Wales. But we kind of started meeting online and then, within a year, she moved down to London to live with me. So many things about this relationship had been out of my control. How we met online was bizarre. It’s because she liked my screen name, Jamie. That’s not even my real name. I mean I could go on with lots of other just weird things, but it was a whirlwind romance. Now within a year, she became ill, weirdly ill, and she then took a blood test, and the blood test showed that she was HIV positive.

Oh, my.

She had the AIDS virus. Bear in mind, this is getting on towards twenty years ago, so even twenty years ago, it was a lot more of a death sentence than it hopefully is today for most people. But from what I knew about her and what I obviously knew about me, it was clear that I must have given this to her, that she couldn’t have got it any other way than from me. So she was and is an amazing woman, and I remember the days really well. I was suddenly faced with this knowledge that I’d killed her, you know? To me, it was like I’d killed her, and I remember the night when I was sobbing uncontrollably, crying uncontrollably on her shoulder, and she was consoling me. Which says a lot about her.

Yes.

She seemed more okay with it than I was. I just couldn’t handle it that I felt like I’d killed her. And all because of my reckless, self destructive, selfish hedonism. Now… Then I prayed. I remember that night when I really, really prayed. I remember it like it was yesterday. And basically I really prayed, totally different to the stupid juvenile bargaining that was just a pretense before. This time, I really cried out to God. I really cried out. Basically praying, “I deserve this. Take me. But please, somehow, if You can, spare her. Because she doesn’t deserve this. She doesn’t deserve this. Please, just take me.” So it was so different in my heart, and I was literally crying as I was praying this to God. And a week later… They double check these things. A week later, she did another blood test, and she was clear.

Really?

Yeah. And it was incredible. And obviously I then took a test, and I was clear. Gone.

Oh, my goodness! So I presume you attributed that to an answered prayer?

Very easily. I don’t know… I won’t know this side of heaven. I won’t know in this world. Back then, the medics obviously say, “Well, we don’t really know what happened. For some reason, it must have been a false positive before. We can’t really explain.” That’s all they can say. But yes. To answer your question, I do believe that was an answered prayer. Because I believe either God performed some sort of a healing miracle, or I believe that God manipulated those tests as His means of doing business with me.

Humbling you. Yes.

We’re both Christians now. On the day she got this all-clear result, I proposed to her that very day, and we’ve been married ever since.

So this girl is your wife!

Yeah.

Oh, my. Okay.

And there’s been loads of other stuff. Sorry, I’ll go off on lots of tangents. But just to say that God has answered prayer in other extraordinary ways. Just to give you a quick flavor.

Yes.

We had something like… So my wife. Melissa’s her name. She’s got a daughter, Bronwyn, and she wanted me to be her dad when she met. She was five. She is now nearly 24. But we were trying to give Bronnie a sibling for years, and Lissa had multiple miscarriages. She had had an ectopic pregnancy. She had pre-cancer cells and was advised in her early twenties to have a hysterectomy. Her mum had a hysterectomy at 29. But she felt God was telling her not to do that. And then I had my own issues. I swear to you, this is no exaggeration. I had lots of tests done because we were investigated, both of us, for fertility and trying to see how we could… We were about to have IVF treatment. Three weeks after I was given a test result where I was given a zero percent chance of fertility, we conceived Maddy, who’s now eleven.

Another false positive and/or miracle! Answered prayer.

I hadn’t thought of it like that. For that, lots of people prayed for. At that point, I’ve skipped forward many years, and there’s various things to say in between, but all of our church were praying for us over those years of infertility, and to me, that was… Because I had the evidence of the test, and then we worked out when we must have conceived, and it was three weeks after I had had that test result. Again, lots of people had been praying for us. That’s just to give you another.

Wow!

Just to kind of go back to my initial conversion, there’s lots to say about the other things where God was prompting me and how I came to investigate the truths of Christianity and the faith. I mentioned the first girl, Jeanette, because, on the night I was baptized, which I think was 2008, 2009, I managed to trace her. And I was over the moon because I traced her probably by Facebook, and I hadn’t crushed her faith. Far from it. She was living a wonderful Christian life, wonderful family life she had in Australia, both of whom have been in ministry in different parts, both her and her husband have been in ministry in different ways. She’s got a lovely family. And I had to ask her whether she ever prayed for me, and I never forget her answer. She just said, “I prayed for you many, many, many, many times.” She basically said she’d never stopped praying for me.

Oh, wow.

And you know I really hurt her.

Right.

And so the joy I have from the testimony certainly is… This is why I’m convinced God was answering prayer. God heard my desperate prayer, but she had been praying for me, and it’s her prayers for me that I’m convinced He answered.

Yes, yes.

Because so many things had to happen that were completely beyond my control.

Right.

So I’m one of these people… Yeah, I think a lot of might feel this. But I’m fairly confident God, for many reasons—I can’t give you all the reasons—but for many reasons, I’m convinced that God brought me and my wife Melissa together as part of the answer to the prayer. Because Melissa was involved in choosing where we were going to live, and she wanted to start going to a church, trying going to a church. Basically, she’d been brought up as a Roman Catholic, but the worst sort of childhood, she had. I mean the worst. It was her influence… She started looking at local churches, and the only reason I ever walked into a church was because, in our nearest church—bear in mind we were now living in a place called Loughton in Essex. Again, she was integral to where we were living.

And then, as we were looking at local churches online, I noticed that the minister of one of the nearest ones was a man who’s name was Alan Comfort, and he used to play football, soccer. Soccer, you call it in America. In a professional team that was fairly local to where I grew up in London. He used to play for a team called Leyton Orient, which was a sort of lowly but still professional level, and he was one of the best players, so sort of a minor superstar of football where I grew up had now bizarrely become… was now this vicar of this local church. And I was absolutely intrigued, and it was that factor that got me to walk into a church the first time. So in an extraordinary way, I suppose… I never really thought about it like this, actually, but at the beginning, at the very start, I mentioned I grew up in a home in a home that was obsessed by sport, and in a sense, I think God used that obsession to get me to walk into a church, and it was a sportsman that God dangled in front of me to get me to walk through a church door. I hadn’t thought of it like that before.

Yeah.

So we went there. And Alan spoke very well, and so I kept going back. And then, of course, eventually I did an Alpha course. Go on, Jana. Sorry.

Oh, I was just… So when you decided to step foot in a church, how much later was that? When was that relative to that moment where you felt like your prayer was answered and both your and her blood tests were clear? So you had that moment of relief and perhaps maybe a little belief. So how much time passed between those two things?

Yeah. Definitely that moment was the most incredible moment in that series of events, and so my journey really definitely started there, beyond my complete rebellion of God before that in various ways, so that… We were married in 2004, so it would have been 2003? So, as I say, it was a fairly whirlwind romance, but 2002-2003 was when we’d gone through these events with the HIV. And then we got married 2004, and so we would have moved to Loughton within a couple of years after that, so I probably first walked into a church—I wish I knew the exact date or year. But it would have been 2005, 2006.

So after that moment of the sense that prayer was answered, did that open you towards the possibility of a real God existing?

Yes.

So that by the time you got to a place where you’re willing to walk in a church door, you would consider yourself open towards that possibility? For walking into that possibility?

Definitely. Definitely. Certainly in my case it takes to the point of despair. I remember that day of crying out to God like it was yesterday. I still struggle to talk about it without welling up. God knows us better than we know ourselves, don’t we. It was in that moment of despair when I knew nothing else but to reach out earnestly and honestly, desperately, to God. And that was real when I did it, and yet everything in my life up to that was no belief, thinking it was a fantasy and nonsense, but actually… I don’t know. Something happens when we are faced with the most profound things, especially when we’re desperate. That instinct, I think, that little glimmer doesn’t go from ourselves. Sorry, Jana. Sorry.

No, no. It’s really a-

I’ve lost my thread again. I took myself back to that night.

No, no, no. Okay.

Going back to your question, so yes, feeling that something extraordinary had happened, that I’d cried out from the bottom of my soul to my creator God, and he answered me. Yes. Without question. I never would’ve walked into a church. I wouldn’t have walked into a church, I don’t think, had any of those things not happened. So I was open. I didn’t pour scorn on the fact that my wife wanted to go to church and was asking me to go with her. I wasn’t scornful and like let’s be antagonistic or worse. I was open to it. And then the cherry on the top was the fact that it was a surreal thing about who actually was the vicar of this one particular church. So yes. My heart had already been slightly softened by these extraordinary events that did make me more open to go, and so I did go with ears far more open to hearing than I probably otherwise would’ve done.

And then what did you hear when you started listening?

Funny enough, the first time, I remember fairly confidently again that Alan was speaking on revelation, and it was fascinating, and he spoke well, and so I wanted to go back, and I kept going back, and then eventually, they were running an Alpha course, and I… It’s funny now, as a vicar. So much of my planning and what we’re trying to do is get people to the place where we can invite them to Alpha and they’ll actually think seriously about it and come. I remember I asked Alan if I could go to Alpha. I was the one. My heart was softened enough and I’d heard enough to know I wanted to do this and look at this properly.

But there were other little triggers as well. For example, I remember this: This was a significant thing for me. In 2006, I was channel hopping when I came across a documentary. Again, I just feel this was… I remember it so vividly, and I feel it was a… We now would call it a God-incidence, and there are so many that have happened. But I came across a documentary whilst channel hopping, and it was called “God: The Root of All Evil,” and it was Richard Dawkins at the height of his… on the back of his The God Delusion book.

Right.

And he made this documentary. So he was very popular at the time. Funnily enough, it was in that documentary, I think, that Peter Atkins that I mentioned earlier was just saying that anybody who believes in God is stupid. But this shook me. This was another sort of pivotal moment when I realized that, actually, whether Richard Dawkins is speaking the truth or not is the most important thing in the world. It is the most important question for any of us, whether God exists or not. And I’d always, without thinking through things, lived in an apathy of, “Why bother?” This documentary totally shook me out of my apathy. On the back, yes, what had happened in the previous years. Now, it was clear to me. This is the most important question of all. Now I’ve been an investigator all my life. I’d worked in law. I’d been a policeman. I love reading Jim Warner Wallace now, for example. I’ve been a policeman and then working criminal defense, so I’ve been around the law and investigations all my life. And so it seemed just natural to me—it still is—to investigate the God question, if I can put it like that. And that’s never left me.

And so, for me, at that point, it was, “Hang on a minute.” I’m a truth seeker before I’m anything else. Even before. If anybody asks me why I’m a Christian, I could go into all the details of what God’s done in my life and answered prayer. But the other side of the coin. I mentioned two sides of the coin before. The other side of the coin is quite simply because it’s true. I’m a Christian because it’s true. Not for any other reason. It’s classic C.S. Lewis stuff. It took a Richard Dawkins documentary, and I also then read The God Delusion, and it took him to make me realize that, great C.S. Lewis stuff, the truth of Christianity cannot be [UNKNOWN 39:01]. I think C.S. Lewis—I love some of his stuff. It’s either the biggest humbug—or whatever he calls it—or it is the most important thing to know. One thing it can’t be is moderately important.

Right.

And from that moment onward, in 2006, I’ve always absolutely profoundly believed that. Yeah, similarly with Jesus Christ. The person of Jesus Christ is central. One thing He cannot be is—again paraphrasing Lewis. He cannot be a good teacher or anything patronizing like that, I think he says. He’s either severely deluded, the devil of hell or worse, or He is the Son of God. And actually… yeah. Even before I’d read any Lewis, the awareness of that question just suddenly hit me. One could say, from how I’d grown up, I slowly but surely became pleasantly surprised. Not only is it true, but it’s… We have an abundance of evidence for the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. As I’m sure you know.

You know, I started reading—as I was doing Alpha… So from Richard Dawkins, I set out to conduct my own investigation, and the first place I went to was Lee Strobel’s The Case for Christ. Fabulous. And in the last year or so as a church, the Hollywood movie adaptation of The Case for Christ, we’ve had film nights, and it’s gone through the whole congregation, and actually, I think they’ve done a pretty good job with that. I don’t know if you’ve seen it.

Yes, I have. Twice.

Yeah. And I’ve got to get my dad to watch it, but people I watch it with, I do say to them, “Watch this because I really related to Lee Strobel in many ways.” He doesn’t hide the fact that he was a drinker in the film and antagonistic and all those things. I feel… Humbled doesn’t cut it. But humbled to think that God—and this is what I wrestled with for a while, actually—is why would God do these things for me? I couldn’t get my head around it until I started to understand the depth and love of God because of what He’s done in Christ, and actually, He loves everybody to that degree. Yeah, through Lee Strobel, I then… That took me to people like William Lane Craig, who was a massive influence on me. For example, another pivotal thing was when I first… I think it was 2009 when I watched William Lane Craig debating Christopher Hitchens, and it was like, “This isn’t even a contest.” Christopher Hitchens, for all of his skilled rhetoric and clever wordplay, he had no answer to the conveyor belt of good argument and evidence that there is for Christianity. And that was just clear to me. And so Reasonable Faith, Bill Craig’s ministry, they run chapters, and I became qualified and a chapter director many years ago, and that’s always been a good feeding pool for me. He’s been a big influence.

So obviously, over time and investigation, you became convinced that it was true, obviously existentially and spiritually you believed God was real.

Yeah.

So those things came together and you came to a place of belief.

Yeah. I feel… to say humbled, that doesn’t… When I stop and think about it, it’s hard to get my head around, but in personal ways, God has been personal to me. My existential angst, the arguments and evidence, in every way, God has kind of met me through circumstances, through… He’s given me the means to know that He’s there. I think through Jesus Christ and the evidence that God has ordained to give us through the Bible, especially the New Testament. He’s given everyone access to sufficient evidence. I mean it’s like… It’s the Pascal stuff. I think God is… obviously. It sounds ridiculous to say this, but I think God is a genius, and I think God has so ordained this world to be an arena in which people… the human condition and the fallen nature of human beings gives them sufficient… whether that’s inner reasons or outer reasons… to stay rebelled from Him and to disbelieve Him and to reject Him in equal amount—Pascal mentioned this—has given sufficient amount for people to be able to find Him if they seek him. I think there’s an incredible balance about the way God has ordained things.

Yes. He has. I love the way that Pascal talks about He gives us enough light in order to see but enough shadow if we want to hide and that sense of freedom and free will that He gives us. And it’s interesting to me that, once you had the eyes to see or the ears to hear, you began to see it in loads, like you said a conveyor belt of evidence. I like that turn of phrase. But it also… I think your life really speaks to… When you make the statement, whether or not God existed is the most important question of all, you not only took that for yourself, you actually took that for your own life in terms of helping others understand and answer that question. Because obviously you moved into a place where you’re doing this professionally! Tell me how you made that move. I mean, that’s quite a move, to move into the ministry. Tell me about that.

It’s funny. I couldn’t tell you, Jana, when I became a Christian. So not one Damascus Road experience. An awful lot of things happened, as you can tell. So I can’t say when I became a Christian, but I know I was baptized in, I think, ’08 or ’09, so it’d been in the years preceding that. I can tell you that it was the 10th of January, 2013, that I felt God was calling me to go into full-time ministry. After a relatively sleepless night, I know it was that day because I wrote it down that day and I told my wife. And to me, it was just obvious. And it is. Although I’m still a wretched sinner, I’m a lot less of a sinner than I was, but it’s this… It’s C.S. Lewis stuff. To me, it’s just obvious. What is more important than God? And what is more important than God in Christ the way He’s revealed himself to us? To me, it just became clear, leading up and then that day. What else are you living for?

In fact, again, off the top of my head now, actually, I’m joining the dots even now as I reflect. I grew up thinking, “What’s the point of anything in life?” to a certain degree. Meaningless, hopeless. No meaning, value, or hope ultimately. When you find the ultimate meaning and purpose and the foundation on which anything and everything has meaning, purpose, and value, what else are you going to do other than this? And that’s really how it was for me.

It became a clear path to what you were called to do. And it sounds like you embraced that with both arms, just full hearted, and you never looked back.

No! My struggle, if you will, the race I’m running. You know, we strive for the prize, Pauline-type stuff, is I just wish people could have… What is it that will give people that same awakening I’ve had? And on a superficial level, or a conscious level, I just think, “Why can’t other people see just how important this is?” Why can’t they see that it’s… entire destinies. All meaning. Their lives are meaningless unless there is a God. What can I do to help them see that they need to at least look into this stuff? What is it? And of course… because to me it’s obvious. Why wouldn’t you investigate Christianity? So I’m always desperately thinking through, “What is it we can do to try and get people to see that, how important at least the question is, so to spend some time exploring it.”

And then, of course, even as I hear myself saying that, it’s, “Well actually, it took God to intervene significantly in my life for me to see that.” Hence, there lies in… you know? God’s grace. We need to be called by God himself and the Holy Spirit to at least… And a lot of people don’t like the term, but God’s prevenient grace. No one can come to the Father unless the Son calls him. We remain blind. A lot of the analogies from both the Old and New Testaments. We’re in a state of spiritual blindness, and we need God to do the things that will open our eyes and open our ears to see the significance and then move on from there.

So really that’s why I’m in ministry. I’m fundamentally, if I were to label myself or people were to label me, they would say I’m an evangelist and apologist first. Because one of the most absurd things of the culture we live in and I’ve been living in is this idea that, “Oh, it’s true for you but not for me,” and I’m a firm believer in objective truth, as you can probably tell.

Yes, yes.

And so the truth of salvation in Jesus Christ… Obviously, there’s nothing more important than that. What can we do to get people to look into it. And so I’ve spent my life now trying to build relationships with people, trying to encourage people to be ambassadors for Christ, to care for others, to nurture community and relationships, so that you can get to a point where an invitation that is given to something like an Alpha course is not just going to be falling on deaf ears, but it will be given a fair hearing, and people talking about their faith will be given a fair hearing. Or the invitation to come to church or come to something like an Alpha course. They will receive it warmly because they’ll have received it from somebody that they’re already warm towards. I think that’s why I do what I do, to try and get others to similarly be the ambassadors for Christ in that way. Greg Koukl, another influencer… I used that phrase, ambassadors for Christ. I think that’s one of his phrases. It’s a good catch-all, apt term.

Yes, it is. I think this is a really wonderful place to transition. If you were to be able to speak directly to a curious skeptic, or at least someone who’s raising an eyebrow or just willing to hear you out for just a moment, what would you tell the curious skeptic?

Oh. I wish I’d prepared something in my mind for that question, but of course, I should be prepared. I’m always telling everybody else 1 Peter 3:15. I think it makes all the difference in the world. So I’d ask… Conversation will always be the way to go. What is it you’re looking for in your life? People don’t like thinking about their own mortality. I think people are aware of their own mortality. So is there more than this life? And I think there’s ways in which people can look inside themselves and outside themselves to find the truth and that it does lie in Jesus Christ.

So depending on how the conversation would go, I would say look at the beginning of the universe. I’d say you can look at the fine tuning of the universe, again which points to a designer. The argument for mathematics. So these are all ways that people can look outside of themselves to look at… Actually, there’s a lot of good reasons to think there is a creator. Did I just say the argument for… yeah, the argument for mathematics would be another one, and how mathematics cohere in an extraordinary way with science in a reliable, predictable way. Again, that speaks to a creator.

But then probably more important than those things, I would challenge any individual and say, you can look inside yourself to know the truth. Now, on one hand, when other people say that, I’m usually sort of skeptical. Because that’s a very modern Oprah-Winfrey-type, forgive me, sort of way of, “Oh, you can just find all truth within yourself.” But I would put it like this: When we talk about morality, for example, I think most people, when you start prodding and probing about questions of morality, various forms of the moral argument, realize they do subscribe, they do think some things are objectively wrong. There are certain objective moral values and duties that they think are actually real, that we’re not just products of animals and all moral values are ultimately relative and part of a delusion. So I think they can find within themselves that. Obviously, the moral argument speaks to there being a Creator God and ultimate lawgiver. Along with that, their sense of justice. most people can see there’s something wrong in the world. Most people wish and desire that there is some ultimate justice. And then the other thing, so the third thing, if you will, is the sense, the desire to be loved unconditionally. I think there are things that we can appeal to people within themselves speak profoundly… Most people, if they give themselves a chance to look at these things… So, for example, we all desire to be loved unconditionally unless something has gone very wrong. And it’s through these things that we can talk about Jesus Christ in particular.

So you can see from the evidence beyond us and outside us that there’s plenty of evidence for a Creator God that governs this universe, but then we can talk about the person of Jesus Christ and say, “Look what happened on the cross. Here was a man who said, in various different ways, and showed in various different ways, who claimed in so many ways to be the God of the universe in the flesh, and He goes to a cross so that God’s justice is met. His perfect justice has to be served, if you will. The iniquities of us all are laid upon Him. But He does it because of his unconditional love.” So I’d love to say to anyone, when you look inside yourself and you know your sense of justice is real, that your desire for justice is real, your desire to be loved unconditionally is real, because they’re both a reflection of the Creator of the universe, and it just so happens that Creator God has come into this world to see that justice is served, but such is His love for you, that you know you have, because it reflects the love of your Creator, He went to the cross for you. Because He loves you unconditionally.

So I think, on that personal existential level, within us as creatures, as human beings, we can get a sense and see… We feel and are made the way we are because we are made in God’s image, and we can see the nature of God, and in some way that is real. So even if nobody ever looks as cosmology or maths, just those things within themselves, they can see that they’re a reflection of a God that exists and loves them if they spend the time to then look at the man, the God-Man, the person and life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and just what that means.

It sounds like you have given that a lot of thought. And it’s really-

That’s pretty wonderful. What about if you had a word for Christians in terms of how they actually think about or embody their own faith or how they might engage. You had said before, and I really appreciated that, that just relationally, being in relationship with people who don’t agree with you, so that there’s a warmth, a genuineness of relationship and openness for discussion about things, just like you were talking about to the skeptic.

Yeah, sometimes I do like little trite phrases. A little trite phrase that I liked, it’s a truism. It’s, “People don’t care about how much you know until they know how much you care.” And I like that because one could risk—even as a Christian, one could risk over intellectualizing everything. I certainly can. Because that’s where I’m inclined. That’s my background, is investigation. Like Jesus Christ, sometimes I approach as if He’s just this amazing figure to kind of be unmasked, like in the New Testament, unmasking the Messianic secret or something. Sorry, I’m going off on a tangent.

No, it’s fine.

Where was I? But yeah I think… I’ve seen it. This is one of the things that I’ve seen in ministry that’s most wonderful, is people who aren’t like me at all, and they can’t get their head around arguments and evidence and all this stuff, but they can be the most winsome ambassadors for Christ, more than I can. Their gentleness and their love and just the Spirit working in them and through them could be far more, for want of a better phrase, magnetic than any dry argument that I might sometimes come out with. Care. So the trite phrase, care. Ultimately, we’re trying to be intentional about conversation, intentional about sharing our faith, showing our faith in the way we live, and being invitational. The amount of times I’ve seen statistics that say, “X, Y, Z people would think about coming to church if they were only invited.” This sort of thing. And it does begin with the culturing and nurturing of relationships. So let’s say an invitation to church is cold and dry. The invitation is only as good as the person that’s making the invitation. And I don’t mean a good person. What I mean is any invitation has got far more promise if the bond between the two people is strong. So there’s got to be a genuine sense of nurturing a relationship between the Christian and their neighbor, and their nonbelieving neighbor or those that are non-churched.

And it can’t be faked. Do we, as Christians, truly love others. Obviously, we should, and obviously we are called. The great commission applies to all of us, Matthew 28. To always have a reason to give a defense for the hope that you have. But all these things and the way we go about evangelizing and sharing our faith, it’s got to come from a foundation of having built a relationship where the person that you’re engaging with knows you care, knows that you love them, and knows there’s something about your faith that has done something to you. That’s why we’re called to live it out. Does that make sense?

Oh, it makes perfect sense.

So again, for example, going back to Greg Koukl, I like the way he puts a lot of things. I mean obviously he’s one of the best in terms of conversational evangelism and apologetics. Tactics is always one of the first books I recommend to anybody. But he talks about we need more gardeners, and I like that. I just think we, as Christians… Before my time, if you like, before I was a Christian, I understand there was lots of calls for people to go through the sinner’s prayer and always get people to say that prayer and they’re saved, and I don’t think it’s as simple as that.

I think most of us are called just to sow seeds. I think, for every individual, God knows, obviously, how many seeds it will take for that person to be ready for the heart change and for the Spirit to be able to then convict them without being blocked, without that person living in rebellion. Now, for some people, it might be one seed, ten seeds. It might be a hundred seeds. But I think if every Christian just works on being a gardener, as Greg Koukl would call it, just working out how they can keep sowing the seeds, I think that’s what we can all do.

I think that’s perfect. You know, in sitting back, it has been such a pleasure to hear your story. Not only your story but your wisdom and your perspectives. I am struck by the paradox, or just the contrast of the selfish way that you used to live, the way that you were so frank and transparent about your life and how it is completely turned upside down, completely different. You’re living in virtually the opposite of selfish. You are completely selfless in giving your life in terms of helping others find their way to this life, to this God, to this Jesus Christ that you have found that has made all the difference. And I just want to thank you, Rob, again for coming on this podcast. It’s been truly amazing, and I just truly appreciate your time, and more than that, your generosity and your wisdom. So thank you so much for coming on.

It’s been a real pleasure. Thanks ever so much, Jana.

Thanks for tuning in to the Side B Podcast to hear Rob’s story. I’ve included all of the resources that he mentioned on the podcast in the episode notes for your reference. If you’ve got questions or feedback about this episode with Rob, you can reach me by email at [email protected]. If you’re enjoying the Side B Podcast, I’d appreciate it if you’d subscribe and share with your friends and social network. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll be listening to the other side.

Matt endured a tragic accident that pushed him away from God. In the years that followed, his natural curiosity and search for purpose led him to reconsider the God of the Bible.

Episode Transcript

Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to the Side B Podcast, where we listen to the other side. Sometimes, people move towards God during disappointing life experiences and times of acute tragedy, but sometimes they move further away. Disappointment and tragedy only serve to fuel doubt and disbelief, giving more reason to push and press against a God who doesn’t seem to exist. Many believe the only reason people run to God is for nothing but an emotional crutch, to find a Sky Daddy who will solve all their problems and soothe all of their pain, and as thinking people, they don’t want to succumb to that kind of weakness or superstition, but this way of thinking reduces belief in God to merely its function, what God or religion can do for us, what purpose it serves in our lives.

This way of thinking also commits a genetic fallacy. While pain may lead someone to God as the door opener, so to speak, it doesn’t ask the real question of whether or not God is substantively true. That is a different question altogether.

In our story today, tragedy did not lead to belief but only further skepticism, but now the one who was a skeptic is a Christian. What was it that changed his mind? How did he move from embittered disbelief to believing not only that God is both true and real but that, as C.S. Lewis says, everything else is thrown in? That’s what we’ll find out. Matt Fincher is our guest today. A former atheist, he will tell his story of how he made his way to God.

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

It’s good to be here.

As we’re getting started, Matthew, why don’t you tell me a little bit about who you are, perhaps where you live or what you do?

I’m Matthew Fincher. I live in North Carolina and have so all my life except for about five months, and I work in insurance and have so for about three years.

I know that, at one point, you were an atheist, and that’s where these stories begin, but I want to understand really what shaped those views of atheism, and I know oftentimes it starts way back in your childhood in terms of where you lived and the family and culture that surrounded you. Take me back to when you were a child and talk with me a little bit about your experience of God or not, your family’s beliefs, all of those things.

Okay. I grew up in a family that went to church but I don’t believe to be Christian. We went to church every Sunday. My granddad was a solid figure in that church. He taught Sunday school, but we didn’t really go. We just went to the church service. And up until I was about 13 or so, we went to the same church. My parents got divorced around that age, too, and we went to a different church. However, at either of the ones, they were similar preachers, similar styles of service and everything. They had altar calls every week, and I didn’t know what I was supposed to do except ask for forgiveness. I knew that I was guilty. And so I would go ask for forgiveness, and sometimes it’d be very intense. I’d have a real understanding of how guilty I was and didn’t know what to do except to ask forgiveness, and I thought that as soon as I committed any kind of sin again, that if I didn’t ask for forgiveness before I died, I’d go to hell.

And so that was quite a bit of pressure, especially as you grow up in just a weird culture. I’m pretty sure I was the first generation of people to grow up with cable TV, and it wasn’t really bridled. They put a lot of stuff on there that children my age shouldn’t have seen, even from the age of six or seven or so, and there wasn’t a lot of restraint on any of the stuff culturally, whether it be video games or the movies we watched, but that was the way with me and cable television, video games, and so many things, and I was just influenced so much by the culture that, on the one hand, I knew that I was sinful, and on the other hand, I knew I wanted to get into trouble, whether that be chasing girls or… I started drinking at a very young age.

And all throughout high school, I was presented with this dichotomy. It’s like, “I want to do this, but I know this is wrong,” and when I was in the 10th grade, I met a friend who had moved down from Wisconsin, and his family was Catholic, but he had converted to atheism and was a… He supported Communism. And I listened to his arguments. He was a really bright guy, and in kind of different ways than I was. He was more artistic and linguist, and I was more the math/science type person. And it was a nice blend of skills that we could bring together. He introduced me to punk rock and other things like that that I would never hear of were it not for him.

And he began to make issue with the church, and he’d actually come with me a few times. We’d hang out over the weekends. One person would hang out at one person’s house for either the Friday or Saturday night. And he found my church different from what he’d been to, to say the least, but he started pointing out atrocities in history of the Roman Catholics. And it’s not that you couldn’t do the same thing for so-called evangelicals. It’s just that the Roman Catholics have a longer history, and in some sense, there’s more to point out about the wrongs that they’ve done. I mean we had a Reformation over that. Some of it’s quite well documented.

But when I asked my parents, or my mom at least, about what the difference was between a Roman Catholic and what… I’d tried to find out what denomination we were, and she just said Protestant. I don’t know if she knew. And I asked what the difference was, and she said, “They just have a lot more ritual,” and so I didn’t see any kind of real distinction between Roman Catholics and whatever it is that we were. We went to a Church of God at the time. It wasn’t a denomination.

So the further and further I got ingrained into culture, the more I didn’t want to deal with the sinfulness. I became more and more sinful, but I would still pray. I would still try to read the Bible. I think when I was 17 I read through the end of Deuteronomy, and I got to the part… I think it’s around chapter 28, somewhere around there, where it’s like God tells them that they’re not going to succeed at this, and He’s going to have His hand in it, and I thought, “What am I reading this for? He’s showing them that they’re going to fail.” And then I stopped. And it wasn’t long after that I went to college.

I’d like to go back for just a moment, before you go to college. This friend that you befriended in high school, it sounds like he had a lot of skepticism about the church. How did that affect your view of God and Christianity at that time? Did it cause some skepticism in you? Or doubt to arise in you? Were you able to ask and ask questions or get answers? What was your mindset around that time?

Yeah. That’s good to stop me there. At the time, it was still kind of like… Like you’ve got to be good to get to heaven was the thought, and then that was the prevailing thought going through. Just don’t sin or make sure you ask forgiveness about it. I’d even been baptized when I was around 13 or so. I didn’t even know what it meant. It was just a ritual that you did. So I understood myself to be Christian. I was in the Fellowship of Christian Athletes in high school, but so much of it you could see was superficial, and the media’s quick to point out any time some Christian fails at anything, where they can make a public spectacle of it. So combined with the prevailing culture’s attitude toward Christianity and my friend’s skepticism, I couldn’t make sense of how all the things that I wanted, all the bad things I wanted to do, that I got really, really caught up in. That was the main thing I thought about was the next time we were going to go party or I was preparing for it or just… That was really my goal, was just to waste time, for the cleanest phrase I could put forth.

But it did come to mind. I didn’t think that there was any kind of personal understanding of God. I don’t mean to say understanding. Experience of God. I just thought it was the kind of thing where He’s up there and we’re down here, and there’s nothing to connect in between. And those seeds of doubt didn’t take me all the way away, but it certainly did have me something to compare to.

So, in a sense, you had talked about a dichotomy going on with you, in that you were going through the motions, if you will, of Christianity, but yet it was a superficial kind of Christianity, and you had seeds of doubt, whether or not it was even true. It didn’t seem to fit with your desires and your lifestyle, but yet you had a sense of this moral obligation, this sense of guilt when you did things wrong, so even though your Christianity was somewhat superficial or cultural, you still had these very personal feelings of wrongdoing, I guess you could say, and so that was causing some tension in you.

Right. Yeah. Let me just say this. I don’t think I felt guilt when I did the bad things. I think I felt guilt when I went to church. We had to go almost every week.

I see. It was a reminder. It was kind of in your face.

Yeah. So I’d hear the preacher preach, and I was like, “Man, that’s true. That’d be really good, and we really ought to do that,” and agree with it and understand so much of what he would be saying, but when it’d come to applying it to life, as soon as Monday came, it was right back to being the person that I was the other six days of the week.

It was something that you could easily leave behind, so when you went on to college, then, it was probably even easier to leave church behind or Christianity or that Sunday morning reminder of guilt behind.

Right. And not only that, it went from… The culture I grew up in with the people I was around was, and I’ll say Christianized with air quotes, like it was still the Christian ethic, if not even the Christian practices. But the media culture that I was in, whether it be video games, we had the internet by that time, albeit very slow, and television were not. And so that presented differences, too. But once I got to college, and this was in late 2001, the regular church service went away. I didn’t have to go. I didn’t deal with that very much. And then the people that I was around, whether it be people in the dorms or classmates or teachers or wherever else was influencing around, were nothing of the sort. It was secular at best, and so much of it was even anti Christian, although there would be campus preachers that would come because it was a public university, and they would make their plea.

And I think I listened once. This one guy, he would just come and read the Bible out loud, and he would answer questions, but he never really preached. There was one guy who preached fiercely and seemingly enjoyed the agitation that he could stir up within people, and that wasn’t very appealing, but the one guy, he would just read the Bible. Real nice guy. But I listened to him once. He was there two or three times a week, it would seem like I would pass by him, but that was as much as I had to avoid, and the rest of everything else, whether it be media or the rest of the people around were… It wasn’t promoting the faith, and so much of it was antagonistic. I then got into classes, too, that seemingly supported the kind of things that I’d want to hear to get rid of the guilt that I had.

So I didn’t have the regular reminder, and I was studying physics more. You get into science classes, and the evolutionary worldview is assumed rather than questioned. It was to the point where… The things that I did that were wrong, that I knew were wrong, that I felt like I needed to ask forgiveness for, became more prevalent, and the restraint that was pulling me back in that direction was gone, and so it was so much easier to embrace anything that was against that. It was a lot easier to try not to deal with the guilt that I had. I can’t say exactly where because it’s been some time now, but probably around 19, 20 years old or so is when I went into full-on atheism. I didn’t promote it or anything right away, but it was something I think I was coming into. And after that, it just became more easy to do all the immoral things that I wanted to do.

Right. So it gave you a moral license without guilt.

Right. Now, there were other things, too, that… Like I got into some of the culture of it, like the culture of atheism. Just finding out certain facts that made it easy to fend off anybody that might want to argue with me. I’d been good at arguing my whole life. It’s not something you want to naturally be good at, I don’t think. Or most people wouldn’t, but I was, and so I just pieced together a few facts. And some, I would just assert as if they didn’t have to be argued. Evolution was one of them. I wasn’t sure about it. They taught it to us in high school. And so I’d already embraced the evolution of the species, and then I would find out in physics about the expanding universe, and now I think more so that’s something on our side that we can use to defend, rather than something that helps the-

Yeah. The expanding universe confirms the reality of an initial big bang, as it were. A singularity at the beginning of the universe.

Right. Well God also says He stretches out the heavens, so I’d take the expanding universe. I would just presuppose evolution. I would put that the Bible had been translated so many times, so we couldn’t really know whether it was true or not. I mean I sounded like a professional. And the one that got me the best that I would save for last that I thought was my best attack on the faith was, you know, we’ve got 800,000 species of insects, and this shows that Noah put every single thing on the ark in twos, and it was like I don’t think that he really had 1.6 million different little insects there in male and female and then set them all off the ark. Now I’ve got different arguments as opposed to that now and everything, but that would really blow people’s mind when I would start defending myself. So they’d either at least have some chink of skepticism in their armor if they wouldn’t respond. Or maybe they didn’t. They just didn’t want to argue with a hothead like me. I didn’t really take that into account. Or I’d leave justified, but either way, they wouldn’t talk or they would lose the argument. So no one could respond to your intellectual arguments for atheism.

Right. And so I felt all the more rigorous and justified in my own unbelief, or my own belief in atheism. It is a kind of a faith. I didn’t always go out looking to be like that, but… Another thing I could point out too was the inconsistencies in people who named themselves Christian. I didn’t really go out starting fights, but when somebody would use that as a crutch in conversation or just even mention Christianity or Jesus or anything like that, or a belief in God, then it might… I view it now like now triggered, like I would just want to fight back about that and then start tearing down the walls of somebody’s faith. It’s just like so much of what we see now. I just wanted it removed from public discourse. Like, “You can believe this on your own, but I don’t want you talking about it around me kind of thing.”

Right. Right. It wasn’t true. Science had disproved it. It wasn’t good. You’re hypocritical. The atrocities of the church. All of these things. The corruption of the Bible. It’s just that you showed Christianity to be rather weak compared to the strength of your intellectual atheism.

Right. And my theory on the people who were Christians, apart from a within-the-church kind of view, it looked to me… Like, I just examined the ten commandments, and after you get through the first four, it just seemed like something was set up to keep the people in power in power. And some of the Communism had had leaked through made that kind of impression seemingly. “Don’t want my stuff. Don’t take my wife. Don’t steal from me.” I couldn’t make sense of all of it, but that was enough for me to think that there was some kind of motivation to keep people in line. And I didn’t look much further into that. I theorized it, and then I’d heard some other people… Maybe not directly, people in person. I read something or heard something somewhere. That made enough sense to me to keep the belief, and from the personal perspective, it just seemed like, to me, a way to not have to make explanations for things. I was just so enamored with all the wonderful things that I was learning that it seemed to me that if you didn’t want this, what I knew, that I found to be so wonderful, then you were just being lazy. And I can do this now, too, even as a Christian. You find sometimes in life things are so hard to explain that you don’t know what to say. Sometimes we’ll just… We don’t want to push people through their own difficulty. You can see something’s difficult for somebody and say, “Well, I’ll pray for you about that,” or see something so tough, but when I would hear people say, when I was younger, “The Lord works in mysterious ways,” it seemed like such a cop-out. As if… If something favorable to you happens, then, “Oh, the Lord is so good,” and then, if you couldn’t explain or something bad to you happens, it’s like, “Well, the Lord works in mysterious ways,” seemed to be the explanation for all of it. That there wasn’t anything within the bounds that could happen to you that couldn’t be explained by one pithy phrase about how God’s working in this. And that just seemed to be so intellectually lazy that I didn’t want to have that to be the explanation for what I had. Now I couldn’t offer any better explanation for why bad things happen to good people seemingly, but that was a tough one for me.

Matthew, it sounds like you had a lot of things going on. You had become a militant atheist. It seems like you had a lot of contempt for Christianity and God in your life, and I presume that this affected your lifestyle, and I just wondered how your atheism affected the way that you lived.

Right. Well, not only was there the culture in school, the absence of the church kind of being that moral balance to combat, so much of what I wanted to believe… There was an experience I had when I was 20. I had come back from an internship as an engineer and was in school over the summer, and for the Fourth of July holiday I went back to my roommate’s hometown.

I was at a point where I was very low. I didn’t know what to do. I recognized that I had a problem with alcohol and drugs and was starting to see a counselor about it, and his thoughts… And I think he kind of knew, but he just couldn’t say. Some people won’t take certain things, no matter whether they’re true or not, just because they’re so hard to believe. Or they cost too much to believe. And I think that’s what happens with people a lot of times when you try to present Christianity to them. It’s a harder truth than what he was telling me. I went because I was depressed. I just didn’t have a whole lot of hope, whole lot of joy, and this was already by the time I was 20, so this is before any kind of militant atheism. This was just kind of the seedling phase. But I went to this counselor, and he said, “Perhaps it’s that you’re depressed and that you drink and do drugs because of this. Or it could be that these are the things that are causing you to be depressed, and the way we can put a control on this is by having you stop,” so he agreed to have me stop for 45 days, and at the time, I was into alcohol and marijuana and some other drugs, too, but those were the main two. Those were the only two I had any kind of possession of. And so I’d agreed to have one more time with each, and so I finished the marijuana that I had.

And I planned to go back to my roommate’s hometown for the Fourth of July. There was this pretty girl that I had seen there before that wanted to meet me again, and I didn’t want to go back and not be cool by not drinking. And so I was saving that day to drink. But in the 30 days or so leading up to that time, I was having such a good time. I got back into being active and running. I was an athlete all through high school, too. So I think I’d even quit smoking. I still smoked cigarettes then.

So this day comes along, and I’m going back. I never did end up running into the girl, but we also started drinking around noon, and by 5:00, I’m drunk. I didn’t drink for 30 days, and I don’t know how many beers I drank, but it was a lot. More than normal, and I’d lowered my tolerance by not drinking for several days beforehand. And somewhere I began to lose memory. We went to several different places, but I woke up in the hospital, and I was on all kinds of drugs, I’m sure. I later met a doctor of pharmacology that said, “If you go into a coma, even if you would remember anything, they put you on drugs, so that you won’t remember anything.” So I didn’t remember a whole lot about what happened, but I looked down, and my left leg had been amputated. And just knowing how bad off I was, with drugs and alcohol and trying to be cool, I thought… I mean I’d been in so many car wrecks already by then that I was like, “Well, that’s the kind that can happen doing the kind of things that I did.” And didn’t really question too much the fault of the matter, what had went on. It was like, “I mean, I’m sure that something bad happened and that it was my fault. I was the one getting drunk.”

Now, I don’t doubt that something else contributed to it. There may or may not have been any kind of foul play, but from what I can gather, I got hit by a truck going about 75 miles an hour that hit me as a pedestrian. I don’t know if I was standing or lying or sitting or what. I don’t know. And I feel bad for the guy that hit me. I ended up being in the hospital for a month. I had a lot of surgeries, a lot of staples, but I was a pretty cheerful patient. I had family all around. I think so many people were just glad that I lived, and for me, the experience was I went out partying one night, knowing I shouldn’t really do it, and then I woke up in the hospital.

And I had some tough experiences there, the additional surgeries that went on, but to me, it was just like, “How am I going to get back to normal now?” That was more the focus for me. “How do I get up and get moving?” That seemed to me the harder thing than to deal with what actually happened. But, being proud as I was, it seemed like the kind of thing… I was like, “Man, I’ve been through so many wrecks and a bunch of fights and just a bunch of dumb stuff.” It didn’t seem like I could die, and that didn’t fit anywhere into an atheistic worldview. And then there’d be people that would come and visit me that I hardly knew. I mean I kind of know but… They just had been praying for me at different churches from around the community. And I’d hear about that, and I’d dismiss it, and I’d hear about it, and I’d dismiss it, and I’d hear about it, and I’d dismiss it. And it just seemed to me like I was a medical anomaly. That was the easiest way to explain it, than some kind of miracle, like people were exclaiming.

That is, for you, it wasn’t something that you all of a sudden opened up and said, after this tragedy, “Oh, I believe in God, and this was a miracle.”

No, not at all.

You were actually pushing farther away or still-

Yeah. I was like, “I just had good doctors,” is the way I thought about it. And that was so tough for so many people at the time. Not only did they see something they thought to be genuine, this is me putting my thoughts into their head. Nobody’s told me this. But at the same time, I’m like, “Oh, it’s okay,” and just discounting it. Not that I wasn’t a cheerful hospital patient or anything like that. I think so much of it was just shielding the difficulty of all that I know was to come. I mean it was a lot of pain and still is a lot of times, but-

I can’t imagine. Truly can’t imagine.

Yeah, but it’s bearable. And it’s a lot more bearable to know that I contributed to this. We have a tendency, and I say “we.” You may not be included in this “we.” You or anybody that would hear this. To want to be pitiful about a plight in our life. And God’s done good enough for me that the most difficult things that I have to deal with in my life, this being one of them, was that they’re my fault. And so I can’t go to, “Well, look at all the bad things that happened to me.” It’s like, “No, look at the bad I caused myself,” and so I kind of just get to gloss over the whole pitiful part. I can feel sad for a minute, but I’ve got to figure out a better way or just rest until we get the proper thing fixed or the proper remedy of what the situation is, or proper diagnosis.

So it sounds like you became rather convinced of and ingrained in your atheism. So what was next in your journey that perhaps caused you to either push further into atheism or turn towards God?

I’m thinking I’m about 22, 23 when it goes not just into a passive and then occasionally combative to like a militant atheism. At the breath of the opportunity, I would make a point to do it. And it didn’t matter with whom. People I would work with, family members, even my own grandmother. It was terrible. One of them, not both. But one of them, I was just like, “Look, we don’t have any explanation for this,” and she said, “I’m still believing in God. I don’t care what you say,” but that’s just the extreme example. Like why would you do that to your grandmother? I was corrupt.

Yeah.

Just awful. And something that I heard… I wish I could remember the scholar. I can’t remember who it was, but he ended up being converted, but he said he was the kind of atheist, he had to be so smart to be so dumb. God’s fingerprint is on so many things and everything in life, but if you’re so pleased with your own atheism, you have to stop looking at the pieces of the world that have God’s fingerprint on it until you retreat and you retreat and you retreat and the only thing you can kind of be pleased with is your own thought of atheism. And that’s just a sad world to live in. I don’t think I got all the way there, but I got very close. And it was just such a sad existence. It’s just so much complaint, anger, and I just really was not a very happy person at all.

And when you’re a militant atheist, you have nothing to live for but that, and after a while, that becomes so terrible that you try to find some other purpose in life. And I couldn’t find anything to live for. I thought about… And I’m probably not as good of a scientist as I’d like to think, but I thought, “Maybe I can just do that,” maybe I could just go do science somewhere. “Can I really live somewhere out in the woods and just conduct experiments or something, like Tesla or something.” That’s way too proud of me to think that I could do stuff like that, but it was an option I was examining. Another thing we looked at… I was trying to figure out what we could do, like, “Man, things seem so terrible. What could we live to do something worth doing?” And I thought, “Maybe we could try to make humanity more efficient.” I still kind of had the engineering mindset, and I thought that making humanity more efficient, at least… It seems like there’s so much waste, and I think that’s probably still some of the leftovers of dabbling in Communism that brought about, but I wanted to just have humanity be better. And I didn’t even have a good definition of better, but the area of history that my friend had been influenced by so much was the Roman period, and we had come to the conclusion that having one currency, one language, and one government would make things a lot more efficient and cut out a lot of waste. So adjacent to that is the whole scare of 2012, and for those who don’t know or don’t remember, it was the worry that there was going to be some kind of big asteroid to come and hit or just the end of mankind in some kind of way. So I really thought that we were coming to the end, and I wanted to try to make things better before then.

I told my brother about this. So I thought that I can check out and see if the Bible is really true about this, and so I started reading Revelation.

So, Matthew, you started to read the Bible. You started reading Revelation. What were you finding there? Were you finding the answers that you were looking for?

No, not at all. I didn’t find the answers I was looking for, but I did find some answers. It really was like something had gone on that, for some reason, when I picked up the pages of Revelation, I immediately thought, like, “Man, this is true!” I did think that the things that I saw in there seemingly corresponded to what was happening at the time. I don’t think so now so much. The world obviously did not end in 2012. But some of the stuff seemed to fit, but no matter the rest, I continued to read on and just reading that book and went from book to book to book after that of the Bible. Not necessarily in any kind of order or anything. I just… Something happened where I was like, “This is the truth.” It wasn’t any kind of reasoning involved in it, which was weird. It was just as if the internal voice you have, I don’t know. I hear there’s people that don’t have an internal voice when they think. But I do. And I think most of us do. And it was just like, “This is the truth!” And it didn’t make any sense because everything I’d kind of positioned myself in life was antagonistic to it, but I kept reading. And weird things started happening.

The moral arguing is finally what got to me. I just couldn’t grasp that there wasn’t anything that we could that was wrong. I could push out to the thoughts of some of the worst things that could happen to someone or someone else, and I was like, “That’s definitely wrong, and I don’t have any answer for why it’s-

So you started becoming skeptical about your own atheism?

Right. I kind of pushed back into agnosticism. I think I skipped over being there for a long… For probably a year or so after high school, I branched into being agnostic. It was just a cheap way of saying you’re an atheist that doesn’t want to obey anything. Now I’m sorry for any agnostics that I offended. It’s just like, “I don’t want to obey any rules, but I don’t want to say that I know anything.” Or at least that was how it was for me. But then I got pushed back. It’s like, “Maybe I really don’t know,” and then I couldn’t get over the idea of morality. I knew that some things I did were wrong, and I couldn’t explain it. I couldn’t explain having a conscience. And that was a thing I tried so hard to explain away, and I couldn’t do it.

So I started praying. I remember… It’s just so weird. God answered some prayers when I was 17, and there’s no way it couldn’t have been an answer to prayer because the exact opposite of the thing happened the day before and then the thing that I was praying for kind of just turned itself upside down the next day. And I don’t know why I could avoid that happening. Why I couldn’t keep that out of my memory, but it came back to me around this same time. It’s like, “Man, I used to pray when I was younger, and I used to get prayers answered. I should start praying again.” But I was praying to anything but the Christian God, with all His rules and all His bad history. So I started praying to just weird stuff, the sun, the moon, the stars, all manner of idolatry, but I kept praying, just kept praying for God to show itself or Himself to me and had run out of ways to try to pray to something that I could make up.

Around this time, things had just got so bad in my life. I wasn’t fully employable. And this is the end of 2008. I didn’t pick the Bible back up for some time, right after that, but I did continue on praying, and it was so weird, I’d begun again to try to stop drinking and stop doing drugs. I knew I was going to have to get some kind of different job. I was trying to move back to my hometown. And this was at the height of the previous recession, when nobody knew whether we were going to make it out of it or whether we’d be able to have jobs. I ended up moving, not in with my parents but into an apartment somehow, and… Before all this happened, I was going into my morning routine, and I’d already come to understand the Bible as true. I wasn’t reading it still, but I was still praying. I still didn’t want to believe that the God of the Bible was the one that was making the truth the truth. But the conclusion came to me… It’s like when you read about the prodigal in Luke 15. It said he came to himself. That is exactly what happened to me. I came to myself in understanding that everything I wanted was a sin. All I wanted to do was to drink and do drugs and chase skirts and just do a bunch of other bad things. And so I came to the realization, like, “Everything I want’s a sin. All I ever want to do is sin.”

And I just fell down weeping, and I said, “I’ll do whatever You want. I knew it was God there with me at that time.” It was so weird. And I started throwing out CDs that I knew I shouldn’t have and books. I had all kind of manner of terrible books. Music I shouldn’t be listening to. And within a month, I’d moved home to that apartment and started going to church. My dad would take me to church. In the same way that, when I read the Bible, I knew it to be the truth this time around, it’s as if what the preacher was telling me was the truth. It’s like, “Well, why doesn’t somebody tell people that these guys are telling the truth?” I couldn’t understand. This really was the whole change of things. It really was like being a new person.

Like you had new eyes to see or ears to hear.

And ears to hear, yeah. And I just continued on going to church ever since. It was just such a weird experience of it. I picked up and read more and more of the Bible. I was reading other materials along with it. And just really soaking up the faith. It was just such a good thing.

So how has your life changed? Obviously, again, it looked like you had a new perspective on life and living, and I presume that it really affected your life. As an atheist, you spoke of anger. You spoke of depression. And those kinds of things. How was your life affected after you became a Christian?

I had a morality to adhere to. I had some kind of purpose, what I lacked before. And life had meaning. So much, even my goals and stuff changed. Immediately, I wanted to be a part of a family and have a wife and children… Just so much of what society sits upon. I wanted to be a part of that. I became so normal.

So normal!

I just enjoyed my idea of being a radical for so long, and then when I became a Christian, it was like, “Man, this is really normal.” But it was still… I think it would be boring [UNKNOWN 46:30] the thought on becoming a Christian. It just seemed like, “Man, it’s just got to be so boring! You don’t get to do any of the wild, fun stuff I like to do.” But it’s been so much more wild being a Christian. I’ve been on a lot more adventures, however small or large, since then. It seems like it happens all the time, just even everyday events can be like that.

So much of what we see now… Those who would oppose Christianity want so many of the same things that we have, just in a different way. I had a community to be a part of. It’s like a network of something that was other than just a bunch of bad people that were tripping over their own feet metaphorically in life all the time. And I had something to which to progress. Just trying to be like Christ is such a hard thing sometimes.

But it’s in a different way, I presume than the Christianity you knew as a child, where you had to be good. This is a different kind of thing, to be like Christ. You have so much good to say. I wish we had more time in the podcast to do that. So, Matthew, it sounds like your life has changed dramatically, and you were just speaking a moment ago about those who opposed Christianity, or those nonbelievers who sometimes actually are looking for similar things but in a different way or in a different direction. If you were able to speak to the skeptic or the curious nonbeliever, what would you say to them?

Oh, I’d say I’d really examine the motivations that you have for your atheism. Is it really the evidence is really that you want to produce your own ethic? That’s what I find with me and with so many of the atheists that I run into or encounter who’ve come from atheism in the same way. “If this were true, then this would cost me this,” really is the hindrance to come into the faith, rather than, “These other arguments are so convincing,” and some of them very well may be as far as the scientific arguments against the faith if you don’t have the counter to them. But what I would do is to examine your motivations for this. Are they really scientific or are they ethical?

And then to find out for yourself about this. I would recommend reading the Bible and just trying to understand more about what the gospel is. The term is used so much in Christian culture it’s almost lost any effect, but it really is the good news that we live in a fallen world, where sin has corrupted everything. Everything that was to be good is now not as good. And some of the things are not even good the all. And to remedy that, to show how loving God is, He sent His Son to die. He lived a perfect life. He rose from the dead, and it’s really just believing that that brings us into this family, to His family where we’re redeemed, where we can see that this church, this bride of His, is really the whole purpose for creation. So often it’s, “Why did God make the world? Why did God not make the world perfect?” God could have made a perfect world and did. And then it’s better for people to have the choice to live in it with freedom or not, and so He did so, and in their choice, they corrupted it. And yet, in His great love, he chose to redeem it. We could have just been like the angels and got the justice we deserved, but to show loving He is, He’s redeemed us, and one of the ways you can hear that is by hearing this gospel. This news is that you don’t have to face Him on your own account. You don’t have to deal with your own ethical problems. They can be resolved by faith in Jesus and faith that He’s come, that he’s overcome the power of death, and that it can be for you, too.

Also, if you could find a church that believes the Bible, I would participate in it. The way that people come to understand this is just by hearing the word of God, and it really is something supernatural that occurs. You want to think that it’s just a deduction and reasoning, but it really is something beyond what we would think that really happens. It really is a change of heart, a change from stone to flesh.

And then, I know there’s got to be, into the spectrum of ethics in atheism, too. Don’t be like I was. You’ll so much regret it if you really do try to unconvert people from Christianity. Whether or not you come to the faith. It’s such a hard way to live, and if you find something in this world to delight in, I’d hope it would be the Lord. If not, let it not be atheism.

That’s wonderful, Matthew. How about some advice to Christians who perhaps don’t understand those who push away from God or want to engage with atheists. What advice would you have for them?

Okay, I would pick up a book from Paul David Tripp. It’s on counseling, but I apply it directly to evangelism, too. It’s called Instruments in the Redeemer’s Hands. It talks about, when you’re trying to tell people difficult things, so often they’re not going to listen to you unless you get to know them. Although we encounter people here and there that we’re only going to see once, but in those instances, try to pray that the Lord would open up a door for the gospel. In a sense where it’s somebody you know, then try to get to know them and try to let them get to know that you love them, that you care about them, in whatever way that you can. It’s so much easier to hear hard truths from somebody that you know loves you than somebody that doesn’t. And then only after that do I try to help people to understand the gospel and just hope that the Lord opens up the door for it.

And then, too, I know we’re on a podcast about people being converted from atheism, but in a sense of what we do in apologetics, the stuff that I subscribe to, or at least the school of which is presuppositional, and that’s a longer word than it should be, but I really do think that presupposing that people are hostile to the truth and that really the only thing that’s going to help them out is either seeing the truth through the Bible or having their ears opened up is what’s going to happen. But at the same time too, we should have an answer for the hope that’s in us, and if it’s just telling, “This is what happened to me,” that’s perfectly fine. But just expect, at points in times, that you’re going to fail. You’re going to be too scared. You’re going to have the fear of man. But that doesn’t mean it has to be the end. We can keep going to let the world know that we really do have the truth and we really do have the message of redemption that the world needs.

That’s really good advice all the way around. Well, thank you, Matthew, for being part of the Side B Podcast. It’s an extraordinary story. It has so much in it in terms of the reasons why you pushed back against God intellectually, emotionally, morally, experientially. So many ways in your life that you were pushing back against God, but I guess He was not pushing back against you. That somehow, through God, your eyes were opened, and you found the love and care of God, the truth of God through His word, and that your life has been completely transformed. What a beautiful story, and thank you so much for coming on to share it.

It’s been a pleasure for me, too. Being asked about this, it’s like I do want to be able to do what is expected of us in Romans, to confess with our mouth, as I do believe in my heart.

Thanks for joining me today on the Side B Podcast to hear Matthew’s story. You can follow him on Instagram at @PatrickHenry007. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can reach me via email at [email protected]. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, subscribe and share this new podcast with your friends and social network. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll be listening to the other side.