eX-skeptic

Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to the Side B Podcast, where we listen to understand how someone flips the record of their life from atheism to Christianity. Each podcast, we listen to the story of someone who was an atheist and became a Christian. Each journey is unique, filled with unusual twists and turns. The story we’re going to listen to today certainly does not disappoint. It is as fascinating as anything you might imagine seeing, reading, or hearing about. Nikki contacted me after hearing my interview on Justin Brierley’s Unbelievable? Podcast and told me her incredible story. I thought it was too good not to share. As a Jew who didn’t believe in God, who lived and immersed herself in an anti-God, very intellectual culture, Nikki was highly resistant to religious belief, particularly to Jesus, someone whom she adamantly did not believe in, nor anyone she ever wanted to believe in. But she experienced an unexpected profound spiritual encounter with Jesus, that she immediately became open to the possibility that perhaps God existed after all, and that His name was Jesus. As someone who valued reason, Nikki set out on a diligent intellectual search to find out what was actually true, whether or not a reality outside of the natural world actually exists and that the person she met, Jesus, actually had good reason to exist based upon more than just her personal experience. I hope you’ll come and listen to her extraordinary story with me. Well, thanks for joining us at the Side B Podcast, Nikki. It’s so great to have you here today.

Thank you. Thank you.

Well, as we’re getting started, so the listeners know a little bit about who you are, why don’t you tell us a bit about yourself?

So my name is Nikki, and I live in Portland, Oregon. I work as a pastor’s assistant at a local church, and I’ve lived in Portland since 2005, but I’m originally from the South.

Originally from the South? Oh, okay. Yeah, I don’t hear a real strong Southern dialect. As someone from Atlanta, I can tell you’ve not lived here for a while. So, why don’t you take us back to the beginning, your childhood, and let us know kind of where you grew up. What was it like there? Did you live in the Bible Belt? Did you live in southern America. Tell us what that world was like. Was there any sense of God in it in your world?

So yeah, I grew up in Houston. We moved there when I was four years old. And I knew that we were… I’m Jewish by birth, so we were the only Jewish family in the whole neighborhood. I was often the only Jewish kid at school, but we were unique in that my parents did not believe in God. They were atheists, and that’s how they raised me. But we would still go to synagogue. But my first encounter with Jesus was when I was seven years old. We were on the school bus, and I was about to get off the school bus, and I was going down the stairs, and this little girl came up to me, and she had this angry look on her face. She was actually a friend of mine, and she just yelled in my face, “You killed Jesus!” and she shoved me down the bus stairs. So I laid there stunned. I went home with tears, and I had to ask my parents. “Who’s Jesus? And why did I kill him? I don’t remember killing anyone.” So it was at that point that I heard about Jesus and was told that He was a rabbi and that he’s not the Messiah but most of the people that we live around believe that he’s, like, a savior. “But that’s not for us. Jesus is for the Christians, and we have nothing to do with them.

Yeah. So that was your introduction to Jesus?

Yeah.

So I would imagine… Did that make you feel like an outsider with regard to your culture? Was that girl… unfortunately, was she representative of most of the people around you? Did you live around a lot of Christians? Did you ever experience any kind of Christianity apart from the girl who shoved you down the bus stairs?

They were just my neighbors, so I didn’t know any different, but I knew that we were different, that the teachings about Jesus were that… That was for the goy. That was for everyone else. I didn’t understand because I was told there wasn’t a God. And we were going to synagogue, and my dad acted like he was God but he hated God. So there wasn’t any God. We still went to synagogue. It was all very confusing. And then, every year, my brother and I would do a Hanukkah presentation, and my mom would make latkes, the potato pancakes, and bring them to school, and I’d have to do this presentation and educate all the Christians about Hanukkah. So it was kind of weird growing up in the Bible Belt as just, like, the one Jew, but apparently actually Houston has a large Jewish population, but we were not a part of it. So I was kind of isolated, and I didn’t really understand religion. It didn’t make any sense to me. I would go to Hebrew school and learn Hebrew. I would go to synagogue and kind of say these prayers that were transliteration and not in English. They were just… they had absolutely no meaning to me. I liked being in synagogue because there was a sense of community and I kind of felt self, especially when you’re in a culture that is different than yours. And then you have this one little group, so I liked that, but it didn’t have a… I’d hear other people talk about their faith and what faith should be, and that wasn’t my experience, so I kind of didn’t like the whole religion thing. I would go with my friends to Mass sometimes, and there was a sense of peace there that I didn’t understand, but I knew it wasn’t for me. That’s what I’d been told. It was… Christianity and this whole Jesus thing really wasn’t for me. So that’s all I knew about it.

So as you were growing up, that must have been a bit confusing, participating in religious ritual and services but not believing in a sense. That it was more, I guess, community and part of your ethnicity. Part of your community in a sense, but not believing.

Yeah. It was just tradition. It was something that we did, and especially coming out of World War II, there was a strong sense of, you know, “We’re going to stick together as Jews. We’ve just come through this horrible experience. We’ve lost a lot of our families, and so you kind of have an obligation to be Jewish, even if you don’t believe that there is a God or even if you want to be a Buddhist. You still have to be Jewish first. That is your identity. Even though it doesn’t make any sense. That’s your identity. You can be an atheist Jew. The Judaism itself is your identity.” But I didn’t understand. It was unmoored from anything scriptural. I didn’t really understand that part. We did do the feasts. We did do Passover. We did do… Well, Hanukkah’s not really technically a kingdom feast, but we did do that, so there was kind of a semblance of community and culturalism, but it wasn’t connected to who I now know God is, so it was really empty and devoid, and I saw that in the lives of Christians around me, too. So I was told that science was the answer, rationality was the answer, and everything is observable, and reality is no more than what we can see and experience and observe. So that took the place of my God, and that’s what I pursued. I was always just interested in knowing what was true. So that’s how I grew up. I also was pretty ill growing up. I was born prematurely, and so I had a vestibular issue which… I would have severe attacks at least four times a year, and they were hell. I mean I’ve had it all my life until recently, so growing up with that and not having a God was particularly challenging. And I was told that I wasn’t sick. Because it was a dizziness thing, so there was no treatment, and my parents really didn’t know what to do about it, and so I grew up with like a sense of a moral weakness. I know that sounds funny from an atheist perspective, but because I wasn’t able to function, there was something wrong with me. I was morally weak because I couldn’t quite hold a job after graduate school, and so it was all… Growing up was a little bit challenging compared to a lot of people.

Okay. Wow. It does sound like you grew up with some challenges for sure, in terms of trying to navigate your way. Very admirably, though, in terms of really your pursuit of what you believed to be true, whether it was science, rationality, so obviously then you believed that religion was not rational, not true in any sense. So talk with me about, as you were growing up, obviously, through high school, college, graduate school, you were moving through this period of your life, doing life on your own, but what did you perceive religion to be if it wasn’t true or rational?

Religion was an opiate for the masses. It was a crutch for the weak. It was something that people hung their hat on when there was nothing else to hang their hat on. They were uncomfortable with ambiguity. Of course, I… In my intellect, I was so superior because I was okay with not knowing. Belief had nothing to do with truth. I mean that never entered my mind, that belief could have anything to do with truth. At least a faith belief would not have anything to do with truth, so I never… I just saw it as patently untrue. I would hear the bible stories of, like, a talking donkey, and I would just laugh. I worked in a children’s bookstore at one point, and they had the creationist books, and I would be on the floor laughing. I would mock and deride it. I really did. Anyone who believed in any sort of God was… I thought that they were really dumb, although I met some smart people. The Jews were smart because they had been… I guess it was genetic or something, so there was that sense of Jewish exceptionalism and superiority, which is no more than pride, but that’s what I grew up. The term “chosen people” that were chosen by God. I thought that was silly. But I couldn’t see how any of it could be true, and I didn’t understand why otherwise smart people would believe in it, other than it gave them a sense of comfort and ability to deal with the unknown in a way that kind of structured their anxiety. I just thought, in the end, it was a mental illness. I really did. I thought that belief in God was delusional and that some day science would come along and cure humanity of all of this insanity. So that’s the way I looked at religion and belief.

No, yes, in a very… I mean, according to your own worldview, that makes perfect sense. So as you were again embracing your atheism as the rational way of thinking about the world, did you… I know you were dealing with your vestibular issues of illness and frailty on your own part but weren’t able to do that, like you say, with the comfort of a God, but within your own atheistic worldview, did you look at the logical implications of your atheism, in terms of what it meant for your life practically speaking, in terms of…. whether it’s meaning or purpose or human value or freedom to choose or your own consciousness and those kinds of things? Did you reflect on what atheism meant for you and your life in terms of its logical implications?

Not in an ultimate sense. I never really looked at the logical presuppositions of my blind faith in atheism, but I would say that… The farthest I ever got was that I was just going to be comfortable with the ambiguities, that I was just made in that way. I wasn’t weak. So it was really more of a superiority thing that I took comfort in. As far as the logical endgame of reconciling that… how I reconciled that there was meaning and purpose clearly, but ultimately there wasn’t. No. I didn’t think about it had to be logically consistent all the way through to be true, but I just… It was about really self sufficiency, and so ultimately, it didn’t have to have meaning and purpose as long as it had meaning and purpose in the here and now, and then, of course, when you die, you’ll return to dust, and it all goes back. So that’s as far as I ever got. I didn’t need to have anything beyond that. It was just observable and provable. That was what made it comfortable for me. But I never got into more the deep philosophical things, and when I would have those conversations, they were… I think I would just mock them and laugh at the people who wanted to push beyond that.

So you had quite a resolute understanding of the world, of your own atheism. It just seems very pragmatic. It seems like this is the way the world was. Did you feel… It sounds like you had some intellectual superiority with that, some sense of existential satisfaction that you were where you should be as a rational thinking person.

Yes.

Did you live among a community of atheists? Or was this… You said that you live in Portland. You moved from the South to the Northwest, where I presume that atheism is a bit more normal way of thinking about things. Can you talk about the change of culture for you as you pursued your life as an adult as an atheist?

Yeah. One of the reasons we chose Portland is because it was one of the most well-read towns, and I was such a reader. And so I liked being around people that were people of ideas and liked to have deep discussions and were thoughtful about things. So when I moved here, people had all different types of belief, and so finally I got to the point where I realized that not all of them could be true but if we’re making up our own idea of what’s out there maybe some of us are wrong. That kind of occurred to me, but it didn’t really… it was like, well, how do we ever know which one is right, and so we’re just going to make up what we think is objectively true. But I was never really challenged on that. But it was comfortable to me to be around people who had thoughts. Thoughts were really interesting, and so I was very comfortable here. Escaping the Bible Belt seemed like… very fundamental and very restricting to me as a self-identified intellectual atheist, when I was being told I was just wrong all the time. It was very freeing to move to the Pacific Northwest. But I got to a point where my health struggles were getting worse. I’ve always had severe anxiety and depression, and as my health got worse and worse, I did reach out for help, and I began to have my beliefs challenged in a way because truth became very important. Truth, like knowing what was true, what was actually true, became central to my life at that point. If you’re going to be honest, if that’s a characteristic in your life that you want to pursue, honesty, then you have to know what truth is in order to tell it. And so I got to the point where I was told, “You have to choose a higher power,” and well, as an atheist, that’s a really challenging thing, right? So how do you choose something that’s higher than you? Well, I knew truth as higher than me, so put, on the altar of my life, truth. And then I also knew that energy was true, right? Because we can see it. There’s light bulbs. And then love must be true. So those three things I kind of lifted up to a higher power and began to deify those characteristics. And that’s probably when that door opened for me, that I just really wanted to know what was true in order to speak it. Because I wanted to have integrity in my life. So that was the first step that I took. But it wasn’t like God. I mean I never thought that God was a person or anything like that. That was-

Yeah. But there was something in you that became open to another perspective or perhaps another view of reality or, like you say, the pursuit of truth above all else. And that’s very admirable. Sometimes that’s very difficult to do.

I’m curious, during this time where you were becoming a little bit more open, did you meet any Christians or anyone of faith that tried to tell you, “Oh, I know a higher power.”

Yes, I did. And her name is Mary. She’s my little angel. I came in one day, just shaking, and she grabbed onto my hand and has not let go. We called her “Bible-thumping Mary,” and here’s this atheist and this Bible thumper, and we became friends. There’s just like a similar spirit that we had. Because we can spot each other even if we’re in a different field, like the wrong field. But she would just… She told me about Jesus, and she said her pastor was Jewish. I would roll my eyes at her and think, “Lady, you’re crazy, because pastors aren’t Jewish.” But she said, “No, no. Jesus was a Jew.” I’m like, “Well, yeah, I knew that,” but towards the end I really thought that Jesus was fictional. There was a DVD that had been passed around in Portland on the streets called Zeitgeist, and it posited that Jesus was probably made up. Or He was just kind of an embodiment of all these other different mythical gods or real gods or… I don’t know. But in the end, I really believed that Jesus was probably fictional, probably completely fictional, and so when Mary started talking to me about her Jesus and how much she loved him, I thought, “Oh, my gosh! This lady is nuts. But I really like her.” But she would tell me she’s praying for me, and she’s got her church praying for me, and I didn’t know what to make of that. I would just tell her, “Please don’t. Please don’t pray for me. That’s dumb.” But she was… The things she would say were true, like morally true, emotionally true, and I didn’t know what to do with that. That was really challenging. And I was meeting more and more Christians who were like… They seemed really solid, and they didn’t seem crazy, and they were talking about Jesus. I still couldn’t go there. I was not having any of it. So I did meet some, and that wasn’t… That didn’t move me very much, other than to just kind of put things in me that said, “Okay, maybe they’re not completely nuts. Maybe there’s a truth in there somewhere. Maybe Jesus had some really good teachings,” and that’s as far as I got with that.

Well, but I suppose what Mary did for you is to break down some kind of stereotype about who you thought Christians were and that perhaps they’re not as strange or irrational or whatever it is you had in your mind. “They’re not as bad as I thought they were,” perhaps.

Yeah. When you get desperate enough, like… So Mary is a very salt-of-the-earth person, not intellectual at all, but God had… I didn’t know it was God, but my heart was open. Love was a very important virtue to me because I needed that connection. I didn’t have a really good family that I had connection with, and as I had been ill for 13 years at that point, off and on on my deathbed. I had been just, like, slowly dying, and so my friends had fallen away, and so I needed that connection, and you know when it’s real. On a human level, you know when it’s real. So that’s what I was craving. All the intellectual stuff, it didn’t matter at that point. So I think that’s what happened. I hit a point where I was so desperate in my life that I was just going to choose good people, and Mary was good. And she was loving, and she showed up, and that’s what spoke to me. So I would try to engage her, like, “Well, it can’t be true.” She couldn’t follow what I was saying. She didn’t want to talk about quantum physics. So we just had a relationship that wasn’t based on all the intellectual stuff that I would put up that I would have with my other friends, and my other friends just had kind of disappeared when I had been sick. They were in it for just the discussions, and when my IQ started dropping because of the vestibular issue… I mean, in the end, it was down to 85, a functional IQ of 85. I wasn’t discussing a lot of quantum physics. I wasn’t discussing the nature of the universe and reality a whole lot. I was just lying in bed, being sick, and so I needed someone like Mary to just kind of love me. And that’s really what spoke. That’s what did it.

I imagine that was very powerful.

Yeah.

But again I suppose the issue of truth – even though you weren’t able to speak to Mary so much about quantum physics or the hard questions, she softened you in that way – but what happened, though, in terms of… you still had a desire to know what was true. Talk to us a little bit about what happened next in your journey.

So yeah, I was sick. So I still had the vestibular thing. I was diagnosed with MS, I think in 2008, and then in the summer of 2017, I was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and so I was put in the hospital, and it was strange. I had this sense of peace that I’d never had, and Mary visited me every day. She continued to tell me about her Jewish pastor, and she brought me this Bible, and she said her pastor wanted me to have it because it was written by a bunch of Jews, and I’m like, “Okay, lady, I’ll take it,” because I didn’t want to upset her. Here I am dying, and in the hospital, they did another MRI, and they said that I didn’t have MS, which was… I had never heard of anyone just having MS and then all of a sudden not having it, and they did a contrast CT scan. They diagnosed me with pancreatic cancer based on the lab work, and then the next day, they go in to biopsy it, and there’s nothing there. I didn’t know what to think of that. They discharged me from the hospital, and I didn’t know that that had been the case, so ten days later, when I still don’t get the results and I still think I have pancreatic cancer, Mary says, “You probably need to call them to find out.” I called the doctor, and I said, “So what are the results?” They said, “Oh, we didn’t find anything.” I said, “Oh, good! So the biopsy was negative?” And they said, “No, there wasn’t anything there.” And that really shocked me because I’d seen the picture of the contrast CT scan, and there was something there. I said, “But there was a lump.” They said, “Yeah, but it wasn’t there when we went in.” And I didn’t really think about that was a miracle or anything. I just thought, “I don’t have pancreatic cancer. Yay,” move on to the next thing. But the thing was I was still declining. I was having transitory paralysis. My IQ was dropping. I wasn’t able to function. Things I could do before were just not available. My intellect was being taken away, and so in November, November 11, 2017, I go to bed, and I have an encounter with the Lord. But, you know, had I wanted a god, the last god I would have been chosen would have been Jesus, so I know it’s the Lord. There’s a golden light. He gave me the symbol of the cross. I could see that. So it would be unmistakable. He was singing over me, and this word “shekhinah” kept on ringing through my head. I wake up… So I had been asleep, and I had woken up and had seen the Lord. And then the next morning, when I get up out of bed, I don’t need the walker anymore. The word shekhinah’s running through my head, and out of my mouth comes words that sound like scripture, and I don’t know what to make of this. So I had this experience. I call Mary. I said, “Maybe you should take me to church. Maybe I should thank Jesus. I think it was Him.” But I still… Even though I had that experience, I’m like, “I could be crazy,” so I have to do the investigation, right? So if I ascribe to the scientific method, if I think scientifically, I have to put this to the test, and so I went through a very rigorous period of looking at science, looking at the history, looking at the textual criticism, talking to people, looking at things that I’d never looked at. The Lord was giving me logic proofs. I’d never studied logic. I never studied these things, but they were coming in whole. There were things that I knew that there was no way I could have known because I’d never studied them. I never formally studied logic or philosophy, and yet He was giving me things that there’s no way I could have known unless it was Him. It’s kind of like I had a library card to the universe. And I used it. I did, I did! I would just ask these questions. And in the beginning I didn’t know who to ask them to. I said it was the universe, and then I knew it was the Lord at some point. But even as I went through the investigation and the science and into history, there was a majority part of me that did not want Jesus to be true. I didn’t want it to be true. Because then there are certain implications. At the same time, though, I was attending church, and I was worshiping, and I was studying scripture, hard. I was studying the Torah. I was reading the New Testament, and the Lord was putting it all together. I knew things that… pretty advanced theological concepts were just like I knew them, and I didn’t have any explanation for that. People were seeing the writings I was… the Lord had given me. They were coming to the Lord. Ex pastors, atheists. I mean, it was just kind of crazy, and I liked Christianity because it just opened up the world. It gave it color. It gave it dimension, and the world began to make sense. When you see truth, things come in line, and I really like that. My political views the day I went to bed had been very, very liberal. I do live in a… Well, you guys know Portland. You’ve heard of it. It’s a very liberal town. The morning I woke up, my views had changed. I became a political conservative overnight. Never wanted that to happen. So what the Lord did with me was extremely dramatic, and I don’t even… There are some times I just don’t have words to put it into context. It’s just a miracle. So that’s how I got to Christianity. I had to have the Lord blast my eyes open, give me scripture supernaturally, and then I had to do the rigorous research, and then I came to see that it was true.

What an extraordinary story! A very supernatural story, it sounds like, in many ways. So you came to believe that it was true, but there’s a difference between just belief that something is true and actually willing to give your life to a person who is truth.

Yes.

So you obviously made that step towards an embodied belief, almost.

Yes, exactly. But that took a while. He had opened my eyes and put the questions to seek out in my heart and gave me that spirit of inquiry, and it was progressive after that. It wasn’t a very clear vision of Jesus in the beginning. It was more conceptual, and the embodiment, like seeing Him as a person, it took time. It’s only been three years, but it took time for Him to come out of the scripture into 3D form as My Beloved. Yeah. That was not immediate, but the eye opening was, and the Lord just removed whatever was blinding me. And I truly believe that the reason that that was possible was because I had truly been seeking truth. I truly wanted to know what was true. But more than that, I needed something more, and it was the morality of truth that I needed. Because I wanted to be a person of integrity who spoke truth, not just an intellectual knowledge of it, but a heart knowledge of truth, which is different. Those are qualitatively different.

Yes, and it strikes me, as you’re telling your story, that the three values that you honored or were pursuing the most before you met Jesus were truth, energy, and love, and it’s not lost on me that the person of Christ came, you said, in golden rays of light, which is extraordinary energy, but yet He is the personification of both truth and love. So He came as, again, the person, the embodiment of all of those things which you had valued but you had no place to put them. But then you found them in the person of Christ, and it sounds like He’s just completely transformed you, so that you are actually experiencing and knowing those things, knowing them intellectually but experiencing them in your life and in your heart. I’m curious about two things, really. One is how has your life changed? And secondly, now that you still live in Portland, Oregon, in a place that now you find yourself as an outsider again in a different way, describe for us what that is like.

Well, I’m not in my deathbed anymore. Praise the Lord. And just like the disciples, after He had communion, they’re like, “Where are we going to go, Lord?” Where am I going to go? I had to find something to do. So I started working at a church. I didn’t have any income when I started. They didn’t pay me for two years, but praise the Lord, He’s been faithful, and this year I started earning a salary. So I started doing that. I started working again after not having worked since 1999 because I had been so sick. There’s some sadness, of course, but the Lord says that those who are not willing to leave house and father and mother are not worthy of Me. And so my husband did leave. My family, most of them do not talk to me because they know that I’m a follower of Yeshua, so that’s been… I’ve largely done this alone. My son, as I raised as a very good atheist. He will not talk to me. So there are these things that the Lord tells us about, and truth is truth. He is the embodiment of truth. He is my beloved. I’m going to follow Him. And yeah, there are sacrifices, but He sacrificed Himself for us, and I don’t get to make up truth and change that. I have to follow it. I was following it, pursuing truth before I met Jesus, and I’m still going to follow Him. And I’m glad He’s a person. Let me just tell you that. When you walk alone and you have the Lord, it fills you, and my life, even though I’m alone, even though I’m in Portland, I’m alone without my family, I am in a really good Spirit-filled church with the word that has kind of embraced me. I’m literally at the center of the church now as the pastor’s assistant. But it’s Him, it’s the Lord that fills me. I have time to study the word. I have time to worship Him. I have time to pursue education in apologetics and do ministry, so He’s filled my life. So it is different, but He is worthy. I don’t know what else to say. I think a lot of other Christians might look at it and say, “Wow, that’s a big sacrifice.” The Lord is worth it. And especially I know the joy of salvation. Every day, I know the joy of my salvation, because I know from whence I come, and that was hell. Literally being snatched from the jaws of death in the midst of depression and anxiety, suicidal often because of my vestibular issue and because of emotional scars from my past. I know what I’ve been given, and I know what I’ve been saved from, and I am not… what’s the word? Complacent about it. I am not complacent about my belief because of what He did for me and who the person of Christ is and the reunification with the Father and having the Holy Spirit. So my life has dramatically changed, and to know truth is the most glorious thing I can possibly imagine. So Portland… They can burn their flags, and they can ring cowbells in front of my house or whatever they’re going to do, and that’s fine. God bless them. They don’t have the knowledge yet. And I have great compassion, and I just remember Jesus on the cross saying, “Father, forgive them.” That’s my attitude towards Portland because they don’t know, and I’ve been given such a treasure and such a gift, and I’m so grateful that I have him in the midst of this. I can’t even imagine going through the world now, the way it is, with COVID and the elections and fires burning this summer and riots going on. I mean, my goodness! So I’ve got a grounding in truth, and I’ve got the peace of God and meaning and purpose, so yeah. It’s great living here because, in the middle of this darkness, they need the light, and we’re the light. I mean, I get to be the light! That’s amazing!

What a privilege! What a privilege!

And I’m thinking, for some people listening, they may not understand how you can be Jewish and Christian at the same time. Can you just very briefly put the dots together for that?

Well, if Jesus is not the Messiah of the Jews, He’s the Messiah of no one. He came for the Jews first, to reunite the tribes, and then to the rest of the world. So I am more Jewish now than I have ever been. It’s just such a joy. I study the Torah. When I do Shabbat, His presence and being in the presence of the father is profound, but Jesus is a Jewish man, and that just… If I had just been given the New Testament, it would not have made sense. I have to have all, and His wisdom of the Torah and the Chinuch and the prophets and the writings, all of it, in order to be complete. Jesus completes… He stands at the center of Judaism and Christianity. He is the whole thing. He is the embodiment of God, the same God, the Holy One of Israel. So that’s what I would say. I think that Christianity is beginning to wake up, that those false divisions are being broken down. That’s what God wants. He wants us all united. There are no Jew or Gentile, male or female, none of it, in the kingdom of God. So yeah, He’s breaking down those walls for all of humanity and reuniting us back to the original Adam in the garden before the fall, so that’s what I would say.

Wonderful. Thank you. Thank you for that, Nikki. As we’re wrapping up, I wondered if there was someone listening who valued truth like you did and like you still do. What would you say to a curious skeptic or a seeker or someone who really does want to know what is true and what grounds love and what is light and what grounds even, like you say, you had a strong sense of morality, a strong sense of good and evil, and you wanted to know what was true. What would you say to someone like that, who is open to seeking truth?

Yeah, so I think you do have to be humble, and you do have to be open. I wasn’t. I never would’ve made it on my own. I admire atheists who actually have the humility to put their true bias aside and just seek after it. So if you’re truly seeking truth, then you have to approach it humbly. Because it is greater than you. Truth is always greater than you. Put it on the altar of deity in your life and seek it humbly. Ask questions. Follow it, even where you don’t agree necessarily. Look at all the sources. Truly be unbiased. Don’t exclude the Bible. Because it can be treated like a theory. You just want to see where the evidence best fits, and if it best fits on scripture, then that’s where the evidence leads. So that’s what I would say. There is a logic proof that the Lord had given me very early on, and it’s called the absolute truth proof. It’s very brief, and it’s that all claims of religion are claims of absolute truth, including atheism. They describe the nature and function of reality. But absolute truth is exclusive. It excludes everything that isn’t absolutely true, so that if there are differences in the claims of absolute truth, the differences between the claims of religion or atheism, that means that only one claim can be true. Now if that’s true, which it is – and that’s just logic. Well, which claim? Well, God’s going to make it easy. He says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” He’s not claiming to be just one way among many, nor is he claiming to be a truth among many truths. He’s claiming to be the truth, the absolute truth. So if we’re going to start looking at truth, you can use that claim and just say, “Okay, let me take this claim seriously because I value truth. Let me look at the historical evidence. Let me look at the evidence for the resurrection unbiased.” Follow the evidence. Look at the scientific sources and then make your own decision. And don’t rule out people who are experts in the Bible. Because they’re going to know it better than you. Just like you would go to an expert in any field to look at the information, you also want to consider the claims seriously. So seek truth. Knock, and it will be opened to you, and the truth will set you free. That’s what I would say.

That’s excellent. And again, you are speaking as a voice of wisdom and experience, as a light in your own culture. If you were speaking to Christians now as those who want to be light among those around them, what would you say to the Christian who wants to be like a Mary in your life or even in a different way addressing the issues, the intellectual issues with regard to truth, or whatever you think. Stereotypes or anything that you want to say. What would you say to the Christian in terms of them being a better witness to a resistant world?

Fill yourself with God. Get to know Him. Make sure you have a good relationship with the Lord. Worship. Read the word. Take it seriously. It should come first. Secondly, if you’re going to talk to atheists, you want to lay a foundation. So one of the objections I had about Christianity that it was intellectually vacuous. I would ask someone, “Why do you think it’s true?” and they would say, “Because Jesus” something. And that did not… It’s not very satisfying when you’re an atheist. So if you really want to deal with atheists, you’re going to have to do the hard work of learning their perspective, learning what they know, and studying. So you want to do the preparation, which is work. Of course, you do that with a grounding in the gospel. No one’s going to listen to you if you’re shoving facts in their face because it’s disrespectful. Jesus gives us dignity. He comes from grace. He asks questions. He’s not forceful with anything, so we want to, when we’re preparing, just really embody Christ and treat the person in front of us as a person, as Jesus would, despite their beliefs. And build relationship. I would say that relationship is key. God is a relationship of three persons. He puts us in relationship. When He was here, He had his disciples. You see Him moving in relationship. That’s how He shares love. So, like with Mary, the reason I even listened to her is because she had ministered to me in relationship. She had shown her love and proved that to be true. If we think that someone doesn’t care about us, we’re not going to listen to them. No matter what, I would say. No matter how good the argument is, if there’s not love – 1 Corinthians 13 – there, you’re just going to be a noisy gong. So you have to ground it in true love for the person in front of you and true caring and then prepare. Yeah. That’s what I would say.

Yeah. That’s beautiful. I am sitting here feeling so – I guess blessed is the best word I can come up with  – to hear your story. Just to have sat back and listened to the really extraordinary transformation in your life and how that happened. I mean, someone who was an atheist and so strongly against Christianity, an intellectual atheist who believed that nothing supernatural was real, and then you encounter this incredible supernatural reality in the person of Christ, but of course, at that point, too, you had made a choice to be open to that coming into your life, to that person coming into your life, that truth, that love, that energy, and that speaks to all of us, really, that we all need to have an openness to truth, wherever that evidence leads. Whether we’re Christian or non-Christian or wherever, that should be our posture, one of humility. I mean if we know anything as humans, we know that we’re very finite! And we’re very fallen, right? But God overcomes those, and like you say… I love what you said about the fact that He will show up if you are earnestly seeking. So thank you for your story, Nikki. It really is extremely powerful and such a privilege to have you on the podcast today.

Bless you. Thank you so much.

You’re very welcome. Thanks for tuning into the Side B Podcast to hear Nikki’s story. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can reach me by email at [email protected]. If you enjoyed it, subscribe, rate, and share this podcast with your friends and social network. I would really appreciate it. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next podcast, where we’ll be seeing how someone else flips the record of their life.

Former atheist Stuart moved from a world without God to one where God changed his whole world.

Stuart’s new book, Faith that Lasts: A Father and Son on Cultivating Lifelong Belief, is co-authored with his son, Cameron. They reconsider each myth in the light of the Christian faith and their own experiences. When our confidence is rooted in the good news of Jesus, our homes can be places of honest conversation, open-handed exploration, and lasting faith.

For more information on events and resources, visit www.cslewisinstitute.org

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 we look at others, and we think, “They will never change their views, their lives, their decisions, what they believe.” Sometimes we think to ourselves we will never change our views, our lives, our decisions, our beliefs. That certainly was the case for the majority of the 52 former atheists that I’ve interviewed. Two-thirds of them thought they would never change from being an atheist, much less become a Christian.

That begs the million dollar question: What would it take for someone to change their lives so dramatically? More than that, what did it take? What was the catalyst that turned someone so resolute against God to a place of openness towards God? More specifically, towards Jesus Christ. In my research, the catalyst was different for different people. There’s certainly not one size fits all. For some, it was sudden. For others, quite gradual. For some, it was a crisis moment. For others, it was along the process of their life. It may have been prompted by existential dissatisfaction, looking for something more in life. For others, it may have been a quest to disprove religion or even to quest for truth itself. Still others, it was an unlikely spiritual experience. It may have been meeting a Christian for the first time who completely broke down their negative stereotypes of Christianity, someone who was intelligent and kind, and well, normal. Someone who makes Christianity look attractive, even plausible.

Each person’s story is different. If you’ve been listening to these stories of change through this podcast, I would encourage you to begin actively searching for and identifying the catalyst, that thing or combination of things that moved someone towards considering another life-changing perspective.

Today’s story is of a former atheist, someone, if you looked on from the outside, you would never in a million years think they would ever change, but change he certainly did. Not only did his own life dramatically change, but since his conversion to Christianity, he has spent his life helping many others see things differently as well. I hope you’ll listen closely to his surprising journey to see if you can identify the catalyst that opened him towards another direction.

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

My privilege to be here. I look forward to talking with you.

Well, we’re looking forward to hearing your story, but before we get into the story, Stuart, why don’t you tell me a little bit about who you are, where you live, perhaps what you do?

Well, I am originally from Glasgow in Scotland and was raised in a non-Christian home. I became a Christian when I was just turning 21 in Glasgow in Scotland and then pretty much got involved in a call to mission right from the beginning of my Christian life, so I moved to Vienna, Austria, where I was working as a part of a team taking Bibles and literature into the Communist world at that time. I operated there for a number of years, and I actually met my wife, who was from America, Mary, on the team, was married in Chattanooga, then went back to Vienna, and both my kids, Cameron, my daughter Catherine, who works here in Atlanta, were born in Austria, where we lived for, in total, 20 years, so brought me to sunny Atlanta from Glasgow through Vienna, Austria, to this beautiful city of Atlanta.

It sounds like you’ve journeyed quite a long way in your life since atheism. Why don’t we go back to the beginning and I guess this would be in Scotland. And why don’t you talk with me a bit about what life is like in Scotland in terms of, I guess, worldview or view of God or those kinds of things that were in your world as you were growing up.

Yes, well the Scotland I grew up in—of course Scotland has a rich Christian heritage, but that’s a long way off now. Many people would see Scotland today, and particularly as I was growing up, as very much a secular country. My dad was a product of the second world war in a sense. He’d been a young man in the Royal Air Force, and the home that I grew up in—my mother had actually fled Christianity. She had been raised in a very devout Nazarene home in a Holiness-type church, and she had chafed against the restrictions. She loved her parents but hated the restrictions of that kind of life, so Dad became a ticket out to her. So when they met, fell in love, and got married, really it was a new beginning for her, and so the home I grew up in was one in which there was kind of a religious background roughly because of Mom’s background, but they had really chosen very much a kind of a party lifestyle in a sense. I don’t mean that in an overt way, but I mean, drinking and smoking became a big thing to my mother, for some reason, and at the weekends, that was a big part of our household. And for me, growing up, in terms of ideas, it was very much the postwar years. Economics were a bit tight. And as far as Christianity went, there was very little presence of it, other than the symbols of Scotland. I never saw it as having any traction or relevance or value in my life whatsoever, and my interests were just more like a little boy, the usual kind of things of adventure and having excitement and fun, and that’s pretty much the way it was until my teen years.

So you may have had some kind of cultural reference of God or Jesus, on a building somewhere perhaps, but it obviously wasn’t in your home.

Yes. My grandmother was devout, and I really didn’t like her because she had . . . . I guess I’d her hear quote Bible verses now and again, but I was kind of a raucous kid, and I think not a kid that stayed within the lines, which led to, when I became a teenager, then my parents saw me being drawn to a gang culture in the east side of Glasgow, so my dad, being at that time doing well in his business, bought a house on the west side of Glasgow, which is a more middle class area, and I hated it from day one, right from the beginning. As I went to the school there, I was just alienated and ended up skipping class most of the time, and then, as many young teenagers do in Scotland, I found my way to get alcohol. You know, usually if you hung around pubs, you could get some drunk to buy you booze, and I started getting drunk at an early age, so that really began a pattern that was to have kind of a sad outcome in my early teens, actually.

So you really pushed against convention, it sounds like. You wanted to go your own way from an early age. I guess . . . . Did you find other friends? Or were you part of that gang culture? Or did you find other friends that reinforced that kind of dark lifestyle or party lifestyle?

Like kids do, you find the other kids who are the wild kids, so there was a guy in particular, this Ian Cassells, a friend and I. We teamed up, and he was the one that introduced me to Alice Cooper and some of these things, so there was music that was, at that time, it was that real youth rage kind of music, Alice Cooper being kind of there, and of course, the Stones and the Beatles were more in the background. They were classic groups, but this more angry rock. And then . . . so drinking and fighting particularly. It all led to a conclusion where I came home drunk one night and ended up getting into a major fight with my father, as he had seen I’d been drinking, and he actually hit me, and I . . . . All this pent-up rage towards him came out, so I had this knock down, slap out fight, which led to me then basically leaving home when I was 15 years of age.

Wow! What was that life like? Trying to survive on your own as a teenager?

Well, there was two pieces to it. First was the excitement of being on your own and having nobody to tell you what to do, but the other thought was of survival. I mean I didn’t know how to wash my own clothes, didn’t know how to cook my food, and I didn’t realize the money that I was earning, which wasn’t terribly much at that point, had to go to pay my rent and cover my costs, you know? But what it did do is it brought me into a world where I guess I was seeking a new family, and during that time, I ended up beginning to work in a dance hall as a bouncer. A guy that had invited me and we’d met in the shop I was working in. And that opened up a whole new world for me. This was the world of parties and girls, and I mean, a dance hall, when I say a discotheque, there were about 1,500 to 2,000 kids over the weekend, so it was a huge place, and I was part of the security team there. And yeah, that just brought me into a new way of just living for my passions and pleasures, really, you know?

So that was, in a sense, your life, just living for the moment, living for pleasure. Was that your personal philosophy in life? Just kind of eat, drink, merry, and then we die. Or-

Well, it grew to be that. I got recruited by a guy who was part of a car business but involved in Glasgow’s darker side, and he wanted young drivers to drive cars from one place to another. I didn’t have a driver’s license, but I ended up working for him. And he took a shine to me, and I liked what it was. These were tough, hard men on the south side of Glasgow, and of course, I began to get trusted as a faithful lieutenant, so I was in that world, and things began . . . driving nice cars, earning a bit of money, beginning to do some stupid things, and yeah, my philosophy became . . . I mean, just being wild and free. I guess I can remember we’d have these drunken parties, and sometimes we’d buy so much beer and whatever, vodka usually, and we would joke that we’d drink till we passed out. Well, the only one that ever did, as far as I remember, was me.

So yeah, that was the world, and everything in that seemed that that was the trajectory. Just live for passion and pleasure. Also against my parents’ middle class lifestyle, I was involved in a kind of criminal set and seemed to rejoice just that suckers lived by rules, and those of us who were the wise dogs just did what it took to get ahead, you know?

Right, right. Wow. It sounds like . . . I imagine, as a teenager, living in that world would be somewhat exciting, although a little bit dangerous, but I guess, as a young man, though, it seemed like you were living the life in your own way and on your own terms.

Well, we glorify all this today, Jana. I mean, I look at a lot of movies and things, that kind of stuff, and of course, that’s exactly right. There was money. And I mean of course there were a lot of boring times and hard times and stupid times in the midst of it all, but the idea of thinking in your mind you’re a tough guy and that you’re making money and you’re cool and all this kind of stuff. Well, then, in the midst of that, I was asked to help a lady, a married woman, who was living as the lover of a policeman and had got into some trouble. This guy was kind of extorting her, and I was asked, with my colleague, to help her out and see if I could get her money back from this cop, which I did, and this girl ended up moving in with me, so all of a sudden . . . She was 23 years old. I was then 18, 19, and I had this beautiful girl. She wanted to live with me then. Driving cars. And I thought everything was pretty cool. So I had achieved what I felt was kind of a nice status in life, and I was pretty happy with the way things were at that point, you know?

Right, right. Wow. So with achieving this nice status—you had a girl, you had a job, and you were getting along—so there was really no sense or even thought of God of in your life. We there any kind of spirituality or interest in anything? Or exposure to? Or anything like that during this time?

There was some very dark stuff. This was around the time—I don’t know if you remember Peter Blatty film The Exorcist?

Yes.

Well, I had some friends that were occultists. At least that’s what they said they were. I didn’t really believe it, but I’d gone and saw that film, and I have to say, it really freaked me out. It scared me, and I don’t know why. I mean, I didn’t believe in God, so I thought, but I certainly seemed to believe in the devil, and then, with my colleagues one night at a party I was having in my apartment, these guys . . . a couple of them went off in another room with some of the girls, and they were supposedly doing some kind of a seance thing. Anyway, something did happen. Something happened. I remember there was a sound like a cracking on a window. The whole place went very cold. And everybody got freaked out. And in fact, the party came to a sudden end, and this big friend of mine, Big Stuart. I was Little Stuart; he was Big Stuart. He was absolutely freaked out. I’d never seen someone so scared in all my life. He said, “Something’s happened here,” and one of our friends was a Catholic, so we commissioned him to go and find a priest and come and do something in the house, which the priest laughed at and didn’t come.

But the long and short of that was we had to abandon that. I moved out of that apartment within about three or four days. There was something freaky. And that always left a backstop. So that was a spiritual thing but not on the usual variety that most people would tend to, you know?

Right, right. So there was this sense, this presence or exposure to dark spirituality. You felt a touch of it in The Exorcist as a film, but you also felt a touch of it in your own apartment, so much so that you moved out. That must have been incredibly frightening. I can’t imagine! But I’m just curious—if you encountered or had a sensibility that there was a dark spiritual world, did it ever cross your mind that there might have been some alternative form of spirituality that’s good or God or any of that?

I think the key that came . . . and there was some follow through from that because there were some subsequent dark experiences, and the only word I could use about that time was terror, Jana. I mean I’d never felt fear . . . . You know, we’d been in fights and things. I mean, people get scared when you’re fighting, and you can get hurt or winded or whatever, and this was a different kind of thing. This was of a whole ‘nother dimension.

And the next encounter with spirituality was when, after a couple of years, Joyce came in one day and asked me what did I think about Jesus. And that absolutely threw me for a loop because I never thought anything about Jesus, other than the fact, you know, whatever his name was, but I thought that he was probably maybe a spaceman who had came to earth and they were so primitive . . . I mean, it’s so naive, the way I thought . . . but they worshiped him. So I basically had written Christianity off. It had no traction whatsoever. But then she ended up having a real encounter with Christ and became a Christian, and we split up because I really didn’t understand any of that and wasn’t interested, so that was the beginning of a more positive turn.

Ah. So even the thought of Jesus or her becoming a Christian was very off-putting to you, I guess.

Yeah. There was nothing attractive or interesting. To me, I think my philosophy was kind of a Nietzschean view, that life was for just take. It was seize whatever you wanted and keep it. And then there was a survival of the fittest type of thing. So probably a lot of ideas that I hadn’t really fully understood, but they were in my bloodstream, and the idea of any transcendent order of a God or Christ or forgiveness or any of that, even goodness just wasn’t there really.

Wow. So you were willing to give up the relationship because you didn’t want to have anything to do with God or Jesus. What happened or proceeded from there? Or actually, I’m curious, how is it that your friend, Joyce, became a Christian in this world that you all inhabited?

Well, there’s two things to that. One was that Joyce was really like, now that I know the Bible, she was really the woman at the well who had multiple relationships, many men, seeking in lust in a sense and relationships for love and never finding it, and in desperation, while she was with me, she’d had an affair even while she was with me, she reached out and went to a church one day. And she’d been witnessed to by a nice Christian couple in the tax office in Glasgow where she was working, and they had a big impact on her, and she walked into a church and said, “I need to know God.” So she had a genuine, I mean a very strong encounter of forgiveness and healing and really meeting God, and when she told me this, I just basically told her to get lost. So for about two or three weeks, and I was mad, and in fact, I didn’t know who this God was, but I thought, “Whoever these Christians are, if I ever meet them, I’ll put them right,” you know?

Right. Well, yeah. That’s who you were, right? You were a bouncer. You were someone who didn’t mind going after.

Yeah. So that’s actually what happened. A couple of weeks later, the Christian friends, who I didn’t know were praying for me, suggested to Joyce that she contact me and ask me to come to their house, so she called me, and thought, “Oh, maybe she’s coming back,” and of course, it wasn’t that. She wanted me to meet them. So I went with a chip on my shoulder and ready to do battle, and it didn’t work out that way.

What happened?

Well, we got there, and they were obviously . . . they were quite excited to meet me. They were very nice. The guy was kind of a soft, gentle human being, which I didn’t take to. That wasn’t my world. The wife was a kind of cutie, and I liked her, and I didn’t know she was an evangelist. And of course Joyce was there. And they began to share, and I mean I began by throwing back all kinds of stupid comebacks which I think were relevant, but as the night wore on, they testified about who God was, who Jesus was, about sin, about brokenness, and of course, Joyce continued to tell her testimony. And yeah, I don’t know how long it was, but eventually I became there was a presence. There was something that I couldn’t quite put my finger on, kind of an intuition of something, but this time not dark. Good. And after them sharing for some time, I ended up going up to their bathroom, because I became convinced it was real, and thought, “Well, God if you’re there, and this is true, and Jesus really . . . You are the Lord, then I need to know You. I’m a mess. I need help, and I need forgiveness, and I’ve done some real wrong here,” so I prayed in their bathroom and then ended up . . . came down and told them, and they all started hugging me, and that was really a “Whoa!” That was a bridge too far at that point, but something began then. That was the beginning of the story, really, for me.

Wow! What a dramatic shift in such a short period of time, in just a moment practically. How old were you here?

Just turning 21. It was just on the cusp of my 21st birthday.

Right. Because you had been thinking and living in seemingly the opposite way of what the truth that you had just accepted.

Totally, yeah.

Yeah.

Everything that I stood for was so violent. I mean everything, language, behavior, thought. I mean it just . . . . Violence and anger was a central part of this, because I really had been kind of framed to believe that if someone crosses you, you hit them.

Right.

And if the police become involved, well hit them, too! I mean, a see if they can get you kind of thing, you know? So it was really a messed up idea.

So talk with me then about this sudden change, yet you just chose, and that evening, because of the reality of the presence of God, of who God is and who you were before God and need of forgiveness. You obviously found that gospel, that good news of Jesus that actually forgives and, like Joyce found, that loves you no matter what or who you are or what you’ve done. I imagine that concept by itself was just transformative, but I can imagine how this might play out in your life. I mean such a sudden change, and like you say, so many things differently. How did your life change? Did you start reading the Bible? Did you go to church? Your heart, your mind, all of those things. Talk with me about that.

Yeah. I mean, gosh, Jana, it all happened very quickly because I think the passage that struck me very clearly was 2 Corinthians 5:21 or 17 first of all. You know, “If any man is in Christ, he’s a new creation.” 2 Corinthians 5:21 says, “He made him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, that we might become the righteousness of God in him.” And all of that was really impressed very deeply on my soul right from the beginning. So I mean I was told . . . These people who led me to the Lord were very devout and encouraged me, of course, to come to their church, which was a Brethren Assembly in the east side of Glasgow, and the Bible and prayer. I was taught . . . Of course, I started, from day one, just starting to read the Bible. I didn’t really understand it very much, but I really got into reading nonstop and of course it was like . . . I couldn’t even describe what effect it had on me. Reading and then praying, and I went to this little church, and then I started having fellowship with these Christians, and of course, they were a whole different world. I mean, the way that they talked and acted. They didn’t swear. They didn’t do any of the wild stuff.

And I kept thinking, this may be kind of boring, I thought, but then they could have fun without alcohol or without violence. They could enjoy each other. And so really, for me, because I’m still in my old world. I was caught between my work world, where I was still with these gangsters basically, and then every moment of the day I could, I would go to the church or go to this young couple who discipled me. I’d go to their house, and it was simply extraordinary to me. It was marvelous, you know?

Wow, wow. So your life and your decisions and your choices just started changing. I guess you didn’t stay in the work that you knew?

Well, several things happened very quickly. I’d only been a believer for about two weeks, and I was encouraged by this couple to go to this Christian camp. I didn’t even know what a Christian camp was. And normally I worked seven days a week, and monthly, the guy who I worked for—I was his lieutenant. He normally wouldn’t be keen to give me time off, but anyway, for some reason, he let me know, and off I went, and at that camp, God really spoke to me. There was Bible teaching every day. There were games. There were all kinds of things. And I got just turned upside down about the lordship of Christ, mission, and God spoke to my heart very clearly, Joyce and I, about . . . . We thought that, now that we were Christians, she would get divorced, and we would get married. I just thought that was the right thing to do. And then I heard some teaching there that put that into question, and that became one of the first tests of my early Christian life. Because really we were . . . I thought the Lord was asking us to split up, and I did that, and that was very, very hard on us both. But that was the first test of obedience early on in my Christian faith.

Oh, my. And I’m curious: The folks that you worked with. I imagine they were somewhat surprised by your life change and your decisions.

Yeah. That’s the understatement. Well, first of all, they thought I had been brainwashed, so there was a real attempt on their part to try to help me and then to mock the faith. I mean, they would do some ridiculous things, like, after several weeks of talking . . . Of course, I didn’t know anything, and they would ask questions about, “Well, where is God?” and, “Where is Jesus?” “Where’s the proof?” and all this kind of stuff. “It’s a lot of nonsense.” “You don’t need to believe that.” At first, it was out of curiosity. Then it became anger.

Then it became a determination to de-convert me, and at one point, they were cutting out all the centerfolds from Playboy magazine and all this kind of thing and posting them all over the office, so there were naked women all in our office. And it was at that time that I discovered there was a thing called a Christian bookstore, which I didn’t even know existed. And when I went to this Christian bookstore, they had these things called tracts, and you could buy them, whole bunches of them, like 100 for a pound or whatever it was at the time. So I bought hundreds of these tracts, and then I would go back and paste them all over these naked women! These tracts. And then when Monty and the guys came in, they would tear off . . . . They tore all the pictures off the wall because of all these Bible verses all over the top of them. So the literature war started at the beginning, and that went on for a little while, but it stopped fairly quickly.

Wow. Okay. But they were obviously posing questions to you that you didn’t know how to answer, and they were determined to de-convert you and de-construct your faith. I wonder, did that kind of push back, did that compel you in any determined way to look for those answers that you didn’t seem to have at the beginning?

I think in a curious way. Because they asked questions, and then, as I would talk to my Christian friends . . . . They would point me to the Bible, and say, you know, “Show me the answers,” and of course, as I began to read the scripture, I found there were answers. So, over time, I began to read the gospels and to find out what it actually said. And the caricatures of Christianity, I realized that they were throwing were not true, so really, in the early days, it was developing an apologetic in the sense of, “I know that you think this is what it says, but that’s not what it says. This is what it means.” So part of it was learning to understand, well what was the gospel actually about. What were the claims? And many of the things that they believed—they still rejected the truth, but I could answer the caricatures fairly readily. And I think that was probably a good school to get me started on my own Christian defense of how to do evangelism, how to answer hard questions, in a sense.

You know, I can just imagine the skeptic listening to this and listening to your journey and thinking, “Oh, he just found answers to satisfy the questions just because he had already converted.” You know what I’m saying? That you found the answers that you were looking for. So I wonder what you would say to the skeptic about that, in terms of—I know that, as you were reading the Bible, that the caricaturing of Christianity was being defeated in your own mind. But for those who might be pushing back on you still, or pushing back on this story, how would you answer that?

Yeah. Well, there’s two things I would say, Jana. One is, first of all, we’d need to lengthen the story out. One would be that I wrestled. I had doubts myself. I took the doubts that I had—when I came across hard passages in the Bible, and most of them were hard because I didn’t understand many of them, I would argue with my Christian friends to try and get an interpretation to understand, so I didn’t give them an easy time. But there was this experience of God that was real. It was an encounter. It wasn’t just an idea. The heart of this was there were concepts involved, but I was overwhelmingly gripped by the presence of God and by ongoing answers to prayer.

The second part would be, as my Christian life unfolded, I began to deal more with the objections and then try to read books. Because in my first Christian experience when I went on mission the following year, I was arrested and put in jail in Yugoslavia taking materials into the Communist world, and I was interrogated repeatedly. So these were Marxist people. If someone could talk me out of this by a set of ideas and concepts, then I would give it up, but I was willing to expose myself to the thought of others. And I have tried to do that all my Christian life since then. And if there are objections, that doesn’t mean to say all the answers I’ve found have been tidy or nice or neat, but I found that the Christian faith stands up to robust examination, and I don’t find that that’s a threat. And it wasn’t just my emotions. It was an experience, including my mind, that was involved in my conversion.

Thank you for clarifying that. Because I think it could be very easily misinterpreted, I guess, but yes, very much you’re encountering with a Person, the Person of God, in a strong and powerful presence, as well as, like you say, answer to prayer and then it just becomes more fully orbed intellectually and in your heart and in every way, I guess so much so that I’m surprised that you, it sounds like, almost immediately changed your life from the vocation that you had almost into mission. You must have been strongly compelled.

Yes. I mean I really heard . . . I mean they use the word “a call,” but I did hear a call. I was in Moniaive in Scotland at the time, and they’re preaching particularly from Luke 9 and Jesus saying, “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross daily, and follow me,” and I really knew that was to me. And I had to follow. So I didn’t know what that meant, but what eventually I did was I sold into my bank accounts. I redid the kitchen at my mom’s house, fitted that out. I put a coffee bar into my church. I gave the rest to mission and sold everything else I had, my car included. And took a suitcase and joined Operation Mobilisation, believing, at that point, that was it. I was leaving, never to go back.

That’s quite a transformation, I must say, in terms of your own purpose, your own understanding of reality, and who God is, who you are, and your role in the world. It sounds like you had found something you wanted others to find as well. I mean, you were willing to give up everything for Jesus and give up everything so that others could know what you knew.

Well, because at the heart of this . . . . I mean I saw a young man killed before my eyes. I was involved in fights. I saw people on drink and drugs. I saw the worst of humanity in those days, in the early days. And I thought that was reality. When I realized that I lived in a world that God created, that there was a God that loved us, a God that knows us, that there is a destiny and a possibility, that salvation . . . . Not just going to churches and being religious or becoming a conservative person, but understanding what we’re made for, that there is a type of life, and there’s eternal life beyond this, that this world is not the end of the story, it’s just a stage in it, but it’s important in his own right. I mean, I ended up having categories for truth and goodness and beauty and meaning and family.  Things that I had just no idea how rich this was, and Christianity was not boring.

I mean, the people I was working with were laying down their lives. I had people who died while we were in Vienna because they were missionaries. My wife was on a team in Turkey where her team leader was shot dead at the door, and his wife nearly at the end of her pregnancy with their first child. So these were people who are willing to die because of Christ, not just as an idea, as a concept, but as a living reality. So, for me, it was an all or nothing. I mean, I had found the truth and reality, and I wanted to live my life and share my life and share the truth of this life, as I was commanded by the Lord, with as many as I could for the rest of my days.

Wow. That’s really amazing. It reminds me a lot of those who had been with Jesus at the very beginning, and that they died for not only what they believed but what they saw, what they believed they saw and had an experience with Christ, and they knew it was true. And that mandate, or that experience, actually, in a sense, goes on with a real God who really exists who shows his presence when you call, so you have come a long way. I mean you’re still in the mission field in a sense, but in a very different way than being overseas in Yugoslavia. You still travel the world. Talk with me a little bit about what you’re doing now.

Well, in my later journey in Europe, I developed in leadership and things and would want to speak up about the Christian faith, and I knew about apologetics. I’d never thought of apologetics as my front-line thing, but I was involved in Christian leadership and witness. I knew that we had to do that. We had to give a reason for the hope that was in us, and we had to do that against Marxism and existentialism and all the ideas of this time, and in my own journey, I’d done a lot of reading and thinking because I’d had hundreds of hours of conversations with people of faith, no faith, or other faiths about the meaning of Christianity and to bring it into the public square. So I was asked to be a public voice for the Christian faith, either helping the thinker to believe or the believer to think, and that’s really kind of what I’ve been involved in for the last 23 years.

So you’ve really dealt thoroughly with and have a really deep understanding of these worldviews around the world, all these competing worldviews in our very, very pluralistic world, but yet you remain convinced that the Christian worldview is worth contending for. We encounter so many of these different worldviews really in our own lives today, no matter where you are, because of the global nature of technology. And we feel all these different worldviews pressing in on us.

Yeah. I learned I had to do my homework. A lot of this was reading books and talking to people, so I would ask people, finding out what were the questions that we all had to answer and looking for ways to compare them. I mean, I’ve talked to many Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and of course atheists in abundance. But yes, the truthfulness of the Christian faith and its ability to answer the question in a way that none of the others do has been one of the reasons why I remain committed to the Christian faith. I mean I fully . . . . Its coherence, its clarity. It doesn’t mean it’s easy. It doesn’t mean it’s tidy. Are there things that make us sometimes draw our breath. There are passages in the Old Testament and so forth that give us pause, but the God of the Old and New Testaments is one, and I am fully comfortable in my faith and confident to share it and leave the onus on the individual to weigh it up and consider the evidence, the facts, and the arguments for the Christian faith if they’ll give it an honest look.

And it’s my hope that there are some curious skeptics or perhaps honest seekers who are exploring or even considering the possibility of God and Jesus Christ through Christianity. If there are those listening, what would you say to, say, a nonbeliever or a skeptic for them to consider the reality of God and Christianity?

Well, there’s all kinds of books that can be read, and sometimes those are a mixed bag. There are testimonial books. But I would obviously encourage a person to begin with the gospels themselves and just read particularly Mark or John’s gospel and then they could, by all means, ask critical questions. Talk to someone who’s a believer. Talk to someone in the faith. Let them answer your skeptical questions. We’re not afraid, as a Christian, of the questions, “Is the Bible true?” “Why should I trust the gospel?” Just reading the gospels themselves, by the earliest witnesses to the story of Jesus, and they’re not all exactly the same. There are four gospels, which are like four angles looking on a diamond, and I think the questions will rise from the text, from what you see in that, and why we believe that Christianity is true, why it is a better answer than atheism or the alternatives.

Ravi used to use this idea of origins, meaning morality, and destiny as four questions that every worldview should be answering. We can compare them, what it says about origins, what is the meaning of life, is there meaning in life, is there a basis and a ground and a focus for morality, death, is there something after death or not? How does the other world system or the person’s worldview answer those questions? How does the gospel answer those questions? And when I look at what the Christian answers to those questions are, I find that it offers a compelling reason intellectually, as well as morally and existentially, for a life well lived, and to meet God.

Because that’s what it comes down to at the end of this. If God’s just an idea . . . we’re not talking about concept. If there’s no God there, there’s nothing to ask for. But if we knock at the door and someone on the other side answers, then now we’re accountable, and that’s often the reason why people don’t want to even give it a shot.

Right, right. And just for those who perhaps haven’t looked at a Bible before and don’t understand the reference of the gospels themselves, can you explain where the gospels are or what they are in the Bible?

Well, the gospels are found in the New Testament, and if you have just a simple New Testament, it starts . . . . The first four books are Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and the gospels are the recordings of those who witnessed the live of Jesus and saw the events and particularly contain the teachings and basically they’re really like a theological biography, if you like. Written in an ancient style, of course, but to ask the question—each one of them asks the question, “Who is this? Who is this Jesus?” So that’s the question that they were written for, and I think, if you would read them and give them an honest hearing, you would understand then some of the questions that came out as to the back story into which Jesus came, the story of the universe, the story of covenant. What do those words mean? Why were they important? Why did Jesus die? And what difference did that death make. And resurrection. Is resurrection a possibility? And if it happened, what would that mean? Well, those are the questions that the gospels seek to address, and therefore, that’s always a good place, I think to start.

For the Christians who are listening to your story today, Stuart, how could you encourage them? You just spoke about the seeker, perhaps, taking with somebody who actually is living the Christian life. How would you encourage us as Christians to perhaps engage better or understand the questions that are being asked of us?

Well, Jana, there’s nothing like being willing to witness to deepen your faith because you have to break the sound barrier by talking to people and then be willing to engage their questions. There’s so much fear and laziness in the church, so that we don’t share because either we don’t know or we don’t care enough. I think evangelism—it’s not a duty. We’re called to be witnesses. That’s part of what Jesus said in Matthew 28. Sent us into all the world to make disciples. So we should be willing to talk to people, to ask them questions, to share the love, and that means we have to do our homework. It doesn’t mean to say we have to study theology completely and memorize every sermon, but we will need to do some of our homework over time. Don’t be afraid of questions! When someone comes with a question you can’t answer, you can go do your homework. Find an answer! But if we love people and we believe that this is the truth, then out of compassion and conviction we should be motivated enough to try to find answers to pass the truth along. And not be afraid.

And Jesus said, “Lo, I am with you always.” The Holy Spirit will be with us in our witnessing and how we witness and what we share, so it becomes a part of the adventure of faith and walking with God in this world and being witnesses, to His life, to His love, and to His care, in our time.

I don’t want to end before I give you an opportunity, Stuart, to tell us about a new book that you and your son have written that’s about to be published. Would you talk with us about that?

Yes. My son came up with the idea of us writing a book together because we get a lot of questions here about raising kids and the family and particularly in the hostile climate that often is our culture today, movies and music and so forth. So because I was raised in a non-Christian home and then I raised my kids, of course, I was always terrified that I would inoculate my kids against the gospel by maybe my imperfections, my lifestyle. By God’s grace, they trusted the Lord, so we’re grateful for that. The book that we’ve written together is Faith That Lasts: A Father and Son on Cultivating Lifelong Belief. So what we’re doing in the book is to talk about some of the questions that we get from Christian parents, and some of what we felt were the mistakes made, particularly three big ones. Using fear as a controlling mechanism in the home, believing that information alone saves and trying to bombard your kids just with facts, and then outsourcing children or kids to experts to try and save them or help them or whatever. And really what we want to talk about is the home and the parenting and the role of witnessing and taking the home as a place where hard questions can be dealt with safely, in a loving, safe environment. So the book comes out towards the end of the year. It will be on Intervarsity Press, and we’re quite excited and hope it will be a conversation starter.

Excellent, excellent. I can’t wait to get my hands on that. I know it’s going to be a wonderful resource for so many Christians and parents alike. So thank you, Stuart. Your story is extraordinary. It really is one literally coming from darkness to light, to the person of Jesus, who is light and life and truth, and wow, I’m inspired by it.

Sometimes I think that you can pre-judge someone or even yourself, saying, “I’ll never change my mind,” or, “They will never change their mind,” but in your case, that wasn’t the case. It’s truly extraordinary that someone can come from such a place of darkness to an amazing life in Christ. So thank you for sharing that with us.

My pleasure, Jana, and I wish you every success with this, and may God bless the ministry and the opportunities to just talk to people and dialogue about important ideas and ideas that lead to life.

Thanks for tuning in to the Side B Podcast to hear Stuart’s story. You can find out more about Stuart and his new book, Faith That Lasts, by looking at this episode’s notes. For questions and feedback about this podcast, you can reach me by email at [email protected]. If you enjoyed it, please subscribe and share this podcast with your friends and social network. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll be listening to the other side.

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. This is a podcast where we listen to the stories of former atheists who are now Christians, so that we can listen to really both sides of their story. I hope you’ll come along today as we listen to a very interesting one. There’s something inside all of us that longs for freedom, to find our own way, to create our own destiny. Along with that, there’s also something in us that doesn’t like to be told what to do, how to live, where to go, what to think. We want to decide for ourselves, create ourselves, live in our own way, unfettered, without judgment except for our own. There’s a certain freedom in that, in losing authorities in our lives, especially those who dictate some form of morality. There’s something very appealing in casting off institutional or traditional authorities, especially of the cosmic sort. We can find what we’re looking for without God. God is simply an interference to our lives. We would rather pursue life on our own terms, for our own pleasures. After all, we’re rational and intelligent, able to make our own wise choices. But what happens when we take God off the table? A lot of things go with it, including our grounds for human dignity, value, meaning, and purpose. We create sand castles with our lives, only to have the tide wash them away. Nothing lasts. We become like Plato’s Greek hero, Sisyphus, who was condemned to push a boulder up a mountain every day, only to watch it roll back down each night. What happens when our choices don’t lead to the satisfaction we thought we would get? When we find ourselves more alone and lost than ever? The nagging futility and emptiness without God reminds us that perhaps we were made for something more, for someone more than ourselves. That’s Ted’s story, our podcast guest today. And I’m excited to hear him tell it. Ted Cabal is a former atheist, now university professor of philosophy and a strong advocate of the Christian worldview. Welcome to The Side B Podcast, Ted. It’s so great to have you.

Thank you so much for having me, Jana.

As we’re getting started, Ted, why don’t you tell me a bit about who you are, your life now, where you live, a little bit about your academic work, and your books?

Well, thank you again for having me. I pronounce my name Cabal, so I go by Ted Cabal, and I’m married to Cheri, 43 years now. It is truly one of the things that I’ve said through the years, in debates with atheist philosophy professor friends and others that, when I look her in the eyes, she is my greatest evidence that God exists. The kind of incredible person she is and that she would love me the way she has all these years, I just cannot believe there’s this cosmic accident that brought us together, so she, I wish, could be part of this story, but we’ll move on from there. So we have three wonderful sons, adult sons, and eight grandchildren, and truly I never believed that I would live to be 67 and to see my grandchildren. I was diagnosed with a terminal cancer when I was 48 called multiple myeloma, and I’d always been very healthy, and I was given three years to live. It’s like lymphoma or leukemia, in that it’s part of the blood, bone marrow, lymph system lifecycle, and it’s considered incurable. I was told, “Three years, you’re gone,” and after about ten years of really hard core treatments, the disease just kind of went to sleep, and so about 12 years since I’ve had any treatment, and my specialists really don’t think that I need to worry that it’s gonna come back. It’s really remarkable. So I’ve seen a kind of dark night of the soul, and I’ve seen good things, and I don’t feel sorry for myself, but I do believe in the incredible mercy of God, that I’ve lived a life that has seen a lot for just a Texas kid that wanted to be a hippie rock and roll guitar player and ended up teaching philosophy of religion in a Christian seminary. So yeah, here I am at 67. Just moved back to the great state of Texas. I’m teaching apologetics, Christian apologetics, and philosophy of religion at the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas. I have a real interest in all things related to worldviews and those types of things you’re interested in, Jana, that cause people to believe the way they do. Obviously, my discipline is very much interested in the side of things like science and philosophy and the sorts of things that we think of regarding defenses of Christian faith and interaction with others, but there’s more to being a human being than just our minds, and so I have a keen interest in what I might call the psychology of belief and unbelief as well, because I’ve been on both sides of it, so I’m amazingly healthy in the grace of God at the moment and loving life. My hobbies are all kinds of things, like reading and I like to golf and I like still to play guitar, but nothing beats being with my family, and especially grandkids are an obsession, so yeah. I’m living the dream, and it’s so fun to have, in God’s kindness to me, get to meet people like you, Jana, and to have followed the things that you’ve done over the last few years has been amazing, so to me, this opportunity to just hang out with you and chat like this, I’m just pumped about it, so thank you so much for inviting me.

Wow. Wow, that was fantastic! Thank you so much, Ted. That’s unexpected, but I appreciate it. It sounds like you’ve lived a life—you’ve seen a lot, you’re living the dream, but I must pause and give you applause for the incredible tribute you just paid your wife. That’s quite impressive.

By the way, Jana, get this: I copied Bill Craig early in my debate thing. Before I got cancer, I was sort of like, “Well, you’ve got to learn how to debate atheist philosophy professors and aspire to be William Lane Craig,” and it’s pretty funny. I joke about it with my students and stuff now. So I was doing a lot of that, and there are very few Bill Craigs in the world. Maybe just one, right? And so I was happy with the results in some ways, but it’s amazing when, on kind of almost a moment’s notice one night, I decided I was just going to add in that sort of more touchy feely side of things at the very end, and it’s amazing. All the times I did that, all the people that had been kind of mad at me would applaud, and at least for a moment, be on my side. There’s something about the affective side of human beings and the way we believe and come to want to believe or not to believe that is touched by the way God makes us relational and stuff. So yeah, that’s where that comes from.

Ted, I appreciate your saying that because, in this culture today, a graciousness towards each other is lacking. That’s why I love this podcast, because I really want for people to understand each other by listening, by being gracious, by sitting back and giving someone a chance to speak and to listen to them, so thank you for that. You’ve obviously had a tremendous shift in your life from atheism to Professor of Christianity, Philosophy, and Apologetics, so in order to understand what happened and what shaped your atheistic worldview, take me back to your childhood and tell me about where you lived, the culture around you, your family and your friends. Did they have any religious beliefs? Was there any thought about God in your world as a child?

My parents loved me, and I’m so grateful for me. I didn’t appreciate what a gift it is to come from a home where your parents love you and treat you well. But—and I don’t hold this against them—they grew up, especially my father, in a home where there was abuse, and he himself never really saw anything of Christianity or God or belief that made any sense to him, so he did his best in the way that he raised me and my brother, and my mother had rebelled a little bit against a church background, but she never shared any of that with me or my brother growing up, and so frankly what little we went to church was in a church—and this is fair to say, because it’s the word they would use—theologically, they were liberal. That term in theology doesn’t mean the same, of course, as in political circles. What it refers to is the idea that any aspect of Christianity that could still be helpful today is not necessarily those things that traditionally Christians would consider the core of Christianity. And without getting into a side subject here, for me—and I probably would have felt the same, even if I’d have gone to a more traditionally doctrinal church—it just all seemed irrelevant to me. And I’m sure it was partially because it didn’t seem relevant to my parents. And I’ll tell you a little story that’s interesting: I’ve long been fascinated with the way God works with people through their life, even during their times of unbelief, and of course, the most famous conversion outside of the Bible is Augustine’s, and his telling of his conversion in the Confessions is so amazing because he describes his memory now on the other side of his conversion. In coming to know God personally, he looks back, and in the first person, talks to God about times when he didn’t see that God was still loving him and reaching out to him, and it’s truly a genuine classic I think any person should read, no matter whether they’re interested in Christianity or not. So I look back in much the same way now, Jana. I can see where God was being kind to me in my childhood. I developed interests in sports and in music. I enjoyed family. I had friends who were kind and good. I even remember, one night, having a dream—and this is a little strange and I don’t normally tell this story, but I had gotten so disinterested in church, even in elementary school, that I would sneak out of church and take my younger brother with me across the street to the drugstore. In those days, you’d go in and you’d sit down at a little counter in Arlington, Texas, and order your soda. That’s what they would call it. And I remember one night I had a dream during this period, and I woke up, and I don’t know if it’s God talking to me. I don’t know if I was having a dream. You know, you can describe it and think of it any way you like, but I felt that I was staring at a light shining on the wall in my bed, and I knew immediately God was talking to me, and He just said something to the effect of, “Teddy,” which is what I went by as a kid, spoke to me in a way I perfectly understood, and He just said, “You have quit showing any interest in church, haven’t you?” And I understood that to mean, in my incredibly limited understanding of God, that I had lost any kind of interest in asking questions about God or having my heart open, even at that young age. I had asked my mother, about that time, “Mom, what should we think about the universe? And where does it end? And how old is it? And is there a God?” And it was interesting. Her attitude was, “You know, I don’t know,” and she went on about her housework like it didn’t matter. And so I kind of fell asleep, Jana, spiritually for—I don’t know—a dozen or more years. I was spiritually dead and asleep.

So, even as a child, when you were letting God go, because God didn’t seem to have any relevance to your life, when you were taking on this atheistic identity, did you understand what you were embracing as you were rejecting God and Christianity at that time?

At that very young age, I think I was like most people, and I was following the culture around me. Through my conversations and friendships with a number of atheists through the years, their stories haven’t been that different than mine, and it’s not that different with many other religions and worldviews. So often we simply sort of adapt to what’s around us at our earliest ages and only later do we—in some cases, maybe not most—some cases step back and say, “Is there a good reason for me to continue to believe what I inherited?” So I don’t think I was thinking, “I’m walking away from God.” I don’t think that I suddenly was mad at God. I think I maybe had a little bit of an awareness of some problems in this church we were attending. I think I’d heard stories that the pastor had run off from his wife with a church secretary or something, but largely I think the main sort of focus I had was suddenly me. Just what did I want to do, rather than, “Is there a purpose for my life that I need to seek?” or anything more noble than that. It was really about—the good things in my life became, in effect, my new God, and that, for a long time, was sports and music. And that’s where I found my identity and meaning.

It sounds like you had a full life without God. You had your sports. You had your music. You were going to high school, just making your own way, so I presume you just had no real felt need for God at that time.

Yep. That’s very true. I don’t remember, until high school, so I would say I went from probably fourth or fifth grade until tenth grade or eleventh grade. I don’t remember giving one thought to, “Is there a God?” “What happens when you die?” “Is there a purpose for my life?” “Is there a certain way you should live?” I basically feel like, in retrospect, the main thing I can remember, and when I look at pictures of my life during those years and so on, I was generally happy, especially the further back you go. Yeah, I was happy, and God was good to me. He didn’t punish me because I walked away from Him. He let me continue to enjoy so many things. And it really was like a long deep sleep in which I was dreaming. I was in an unreal world in which the universe orbited around me. And it would only be in high school. By then, I was into the drug culture and the sixties, late sixties hippie scene and this sort of stuff, and a whole lot of the music at the time was antiestablishment, and the ideas coming out were exciting and revolutionary, and some of them were religious. Some of them were Eastern religions. Some of them were anti-religion. Most of them were anti-establishment. And so those ideas were sort of mine, and I remember, in about the tenth, eleventh grade, I did, for reasons that were not well thought out, and I’m not pretending I was an intellectual. I do think my experience wasn’t that unusual from the folks that I talked to. But I definitely became a believer in atheism. I had a religious fervor about it. I essentially would’ve grounded it—if somebody had asked me—that my atheism was grounded in what I understood to be true from science, evolutionary naturalism. I think I understood, whether I’d actually been taught this or not, that the universe was purposeless, that it could be fully explained on the basis of some kind of scientific law. I essentially was what I might call a naive atheist. I mean that as no insult to an atheist. I mean it in that I wasn’t any more reflective about my atheism than I had been about my views of God or anything else prior. And so, just like I think my earlier days and the way I lived had been largely shaped by those forces around me that were available as I aged into my teen years, I think it was peer groups and the ideas of the bigger sort of young person scene that I admired and music and the like, that shaped my worldview during those years. And I frankly made life pretty miserable for at least some of my Christian friends, and Jana, if I could say this: Maybe this is of interest and maybe not, but I have some regrets, thinking back to that period, because I think maybe my biggest… I have a number of regrets actually, but one of my biggest is the fact that my younger brother, who admired me so much. In many ways, I kind of evangelized him toward atheism and toward my lifestyle, and he would go on also to be a professional musician, like I was, but went way further. He became a country/western lead guitarist for George Strait and actually started the band when George first was in college, and they recorded together, and my brother’s life had a number of difficult turns, and he ended up dying in a very unfortunate way in his 40s. So I think about those kinds of things, and I have to tell you, my teen years were really quite unlovely, as the further I went along in them, I hurt people, for which my heart still grieves over. I went to Holland to just simply live as wild a life as I could. I dreamt of being a big name rock guitar player and would jam in nightclubs with some famous people in the Dallas/Fort Worth area and dream that I could be like them and this and that, and the more I had the universe orbiting me, the more dissatisfying I found that life. I literally lived out every kind of pleasure that I could think of that had attracted me while I was in Europe, and I came back just really, really empty. And I’ll just pause here, but I came back from there as a 19-year-old kid. My dad had disowned me, and I’d aged pretty heavily by then. But I really had plumbed the depths of at least the experience of just having nothing but yourself as the center of your world, and so I at least knew by then that wasn’t really going to satisfy me, even if I had no interest in God.

It sounds like you did go on quite a journey. Within that atheistic mindset, I know you said you weren’t particularly thoughtful about the implications or the outworking of your atheism, but you did kind of experience the pursuit of “eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die,” because this life is all there is. But you said you became empty and that you were existentially dissatisfied. Did you connect that sense of dissatisfaction with your atheistic beliefs?

It’s interesting. I wasn’t reflective enough. That’s a very thoughtful question, Jana, because I look back now and I realize that, if you would’ve asked me at the time, I wouldn’t have connected it necessarily to any kind of religion or irreligion or atheism, but what’s interesting is I remember, in Holland, in a little apartment that I rented. It was really just a simple room in an apartment of some other folks. And smoking hashish one day. It was so powerful and opiated that I couldn’t even do anything but lie on the bed all day and watching the sun go by, and I realized, “I’ll die over here, and nobody will know. My Mom loves me, and she’s all the way back in Texas, and nobody will care, and if this is all there is to life, this is pretty bleak,” and it made me want to reform myself, and so I realized that I needed to do better, and so I kind of tried to pull myself up by my own bootstraps. I sort of limited myself to how much drugs and drinking, and I tried to start writing music and sort of better myself. So I came home from there… Even though I had hit bottom, I came home with sort of a renewed hope that I could find a way to make the universe circulate around me in a better way and got in a new band and went to Colorado, and that was really where things turned around for me. This experience there. Here’s a Texas guy where stuff there was amazingly different. It was wonderful. The little story I’m about to tell you, as I look back now, is a big turning point. Maybe some of your listeners will find it pretty humorous, but it was not as uncommon as it might sound back then. As a bunch of young hippie musicians, there was a period where, just for fun, we went—we had this old 1949 school bus that we were living out of, and we had a generator and all this stuff. And in those days, you could go up into the mountains, and these national forest roads were not blocked off as much as they are today, and we drove up into the mountains and parked out there and would practice our music and play frisbee when the snow would melt off, and I mean, it was amazing, and I look back on it, and it was such a happy time, because I was just in a kind of fairybook tale existence just for the short time, but what began to happen was I remember standing outside on one of these mountaintops, looking up, and the starry heavens frightened me. And I wouldn’t have told anybody I believe in God, and I wasn’t even consciously aware that I believed in God. All I knew was that it frightened me because I was intuiting that the order and power and even apparent wisdom, it seeemed to me, of the heavens, it spoke of something or someone I didn’t know. The only way I can put it is it frightened me. And another thing was occurring at that time, is I began to have this very strong awareness of deep moral failure on my part, and if you’d have asked me, I would’ve said I don’t believe in that kind of thing. I don’t believe there are actual and right and wrong ways of doing things. And yet I found myself terribly unhappy and even ashamed of specifically the way I had treated a number of people. Some things which were just heartbreaking to me to reflect upon, and so I began to look into Eastern religions. They were not theistic. They were pantheistic or maybe, in some cases, not even clear enough to know what they were, but they were spiritual, I guess we could say. So it was part of this reforming myself. I became a vegetarian, and I was really trying to be a good person. And I’ll pause with this little note, which sort of shows the lack of consistency in my life at the time. I was so interested in studying these religions that I checked out books from the public library that I had no intention of returning to find out how to be a better person. And only after my conversion did I remember it and make sure I sent them back.

Your morality only went so far during that time.

I guess so. It was still all about me.

Yes. Okay. You were finding this extraordinary beauty and vastness of the heavens, and you considered that there was something more than yourself, but that was a bit scary, so you became attracted to a more pantheistic form of spirituality, where there’s not a personal god but rather this more nebulous, impersonal god that was less frightening.

That’s exactly right. It was less threatening because it was still what I did. It was about me improving myself and that, if I just did the right things, it would lead to better things for me. It was akin to lifting weights or eating right or whatever, getting an education. It was just one more step or stage in self improvement. And of course there’s nothing wrong with self improvement or caring for oneself, and that was just exactly the way I viewed it. It’s just that it really was not satisfying me any more because, in the end, I was longing for something that I was not finding. I was not asking even the right questions. And so that led us—and here’s where the story gets pretty funny, as well as interesting. To me, it was kind of heading toward God’s kindness in pulling me to himself. Our band, in those days, if you wanted marijuana, you didn’t stay in Colorado, you went back to Texas, which, of course, is the opposite it might seem today. And so we were driving back, and our old school bus broke down in Texas, and we were stuck, and I was stuck with a couple of pounds of marijuana in my parents’ house. I was 20 years old by then. They didn’t know I had it there, of course, but waiting to buy music equipment and more marijuana and then our bus would be fixed, and we’d head back to Colorado. And while I was just basically passing the time, I talked to people who had been old friends in the music scene who had become believers in Christ, which—I just was horrified. I made fun of my brother in those days for reading his Bible, even though he didn’t apparently know much what to do with it. These friends who had become believers in Christ, I gave them the most miserable time, and I just told them how stupid they were for believing in the God of the Bible. I didn’t know much about this God, but I knew it was stupid and that they were stupid, and it’s interesting, in that at some point during that time—well, it was certainly out of spite—I decided I was going to read about Jesus Christ, so I could have at least some kind of an informed opinion when I told people they were stupid for believing in Him. I really literally did not know where to read about Him. This is long before there’s any internet or anything, so I asked a Buddhist friend—another musician had become a practicing Buddhist, “How do I read about Jesus?” He knew more than I did. He said, “You have to read a New Testament,” so I asked my mother. “Mom, do you have a New Testament, and she gave me one,” and so I started reading the New Testament to make fun of Jesus. And that’s where the most amazing thing happened, because, being quite a rather unclever 20-year-old—I’m not pretending in the least there was anything intellectually respectable about what I was doing. I was not deeply thinking anything. But God in His great mercy utilized the reading about Jesus Christ to completely awaken me. I had no idea what was happening to me. I did not understand it. I would put it this way, Jana: Many different Christian thinkers through the centuries describe it and analyze it differently, but one thing seems to remain, even for people who are not particularly introspective or intellectually analyzing their faith, and that is that they feel that they come to know God personally, or that the universe, to put it differently, has this incredibly personal dimension which comes alive, this religious experience, and for some people, it transcends a… maybe we could say body of propositional knowledge or something like that, and I experienced that without having a clue. In fact, I had to call people who were Christians and say, “I’m interested in Jesus from reading the Bible. He seems real to me,” and they didn’t know what to do with me because they knew I’d been antagonistic, and the people that knew me who weren’t Christians thought that something bad had happened to me. My Dad, who had disowned me, actually had a conversation, and he said, “Son, a little religion’s good for you. Don’t let it ruin your life, though.” He had finally reconciled himself to the fact that I was going to be this musician, hippie, whatever, and I said, “Dad, I can only tell you that I feel like it’s the first time I’ve ever been alive.” I didn’t know what it was that was happening to me, and it would be years later, of really taking seriously the idea that it isn’t enough just to have an experience in Christ, and if it’s not true, we can be misled, and they may not be veridical experiences, we would say in philosophy, and so I—it would be years later that I would actually do the intellectual side of things and take a look at, “Have I been tricked or deceived?” or whatever. But it was really a remarkable kind of thing that happened, where I literally didn’t understand it, and I did things that some would think are funny or tragic, depending on your viewpoint now, but I just instantly didn’t care about, say, for instance, all that marijuana, which had been one of my favorite things. And I would call friends up and say, “Hey, look. Come on over. I’ll give you this,” so I could tell them, “Hey, I’ve been reading the New Testament and about Jesus,” so you can understand, Jana, that I literally was this big enigma to just everybody around me, including myself. And I’d never been happier. For the first time in my life, I had this incredible awareness that it didn’t matter what I was doing or what I accomplished. I didn’t need to be a musician or have people think highly of me, that I found my deepest fulfillment and contentment in knowing that God loved me and had forgiven me for these really horrible ways that I had treated other people, and that I was, for lack of a better word, I was just right with the universe. And I’m not ashamed to say it at all. To me, it is, in fact, one of the great treasures of the Christian faith that a person need not be an intellectual, and God will stoop to make Himself known to them.

What you just described is so powerful. It sounds so simple in a way. What you found in the Bible was just surprising. The words on the page weren’t just something to disprove or dismiss. Rather, you actually found the person of Jesus. What an amazing thing to consider! The same person you found in the pages of scripture was the same person who had created the beauty of the stars and the heavens you saw in the Colorado Mountains, but more than that, you realized He loved you and forgave you. It’s so beautiful and yet so simple. You found the one who had been looking for you. I’m sure everyone around you was shocked just as much as you were.

Indeed. I had friends who had admired me because I had been around and looked like I was on the upswing in the music world, and I’d had all the fun that they’d never had, who brought me books, trying to explain to me why what had happened to me was some sort of mental breakdown or it could be explained as just a psychological aberration. And I knew that it wasn’t enough just to have this experience. It is enough for many people. And I understand that. Because I experienced God’s love made so real to me, as you described it. That is the way it felt to me, like I said to my dad. But I remember that first week I also prayed a little strange prayer. Some people are made differently. I know you’re this way and many people are, and I think it’s a good thing, whatever our religious or lack thereof views are, that we want truth. And I remember I prayed this strange prayer where I said, “God, you seem more real to me than my next breath, but if I ever find out that You’re not real, I’m not going to continue to pretend like I’m a Christian. Amen.” Or something akin to that. It was a very powerful moment, because I know after I told some other Christians that I had prayed that way, they were horrified because they felt it was a lack of faith or that there was something deficient that this would lead me astray. And I think it was actually the right idea. Even though my friends felt it was a lack of faith on my part, I believed, and still do, that the reality of the Christian faith is that it is indeed true, truth being a description of the state of affairs lining up with correct belief. If I believe that Jesus is real, then I need not pretend that he’s real. I may not know, as many Christians don’t know, how they could validate this powerful experience, and it’s easy to say, “Well, lots of people have religious experiences without them being anywhere compatible with a Christian one,” but in my case, that was important. And I know that’s been this way for you and other Christians who have been called to think about the intellectual side of their faith, so I’m very grateful that, in my experience, that came first. Because I do understand both the psychology of unbelief, at least from my own vantage point, and then also how so many people come to have faith in Christ, where He is so real to them that nobody needs to play the skeptic with, say, for instance, a person in the room, but in this case, as one Christian philosopher put it, if God chooses to make Himself known in a way that is analogous even to our five senses, He can do so. To put it differently, it is as if I were in a room with God, and He just made himself known to me. Not every Christian has this. I did. It was just powerful. Maybe I was that far gone. I needed something like that. But that wasn’t all that was there, and the rest of my adult life has been spent in working and thinking about why it is that I can have confidence that it’s true and those sorts of things, and so that was the beginning for me of a long journey.

I presume that, since you’re a philosopher and a promoter of the Christian worldview, you must have come to see or believe with some degree of confidence that your beliefs were indeed true in the most real and objective of senses.

Yeah. I might put it this way: Several years back, I had a friend I met through a coffee shop. A mutual friend put us together. He was a prominent atheist in Louisville, Kentucky, kind of a local figure that people knew, and was a wonderful man, very kind, good-hearted man. We became friends, and we met once a week for about a year and a half over coffee and would have just as honest a conversation as we knew how about how different our views of reality were. And one of the questions he asked me one day—I don’t know if he thought it might be a gotcha moment or whatever, but he said to me, “If I could demonstrate to you that your belief is false, would you walk away from Christianity?” And I said, “Well, look, please hear what I’m about to say carefully. Many Christians could not say what I’m about to say because they would not understand the meaning of what I’m saying. That is to say they would be confused by your question. It would be akin to what we say in informal fallacies. It’s a complex question. It’s like asking, ‘When did you stop stealing?’ or, ‘When did you quit beating your wife?’ or something. You don’t know how to answer it without feeling incriminated.” But I said, “I would walk away if I were really convinced that it’s false that there is a God or that Christ is who He says He is, et cetera. I wouldn’t pretend.” And then I said, “But you have to understand that I can’t even imagine, after the amazing privilege I’ve had over these decades of studying and looking at all of the options in worldviews and religions. I don’t mean that I’m super smart. I don’t mean that that I’m omniscient. I don’t mean any of the above. I do mean that I’ve done my best to be intellectually honest, and in fact, I think, my friend, you have a far bigger problem than I do. Even though there are certain things I’ve admitted to you in our chats that I don’t have as good an answer for as I would like, I am fully convinced that your answers, they’re so much more empty in comparison to the rich intellectual tradition and evidence and reasons for believing in Christ.” So that’s where I am, Jana. That hasn’t changed, and it’s not changed through the existential, to use that word again, experience of knowing I was going to die at what seemed a pretty young age to me at the time. And facing eternity, and you ask yourself, “Do you really believe that you know God?” or, “Is this it?” and all kinds of questions. I found, in the dark night of my soul, this incredibly amazing sense of God’s kindness to me when I felt horrible, could feel genuinely depressed emotionally. There was something real that transcended all of that. So the Christian believes in a reality that’s multifaceted. It goes beyond just the intellectual or just the emotional, and so on, and what an amazing thing it is, and my, how I just wish so many friends who don’t know that reality could.

Obviously, it’s been a life of blessing and fullness for you in every way. Ted, if there are any curious skeptics who are listening or someone who is seeking or even willing to consider in an open way the Christian worldview or Christianity or this person, Jesus, what would you say to them, if you had a moment to talk with them?

Yeah. I think what I would say is, if you can actually consider the option of investigating with an open mind, not just the intellectual side of things. I’m fully on board with that. I love doing that. That’s been what I’ve been all about, and indeed, I would cherish the opportunity to spend having those kinds of conversations with someone in that position, but I to think there’s a side to this that’s often overlooked, and that is that God loves people more than they give Him credit for, and yes, you can use the problem of evil or your own personal experiences. I get it. I’ve been through some of the personal experiences, where things were black as truly black, but God is the one who is seeking and loves people, and I think I would just suggest that, aside from the intellectual search. Not to put it away, but in addition to, maybe we should say. I would suggest taking a look around and see, “Are there any of these telltale signs that maybe you’re being pursued, that it’s not just you pursuing and looking for God, but has He been looking for you, and maybe you haven’t been letting Him show up in the way – you had a certain way He had to show up.” God might just not do things the way we would expect or want, and I had an atheist I was debating once in a large room with hundreds of people, and one of the things that he said, and happily not all of my atheist friends would say something like this, but he said, “I’ll believe if, right now, God’ll turn this pencil in my hand and turn it into air, and it’ll just disappear.” And I think this misses the point. It’s sort of like Tony Flew, the famous atheist philosopher, said at one point in his life that, even if he saw a marble statue wave at him, he wouldn’t believe it was a miracle. He would prefer to believe that it was simply some sort of quantum mechanic aberration or something. I think that, in fact, this is more honest with our hearts is the way Flew answered it. I think, if an atheist or any kind of person, wherever they are, will actually pause and not make God have to do it their way, but sort of take a look and see what might be all around them and kind of start listening, they might actually find that God has been reaching out to them in ways they would’ve never imagined. And so that would be my prayer. I think you feel the same way, Jana. We’ve come to know the reality of the love of God in Jesus Christ. What an amazing gift it is to know him, and we’d do anything to be able to share that with someone else, and I still feel the same way.

You spoke quite frequently throughout your story of God’s kindness and mercy drawing you to Himself, and that’s something you believe as a reality. And I do, too. And there’s nothing like it. When you feel that the eyes of God are upon you or that the love is so pervasive yet so personal. If you were speaking to the Christian who’s listening and is curious, not only about what might inform atheism but also curious as to how to engage with those who really push back against God and Christians and Christianity, do you have any advice for them?

Yeah. For my atheist friends who might be listening in, you’ll certainly enjoy this, but I want to scold some of my Christian friends, and I’ve been there. I’ve done it, what I’m about to say, and most atheists who’ve been around Christians who want to share their faith with an unbeliever will relate to this, but the worst thing a Christian can do is to quit viewing their unbelieving friend as someone God loves and start viewing them as an object of evangelism or a target whereby you have a duty. You have to do something. It’s picked up by… People can tell if you’re just following through on some sort of obligation instead of loving them and caring about them as a real person, and when I think of another person as someone… God loves them so much than I ever could, just like He loves me more than I ever deserve, I find that helpful, and when I try to understand what they think and that I care about what they think… It’s an amazing thing. When you look in the New Testament, you actually see Jesus Himself willing to converse. He doesn’t just preach when He’s in front of large crowds and teach the crowds, He gets in personal conversations, including with, as has long been noted, people that normally Jewish men would not have had these conversations with, and these conversations are remarkable in the way that He cares about and listens to people, and Paul does the same thing, the great apostle Paul. That has informed me, and I would say to Christians, the first thing you can do is just listen to people and love them. You’re not God. You don’t have to pretend you’re God. You don’t have to say everything. You don’t have to know everything. You’re God’s ambassador. You’re God’s spokesperson. Just let God be God, and you just do what you’re supposed to do. You can’t save anybody. Christ is the one who draws people and makes Himself known to them, so you’re just faithful in trying to share His love and truth through your conversation, but just by simply relaxing and not having to know everything or do all the talking, but let your friend talk about what it is they actually think and believe, and that allows that conversation to be real and meaningful.

That’s such wisdom, Ted. I think that many people are going to connect with your story and possibly be spurred on towards further consideration of the mercy and kindness and love of God. It sounds like a very attractive life to me, one that’s also existentially and intellectually satisfying in every way. I do hope that those who are listening to Ted will give his story and give God a chance, just by being open. Like he says, it’s always good if we listen, not only to each other, but also perhaps listen to God, even be looking for God, because He’s the one who’s always looking for you. Thank you so much, Ted, for coming on and sharing your time and your story with us.

It’s been my pleasure, and indeed, Jana, I am so grateful for the way you care about this issue and you’re investing yourself in trying to reach people. I want our hearers to understand you do what you do, you’ve invested so much of your life in studying the way unbelievers feel and think, the obvious care that you have for people, including even doing these sorts of interviews, when there’s really nothing that you’re getting out of this, other than the satisfaction of knowing that you’re doing your part in showing God’s love to people. I think it’s amazing. So I’m so, so happy that you invited me to do it and really appreciate you. So keep up what you’re doing, and I’ll look forward to watching to see how your book comes out down the road. I think your book is going to be amazing.

Thank you so much, Ted, for that encouragement. I really appreciate it.

Thank you.

Thanks for tuning in to The Side B Podcast to hear Ted’s story today. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. You can find out more about Ted by visiting the episode notes and how you can follow him and also some books that he’s written. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can reach me by email at [email protected]. I hope you enjoyed. Subscribe and share this podcast with your friends and social network. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll be listening to the other side.

There is often a presumption that religion is irrational, far from truth and reason. In today’s episode, Philip Vander Elst describes his “journey of discovery” from atheism to an intellectually-grounded Christian belief.

Find out more about Philip and his writings at www.bethinking.org/author/philip-vander-elst

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. Each podcast, we listen to both sides of a story, from atheism to Christianity. It’s commonly said that people are religious merely because the people around them are, but what happens when the people you love believe in God and you don’t? You won’t believe in God because you don’t believe it’s true, no matter what they say. At the end of the day, truth and reason are more important than the potential of lost relationships. There were several in my research with former atheists who chose truth over social gain or loss. Today’s story with Philip wrestles with this difficult conundrum. If he remained an atheist, true to his belief in truth and reason, he would lose the one he loved. If he became a Christian, he would compromise his intellectual integrity. Conversion for social or emotional reasons alone was unthinkable. As an intellectual, a thinker, it would be immoral and dishonest. He would be denying his highest value, holding fast to truth. How could this situation be resolved? There is often a presumption that religion is irrational, far from objective truth and reason. For many, the assertion that scientific, philosophical, or historical truth can be found within the Christian worldview is simply nonsensical. Today, through Philip’s story, we’ll explore whether or not rationality and truth can be found, can be grounded in a religious worldview, specifically Christianity, or whether or not religion merely serves a social or emotional purpose. We’ll consider whether or not Christianity is worth believing, especially for the intellectual. Today, we’ll be talking with a true English gentleman and former atheist. Philip Vander Elst is a prolific writer and esteemed lecturer, working in and among forums discussing deep philosophical issues. Welcome to the Side B Podcast, Philip. It’s wonderful to have you.

Well, it’s lovely to be with you, Jana, and I’m looking forward to our discussion.

Terrific! Me too. Before we get to your story, Philip, I’d love to know more about, and for our listeners to know more about, where you live and your academic study and work.

Okay. Well, I live with my lovely wife Rachael. I live in a little village in West Oxfordshire in England, about 22 miles northwest of Oxford, and that was my old university, where I studied politics, philosophy, and economics in the early 1970s. I’m a freelance writer and lecturer, and so I spend my time writing stuff and getting it posted on the internet. I wrote a book on C.S. Lewis some years ago, amongst other things. I give occasional lectures on C.S. Lewis and indeed on Tolkien as well. And most of my professional life has been, since leaving Oxford, has been actually in politics and journalism. So really my world has been the world of ideas, and that’s what I’ve always been most concerned about, which is the battle for truth, the battle of ideas, the battle for hearts and minds, and that’s what makes me get up in the morning and gives purpose to my life. So, yeah. So that’s by way of some intellectual background and what I do, in terms of my work. And I write about politics and political philosophy, and I also write in the area of Christian apologetics. So that more or less sums up what I do.

Fascinating. And so you live, actually, physically close to Oxford? Is that right?

Yes. Yes, that’s right. I’m a life member of the Oxford Union Debating Society, a famous debating society which was set up in 1823, and I’m a former officer of that debating society, and so I have access to their wonderful library. It’s one of the finest private libraries in the world. So yes, I have access to Oxford libraries, which is always a great blessing to a writer and researcher like myself.

Right. Yeah. That’s wonderful. I can’t imagine just being constantly inspired by being in that type of intellectual environment, constantly thinking and discussing. I remember visiting there in Oxford and the lovely bookstore, and I didn’t have access to the library, but it was just such a wonderful, wonderful place just to be. I can’t imagine being an academic there in that environment. What a privilege!

It was lovely being there.

So I know that you were an Oxford man, as it were, and that, during your time at Oxford, you weren’t a Christian.

No, I wasn’t.

So let’s take this way back to when your life started, as there are many things that influence atheism, of them being your family and your culture and the place where you grew up. So why don’t you take us back there to the beginning of your journey towards atheism and talk to us about how your life began, your early concepts of God, how your parents spoke into your life.

Well, I grew up… I had a wonderful father and mother who were highly educated professionals. My mother had grown up and had her education in Germany before the war and in Switzerland during the war and was very proficient in modern languages. She became an interpreter and was the youngest interpreter at the Nuremberg war crimes trials in 1946. My father was Belgian and was trained as a civil engineer and physicist in the 1930s, University Libre de Bruxelles, which was the secular university in Brussels. There was a Catholic one as well. And he was a brilliant scientist, and so my parental background was I’ve got these highly educated parents, English on my mother’s side, Belgian on my father’s side, but neither of them, although they were upright people with a strong sense of morality and belief in excellence and truth and very impressive human beings, they weren’t Christians. They didn’t believe in God. And one of the reasons for that was that they’d been put off religion and belief in God by their experience of Catholicism or the Catholic Church, and here, Americans need to understand something about European history, that on the mainland of continental Europe, particularly the Latin countries, like France, Belgium, Spain, and so on, the main Christian witness was the Catholic Church, and the Catholic Church had been a persecuting church for much of its history, and so I grew in a mental universe where on one side you had reason and liberty and science and progress and on the other religion, authoritarianism, a persecuting church, and a generally obscurantist attitude to life, and so that was the kind of mentality that I grew up surrounded by, and in continental Latin countries, there has been this cleavage of kind of the intellectuals against the church sort of thing which you haven’t had in the same in the English-speaking world. And they personally, my father and mother, had personally bad experiences with Catholic priests. When my father’s father had died, the local priest had bought up lots of the books that he had that my grandmother sold, and the local priest burnt them because they were on Papal Index as forbidden literature, so these kinds of experience had put off my parents, off religion and so on. I do remember asking questions like, “Well, where does the universe come from?” and I think my father said that the universe had always been there, so it didn’t need any particular explanation. And that was, of course, the view of many intellectuals who didn’t believe in God, that the universe had always been there, so it didn’t need any particular explanation. And then, well, I didn’t come across any Christian stories. I didn’t come across the gospel or anything like that until I was at my first boarding school when I was eight years old, and then I came across all the scripture stories, David and Goliath and Abraham and Isaac, all those great stories from the Old Testament and of course some of the stories of the Gospels, and I was always top in scripture at school, so I liked the stories, and I remembered them, but I didn’t engage. I didn’t come across any intellectual arguments for Christianity and for God until I was at my second school, my second boarding school, which would be the equivalent of your high schools in America, and that was when my father died unexpectedly when I was only 17, and that was a great shock to my system, and so I was grief stricken and I suppose looking for meaning and comfort in life, and I dipped into C.S. Lewis, into his book Mere Christianity, his famous wartime broadcasts, and for a while, they held my attention, and I began to have contact with an intellectual argument for Christianity which was beginning to make some sense, but I was interested in politics at that time, and when you’re young, even when you suffer great grief, if you’re in a nice school, if you’ve got good friends, you’re young, you’re resilient. The grief gets submerged underneath other things. You’re thinking about life and what you’re going to go and do in the future and so on, and I started reading Bertrand Russell and Ayn Rand and anti-Christian writers, so my interest in Lewis sort of died, and I stopped reading Mere Christianity and drifted away from thoughts about God, so when I get to Oxford, I don’t believe in God. I’m not interested in religion. I’m only interested in politics and political philosophy and having a career in politics and journalism afterwards. So that’s where I was by the time I met my wife, Rachael, since we were both involved in conservative politics a few years after leaving Oxford. So that’s a kind of gallop through my past.

So, Philip, you have quite a… It sounds like a very strong intellectual history, and there was a very clear understanding of what the church was to you in terms of perhaps some of the negative aspects of it. You heard some good stories, but you were more interested in truth and reason, and that, I think… where those stories that you read in the Bible were just merely stories, right? What did you perceive God and Christianity and Christians and those stories to be? Was it mythological? Was it social construction? What was your thought about what religion was at that time?

I didn’t really think very deeply about the stories. I suppose I regarded them on the same level as The Twelve Labours of Hercules, stories from Greek mythology which I enjoyed. Like the story of Odysseus and the War of Troy and so on. So I didn’t really think about them very much. I did wonder whether there was a God because of this question of where does the universe come from, but I found it difficult to believe in God because, if God is good and our Creator, why is there evil and suffering in the world? Why is there so much cruelty and suffering and disease and so forth, so I couldn’t… Although I was aware of the argument for God from intelligent design, it seemed to me that argument was canceled out by the existence of evil and suffering, and I remember… It was the argument of Bertrand Russell. And Ayn Rand, reading Ayn Rand, as well as Bertrand Russell, made me think that worshiping God was really a kind of form of worshiping power. You worship God because he’s all powerful. And also the story of the fall in the Garden of Eden, you know, “You mustn’t eat the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil,” seemed to be to present a view of life where God is this omnipotent power that doesn’t want human beings to think for themselves but just to submit to him, so it was kind of a form of self abasement which was not worthy of human dignity and anyone who cared about liberty. So that was a very jaundiced, prejudiced, shallow view I had of God, derived from reading Bertrand Russell and Ayn Rand, and not really encountering Christians who could feed my intellect, apart from having dipped for a short while into C.S. Lewis, so then when I met my wife, Rachael, who was highly intelligent, and her Christian friends were also highly intelligent and lovely people, then I began to think… This began to challenge my prejudices and then made me think, “Well, perhaps I ought to go on a journey of discovery to see whether there is any good evidence for the existence of God and the truthfulness of Christianity and the truth of the gospel.

So were you surprised to meet Christians who you thought were deemed intelligent in your mind?

Well, yes. It’s funny how inconsistent people can be, because I had… There was an intelligent Christian chaplain who was called Dr. Pugh at my school, my independent boarding school which I attended before doing to university, and I remember some interesting conversations. I remember a conversation with him when I said to him, “Why it is important whether there is a God or not?” and he said to me, and his answer remained in my mind, “Well, because without God human beings have no value. Life has no value.” And I didn’t believe him at the time. I thought, well, we can just make it valuable, create value for ourselves, but nevertheless his answer, his question, his comment remained in my memory, so I had come across intelligent Christians, and my tutor at school—I had this wonderful tutor who was a history master, and he was a lovely, lovely man. He loved C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books and The Lord of the Rings, and we used to discuss how much we shared our love for these particular books over a cup of tea before a roaring log fire in his book-lined study at school once a week. So he was a lovely Christian and a highly intelligent, scholarly man, so it wasn’t that I said to myself rationally, “All Christians are idiots,” but I just hadn’t spent enough time, I suppose, with Christians and been interested enough to get them to talk about the reasons they believed in God and the truthfulness of the Bible and therefore I hadn’t encountered the arguments, as I say apart from this brief dip, which meant a lot at the time, into Mere Christianity after my father died.

So you perhaps hadn’t, except for that dip, really appreciated the rationality of Christianity. I’m wondering… It was brought to your attention that… The gentleman said that you wouldn’t have human value without God. I wonder if you actually looked fully at the implications of the atheism that you were embracing or that you did embrace.

No, I hadn’t. You see, that was the point. I hadn’t understood that, if atheism is true, if we are only the accidental byproducts of a meaningless and accidental universe, I hadn’t appreciated the argument that Lewis developed against atheism, which is that, if atheism is true, that means all our thinking processes are simply the inevitable, unplanned result of a long chain of non-rational biochemical causes at work in our brains and therefore how can we attach any truth or significance to our thoughts? We’re simply bound to think them because of what’s going on in our cerebral biochemistry, which discredits all thinking, including the arguments for atheism. And also if we are simply the accidental byproducts of a meaningless universe, then we’ve got no grounds for moral value. We can say, “Well, we choose to value life, and therefore anything that enhances life is good and anything that destroys life is evil,” but that conviction is, in itself, a moral axiom which needs justification, and unless our moral values, that moral law written in our hearts, is rooted in God, in a reality outside the chain of physical causation, of material being, we have no objective ground for this conviction that good is somehow an objective category. I suppose I’m jumping ahead, really, to the arguments which started making me doubt the truthfulness of atheism, but I just hadn’t understood this basic point, that atheism discredits our thinking processes, cuts its own throat philosophically as a result, and deprives any belief in moral obligation and the objectivity of moral values of any proper metaphysical foundation. Because somehow what’s interesting about the belief that raping a woman or torturing a child or telling lies is wrong is that these truths are somehow transcendent. I mean they remain through whether we live or die, whatever culture we’re part of, whatever time we’re born in. They remain eternally true, whether we acknowledge that truth or not, whether we die or not, they still remain true. As Plato believed, there are eternal categories, and yet how can such categories exist except outside time and outside the material universe, which therefore leads us to God, to a being or a power or a reality that is outside the physical universe. So that becomes a complicated philosophical argument, but it’s a true one, and I hadn’t understood it. I hadn’t even thought about it when I was an atheist. I had to read C.S. Lewis to come to that realization and understanding.

So there was a strong what you felt rational presumption for the truth of atheism, but you said that you came to a point in your life where you actually met some Christians, particularly your wife, that caused you to step back and rethink your atheism and perhaps think a little bit more about Christianity. Talk with me about that.

Okay. Well, I met Rachael, and I fell in love with her very quickly. We more or less got unofficially engaged after about the fifth date. So it was very swift. She hardly had time to say she was a Christian. Anyway, she had Christian friends who were praying for me, who started praying for me, and she, of course, was praying for me, so there was that going on spiritually, but I said to her, “Look, I’m not going to become a Christian just because you’re a Christian, but I will go on a journey of intellectual discovery. I want to see whether I can find answers to my questions, like what is the evidence for God? What is the evidence for the truthfulness of Christianity?” So I read C.S. Lewis books, C.S. Lewis’s book Miracles. Oh yes, actually I ought to say, before I did that, I read a paper he wrote for the Oxford Socratic Club, which was a debating club to discuss God and religion and so on. It was a debating forum that was set up during the war in Oxford to bring Christians and atheists together in intellectual debate and argument, and Lewis was the president of the Oxford Socratic Club, and he often gave papers or talks to that club, which were then answered by atheist philosophers the next week, and then he replied to them and so on. And one of these papers was called, “On Obstinacy and Belief,” where he discusses the issue of faith. When Christians say you ought to have faith, what do they mean? And he said it does not mean that you ought to believe in God without any evidence. He argued that if you genuinely thought there was no evidence for God, no good arguments for God, philosophical or historical, then it was perfectly correct for you to seek out those arguments, to try and find out whether Christianity and belief in God could withstand forensic intellectual examination, historical evidence, logical arguments, and so on. When Christians, when the Bible talked about you need to have faith, that’s a commandment aimed at people who already knew that there was a God and were being asked to believe God, were challenged to have faith in God, when it involved believing some commandment or promise of His that seemed impossible of fulfillment, the famous example, of course, being when the Lord says to Abraham and Sarah, “You’re going to have a child in old age,” and they find that hard to believe. But faith involves a personal relationship with a God you already believe in. But if you don’t believe in God at all in the first place, then it’s okay to search for the evidence. So because I knew that this was Lewis’s attitude and that Lewis himself had been an atheist, I thought, “This is a guy in whose footsteps I can walk because he’s somebody who’s honest, who cares about truth, who understands why people are atheists, and so I can confidence that, if I read his books, I might actually find answers to my questions. So I started reading Miracles, where, the first three chapters, he proves the existence of God philosophically, and to come back to this argument that I was referring to earlier, where he says that the problem with atheism is, if we’re only physical beings, unplanned physical beings, the accidental byproducts of a purely physical universe, then all our thinking is simply the unintended and unplanned end result of the mindless movement of atoms in our brain, which is just as likely to produce falsehood as truth, and therefore we have no reason for believing in the truth of any of our conclusions. So in other words, atheism discredits thinking, because it makes all our thoughts the inevitable result of our cerebral biochemistry, of non-rational physical events, and as Lewis said, we don’t accept the truthfulness of any conclusion if it can be shown to be purely the result of non-rational causes, but that’s exactly what atheism essentially implies for all our thinking processes. So atheists cut their own throat philosophically. And then the other great argument of Lewis’s that influenced me was the argument he uses when dealing with the problem of evil, which is that we can only complain about evil if we already have a prior sense of good, just as you can only tell a line is crooked because it’s a deviation from a straight line, and you already have the idea of a straight line in your mind, so we can only complain about evil if we have a standard of good in our minds, of objective goodness, and therefore the question then becomes, “Well, where does our standard of good come from?” And you can’t explain the existence of this objective eternal standard of good written on our hearts without introducing God into the picture, because again, if atheism is true, all our thinking processes, including our moral judgments, are simply an accidental byproduct of non-rational physical and chemical events, to which we can attach no ultimate significance. So these were the great arguments that destroyed my atheism, more or less in three chapters in Miracles, and then he goes on to argue that, well if God exists and is the creator of the universe, then clearly He can suspend the laws of nature that are His creation in the first place, just as an author, and introduce miracles, just as an author can change the ending of a book and a composer can change a note in a symphony, so if one should acknowledge the existence of God, all my objections to miracles and the supernatural collapsed, and then I could begin to look at the gospel stories and the story of Jesus with an open mind and not simply rejecting it because it introduced the miraculous. So those were some of the arguments that really put me on the road to Christ.

So your perceived foundation in atheism, it sounds like, was crumbling, one argument at a time, so these obstacles were being brought down, so that it gave you an openness to pursue whatever Christianity was. So how did you pursue what that was? Did you read the Bible? How did you kind of figure that out?

Well, I didn’t read the Bible. I mean I was familiar with the basic story of Jesus. Well, and of course Lewis talks a lot about a lot of the truths, the stories, the claims made in the Gospels about Jesus and His divinity were discussed by Lewis in his book Miracles. So for example he says that the idea that you can’t trust the gospel writers because they were ignorant of the laws of nature, and so they believed in things like a virgin birth. And he knocked that argument on the head by saying they might not understand modern physics and chemistry, but they knew perfectly well that babies aren’t born unless a husband and a wife come together sexually, and Joseph knew that as well as we do, which is why he was minded to put Mary away when he discovered that she was pregnant with Jesus. So a lot of the arguments that people have about the truthfulness of the gospel stories in the New Testament were already being discussed by Lewis in Miracles, so I didn’t need to read the Bible, but I did read… I was interested in the whole issue about what evidence was there for the resurrection of Jesus, and so I read a book called Who Moved the Stone?, a famous classic I’m sure that you’ve heard of, Americans have heard of, Who Moved the Stone?, which discusses—which was published in the 1930s, I think—where the argument of that author. I can’t remember the name of the author for the moment, but anyway, the great argument, of course, of the empty tomb. Jesus is crucified, he’s put into the tomb, a guard of soldiers is put on that tomb, and then a few days later, there’s no body in the tomb. And how do you explain that, other than by the resurrection. And so, you know, if the Jewish leaders and Pilate and the Roman leaders had wanted to discredit Christianity, as they had every reason for wanting to do, politically and religiously, all they had to do was to point to the body of Jesus in the tomb, but they couldn’t do that. And why couldn’t they do that? And how is it that Christianity takes off in a big way in Jerusalem 40 days or so after the crucifixion, with 3,000 people coming to Christ as a result of Peter’s first great sermon that we read about in the book of Acts. How could that happen in the city where He was crucified, where thousands of people knew exactly what had happened to Jesus, if the tomb wasn’t empty and there wasn’t good evidence for the existence of the risen Christ? So as I started to look at the historical evidence for the existence and the claims of Jesus and the truthfulness of the gospel writers and of the early disciples, I began to see that the evidence for the truthfulness of Christianity was overwhelming, not least the evidence that we have from St. Paul. I mean here is a man who is persecuting the early church, convinced that they’re liars, that Jesus is not God, and then he has this famous experience of seeing Jesus on the road to Damascus, and he turns over 180 degrees and becomes the greatest preacher of the early church, and both he and the other apostles were prepared to lead lives that involved suffering and ended in martyrdom, and would they have done that for something that they knew to be a lie? What was it that explained the total transformation and the character of the disciples, who went from being terrified of the Roman and Jewish authorities to being heroic missionaries for the Christian faith, and likewise how do you explain the conversion of St. Paul. And then, of course, later on I read in the book of Acts and in the epistles that Paul refers to 500 witnesses to the risen Christ, and some of these people are still alive if you want to check my story with them. So when I began to look at the evidence, the historical evidence for the truthfulness of Christianity, I was overwhelmed.

That’s quite a paradigm shift. So you were moving through this evidence, and during this time obviously you were still dating Rachael and trying to figure out things relationally. Do you… I can see a skeptic saying your emotional involvement with a girl that you loved was skewing your perspective on how you were viewing the evidence. If someone accused you of that, how would you respond?

Well, I would respond that, on the contrary, the fact that I was in love with a Christian girl simply counterbalanced, in equal measure, all the emotional prejudices I had against Christianity. And one powerful force that was hindering my open-mindedness and, as it were, countering my progress along the road to Christ, was the worry of what would my family and what would non-Christian friends of mine think of me if I embraced Christianity? I was embarrassed and anxious about how other people would think of me because I still had this feeling, this purely emotional prejudice from the past that it wasn’t cool to be a Christian. It would make people think you were intellectually second rate. And it was just embarrassing. It took me a long time to admit to my mother that I was a Christian. So really my love for Rachael simply counterbalanced, in more or less equal measure, the other reasons, other emotional influences on me not to accept Christianity. Also, I have to say Rachael took me to an Anglican service, communion service, in her local church, and we were both living in London, at opposite ends of London, and she took me to one of the services, and it was a communion service, and I’d never had communion. I’d never been to a communion service, and I was shocked by the liturgy. You know, “This is My body, broken for you. Take, eat. This is my blood. Drink it.” And I thought, “This is cannibalism.” I was really, really shocked by the liturgy of communion. And the other thing I didn’t like about that particular church service—and what I didn’t like about liturgy. It was the sense that I thought it was a bit like the Moonies, with chanting stuff, which is kind of a form of brainwashing. So I didn’t like going to church, and I didn’t like the idea of reading your Bible every day. I thought that was a kind of irksome and rather embarrassing habit. So I had plenty of emotional reasons influencing my approach, my journey, so really it was a kind of… By God’s grace, if you like, the fact that Rachael was in my life simply created the opportunity… made me set out on a journey of discovery, of exploration, which I would never otherwise have done. And it just counterbalanced, in equal measure, all the influences on me not to do that, so I was kind of caught between two equal and opposite forces, which is where the prayer comes in that people were praying for me. Because as we know, those of us who’ve made the journey and come to discover God and become Christians, there’s a spiritual battle. There is a supernatural force of evil. There is such a thing as Satan, who tries to stop people coming to the God he hates. So that would be my answer, really. And also I would challenge… I’d say, “Look, forget about what you think are the reasons… what you think about my emotions or not. Look at the evidence for yourself.” I would challenge them to look at the evidence. There’s good historical evidence for the existence of Jesus from non-Christian sources like the Roman historians, Tacitus and Suetonius, and a Jewish historian, Josephus, so no serious historian doubts the existence of Jesus or that He was crucified under Pontius Pilate. So how do you explain the growth of the church? Why should the church spring up led by people who made this extraordinary claim that their God was somebody who hung on a Roman cross and then was resurrected? I mean it’s the most amazing statement for anyone to have ever made in the history of the world. How could they possibly have got away with it if it wasn’t true? So I would just try and turn the tables and challenge them about their assumptions and about their emotional hangups about God which might obscure their ability to recognize rational evidence. So I’d kind of take the fight back to them, hopefully in a sympathetic way.

Yes. Wow.

You were becoming intellectually convinced. You were somewhat conflicted emotionally, but you were becoming intellectually convinced, but I know Christianity and accepting Christianity as true doesn’t necessarily make you a Christian or even want to be a Christian. So what was it that was next in your journey?

I hadn’t prayed to God beforehand, and I just prayed to Jesus, and I said, “If you’re real, come into my life and sort out this mess,” this inner conflict, which, at a key moment, I couldn’t resolve, and I had perfect peace about it somehow after that time of prayer, and then I was with a Christian friend afterwards, and I explained I had a bit of a hangup about the cross. I wasn’t quite sure. There were moments when I understood what the cross was about and the atonement, and then there were moments when it seemed a veil came in front of my eyes and I couldn’t quite grasp it anymore, and so I was kind of blocked, and anyway, he started talking to me about the veil in the temple of the high priest being torn in two when Jesus died on the cross, giving access to God, and as he said that, a kind of understanding of what the atonement and the cross was about just fell into my head. “Oh, yes,” I said. “What you find on the cross is the reconciliation of God’s justice with His mercy because sin separates us from God and therefore has to be… The penalty of sin has to be paid. God pays it through Christ in our stead and enables us to then have a new relationship with God,” so the penalty, the justice, God’s justice is satisfied by Jesus’s death on the cross as a representative of the human race, but at the same time, because He’s God and can conquer death, His mercy is released into our lives, and we are able to have a relationship with God, and that’s, of course, what the resurrection is all about, that Jesus conquers death on our behalf, pays the penalty of sin and conquers death, so I understood all that, certainly, in a way which, funnily enough, didn’t involve quite the same sort of reasoning that my friend was using at that time. It was a kind of separate, alternative explanation, parallel explanation to the one he was giving, but it just kind of literally fell into my head, and then I just had this experience of… It was like falling in love again but much more powerfully, and so I caught a taxi home in a sort of daze, realizing I had now become a Christian. So there was this kind of spiritual struggle, and I’m sure the prayers of Rachael and her friends made a difference. So there were two things. There was a spiritual struggling on for my will and my understanding and this intellectual journey through following the footsteps of C.S. Lewis. So the two kind of came together at that moment, and there I was, becoming a Christian in last days of summer of 1976.

And you received a sense of peace.

Yes. Total peace.

And I presume that peace has remained, in a sense, and that the pieces came together, that everything started to make sense to you, intellectually, spiritually, emotionally things were resolving.

Yes. That’s quite right, Jana, and then, of course, I began to read the Bible properly for the first time, really seriously, and that began to make sense. And yes, I mean I’ve had lots of ups and downs in life since becoming a Christian, as we all do, but I’ve never for one moment doubted the existence and goodness of God. I mean I get angry with God sometimes when things don’t work out the way I’d like and when there are unexplained trials and sufferings or friends I love die seemingly prematurely and for no good reason, so one goes on… I think as a Christian, you go on wrestling with God, but once you have met Him, once you’ve had an encounter with Him and you know that He’s real, you know then that… Life then moves on to a different level. You’ve now got a personal relationship with your Creator and Savior, and you know you’re challenged to trust the one who created you and who died for you and who, because He knows the end from the beginning and created our very ability to think and reason, must always know better than we do, and so we must trust him, even when we’re sort of in the dark and we don’t understand why certain things are happening in our lives. We need to trust His sovereignty and His goodness. That’s where faith comes in. That’s what faith is about. It never involves a leap in the dark with evidence. Once you know that God is real and you have a personal relationship with Him, then you have to learn to trust Him. And that’s what life’s about, really.

Wow, that’s really quite beautiful. Such a transformation from where you began. I’m curious. You were concerned about the perception of your family and friends after you became a Christian. How did that resolve?

Well, my mother… I gave her a copy of my book on Lewis, which is a very evangelistic book. I sent her essays and lectures that Lewis had given. And so I did witness to her. We did witness to her, including the evidence for the resurrection. And I think the situation we got to was… And also she met some of our Christian friends, some of whom are very impressive. Well, they’re all impressive, but one in particular made an impact on her. And I think she certainly respected our faith. She said to me early on, “You must think for yourself and follow what you think is true, and I respect that.” And I think we’d got to the position not long before she passed away that she, I think in her heart of hearts, was beginning to realize that actually all this stuff is true, but she wasn’t going to admit it, but I believe that, before she passed away, she did, in her heart of hearts, believe in God. I just have reasons for believing that which… It’s too personal. I can’t really share it. But I’m quite sure she’s with God. Well, my father had passed long, long before, when I was 17. Other family members are not Christians, and I go on praying for them. Yeah. So I’m encouraged by the fact that Jesus had problems with His human family, and a lot of Christians are in that position, aren’t we? We have relatives we love and value who haven’t yet made the journey we’ve made, so we keep praying for them. So I would say to any Christians who have unbelieving relatives, “Just keep praying for them. Keep loving them and keep praying for them. And believe in the power of prayer.” So yeah. So that’s where I am, really.

And so if there are those, Philip, who are listening today who might be curious. They’ve been inspired or challenged by your own story of atheism, especially as an extremely brilliant man. It does challenge the stereotypes of Christians as nonintellectual or anti-intellectual kinds of people. I wonder what you might say to them.

Well, I’d say to any atheist, any unbeliever, I’d say, “Look, do you care about truth? Are you willing to ask yourself, ‘Is there good evidence—philosophical arguments, historical arguments, scientific arguments—for the existence of an intelligent and rational and good Creator God? And is there historical evidence for the existence of Jesus and the truthfulness of the Gospels and the stories they tell about Jesus? And is there good evidence for the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus that suggests that actually He is divine?'” So I would say to them, “If you care about truth, then why not go on a journey of discovery? Why not try to find out whether there is any evidence for the beliefs that I hold and other Christians hold?” And I would say to them, “It’s a big question, isn’t it? Whether we’re just accidental byproducts of an ultimately meaningless universe, and all we have to look forward to are our years in this life, followed by death and oblivion, or whether there actually is a creator and there is such a thing as the supernatural and there is such a thing as eternity and are we going to be with God in eternity or are we going to be eternally separated from the source of all life and truth and goodness and beauty and so forth? It’s a really important issue.” And I would suggest that they might try reading C.S. Lewis, try reading Mere Christianity, which is his radio broadcasts, which were addressed to a general audience during the Second World War, and starts off with, “What is the evidence for the existence of God?” I would suggest that they read C.S. Lewis if he might be a thinker who could help them. And I would recommend other books. There’s a book called, I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist by Norman Geisler and Frank Turek. That’s quite a good book to read, where these are two Christian philosophers and scientists and theologians who set forth the arguments and the evidence for the existence of God and the truthfulness of the gospels, and there are lots of other books along the same lines. There’s another book by a British scientist and mathematician called Dr. John Lennox called God’s Undertaker, where he looks at the scientific evidence for the existence of God. So I would just challenge them to do that and to visit websites like bethinking.org, the website of the Oxford-based universities and colleges Christians fellowship, based in Oxford, where there’s lots of material on these issues and equivalents in America. Well, I would just challenge them to go on a journey of discovery. “And if you don’t find the arguments and the evidence convincing, okay, that’s fine. At least you made the effort to try and see what is the truth.” So that’s what I would say to them. Go on a journey. Oh, and the other thing I’d mention is the example of Lee Strobel. Lee Strobel used to be… I think he was the law editor or law correspondent for the Chicago Tribune and an investigative journalist with an excellent mind. I think he got a law degree from Yale, and he didn’t believe in God until his wife had a conversion experience and became a Christian, and so he set out on a journey of discovery and has produced these books, The Case for the Creator, The Case for Christ, where he describes all the interviews he had with theologians and scientists and philosophers when he was making his journey of discovery, and he became a Christian. And in fact there’s been a film that’s been made about his life, his journey to Christianity, so there’s lots of material out there for those who care about the search for truth and are willing to embark on it, so that would be my challenge. If you believe in truth, put it to the test. Put Christianity and belief in God to the test, and with an open mind, try and see whether there’s any good evidence. That would be my invitation and my challenge.

That’s excellent. And as far as Christians, if you had a word to say for them or to them, I know you mentioned to keep praying and to keep loving, and I also am reminded of what you thought when you saw those Christians in the coffeehouse. You described them as being rather lovely and that there was a beauty to them. I wondered if you could speak to the Christian.

Well, yes. I would say, “Dear brother and sister, first of all, don’t despair. The Word of God says that the prayer of a righteous man or woman has great power and achieves wonderful results, so that’s a promise, and we’re righteous through the blood of Jesus, so that’s a promise that you can stand upon in prayer. So pray. Just pray by name for your loved ones.” I also include them when I pray The Lord’s Prayer. You know, “Your kingdom come, Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” Well, I often pray, “Well, Lord, Your kingdom come, Your will be done in the lives of those I love and care about who don’t yet know you.” That’s a powerful prayer because it’s part of The Lord’s Prayer and that the prayer of Jesus, the prayer of God the Son Incarnate, so that prayer, the whole of The Lord’s Prayer has great power, so the first and most important thing I would say to my fellow Christians, to my fellow believers, is to believe in the power of prayer. It’s an incredible weapon of warfare, of spiritual warfare, that God has given us, that the enemy does everything in his power to make us disbelieve in. And he wouldn’t do that if he didn’t recognize the power of prayer, so I give you that thought. So pray, pray, pray. Every day, pray for those you love who don’t yet know the Lord. Just pray for each one of them by name and claim their salvation. Jesus has paid the ransom price for them, so claim them. And never despair. And be good at listening. Listen. Try and find out what makes them tick and why they have the views that they have. And then pray into that. You won’t necessarily achieve a great deal by arguing with them. I find arguing with relatives is not an easy thing to do. But don’t be discouraged if you find that arguing with them doesn’t seem to get anywhere but pray for them and pray that God would bring other people into their lives, experiences into their lives, books, whatever, that might speak to them. And the Holy Spirit knows them and loves them and knows how to reach them. God knows how to reach them. So just pray. Listen, love, and pray. And obviously, if you do have relatives or friends or loved ones who are open-minded and prepared to engage or to listen to arguments and read books and so on, well then lend them books and send them tapes or links to good websites where there are other testimonies. So I think actually sending people links to good testimonies that might influence them is another good thing to do. So there it is. That’s just a few thoughts that I would share.

That’s wonderful. And hopefully this podcast will be a good resource for those stories, those testimonies, yours being a beautiful one. And if I could co-opt the English word, your testimony is just quite lovely. But yet incredibly profound and very, very substantive. So, Philip, I appreciate so much your being on the podcast today and taking us on your investigative journey, your journey of discovery to the one who made you. It’s obviously made a big difference in your life, and I do pray that it will make a difference in the lives of those who are actually listening. So thank you so much for coming on.

Well, thank you for having me, Jana.

Thanks for tuning in to the Side B Podcast to hear Philip’s story. You can find out more about Philip by visiting his website at bethinking.org. I’ve included that in the episode notes for your reference. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can reach me by email at [email protected]. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. If so, 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.

Former atheist Warren Prehmus thought he had all that life had to offer until a turn of events sparked reconsideration of what might be missing. But, the answers were not coming from a place or position that he wanted to believe. Warren found himself in a dilemma of need and belief.

Someone who had no need for God realizes perhaps, well, that he does. Not merely because of his own need, but because it was true and provided the most satisfying answers for his questions and his life.

Email Us: [email protected]

www.cslewisinstitute.org

Episode Transcript

JH: 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.

In my research with 52 former atheists, one-third of them simply felt that they had no need for God.  They enjoyed making their own decisions, living like freely without moral constraint.  They appreciated atheism’s intellectual standing within science and the university.  Their lives were generally full and happy.  They didn’t see themselves as people who needed religion as a social or emotional crutch to get them by in life.  Rather, they were strong, independent, courageous in answering life’s biggest questions.

When life is going well, life without God works well.  When life throws a curveball – which inevitably happens to everyone – it can cause you to step back and reconsider your options your perspectives to see if they hold up, to see if they adequately address your questions.  When solid answers come, you learn to accept and deal with the issues at hand.  When answers seem dissatisfying, it can open you to other ways of thinking about the world, about your life, to become willing to see another point of view. Answers can start to become clear but they may not be coming from a place or position that you want to believe.   What happens then?

In our story today – that’s the dilemma our former atheist faced.  Someone who had no need for God realizes perhaps, well, that he does.  Not merely because of his own need, but because it was true and provided the most satisfying answers for his questions and his life.  Warren Prehmus was a former atheist but is now a Christian.  He is a successful business owner, father, and family man. I’ve had the privilege of getting to know his daughters Courtney and Sarah, both brilliant and beautiful.  And, if they are any reflection of him, which I believe they are, it is an indication that he has done something very right in his life.

JH: Welcome to The Side B Podcast, Warren!

WP: thanks glad to be here.

JH:  As we’re getting started Warren, Why don’t you tell me a little bit about yourself ?

WP:  Sure.  I live in Atlanta and have a small business that’s a wealth management company with four partners including my son.  So I have three children. My son is about to get married.  The other two are married and each have 3 children and I have six grandchildren.  I have all my life been an athlete and I still play basketball in my 60s and tennis and golf and I’m a fisherman so those are the things I spend my time doing when I’m not working at the company or playing with grandkids.

JH:  Fantastic!  I guess the beautiful thing about all of those sports is that you can still be outside and still enjoy them. I know for my husband, his golf game has gotten a lot better during the coronavirus for some reason because it’s an outdoor activities or something he’s been able to do. So I guess you’ve been able to still enjoy your sports.

WP:  Yes.  Golf and tennis from particular have been very popular.  Basketball, however, is kind of on the outs.  No one’s playing basketball but I tell people that if we start and you’ve got to do social distancing and stay 6 feet away from me.  I’m going to score a lot of points. Yeah, that would be a good way to play basketball certainly, for sure.

JH:  Well, let’s get started with your story.  I’m so excited that you’re here today and I want to hear all about it but we want to start really at the beginning.  I want to really understand where your atheism was formed, the context in which you grew up.  So why don’t we just start there at the beginning and your childhood. Tell me a little bit about kind of the community and culture where you grew up.  Was it religious at all?  Was it urban?  Was it rural?  Tell me a little bit about that.

WP:  Sure. I grew up in upstate New York out in the country about 5 miles outside of a small town of Scotia, NY and my dad was an engineer at GE.  So as I was growing up, you know, my dad taught me good there is no God.  God is for weak people that need a crutch and we’re strong we don’t we don’t need crutches.  I loved my dad and my dad was actually was a very good dad, a very good father and so I bought into that fully.  And it kind of gives you a prideful thing knowing that you’re strong while others are weak.

For instance, in the second grade when we had Christmas carols where all the parents file into the cafeteria and all the kids get up on stage and sing Christmas carols for the parents.  When the religious songs were singing, I had to get down and walk down from the stands and go behind the curtain because I was not allowed to sing the religious songs.  Singing about Santa Claus and Rudolph I could sing those.  I sang those songs but if it was about Away in the Manger, I was not to sing.  So I was definitely a little different than the other children in my little school.

There was one family down the street that were Christians and they were a lot of my best friends and I played with them all the time and really liked them.  But yeah, it was too bad that they had to believe in God.

So, we did go to church to the Unitarian church and the Unitarian preacher pastor whatever they call him there he gave my father a saying that my father really liked.  He told my father “I’m not an atheist. I’m an agnostic with atheistic leanings.”  So my dad really liked that and so I really liked that too.  When I was in the 4th grade, my brother and I rebelled against the Unitarian church and I tell people is because we felt it was too conservative for us.  So it was it was Sunday morning and my mother was getting dressed and everyone’s getting ready for church my brother and I ran up in the woods and hid and my mother came out and yelled for us and we’d never came back until an hour later.  And so after that we never went to church.  That was our way of going obviously just as a curiosity.

JH:  Why did you go to the Unitarian church if you or your family or your father were really pushing against religion or religious things at that time? That’s a little bit curious for me.

WP:  Well I mean Unitarians, you can basically believe whatever you want to as long as it’s not Christian.  At least that was my impression of it. And it was more of a social thing for them. They enjoyed those people because those people were mostly atheists and but they enjoyed doing the function of church for the social reasons and hearing the preacher preach about social causes and complaining about Christians.

JH: OK, well that makes sense.  They were just wanting some community and there was a way to do it. Let me ask you too about that family down the street, that family there were Christians. Was there anything about that family that was attractive to you?  Did their faith in any way seem to inform their lives?

WP:  It definitely informed their lives and I knew that dad took a real interest in me.  I could tell he really loved me and there weren’t many other dads like that so that was impactful.  I’m still in touch with the that family.  I was on the phone last night with one of the boys.  There were four boys in that family.  One of them is a pastor up in upstate New York near where we grew up. I’m still in touch with him and I really give him a lot of credit for praying me into the Kingdom because I know he did.

JH:  Wow. That speaks very highly of him to have been that part of your life for that long.

WP:  He was three years older than me and he kind of took me under his wing.

JH: You had this Christian father down the street and you had a father who was agnostic with atheistic leanings.  I find it a little bit curious to have a father who at that time and even American culture who was atheist. Was there something that informed his atheism because he seemed to have a pretty strong resistance against religion to not even allow you to sing songs that were religious in nature.

WP:  Yeah I can’t tell you for sure how he came to his beliefs but I do know that when he grew up on Long Island when he was four his father left the home to go live with his girlfriend in New York City. And he only saw him once ever again.  And you know a lot of people get their view of God by their view of their father and his father was not there.  In addition when his dad left, his mom moved in with her two boys into grandma’s house and when grandma add died, the church took over the house because apparently the grandma had willed the house to the church and they kicked my grandmother and my father out with their and his brother.  And so their view of the church was very negative because they had kicked him out of their house.  That’s how he viewed it .

JH:  I can I can appreciate why he might have pushed back against God that considering his father and the way that the church treated his own family.  I can see why he would want nothing to do with it ‘so thank you.  I think that brings some clarity really to the context of your story.  Now going back to growing up –  You said that sports was a very important part of your life.  I would imagine that that occupied you growing up.  You were athletic. I think probably were you athletic from a young age.

WP:  Yes I mean sports was really important to me.  Basketball in particular kind of took over in junior high and then I was you know a really good high school basketball player and I got a scholarship to play in college.  That’s what I loved to do and put all my passion and energy towards it.

JH: It sounds like you had a real full life, that it was a good life and you really had no need for God growing up that just wasn’t something that was a part of your life.

WP:  Only if he could help me get better.  The only reason I would have needed him.

JH:  It sounds like you were pretty good on your own.

WP:  I did have a good career.

JH:  Did you go ahead and play basketball in college or University level?

WP: Yeah I played at the University of Vermont. I had a scholarship to play there and was a starter for four years.  I ended up as the all-time leading scorer at the University so yeah I played a lot of basketball.

JH:  That’s quite impressive – all-time leading scorer!  Wow!  So your life was going as just as well as it could be without God.  There was really no need.  So tell me then, what changed in your life as you are continuing along in the journey.  What happened next after you got out of college?

WP:  First thing that happened is in college I had college roommate for four years who was also on the basketball team and we were best buddies and until about halfway through.  He got hooked in with the Campus Crusaders and he became a Christian. He stopped running with me and our friends and he started hanging out with his Christian friends and it irritated me quite a bit.  We stayed roommates and we were cordial to each other and were friends but that had put up pretty serious divide between us.  So that happened.

And then I met my wife in college and we got married two years out of college and then everything like you said everything was going well in my life.  I got a job with GE was doing well in my career and had no need for God.  And then my wife got pregnant and at 6 1/2 months along we found out we were having twins and that was very exciting for us for me.  And I was about to become the most naive parent in history I think.  And then two days after we found out we’re having twins I got a call in the office and had to rush home in a snowstorm and rushed her to the hospital in in the snow storm with her in the back of my hatchback yelling, “I’m having a baby!” driving to the emergency room.  And the first of the twins was born you know 5 minutes after we got there and then the second one shortly after that.  Ao that was a hugely emotional time and they those babies lived for a day and they died.

JH: Oh goodness. I’m so sorry.

WP:  From the excitement of having twins to the pain that they died.  We were very well taken care of by that hospital in New Jersey.  They helped us to start the grieving process and it changed my wife’s heart.  She was not an atheist.  She had always gone to church and she loved church.  She didn’t go to church when we were first married but she loved Bible stories and so forth.  But at her church she never heard the gospel.

This emotional event turned her heart so that she wanted God.  And so shortly after that she joined Bible Study Fellowship, started reading the Bible and all this.  In fact during our grieving time, she kept saying that this is happened for a reason.  And I hung on to that because it felt good to think that there was a reason.  But if you’re an atheist, there is no reason that things happen.

So she started going to Bible Study Fellowship and I started getting hungrier just trying to figure out what’s the truth again. I knew some Christians.  I knew some Jewish people. I knew some Muslims. I knew some Mormons and I had figured out that they couldn’t all be true. And, I was an atheist so I mean I just there was a hunger to figure out what the truth was.   So I started reading books on comparative religions which was kind of a waste of time in retrospect because they weren’t written from a Christian perspective.  But, I started reading lots of other things.  The first books I ever read that mentioned Jesus in any kind of positive light were Norman Vincent Peale and Robert Schuler with the positive thinking books.  And looking back their theology may not have been that great, but it was something for me to read where Jesus was not a cuss word.

JH:  Your wife is obviously pursuing her faith perhaps that she had laid down for a while and trying to make sense of this tragedy in your life.  And she started opening the Bible and reading the Bible.  Now it sounds like there were some kind of curiosity for you about it in pursuing the truth.  How did you feel when your wife started pursuing these things as an atheist?

WP:  It was fine. She could do that.  That’s fine whatever she does but I’m going to pursue my own path.  I had a lot of pride and so I wasn’t paying much attention to what she was doing, honestly.  I had my own internal struggle going on.

JH:  You said that there was something kind of birthed in you that wanted to know what was true.  Is that what was the struggle or can you describe that?  Did it have something to do with pride?

WP:  Well my pride was holding me back.  My struggle was to find out what the truth was because there’s got to be something more.   And it was, looking back, it was God just drawing me little by little towards him.  So I had run across some Christians that witnessed to me and they were people I respected.  And I listened to what they had to say without fighting back too hard.  But, my dad was a scientist, an evolutionist and very well read and I had bought and fully into that.  I was in science in school. I was a physics major and so all this God stuff was fine but you know evolution is a fact.  And so that really was something that I hung on to strongly.  So there was a sense of ‘religion is not factual, just blind faith or story as compared to science which is a fact.

JH:  There seemed to be some kind of irreconcilability between science and belief in God in your mind at that point?

WP:  Yeah, it’s basically has proven that stuff is not true.  Science has proven that certainly the Bible is not true and probably there’s no God because of science.

JH:  So you were wrestling with that?

WP:  Yeah but I started reading a lot of books and I got into some better, theologically better books.  And we had moved to Atlanta after the twins had died and we were living here for a year and a half or two years or so.  And, as I was going through this struggle my wife said, you know we’re in the South kind of like the Bible belt now.  We need to have a church home.  And so I thought, ‘Well that’s probably a good idea.’  So we started out to try to find a church which you think about it – an atheist and maybe perhaps a baby Christian going to try to find a church – that would be an interesting thing.

JH:  That would be that would be an interesting thing, but you were both basically going to support her I presume.

WP:  Going to lead her, ah yeah, ‘follow me honey. I’ll find us a good church.’ OK that’s an interesting question for an atheist.  Yes well some of these self-help books I had read had talked about the man being the leader of the family and so that that was what I was kind of following with that.

JH: OK so did you find a church home?  Did you lead her?

WP:  I did. We went to several churches and we would leave and I said, ‘Well we’re not going back there.  That preacher didn’t even believe what he was talking about.’  I might have been right on some of those it seems, like I don’t know.  We did go to one church, the local Baptist Church, with a preacher, I really liked him.  I had known him personally outside of church but they did this terrible awful thing there at the Baptist Church.  At the end of the service they sang the song and they did an altar call and that was very difficult for an atheist.  And he had said something during service that I remember to this day which was ‘When the hounds of heaven get on your trail, there’s no getting him off.’  And I felt like that’s speaking to me.  And so we didn’t go back to that church because of the altar call.

And finally my wife heard about a church that you could go to this class they had that taught you what the church believed and what other churches believed.  And he didn’t have to join the church to go to this class it was something called an Inquirers Class and the church was Perimeter Church.  So we decided we go to that class.  We’ve never been to the church and we went to the class and it was Randy Pope was the pastor and the class it was a classroom. It was kind of tight there.  Everyone is was shoulder to shoulder, sitting in these little desk chairs.  And the first thing they did was hand out this form.  You wrote your name and then the first question was ‘Are you a Christian? yes or no.’  And I didn’t want to fill that out because you could read everybody else’s paper, so very awkward.

So I put my arm across the question and put a question mark move my remove put a question mark there and then covered it up and filled out the rest of the form.  And then you’re supposed to pass your paper down the row to collect them.  And so mine was folded up. Everyone else’s was open and it was just really awkward.  That’s where I got introduced to Randy Pope an I really liked him and I knew he believed what he was talking about.  And so I didn’t even meet him directly that day, but I connected with him.

And from there we didn’t continue going to that classroom.  We did start going to church periodically and the church was pretty small back then.  Randy used to have the habit of he’d preach and then he’d go to the door and greet people as they would leave.  And so I went to church and we were leaving and he shook my hand and I told him my name and he said, ‘Oh I’ve been meaning to get with you.’  And I knew why.  He had seen the question mark, you know right? And so he said he was in the process of putting together these four booklets to help businessmen to understand what it means to be a Christian and would I be willing to meet with him? And so in my arrogance I thought, ‘Well I could probably help him out and I agreed to meet with him.

And so we started meeting at one of these inexpensive steak houses we’d go to.  And the first week he gave me an assignment.  I can’t believe that somebody just meet you for lunch and they give you an assignment, okay, and it’s to read the 1st three chapters in the book of John.   Well, I had never read the Bible at all.  I never had even touched a Bible and I didn’t want to, but he gave me this assignment.  And so I didn’t want to let him down because I really liked him.  I thought he was a very interesting going places guy and so I picked up, finally with great difficulty, picked up the book.  It was like it was poison or something, but finally I picked it up and I started reading the book of John and I couldn’t stop.

So I read the whole book of John that week and went to meet with Randy the second week.   and he said, ‘Well did he do your assignment?’ and I said ‘Well, I read the whole book of John.’ He said, ‘Oh, you were only supposed to read the 1st three chapters.’

JH: I’m curious, in reading the Bible for the first time obviously you didn’t want to but then you did.  How did it meet with your expectations?  It must have obviously surprised you and intrigued you to have read more than three chapters.  This was in the book of John, the story of Jesus, right?

WP:  Yeah and there is there was something in there that was gripping me but I was fighting that.  That gripping was fighting against my pride of not believing that there was a God or that this could be true.  So as it was kind of a battle going on inside of me there, but I did read it hungrily.

JH: I wonder what you thought of the person of Jesus?  Reading his biography for the first time, was he like or unlike what you expected or who you expected?

WP:  Well, I didn’t really know most of the stories.  Now, this was all new to me and it was like ‘Well this is fantastic.’  Not in a ‘Oh, that’s great’ but it’s just ‘That could that really have happened’ and ‘That’s just so unlikely to have happened’ that I was looking at it from the outside knowing that this kind of thing does not happen.  And so, that’s how I looked at Jesus.

JH: I guess the miracles that he was perhaps working or the claims that he was making especially, I guess as a scientist, it probably didn’t fit with your view of the world?

WP:  That’s right, yeah.  Those things cannot happen.  That was my view but there was something really drawing me with reading those pages.

JH: Did it have any ring of truth to it at all or was it just like a fairy tale a good story that was incredibly intriguing and gripping?

WP:  I would say more a good story that was intriguing and gripping but this can’t be true.  That was my feeling at the time.  I began and part of me wanted it and part of me didn’t so then we kept on meeting and the last week the assignment was to pray to receive Christ.  And I told him, ‘I’m not ready’ and just ‘If there’s no God, this is just the story and I’m not going to put my faith and trust in something that’s just a story.’  So he said, ‘Okay, well, we’re done.  We’re not going to meet anymore unless something else changes.’

We started going we go to church periodically and then months later I picked up a book that my probably atheist sister had given me called Mere Christianity, a book you might have heard of.

JH: Yes, I have for sure!

WP:  Well, when she gave me the book she said, ‘You might want to read this book. It might make me you believe in God.’  And remember, she said that to me and I had that.  It was months and months before that, maybe years.  So I picked up that book one night and started reading it.  And it was in February in winter time and I was lying on the couch all by myself reading this book.  And CS Lewis takes you through the proofs for the existence of God and that was something that I had never heard.  And he started making sense to me.

And so I put the book down just to think about it and this thought came in my head that I didn’t put there.  It just kind of came in and said, ‘I’m a sinner.’  And I knew that that was the first step of the four step sinner’s prayer and that was a dangerous thought.  And so, from the other side came this other thought and said, ‘Think about that later.  Put it off.  Think about it later.’ But it came back.  ‘I’m a sinner.’  ‘Think about it later.’  And finally, I felt like I was hanging on to something with all my might and finally just let go and I went ahead and said ‘what I’d been taught with the sinner’s prayer, which was ‘I believe I’m a Sinner and I deserve to go to hell and then Jesus died for my sins and I now trust you with my life.’

I went back to reading the book but I knew that that was significant something had changed right there.  I had too much pride to tell my wife about it, but like I said it’s February. We usually keep the house real cool and went to bed not too long after that.  And we usually bundle up all pile up the blankets.  And so, I was lying there as we got in bed with nothing covering me and I was sweating and she was all bundled up under the blankets and she leaned over looked to me and said, ‘What’s the matter with you? Must be the Holy Spirit!’  And again, I had too much pride to talk about it but I thought to myself, ‘Wow I’m going to remember that she said that.’

Yes and it so the next day, I called Randy and said, ‘Randy we need to get together for lunch.’  And he said, ‘How about a week from Thursday?’ And I said, ‘Randy, it’s got to be sooner than that.’  He said, ‘Oh, how about today?’  And so, we met that day and with great difficulty I shared with him what had gone on.  And he said, ‘Well, that sounds like it’s real, but time will tell.’  So he was a bit skeptical. I don’t know if he was skeptical or I think he saw because I had tears when I was telling the story.   So it wasn’t like I was faking and I know he had seen a change, but I think it was very wise on his part because what that said to me was ‘You better check that this is real’ and I think it really helped me too, to put a nail in it to say, ‘Yes, this is real.’  So it took about 2 weeks for me to be able to share with my wife, maybe a week or two weeks to be able to share with my wife what happened just because I had so much pride.

JH:  I bet she was surprised!

WP:  Sprobably was but she’s a pretty discerning person and she probably saw things changing.  The people who were surprised wer my college roommate when I called him and the boys down the street that were Christians when I was a kid.  They had been praying for me most of my life, yeah, most of my life.  We had some very joyous calls.

JH:  I think for them it probably really confirmed the value of prayer and never giving up on it.  Really the prayer for another person, that sometimes you can see fruit bear many years later.

So it sounds like in your story Warren,  you had a lot of things kind of coming together.  Of course you were sparked towards this journey by personal tragedy and then your wife’s pursuit of God, but you still had those questions.  But somehow those intellectual questions of God’s existence were answered through CS Lewis and the hounds of heaven who was actually seeking you, and that the Bible reading the Bible seemed to be a pivotal part of your story.  All of those things were coming together so that your willingness changed to see and to find something that you were missing.  What a beautiful story of everything kind of coming together over a process, over a period of time.  And even though the hounds of heaven were pursuing you, there was a patience there, it seems like as well, to allow you to journey at your own pace – even from the preacher to tell that you needed your own time and space to work through some things.

WP:  I think that what actually occurred figures not patience on my part but on other people’s parts.  I did not want it.  I did not want this to be true and fought it with everything I had.  But I ran out of gas shortly after that, yeah. I was so very excited about my new faith and I wanted to tell my family and I got blasted pretty good and it didn’t go well.   And the big thing was evolution and I didn’t know anything about creation science, any of that.  But, by golly, I was going to learn.

And so, I finally got some books that talked about how creation is scientific and how evolution is a fraud, and that changed all that.  That was another big change for me that really solidified my faith because evolution and Christianity don’t go together in my view. So after I was meeting with the pastor, I started reading lots of books and one of them that really impacted me was a book that as an atheist I read called The Battle for the Mind by a guy named Tim LaHay.  It was written in the early 80s and it talked about secular humanism.  And it talked about the fruits of secular humanism versus the fruits of Christianity.  And I read that and I thought that’s probably true.  And I did not like the fruits of what I believed and it was very difficult for me to reconcile that at that time.  Then actually there was a pain there was in my chest, tightness in my chest that didn’t go away until the day that I finally submitted.

JH: So when you say there was a tightness in your chest because of the what you were reading in terms of the implications of humanism and atheism, that it was so disturbing to you that you actually felt a physical pain?

WP:  Yeah, I actually felt the physical pain.  It wasn’t a huge pain but it was just a little nagging thing that I didn’t even think about it but I noticed that after I become a Christian it was gone and never come back.

JH:  That’s fascinating!  As we as we are coming to a close, I wondered since you’ve been on both sides of the story, you know what it means to feel like and to think like an atheist and you know what that resistance is towards God or are just thinking that there’s no evidence for God.  If there was a curious skeptic listening today, what would you advise them to think or to do or r to consider in terms of God or Christianity?

WP:  One thing that is significant for me in that area would be to look at creation and the complexity of creation and to think, ‘How did this just happen by chance? How did the human brain become the most complicated piece of the whole universe by chance? and How did the Bombardier beetle get to be able to shoot fire at his enemies from turds that he can rotate around on either side of his body and not kill himself with the poison he’s squirting at them in his body?’ Things like that are things that the atheist has a real hard time if he’s being honest.

JH:  The irreducible complexity and specificity and diversity of creation, the fine tuning of creation from the cell to the cosmos – there’s a lot there isn’t there in terms of trying to figure out how that might happen just by chance.

WP:  Yeah by random mutations over billions of years.  And, if you’ve got an open mind to it, it just doesn’t work and so you’re down to ‘Okay, there has to be another explanation.’  Well, that’s where God comes in.  And, I find very few Christians are armed with this kind of capability to discuss.  So that might be a word actually for Christians –  to become informed –  that it’s not a God of the gaps kind of explanation.  You don’t just plug in God where you don’t know what the answer is, that the hypothesis of God for which atheists say there is no reason. To have that hypothesis is actually that we know that certain things are the way that they are because of what we do know about the universe, that God is a good or best explanation because of what we already know about experience of what we already know about intellect in the mind and language and all of those things.  So there’s a lot there for us as Christians to really take hold of in terms of again speaking to Christians.

JH:  I guess that’s one of the things that you would probably advise them as to become better educated in terms of the arguments for the existence of God.

WP:  Yes arguments for the existence of God, for the evolution-creation debate.  And the other thing is humility, that when– as an atheist speaking from the past – when an atheist runs across someone who takes an really sincere interest in them and doesn’t preach at them and tell them things but has good information, more by asking questions, that that’s to me a more effective way of opening someone’s eyes or helping to open their eyes.

JH:  I guess you had that beautiful example of that loving Christian family back even as a child that you could see that they had a sincere interest in you even though you didn’t have the same beliefs.  I’m sure that probably stayed with you.  Obviously if you’re still talking with that friend there’s something there that started and lasted a lifetime really and helped you moved towards God even though it was in a perhaps not a blatant or overbearing way, but just out of love and humility like you say, in sincere interest.  And that’s really beautiful the way that that has come full circle for you.

Thank you so much, Warren, for being on the podcast today. I think your story is really a beautiful one.  You really come a long distance from where you were as a child and even as a young adult resisting God to a place where it sounds like you’ve got a beautiful legacy now and family, children, and grandchildren who all embrace God.  You have wonderful life and beautiful story to really celebrate so thank you for coming on the podcast today.

WP:  Thanks for having me.  I enjoyed being here.