Explorez tous les épisodes du podcast eX-skeptic
| Titre | Date | Durée | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Leaving Deception Behind – Vince Revo’s Story | 09 May 2025 | 00:56:01 | |
“If there is a God… I’ll follow. I’ll serve. I’ll give my life to you.” Vince Revo is a former atheist who, like many, walked away from the faith of his childhood after encountering religious hypocrisy, unanswered questions, and deep personal pain. Raised amid church culture but overwhelmed by contradictions, Vince found atheism to be a more rational, liberating path, at least at first. But what began as a rejection of blind belief slowly unraveled into a deeper crisis of meaning. From new age philosophy to law of attraction, from hedonistic escape to intellectual searching, Vince tried to find something—anything—that could fill the void. Guest Bio: Vince Revo is a Canadian filmmaker, podcast host, and bi-vocational pastor with a passion for engaging culture through story and truth. Once a committed atheist who explored Eastern philosophies, New Age spirituality, and humanism, Vince now uses his platform to speak openly about his dramatic return to faith in Jesus Christ. As the founder of the Revo Report and Vince Revo YouTube channels, he creates thought-provoking content that tackles skepticism, faith, and spiritual transformation. With a background in media production and theology, Vince is committed to equipping others to explore life’s biggest questions with honesty, courage, and intellectual integrity. Resources Mentioned: Apologists: William Lane Craig Ravi Zacharias Frank Turek Josh McDowell Connect with Vince Revo: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@vincerevo/videos Instagram: Vince Revo on Instagram Connect with eX-skeptic: Website: https://exskeptic.org/ Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/exskeptic Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/exskeptic Twitter: http://x.com/exskeptic YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@exskeptic Email info: info@exskeptic.org | |||
| Believing is Seeing, A Scientist’s Journey to God – Dr. Michael Guillen’s Story | 25 Apr 2025 | 01:01:41 | |
Can science and faith truly coexist? In this compelling episode of eXskeptic, Dr. Michael Guillen—Harvard physicist, former ABC News science editor, bestselling author, and once-devout atheist—shares his unexpected journey from scientific certainty to Christian faith. With three PhDs in physics, mathematics, and astronomy from Cornell, Dr. Guillen lived and breathed science, dismissing religion as irrelevant and unscientific. But when science couldn't answer his most profound questions—like "Why is there something rather than nothing?"—his lifelong assumptions began to unravel. Guest Bio: Dr. Michael Guillen is a physicist, a bestselling author, and a former Emmy-winning science correspondent for ABC News. Holding a rare 3D PhD from Cornell University in physics, mathematics, and astronomy, Dr. Guillen has taught at Harvard University and served as the science editor for ABC News, appearing regularly on Good Morning America, 20/20, and Nightline. Now an internationally respected speaker and writer, Dr. Guillen is the author of several acclaimed books, including Can a Smart Person Believe in God? and Believing is Seeing. He speaks globally on the relationship between faith, science, and reason, advocating for intellectual honesty and the courage to ask life’s biggest questions. Resources: Books by Michael Guillen:
Website: https://michaelguillen.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/michaelguillenphd/?hl=en Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/michaelguillenphd Twitter: https://x.com/drmguillen Connect with eX-skeptic: Website: https://exskeptic.org/ Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/exskeptic Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/exskeptic Twitter: http://x.com/exskeptic YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@exskeptic Email info: info@exskeptic.org | |||
| Resisting God – Dr. John W. Taylor’s Story | 11 Apr 2025 | 01:10:24 | |
Dr. John Taylor, a former atheist, once ardently dismissed the very concept of God, fearing it would cost him his autonomy. Growing up, John was exposed to the traditions of the Methodist church but found himself increasingly at odds with its teachings. As a teenager, he embraced atheism, fueled by skepticism towards religion and a belief that Christianity lacked intellectual rigor. He relished debates with Christians, eager to challenge and dismantle their faith. However, his life took an unexpected turn. Guest Bio: John Taylor is a dedicated professor of New Testament at Gateway Seminary in California, positioned just east of Los Angeles. With an eight-year tenure, he leads the Department of Biblical Studies, focusing his efforts on preparing future ministers, missionaries, and Christian academics. Passionate about imparting his knowledge, John primarily teaches courses on theology unique to Pauline letters, aiming to inspire and equip his students to effectively carry out their ministries. Through his work, he actively seeks to multiply the wisdom and insights he has accumulated over the years, contributing to the growth and enrichment of the Christian community. Resources Mentioned: Fuller Theological Seminary Fuller Theological Seminary and the University of Cambridge Gateway Seminary Website: https://www.gs.edu/academics/faculty-directory/member/1356019/ Dr. Taylor’s blogs: https://thegateway.press/author/johntaylor/ Academic Profile: https://gs.academia.edu/JohnTaylor Francis Schaeffer: “He is There and He is not Silent” Connect with eX-skeptic: Website: https://exskeptic.org/ Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/exskeptic Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/exskeptic Twitter: http://x.com/exskeptic YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@exskeptic Email info: info@exskeptic.org | |||
| Living in Wonder – Rod Dreher’s Story | 28 Mar 2025 | 00:54:28 | |
After transitioning from cultural Christianity to agnosticism, author Rod Dreher experienced profound encounters with the divine that reshaped his spiritual journey. In this episode, Rod shares pivotal moments that reignited his sense of wonder and enchantment, despite facing disillusionment and crises within the church. His quest for spiritual depth led him down unexpected paths, ultimately deepening his awe and connection with God. Guest Bio: Rod Dreher is an American author, journalist, and commentator known for his insights into culture, religion, and politics. He has written extensively for top publications like The American Conservative and National Review and is the author of several influential books, including Crunchy Cons, The Benedict Option, and Live Not by Lies. Beyond his books, Dreher has maintained a strong presence as a columnist and blogger, engaging in public discourse on a range of issues from religious freedom to cultural identity. His work continues to influence readers and thinkers interested in the intersection of faith and modern culture. Resources Mentioned: “The Benedict Option” by Rod Dreher “Live Not By Lies” by Rod Dreher “Living in Wonder” by Rod Dreher Soren Kierkegaard Philosopher and Theologian Social Media: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/roddreher/?hl=en Twitter: https://x.com/roddreher Website: https://roddreher.substack.com Connect with eX-skeptic: Website: https://exskeptic.org/ Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/exskeptic Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/exskeptic Twitter: http://x.com/exskeptic YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@exskeptic Email info: info@exskeptic.org | |||
| From Addiction to Freedom – Bill Scott’s Story | 14 Mar 2025 | 00:51:56 | |
Raised in a politically charged, largely non-religious household in Kentucky, Bill found himself embracing atheism through his teenage years, driven by hedonistic pursuits and a disdain for religious beliefs. His life appeared to follow a promising path in political activism until it spiraled into drug addiction and legal troubles, culminating in a transformative 17-day stint in jail. Guest Bio: Bill Scott serves with dedication at Ratio Christi, based at Houston Christian University. In his capacity as the Assistant Director of Ratio Christi International, Bill leverages his expertise to engage with diverse global communities. His role encompasses initiating and supporting ministry projects worldwide, fostering a robust dialogue around apologetics across different cultures. Bill’s international outreach and commitment to promoting apologetics underscore his professional mission, making his work both impactful and fulfilling. Resources Mentioned: “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins “The Case for Christ” by Lee Strobel “Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus” by Nabeel Qureshi Bart Ehrman New Testament Scholar Apologists: JP Moreland William Lane Craig Lee Strobel Nabeel Qureshi Francis Schaeffer 2 Corinthians 5:17 Connect with eX-skeptic: Website: https://exskeptic.org/ Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/exskeptic Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/exskeptic Twitter: http://x.com/exskeptic YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@exskeptic Email info: info@exskeptic.org | |||
| Truth Seeker – Dr. Larry Sanger’s Story | 28 Feb 2025 | 01:12:56 | |
In this episode, we’re joined by Dr. Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia, esteemed philosopher, and passionate advocate for truth-seeking. Raised in a religious environment, Larry’s journey evolved from childhood faith to agnosticism, fueled by his dedication to reason, evidence, and philosophical exploration. Through rigorous philosophical study, a deep engagement with the Bible, and profound personal experiences, Larry's skepticism was challenged and reshaped, leading him to a deeper reflection on life's existential questions. Guest Bio: Larry Sanger is an analytical philosopher, internet project developer, and co-founder of Wikipedia. He holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from Ohio State University and has been involved in multiple knowledge-based initiatives, including Nupedia, Citizendium, and Everipedia. Sanger has been a strong advocate for internet freedom, online credibility, and decentralized knowledge platforms. His work continues to shape discussions on the role of expertise and trust in digital information. Resources Mentioned: Website: www.larrysanger.org Larry’s Recommended Resources: The Case for Christ, Lee Strobel Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis www.talkaboutdoubts.com Connect with eX-skeptic: Website: https://exskeptic.org/ Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/exskeptic Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/exskeptic Twitter: http://x.com/exskeptic YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@exskeptic Email info: info@exskeptic.org | |||
| Doubting after Faith – Dr. Bobby Conway’s Story | 14 Feb 2025 | 00:52:45 | |
Dr. Bobby Conway shares with us as he talks about his tumultuous path, describing his former lifestyle marked by addiction, self-doubt, and relentless questions about existence and morality. Despite being academically inclined and climbing the ladder of theological education, he faced severe waves of skepticism that brought him to the brink of despair and even suicidal ideation. Tune in as we hear Dr. Conway’s story from a life steeped in hedonism and skepticism to becoming a deeply committed Christian. Guest Bio: Dr. Bobby Conway is the lead pastor of Image Church in Charlotte, North Carolina, and the founder of the YouTube ministry "Christianity Still Makes Sense." He holds a Master of Theology from Dallas Theological Seminary, a Doctor of Ministry in Apologetics from Southern Evangelical Seminary, and a PhD in Philosophy of Religion from the University of Birmingham in England. Dr. Conway has authored several books, including Does Christianity Still Make Sense? and Doubting Toward Faith. He also co-hosts the nationally syndicated radio show "Pastor’s Perspective," addressing listeners' questions about God and the Bible. Resources Mentioned: Radio Show: Pastors Perspective with Brian Broderson Christianity Still Makes Sense (Podcast and YouTube channel by Dr. Bobby Conway) Image Church https://www.imagechurch.live/ Books: "Does Christianity Still Make Sense?" by Dr. Bobby Conway “Doubting Towards Faith” by Dr. Bobby Conway “Mere Christianity” by C.S. Lewis “Shattered Dreams” by Larry Crabb “Resurrection Refutations” by Gary Habermas Connect with eX-skeptic: Website: https://exskeptic.org/ Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/exskeptic Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/exskeptic Twitter: http://x.com/exskeptic YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@exskeptic Email info: info@exskeptic.org | |||
| Finding God through Science – Dr. Michael Houts’ Story | 31 Jan 2025 | 00:48:41 | |
Dr. Michael Houts is an esteemed scientist with a rich background in mechanical and nuclear engineering and advanced propulsion systems for space exploration. Dr. Houts shares his journey of growing up outside the church with a strong belief in science, questioning the limitations of naturalistic explanations, and ultimately finding belief in God through a thorough investigation of the Bible. Guest Bio: Michael Houts is a dedicated scientist whose journey began with a passion for science and engineering. He earned bachelor’s degrees in mechanical and nuclear engineering from the University of Florida and a PhD in nuclear engineering from MIT. He spent 11 years at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he held key roles including team leader for criticality reactor and radiation physics. Now, Michael is a nuclear research manager at the Marshall Space Flight Center, working on advanced propulsion systems to boost space exploration. Resources Mentioned: Apologetics Press: https://apologeticspress.org/ Connect with eX-skeptic: Website: https://exskeptic.org/ Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/exskeptic Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/exskeptic Twitter: http://x.com/exskeptic YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@exskeptic Email info: info@exskeptic.org | |||
| From Anti-Christian to Pastor – Brian Smith’s Story | 17 Jan 2025 | 00:55:31 | |
Brian grew up in a small Georgia town where religion wasn’t part of his upbringing, though he was surrounded by churches. Angry at the concept of God, he viewed religious beliefs as a way to escape the fear of death. In high school, he became an atheist but befriended a popular group of Christians. Although he criticized their beliefs to fit in and feel superior, he couldn’t shake the sense that their faith had something genuine and authentic. Guest Bio: Brian Smith is a Student Pastor at Dunwoody Baptist Church in the Metro of Atlanta. He has been in student ministry for 16 years, and is a loving husband and father of four. Resources Mentioned: I Never Thought of It That Way by Mónica Guzmán Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis Podcast: Within Reason Alex J O’Conner God in the Dock by C.S. Lewis The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis Connect with eX-skeptic: Website: https://exskeptic.org Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/exskeptic Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/exskeptic Twitter: http://x.com/exskeptic YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@exskeptic Email info: info@exskeptic.org | |||
| Faith and Reason – Henare Whaanga’s Story | 03 Jan 2025 | 00:59:08 | |
Former skeptic Henare Whaanga grew up with an ex-gang member father and a mother who was an ex-Jehovah's Witness. His father supernaturally encountered God in prison, and he took Henare with him to preach the Gospel. However, Henare became frustrated with the evangelical church's emphasis on blind faith. His questions were met with shallow responses from the church, and his belief started to crumble. Unable to find any substance in Christianity, Henare left the church, but then he stumbled upon apologetics, leading him to a deeper exploration of key questions: Did Jesus really die and rise again? Is the Bible trustworthy? Guest bio: Henare Whaanga is the Regional Director at Thinking Matters, New Zealand’s leading apologetics organization, where he works to strengthen the understanding and defense of the Christian faith. He is a devoted husband, father, lay pastor and Bible teacher. Resources Mentioned: Frank Turek - I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist Works of Lee Strobel Works of J. Warner Wallace Eli Ayala - Revealed Apologetics Nate Sala YouTube - Wise Disciple YouTube Channel Thinking Matters: https://www.thinkingmatters.org.nz/ Connect with eX-skeptic: Website: https://exskeptic.org Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/exskeptic Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/exskeptic Twitter: http://x.com/exskeptic YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@exskeptic Email info: info@exskeptic.org | |||
| Hyper-Realist Finds Faith – Spencer Durrenberger’s Story | 20 Dec 2024 | 01:08:26 | |
Former atheist Spencer grew up in an abusive home, and while his mother took him to church, it felt more like a manipulative act than genuine faith. Witnessing the hypocrisy of the self-proclaimed Christians around him, Spencer began reading philosophical books. He determined that Christianity, like other religions, was irrational and needed to be challenged. He often engaged in debates with Christians, attempting to liberate them by dismantling their beliefs. He eventually found Christians that not only listened to his criticisms, but helped him look for real answers to his questions. After much study, Spencer began to see Christianity and the God of the Bible in a whole new light. Guest bio: Spencer Durrenberger is a chemist in Texas, with a Bachelor’s degree in Biology and Physics from the University of Texas at Arlington. He currently works in the medical field, specializing in oncology with Humana Pathology, where he contributes to groundbreaking medical research focused on cancer. Resources Mentioned: The Gospels For History, read Luke For History from the perspective of the Law, read Matthew For Why God became Man, read Mark For The Divinity of Christ and Beauty, read John Connect with eX-skeptic: Website: https://exskeptic.org/ Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/exskeptic Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/exskeptic Twitter: http://x.com/exskeptic YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@exskeptic Email info: info@exskeptic.org | |||
| Reasons for God – Dr. Kathleen Noller’s Story | 06 Dec 2024 | 01:02:46 | |
Kathleen grew up in a loving, immigrant household where religion wasn't a central part of her upbringing but was raised with a strong emphasis on good morals and values. In her mid-teens, Kathleen became an atheist, embracing nihilism and developing an animosity toward Christianity. Despite her elite education and achievements, she was not taught to ask deeper questions about purpose and meaning. This changed when a friend gave her a book that opened her eyes to new insights, including the concept of God as both a cosmic lawmaker and a personal deity, and her journey to Christ and understanding Christianity began. Guest Bio: Dr. Kathleen Noller is a leading Computational Biologist and specializes in cancer research. Kathleen completed her undergraduate studies in Biomedical Engineering at Columbia University, where her academic journey laid the foundation for her career as a scientist. She holds a PhD from Johns Hopkins University and is passionate about medical research. Kathleen is also a dedicated wife and mother to a one-year-old, balancing her professional achievements with the joys of family life. You can find her blog on Substack at The Reformed Gadfly Resources mentioned: John Lennox The Reasons for God Timothy Keller Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis William Lane Craig C.S. Lewis Institute resources Connect with eX-skeptic: Website: https://exskeptic.org/ Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/exskeptic Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/exskeptic Twitter: http://x.com/exskeptic YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@exskeptic Email info: info@exskeptic.org | |||
| The Road Back – Trevor Lancon’s Story | 22 Nov 2024 | 01:01:35 | |
Growing up in a small town, religion was a constant yet subtle presence in Trevor Lancon’s community. Deeply involved in his church’s youth group, Trevor longed to grow closer to God, but he began questioning whether his experiences were authentic or merely emotional manipulation. Drawn to the freedom of a secular lifestyle, he eventually distanced himself from the church, and he embraced scientism, seeking tangible evidence of reality. He rejected Christianity and identified as an atheist, diving into a worldview centered on materialism and skepticism. From the outside, Trevor seemed to have it all—a home, a loving wife, two beautiful children, and a stable career. Yet, inwardly, he was burdened by feelings of dread and brokenness. His journey back to faith wasn’t marked by a single dramatic moment but rather by countless small, profound experiences. Guest Bio: Trevor Lancon is a devoted father and husband and works as an engineer at a leading tech company on the outskirts of Houston, Texas. With a deep passion for STEM, Trevor holds a Master's degree in Health Physics and has a background in nuclear engineering. Connect with eX-skeptic: Books Mentioned: The Road by Cormac McCarthy The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel | |||
| An Unexpected Change – David Westerhoff’s Story | 08 Nov 2024 | 01:05:31 | |
During childhood, David Westerhoff’s faith never really extended outside of the church building. The tradition and practice of Christianity just didn’t make sense to David, and he began naturally moving with culture’s secular flow, becoming the ruler of his own life. On the surface, David’s life was unfolding perfectly; he had a loving wife, a growing family, and a steady career, but he still wasn’t content. His own internal battles and addictions threatened David’s marriage, and he began to feel a loss of control for the first time. On a night that seemed at first like any other, David felt the sudden presence of the Spirit of God, revealing the weight and gravity of his sins. Guest Bio: David Westerhoff is a software engineer, a husband, and a father of two. David grew up in the secularized culture of northern California but moved to Georgia after marrying his wife, Megan. He spent fifteen years of his career in tech and software, but after encountering Jesus and feeling powerfully convicted in August of 2022, David immediately realized he needed to switch gears and pursue God wholeheartedly. He is now a seminary student at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, studying to obtain a Master’s in Divinity. Connect with Ex-Skeptic: Website: https://exskeptic.org/ Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/exskeptic Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/exskeptic Twitter: https://x.com/exskeptic YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@exskeptic | |||
| A Scientist’s Journey to God – Krister Renard’s Story | 25 Oct 2024 | 00:56:35 | |
Former atheist and Swedish physicist Krister Renard dismissed God at a young age, believing science was the key to understanding reality. In his pursuit of knowledge, he came to see that the universe demanded a greater explanation, eventually believing in God. Krister's Website: www.gluefox.com Resources Mentioned by Krister:
| |||
| A Cumulative Case for God – Dr. John Studebaker’s Story | 11 Oct 2024 | 00:56:17 | |
Former atheist Dr. John Studebaker viewed religion as boring and inconsequential until he encountered surprising evidence about God and meaningful experiences with Christians. Over time, his quest for truth led him to a profound personal relationship with Jesus. John's Resources:
John's Recommended Resources:
| |||
| Keeping God at a Distance – Daniel Ray’s Story | 27 Sep 2024 | 00:54:47 | |
Daniel Ray did not have a religious upbringing, yet he somehow ‘knew’ God was real but kept him at a distance. He was living his own way on his own terms, but eventually he was found by God. Daniel's Resources:
Daniel's Recommended Resources:
www.exskeptic.org | |||
| Making Sense of Science and Faith – Dr. Sharon Dirckx’s Story | 13 Sep 2024 | 00:54:39 | |
Cambridge educated Dr. Sharon Dirckx was raised in a secular culture where religion played a minimal role. Intellectual authorities led her to believe that science and belief in God were incompatible until she began investigating the verifiable claims of Christianity. She came to see that a robust, intellectually grounded faith was possible. Sharon's Resources:
Sharon's Recommended Resources:
| |||
| Dismantling Atheism – Daniel’s Story | 30 Aug 2024 | 01:11:50 | |
Former atheist Daniel’s questions about the world and morality were dismissed by the religious people around him. His skepticism eventually revealed the logical flaws of atheism, leading him from a godless perspective to a robust understanding of the Christian worldview and belief in Jesus Christ. Resources mentioned by Daniel: Dominion by Tom Holland The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt | |||
| Exciting News for Side B Stories | 16 Aug 2024 | 00:09:19 | |
Side B Stories is turning the page to a new chapter! Listen and find out about our revamped podcast and content experience that promises to deliver even more extraordinary stories of life change. | |||
| Excluding God – Dr. Dan Mizell’s Story | 02 Aug 2024 | 01:16:55 | |
Former atheist Dr. Dan Mizell left Christianity and embraced science as the most rational way to understand and live in the world. Over time, he began to question whether the natural world was sufficient to explain reality. His search for answers led him to a more solid foundation for knowledge, ethics, and life in God. | |||
| Longing for More – Nate Sala’s Story | 19 Jul 2024 | 01:13:13 | |
Nate Sala rejected his parents’ faith tradition of Christianity and pursued life on his own terms, but his life failed to bring satisfaction to his deepest longings. His search led him to find all that he desired in God. Nate's Resources:
| |||
| Returning to God – Melanie Beerda’s Story | 05 Jul 2024 | 00:59:53 | |
Although Melanie Beerda was raised in a Christian family, her life experience alienated her from the concept of a loving God. After leaving Christianity to go her own way for several years, she finally discovered the loving God who had been there for her all along. Melanie's Resources: Rekindled Faith with Melanie Beerda podcast The AC Podcast (Available on Spotify and Apple) | |||
| Struggling with Doubt – Dr. Keith Hess’s Story | 21 Jun 2024 | 01:02:57 | |
Keith Hess grew up in a Christian family but began to question whether or not what he believed was real or true. His doubts went unanswered for years until he was finally introduced to solid reasons for belief. Now a professor of philosophy and apologetics, Dr. Hess helps others find answers to the big questions of God and life. Resources Mentioned by Keith:
| |||
| Searching for the Real God – Carrie Sheffield’s Story | 07 Jun 2024 | 01:07:57 | |
Former skeptic Carrie Sheffield suffered abuse at the hand of her religious father and developed a skewed view of God. After years of questioning and searching, she finally found the unconditional love of God. Resources Mentioned by Carrie Counterfeit Gods by Tim Keller Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis Works of Deepak Chopra Resources by Carrie Book: Motorhome Prophecies Website: https://carriesheffield.com/ | |||
| Searching for Truth – Dr. Kirk Shanahan’s Story | 24 May 2024 | 00:57:19 | |
Chemist and former atheist Dr. Kirk Shanahan began to see science's inability to answer big questions of life and the universe. It opened him up to the search for truth and the possibility of God. | |||
| Experiencing the Miraculous – Dave Rankin’s Story | 10 May 2024 | 01:03:23 | |
Former atheist Dave Rankin's difficult life experiences proved to him that God could not exist. Through his years of atheism, other surprising experiences awakened him to the possibility of something more than his atheism could explain. Episode Notes: Book(2012): 39 Years in the Wilderness, an Atheist Walk With God (available on Amazon Kindle) | |||
| A Christian’s Journey through Skepticism – Adam Terry’s Story | 26 Apr 2024 | 01:11:09 | |
As a Christian, Adam Terry experienced an intellectual crisis of faith. His doubts and questions prompted an investigation to determine whether his beliefs were true. His journey through skepticism led him back to a more robust faith. Episode Notes: Adam's YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@curiouschristianity Adam's X (Twitter) account: @Curi_Christian | |||
| Secular Jew Finds Christ – Dr. James Tour’s Story | 12 Apr 2024 | 00:52:17 | |
From a secular Jewish home, scientific scholar and former skeptic Dr. James Tour encountered the love and reality of Jesus, and his life was immediately changed. Dr. James Tour's Resources:
Resources/authors recommended by Dr. Tour:
| |||
| From Hopelessness to Hope – Al Gascon’s Story | 29 Mar 2024 | 01:14:07 | |
Former atheist Al Gascon rejected God in light of his life struggles. His study of science further convinced him intellectually of what he felt personally, that God did not exist. Now, Al works as a pastor who spends his life helping others know that God is real. Resources mentioned by Al:
| |||
| “From Addiction to Redemption” – Stephen McWhirter’s Story | 15 Mar 2024 | 00:59:35 | |
Former atheist Stephen McWhirter rejected God because of Christian hypocrisy and abuse. Looking for comfort, he plunged into drug addiction. After an encounter with Christ, he left his skepticism and addiction behind and spends his life in leading others to Jesus. Stephen's Resources:
Resources mentioned by Stephen:
| |||
| Intent on Making God Pay – Liam Back’s Story | 01 Mar 2024 | 01:01:43 | |
Liam Back, a deeply entrenched skeptic, had a vendetta against God fueled by personal loss. His quest to “make God pay” led him to an unexpected embrace of the Christian faith. Liam's Resources:
Resources & authors recommended by Liam:
| |||
| Looking for Evidence – Mark McGee’s Story | 16 Feb 2024 | 01:07:53 | |
Former atheist Mark McGee left his childhood Christian faith to search for truth in Eastern world religions, but it eventually led him into atheism. An inquisitive journalist, he investigated the evidence for Christianity and believed. Mark's Resources:
Resources mentioned by Mark:
| |||
| Becoming Skeptical of Skepticism – Matthew Sabatine’s Story | 02 Feb 2024 | 01:19:51 | |
Former atheist Matthew Sabatine journeyed back and forth between faith and disbelief until he finally landed on a view of reality that best explained the universe and his own life. Matt's Resources:
Resources Mentioned by Matt Conversations with God by Neale Donald Walsch | |||
| “The mire of nihilism” – Christine Mooney-Flynn’s Story | 19 Jan 2024 | 01:02:19 | |
| Out of Darkness – Chris Adam’s Story | 05 Jan 2024 | 01:30:44 | |
Former atheist Chris Adam experienced a difficult, chaotic childhood and was drawn to witchcraft and demonology to gain control over his life. After being introduced to the Bible, he surrendered his control and his life to Jesus. Chris’s Resources https://www.xbible.com To learn more about CSLI Resources and Events, visit www.cslewisinstitute.org To hear more stories about atheists and skeptics becoming Christians, visit www.sidebstories.com | |||
| Glimpses of God – Renee Leonard Kennedy’s Story | 22 Dec 2023 | 01:04:17 | |
Former atheist Renee Leonard Kennedy left the God of her youth behind for what she thought was a more enticing life. After years of atheism, she was surprised to find both intellectual and spiritual reasons to believe. Resources by Renee:
Resources mentioned by Renee:
For information regarding C.S. Lewis Institute resources and events, visit www.cslewisinstitute.org For more stories about atheist and skeptics conversion to Christianity, visit www.sidebstories.com | |||
| Deconstructing and Reconstructing Faith – Anna Gray Smith’s Story | 08 Dec 2023 | 01:00:41 | |
Former skeptic Anna Gray Smith questioned her childhood faith and sought other avenues of belief to find identity, meaning, and truth. Her search led her back to a more robust, grounded faith in God. Anna Gray Smith’s Resources:
Resources mentioned by Anna Gray: How Shall We Then Live, Frances Schaffer | |||
| God Showed Up – Jon Wilke’s Story | 24 Nov 2023 | 01:02:35 | |
Former atheist Jon Wilke had no desire for God and wanted to go his own way. After years of living on his own terms, he became open to the possibility of God, and his life completely changed. Resources Mentioned by Jon Mark Mittleberg, Courageous Faith For more information on CSLI Events and Resources, visit www.cslewisinstitute.org www.sidebstories.com Episode Transcript Hello and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to Side B Stories, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist or a skeptic, but who became a Christian against all odds. If you can hear more of our stories at our website at sidebstories.com. We also welcome your comments on these stories on our Facebook page. You can email us also at info@sidebstories.com. We love hearing from you. As a reminder, our guests not only tell their stories of moving from disbelief to belief in God and Christianity. At the end of each episode, these former atheists and skeptics give advice to curious seekers as to how they can best pursue the truth and reality of God. They give advice to Christians as to best [00:45] how to engage with those who don’t believe. I hope you’re listening in to the end to hear them speak from their wisdom and experience as someone who has once been on both sides. We have so much to learn from them. There’s something extraordinary about an extraordinary life change. When someone’s before looks dramatically different than their after, we lean in, and we want to know what happened. In the context of religious conversion, in this case from atheism to Christianity, you would expect an observable change in the way that someone thinks and lives. And that’s typically what you find. Everything changes, and not in subtle ways. Life looks and feels different in very significant ways. Former atheist Jon Wilke says that his life is hardly recognizable from the man he was before he met Jesus Christ and the man of God he has become afterward. I hope you’ll come along to hear his story of dramatic transformation. Welcome to Side B Stories, Jon. It’s so great to have you with me today. Thank you for the invitation, Jana. It’s always a pleasure to be able to share what God’s done in my life, and maybe somebody who’s listening or watching will be encouraged by my testimony. Oh, I’m sure they will. I’m sure they will. Before we get into your story, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself now. Yeah, sure. Thank you. Professionally, I am a media relations guy, so I work with a lot of reporters who want to talk to ministries and see what God’s doing in and through those ministries. I’ll share more about how I got into that maybe later. But I’m a dad, a middle-aged dad, and I love being a dad. I have an 11-year-old and 14-year-old girls. And the essence of who I am is as father. So I’m kind of your standard middle-aged guy with two kids. And I take them to the park. We go to the pool. We ride bicycles. We ride skateboards. I take them rock climbing and that kind of stuff. Well, that sounds fun! Sometimes as an adult it’s really great to have kids. They just keep you young. All right. Let’s start your story now. Tell me about your family, where you were born, your home life. Was it religious at all? Did they talk about God? Did you go to church? What did that look like? I grew up in a large southern family, so there’s a cultural side of religion that’s in there. We had a giant Bible on our coffee table. We occasionally went to church, VBS, Vacation Bible School, was a great daycare for working families. They could drop their kids off for a week at a time. So I had some of those experiences. But my family… I have six brothers, four sisters. I come from a family where my mother was widowed, and then a couple things didn’t work out, and so I am the baby boy of eleven. I have a younger sister. I have six older brothers that are all really big, macho, tough guys. But as far as religion, we would say grace at family functions. My uncle would share a prayer. Just this real simple basic cultural Christianity here in the South. You grow up with this understanding about what’s a little bit of right and wrong, what’s a little bit of morality, but not necessarily anything that’s gospel focused. My sister and I have had many conversations, Jana, about… we’re so thankful that the Lord rescued us from where we grew up from. A lot of times, you can tell a lot about a person by where they came from and where they left and where they live now. But my best friend growing up, my whole childhood, he died of a drug overdose, and that could have been me easily. The county I’m from in Kentucky is called Muhlenberg County, but it’s jokingly referred to, sadly, as “Methenberg County.” Oh, my! So there’s a lot of drug use there, and so we’re really thankful for being able to escape that and get out of that. But, as far as religion goes, we kind of knew who Jesus was, but it wasn’t something that our family took seriously. There were some token displays of religion, as pretty much most southern families know. So you had some kind of touch points of God or church and VBS. Did you have any sense even as a child? Did you pray to God? Did you believe in God? Did you believe what they were saying? I felt like I had a religious experience when I was about seven years old. I was at a Vacation Bible School. But I remember my best friend at the time, a guy named Derek. He professed Christ, and then walked down the aisle to get baptized. And we played baseball, we rode motorcycles, and we were always a very competitive friendship. So part of me… I walked down the aisle when I was like seven, and I got baptized, but it didn’t stick. There was nothing really there. I had a couple of points in I would say middle school years, where I began to just take a look at the Bible. I remember reading some stuff about predestination. I think it was in 1 Peter or something like that. And that just was kind of interesting to me. But one of the main themes I did have in my whole life is I was terrified of death. Growing up…. Being 47, I was just a child during the Cold War in the early eighties. I was just terrified of nuclear holocaust. I mean, all the movies…. There was so much pop culture on this. And so what happened to someone who died, how you died, that was just something really mysterious that caused me a lot of angst, anxiety, just as a boy. And I carried that for quite a while. Yeah. I would imagine that that would be difficult. You said your mother was a widow. And I am sure even just personally experiencing the loss of a parent, that that probably brought that issue a little bit forward for you and makes you think about it a little bit more seriously, especially when it’s happened so close to you. There was always this kind of ghost in our home, Jana, where my older siblings’ dad, there were full-size pictures on the wall, like this one of the Eiffel Tower. In our house, there were always these thoughts and these conversations, and I had this whole separate family that was his family. But there were these talks of Jimmy—that was his name. Jimmy was watching down. He was looking down on people. There was always this kind of ghost of a person that was in our home and was talked about often, and so there was a presence of death and a bit of taste of afterlife that did definitely flavor my childhood. I wonder. When you experience something like that, does that make you want to know more about God or supernatural reality or the question of death? I had questions, but I didn’t really know who to ask. Because there were no real experts in my life. But, truth be told, we were such a poor family, my mother widowed. She worked two jobs. At different times, she worked at a furniture store, and then she waited tables a few nights a week, and then, in that part of western Kentucky, it was what they called a dry county, and so they would set up these illegal bars, where people would bring their own alcohol in, and my mother would be the bartender, so she would do that one or two nights a month to make extra money. So we were just so poor that it was like a survival mode. We moved nineteen times before I graduated high school. So it was just constant transition. And I think that really put me in the moment a lot, just a very existential, “What do we do to get through the day?” And then, when you move that much, when you move to a new school, the girls liked me, and the boys didn’t. So there were a lot of fights. There was a lot of trouble. And so I think I just really was in survival mode most of my childhood. But let me just be honest: My mother was a sweet, loving, wonderful mother. She was my best friend. We’d sit and drink coffee and talk for hours. I could talk to her about anything. She’d been through so much she had a lot of wisdom to share, but she’s just a really kind, wonderful woman, and despite all of these challenges, I had a great childhood. I mean we had a lot of family, had a lot of cousins around. There was always family things to do. Back in those days, they would just send you out in the summertime on your bicycle, and you’d spend all day playing with your friends and come home for dinner. So I had a wonderful childhood in that sense, that it was very loving. It was very supportive. There was lots of family and friends. And lots of fun, to be honest with you. But we didn’t have much. We got a cake for our birthdays. I never went on vacation as a child. One of the fun stories… I think it’s funny now, but I think it was my ninth birthday, I got a Dairy Queen M&M Blizzard. That was my gift, Jana. And I was happy. Yes. So there was a contentment that was with that, because you didn’t have any other choice. So you just learned to be content in those situations. Right. Right. Yeah. I can imagine with, goodness, eleven children and just being in survival mode, but in a way, although there was no doubt, incredible struggle, it gave you a heart of gratitude for something so simple, as a Blizzard for your birthday. We have a lot to learn from that, I think, in terms of contentment. But it sounds like you were blessed in many ways, even with a simple upbringing. But as you’re moving on, you have ten siblings. Was faith among that culture at all? I mean, did your brothers or sisters believe. Did you start questioning it as you got older? How did that work its way out? I had a sister who got involved in a church for a while, but that was because there were teenage boys there. But then sometimes God uses those things. My brother, one of my older brothers, he wound up falling in love with a woman who was very involved in a great family and a great church. And so he began going to church regularly with her. And then mom started going with him, and then occasionally I would go with her. And so we started hanging out with that family from time to time through my brother. And I just got to see a little bit different way of life. His in-laws, who’ve both passed away, were just wonderful people, wonderful Christian people, and it made me really go, “Wow! I missed a lot.” Dorothy and Graham were just incredible people, and they raised wonderful kids and grand-kids, and they all lived close to each other. They were just a really strong Christian family. So I did see the effects of Christianity as a young man, a teenage boy, and I thought, “Okay. There’s something different here with this family,” and it really did have to do with Jesus. It took me years later to understand why that was. Well, I’m glad that you got a good, embodied example of what a Christian family looks like, even though it may not have been the fullness of that in your own family, but at least you had some kind of positive example. So as you’re getting older, are you pushing back against faith or Christianity? Or are you kind of like, “That’s for them. It’s not for me.” Or what started happening in your life? I started dating a girl whose dad—and they were very charismatic, so I remember going in this church, and this guy’s having some charismatic faith practices that just kind of freaked me out. But I liked this girl, and her family always was there, and her dad would occasionally preach. And so I was around a different kind of Christianity. It made me think, “Okay, what’s going on here? I don’t really understand all this.” I did begin to read the Bible. I remember reading in John, and I thought it was really interesting, and then 1 John about love. And so I had a couple of touches with the Bible. I don’t know if I would say God was really…. God was probably pulling me in at that time, but there was a resistance. I was a hell raiser. I was a kid who got in fights at school. I was drinking at a young age. I stole my sister’s car. I made keys to my mom’s car when I was 15 and would drive it around when she was out bar tending at night. I did all those kind of things growing up. And so there was a part of me that was like, “Okay, if God is real, then I’m going to have to change the way I live, because obviously this is not the right kind of way to live.” So, yeah. It wasn’t something you were really eagerly looking for. Yeah. As a teenage boy, I’m sure the last thing you wanted was some kind of cosmic authority in your life telling you what to do. So it was just easier, and I presume more fun for you, to live in the way that you wanted to live. Well, sin has a particular appeal to it when you’re lost, and obviously, Satan’s really good at temptation and keeping people in that way. I do think now, many years later, that he was very fearful of the fact of what would happen when a man like me came to Christ. The times that I did touch into the Bible, there was always something that came up. There was always something that happened, with girlfriends and not living the right way, and accumulating a past that’s not to be proud of. But I would have called myself, at that point, a nonbeliever, an atheist, because it’s like, “I don’t want God to exist.” So I’m not necessarily a full-blown anger towards God. I didn’t really understand God. God was this very intangible thing. But I’d obviously seen the fruit of what a tangible faith looked like in the family that my brother was involved in and those kinds of things. I did see that there is something that happens when you follow Christ and you live a good life. I mean, these people were good, wholesome people. But when you’re a young kid doing what you want to do and chasing after the things of the world, that’s kind of boring. It doesn’t appeal to you, and you’re like, “Oh, maybe that’ll be something that happens when I get older.” So did you, at that time, when you were pushing away from God and the things of God, I guess, you called yourself an atheist? You identified? I mean, you rejected that there was a God? Or that you just didn’t want there to be a God? There’s all these big questions. I didn’t have questions of really my purpose. I didn’t have questions about really necessarily the afterlife. It was more of the morality. I didn’t want God to be…. I didn’t want anybody to tell me what I could or couldn’t do. And that’s just really where I was. So we can talk more about my military stuff, I guess, in a few minutes, but when I went in the military, I had atheist on my dog tags. And how far was it from high school to your military service? How old were you when you entered into military service and decidedly put atheist on your dog tag? It was only a couple years. So I graduated high school not too long after I turned 17, and I joined the Marine Corps pretty soon after I turned 19. I was just a big party guy. And so I didn’t wind up lasting in school but a couple of semesters. And so I was moving home, and my brother, who’s a pastor he loaned me his truck to move out of the dorm, and so I called my best friend up. He came to the dorm to help me move, and on the way back to move home, we stopped to buy some drugs, and we got busted. I’d already talked to a recruiter once. But it didn’t really go anywhere. I thought, “Oh, there’s no way I could go in the military,” with all the authority issues I had and no control or whatever. So I was kind of forced. So I remember walking into this foyer. And to my left was the Navy recruiter and to the right was the Marine Corps recruiter. So I walked in the Navy office, and there was nobody in there. And then the Marine recruiter said, “Hey, hey! Why don’t you come in here?” So I was like, “Okay.” I just kind of walked over there, moseyed over there, and we got to talking, and he said, “Well, have you taken the ASVAB?” And I said, “No, sir. I skipped school that day.” And so I had to take the test, and I would up taking the test, and in maybe a day or two, he called me back, and said, “Hey! You can do anything you want. You scored really good on the test.” I said, “Okay, great!” So I was like, “What are your “Public affairs,” and I said, “What’s that?” And he said, “It’s like you’re a journalist. Have you ever seen Full Metal Jacket?” He says, “”You’ll be Joker.” He said, “You go, and you write stories, and you tell the Marine Corps story to the community,” and he was like, “And then when reporters want to talk to Marines, you usually help them out and help them get their story.” I said, “Okay. Sign me up for that.” And that’s how I got out of drug charges, and that’s why I joined the Marine Corps, which was a dramatic shift in life for me and really helped change the trajectory of my life. I’m really thankful for the Marine Corps. Yeah. So that’s how I joined the military, and I then I wound up putting atheist on my dog tag. And so I did carry that title into the Marine Corps. And then, when I was in boot camp at Parris Island, the only time the drill instructors wouldn’t mess with you was if you went to church or chapel. They’d leave you alone. So I actually started going to church. I started going to chapel. Just to get left alone by your superiors? Yes! Just to sit there and doze off. Just to sit in air conditioning. Because on Sunday, it was a light day, but before noon, you’d go to chapel and then you’d go to chow, and you had a couple hours of free time. And free times was usually like, you work out on your own or you polish your boots. You write letters to mom and dad. Or you get ready for the inspection that’s coming up the next day, or whatever. Those kind of things. But for that little bit of time, that an hour, hour and a half, you didn’t have an instructor barking at you, which was a nice reprieve. But I did start carrying a Bible in the boot camp, and I read it from time to time, and I carried it in my pocket. As an atheist. As an atheist. Yeah. Now, why did you start reading a Bible and carrying one with you? Does it haunt back to those early days of worrying or wondering about death? Well, that’s a great question. I see why you have such a great show. It gave me something to do a lot of times. I mean there was a lot of hurry up and wait, where you would move somewhere as a unit and then you’d sit down for an hour, waiting for somebody to come, supplies to arrive, whatever, the training to begin, and so you’d get there early, and you’d just sit there, or you’d stand there. And so, if you had a Bible, you could pull it out and read it. But you couldn’t talk to anybody. It was boring. And so the Bible gave me something to do and something to read. And I remember… This sounds silly, but I remember just looking at the clouds a lot and just thinking, “I wonder if there is a God and if He’s happy that I’m reading this Bible.” And that somewhat gave me a bit of comfort, just to escape from the… I don’t know. The quote-unquote hell of boot camp. It just gave me a way to mentally get away from that place and think about something else. When you were reading the Bible, were you reading it as something, “This might have actually happened in history,” that Jesus was a real person? Did you look at it as, “The Bible is myth and fairy tale. It’s unbelievable.” What was your perspective in reading the Bible? At that point, the veracity of the New Testament was something that I couldn’t grasp, how true the Bible was, Jesus as a real person, but there were these fantastical stories in the prophets and in Revelation, and there was this wisdom Ecclesiastes and Proverbs, and then there were stories about Jesus. I didn’t really get it, but it was just something that… I think it was just something to do to entertain me, just give my mind some kind of exercise to do. But if we fast forward a few years, I got out of the Marine Corps, and I moved back home, and I was going to use my GI bill and go to college. At that point… you’ve got to realize my time in the Marine Corps was really exciting. I got to do a lot of traveling. First time I wore a suit or a tie. First time I flew on an airplane, because as a poor southern guy, we just didn’t have… this wasn’t a part of my life. And so I got to live a pretty exciting life as a journalist, especially single, no kids, so I got to write incredible, fun stories. But if we fast forward a few years, I got out of the Marine Corps, and I moved home, went to college, and then I joined the Army National Guard on September 7th because they had 100% tuition reimbursement. I joined on September 7th, and then September 11th happened. And then I got called up, and we got deployed. And it was on that deployment where I gave my life to Christ. So this is where the Ecclesiastes comes in to play, because a man gave me a copy of the Bible and said, “Here. Keep this with you,” and I had heard the stories about George Washington and the superstition of stopping a bullet and all this kind of stuff. We were literally just going to Germany to relieve the army, so the army could go to Afghanistan and relieve the Marines. So it wasn’t a difficult deployment in that regard. But nonetheless, he gave me a copy of the Bible. And I did carry it with me. And then, on the day we deployed, one of my soldiers, he had been married for two years and had a 2-year-old kid, and his wife said that she’s leaving him. And so he’s my soldier. And he was broken. I mean, this guy was distraught, just crying, bawling like a baby. His whole life was over, but he was getting deployed, so he couldn’t do anything about it. He had to leave or go AWOL. That was his only two choices. So one of the first sergeants said, “Well, take him to see a chaplain. I hadn’t been in a church in I couldn’t tell you how many years. At this point, I’m 24, I don’t think I’ve been in church since probably I was 17, 18. I might have visited a church when I went home to see mom. I don’t remember any particular time. And so I walk in the chapel. And I remember thinking, “Oh, if God’s real, I’m going to catch on fire as soon as I cross over the threshold of this place.” Yeah. For all the hell raising and bar fights and all the things I had done that I’m not proud of when I was in the Marine Corps and so forth. But the chaplain talked to the guy, encouraged the guy, whatever. I don’t remember what he said to him. That was one example where I was like, “Okay, this guy’s broken, and I have no idea how to fix this kid,” because he’s only maybe 19 or 20. But he’s my responsibility. I’m his sergeant. I’m in charge. And then I had another guy, a giant of a man, a big 6’8” tough guy. He lost his cool in the middle of a patrol and just threw his weapon down and cried like a baby because he was missing home, and he just had a nervous breakdown. I had no idea how to fix this guy, either. He was very angry, and so I was like, “What is going on with these people?” And then, not too much longer after that, I had another soldier whose son had passed away. He had three boys, and his oldest son died. He was only 13 or 14. So we got the Red Cross message, and I had to go get the soldier, bring him to the captain’s office, then I and the captain had the tell him, “Your son has passed away, and you need to go home and bury him, and then you need to come back on mission in thirty days because we need you here.” And you’ve got orders, you know? And so it was those examples where I actually pulled that Bible out, Jana, and I started reading Ecclesiastes, because that’s what I knew. And at this point in my life, you’ve got to realize, you know hell raising, drinking, fighting. I mean, I was not a man who’d want to go to the Bible for anything, but I opened up Ecclesiastes and there it is: “Hey, everything you’ve done is in vain.” All those women you chased. That’s not worth anything. The money that you’ve had, it’s not worth anything. There’s nothing new under the sun. And so it was like, “Whoa! I’ve done the same thing other people have done, and there’s nothing new about that.” But it’s all fruitless. It’s all vanity. And then I got over to the New Testament. And then that’s where I experienced Christ for the first time in a real way. I was reading and interacting with these people from all different strokes of life, from the Samaritan woman, the rich young ruler, to calling Peter and Andrew and these guys. He knew what was in their heart. “I saw you under the tree,” you know? And just all these things. And I was like, “Okay. Something about Jesus understands the heart of people.” And so that drew me to Him because the problems I was facing with my soldiers was how to help what was broken on the inside of them, and I didn’t know how to fix that. And that affected how they were able to perform on mission and what kind of soldiers they were, what kind of people they were, and if they stayed out of trouble or not. So I was like, “How do I help fix these guys on the inside?” And I didn’t know. So that’s when I began to read and got over to some really interesting verses, because I had been a journalist and been a writer, so I was pretty comfortable with the English language. I got over to some verses like John 14:6: “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father but by Me,” and I remember thinking, “That is the most exclusive sentence I’ve ever heard in my life. You have these definitive articles. Either this is true or it’s not true. This is a really strong thing. Okay, this guy lived in early days in Jerusalem and walked around. Okay, was he real? Was He [UNKNOWN 36:20]?” I didn’t think about that? I was just thinking, “Whoa! This is….” Now, I would understand that was a truth encounter, right? I was having a truth encounter. God had begun to draw me in through some of these scriptures. I remember reading Jesus asking his disciples, “Well, who do you say that I am?” Peter said, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Okay. That doesn’t get any more exclusive. “You are,” which is like the present, “the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Okay, so these verses really stuck in my head and just caused me a lot of thought. And so, those were the initial parts of making me think more about the Lord, and, “Okay. Maybe there’s something to this.” As you were reading all of this, whether it’s the Old Testament or the New Testament, about the Person of Christ, and Who He was and how He engaged with people, were you talking with other people about what you were reading? Was there a chaplain around that you were having good conversations with? Or was this something you were processing on your own? I wonder what you were thinking. “Is this guy real? Is this for real? Is there something to this that I need to be considering more deeply?” Yeah, I don’t remember, at this point, having anybody to talk to. I mean, me and my buddy Joe, we were the company and battalion hell raisers. We were the guys you wanted to go party with. We were the guys that were cool and fun and all that stuff. So none of the good guys really wanted to hang out with us. There were a few Christians in our unit. One of them was our sergeant major. So like the top enlisted guy. This guy was as straight-laced as they come. He didn’t cuss. You barely saw him lose his temper. And for a sergeant major in the army, I had expectations of what those would look like. I was looking at him through a Marine Corps lens, so it was a little bit different perspective, but there were a couple of guys that I knew were Christians, and they lived differently. But no, I didn’t talk to them at that point. They didn’t want to talk to me. But one of the things that did happen is I wanted to quit smoking. I was smoking cigarettes like crazy, and one of my soldiers, his name’s Aaron. I’m leaving off last names, but Aaron gave me a “What would Jesus do?” bracelet because I told him. He was one of my soldiers and said I wanted to quit smoking. He said, “Well….” He had seen me reading my Bible. He and a guy named Chris had been… they saw me read my Bible, and they were both Christian guys, and so this guy gave me a “What would Jesus do?” bracelet. And he’s like, “Anytime you want to smoke, just think, ‘What would Jesus do?’” So I put it on because he had honored me with that, and he had given that to me, and he was rooting for me, and I was like, “Okay. I going to wear it because he gave it to me. I’m not going to be a jerk about it or whatever. I’m just going to honor his little gift here. So these were things, but God was working on me. These were convictions, now that I understand what was happening. These were convictions that began to happen. And God put these little pieces in place to start making me think about him and how to live, None of these guys actually ever witnessed to me directly. None of them actually shared the gospel with me, came to me with scripture. They lived differently. But they didn’t ever actually preach or pray for me or even explained scripture to me or even witnessed to me. There weren’t gospel conversations, but there was obviously a wholesome witness that they presented. And was that attractive to you in some way? Or was that more repulsive at that time? It was honorable to me because I had been such a bad person. I stole. I was a womanizer. I would drink and try to fight my best friends, and I’m trying to go out with them the next night, and they wouldn’t want to hang out with me. I mean, I wasn’t proud of who I was. And I wasn’t raised with my dad. Like I said, my mom was widowed, and she married a different man and had me. And he was an alcoholic. He was very angry. And I only saw him a few times a year, but one of the worst statements that could ever be said to me was, “You’re just like your father!” And so it was in those moments where I was like, “I’m becoming my dad.” And what’s funny, Jana, is I look exactly like my dad. Minus the blue eyes. Like we are twins. Oh. But anyway, there was a wholesomeness to that. It was honorable to me that they wanted to live differently and wholesomely, and I remember thinking back to the Grahams and the Dorothys of the world that had been just wonderful family context you think of when you watch TV and see all these wholesome families. That was not what I grew up in. I grew up in a home where I remember waking up on Christmas morning, I had one present under the tree, and there were bunch of people passed out… there were like a dozen people passed out in the house. I didn’t know who they were . I was 12 or 13 years old. I mean that’s the kind of home I lived in. Oh, my! Yes. But there was something about these guys that lived differently. And that was attractive to me. It was like, “Okay. There’s a different way to live that doesn’t come with all this trouble and drama.” And that was a little bit attractive to me. And you knew they were Christians, but they just lived their lives in front of you. They didn’t try to push it upon you. Never. They were honestly quiet Christians. I don’t remember seeing anybody really witness to anybody. So that is kind of fascinating now that you think back on it, how God wound up bringing me into his family. Right. So then what happened? You were observing. You were reading. Yeah. I got into a huge cussing fight with our company sergeant, so one of the top guys. And he was a nice guy. I don’t want to give him any credit, but I had a difference of opinion about things because I had come from the Marine Corps, and so my expectations of professionalism and service and devotion and all that was very different, so there were a lot of deeper philosophical issues. And I just remember getting into a huge fight with him. And we were just yelling, cussing. So angry at him. And he was two ranks ahead of me, so he probably could have got me on some kind of insubordination charge or whatever. And it didn’t resolve, but I remember walking back to my barracks. And some of those songs from the chapel came back. And so I just started having a little talk with Jesus, and telling Him about my troubles, because that’s what the song said. Right! You know, these old southern gospel hymns. Just a few of them. I don’t know hardly any of them. But I just remember saying, “God, if you’re real, I am 6,000 miles away from home.” Excuse my French. “My life sucks!” Like, “I’m a bad guy. I am not happy with where I’m at in life. I’m a paycheck to paycheck drunk. I’m fighting my best friends. I am just a mess.” And I was like, “God, if you’re real, I need You, and I need You now.” Like, “This is it. I need You to show up if You’re real.” And then the sergeant major came around the corner. And you’ve got to realize I only went to the company office a handful of times in a year. And the sergeant major’s…. Here I am. I’m in the Army at this point. I’m a sergeant in an army, even though I earned my sergeant stripes in the Marine Corps. I maintained my rank. And so here I’m supposed to be this tough sergeant guy, right? And I’m crying. I’m just bawling. Snotty, messy bawling. I’m walking down the street in uniform, the sergeant major comes out, and he’s like, “What’s going on with you, Wilke?” And I was like…. I knew he was a Christian, you know? Everybody did, because they always made fun of him because he’d never go drink and he wouldn’t do all this stuff. But anyway, I was like, “I’m just having a little talk with Jesus, and I’m telling him about my troubles.” I have no idea what he said to me. It was probably 30 seconds, but he encouraged me, right? That’s probably what we’d say about it now. But I can’t recall what he said. Then a few minutes later, one of the other Christian guys was there, a guy named Charlie, and he saw me. He was like, “You okay?” And I was like, “No, I’m not.” He said some words to me, and I don’t know what he said, either, Jana. And then I went back to my dorm room, my barracks room, and I was crying, and I was just upset. And then I get a knock on the door. And so I go to the door, and it’s Russ. And I’m like, “What are you doing here?” Russ never comes to my room, right? Russ was the exact opposite of what I was. And Russ said to me, “God told me to come talk to you.” And he hadn’t talked to the sergeant major or the other friend. He just- No. Oh, wow! So I have no idea how long Russ stayed. He may have stayed two minutes. He may have stayed twenty minutes. I literally don’t remember, don’t remember what he said. I have no idea. The only thing that stuck out was, “God told me to come talk to you. So I’m here.” So he’d heard the voice of God, and he obeyed God. And so he’s talking to me, and I’m just sitting there thinking, “Whoa! Wait a second,” and then Russ leaves, and as soon as he leaves, I was like, “Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.” You had just prayed, and Russ is knocking on your door. That’s crazy! But I guess it’s not crazy if God is real, right? Right. When he left, I said, “Wait a second, this is…. Wait. God just…” and people have taken issue with this theology over time, and again, I don’t care. This is my experience with the Lord. I said, “Wait a second. The God of the universe just heard my prayers, stopped what he was doing”—that’s where people have a problem—“and showed me He was real.” And He didn’t send a flash of lightning. There were no unicorns running through the heavens. There was nothing crazy, right? It was really three people who I knew were Christians and respected as Christians that He had put in my path within moments, minutes, after I had prayed, “God if You’re real, I need You, and I need You now.” And God showed up in His people, and that was all the proof I needed. Wow! The verses of scripture, all that stuff, all that would come later, right? Understanding the Bible. But at that point I knew God was real, and if God was real, those things I’d been reading in scripture had to be true, and if that was true, then obviously I was feeling convicted as a sinner. And so my knees hit the floor, and I said, “God, I’m so sorry. I’ve done a horrible job at living, and so I’m done. I can’t do this my way. You’re obviously real. You obviously care about me.” It was His love that he gave me. It was this overwhelming love of God, that He would stop and notice me of all people. Paul talks about being the chief sinner, and I would take him up on that when I get to heaven. No. Literally. I was like, “Okay. His love. Wow! He stopped and noticed me.” And that broke me, Jana, that just broke me, and I said, “God, I’m done. I can’t live this life like this anymore. However, you want me to live, I’ll do it.” And then that was it. And then literally my next question was, “What does it mean to be a Christian?” Yes. Listen, I had nobody disciple me. It was me and the Word and the Holy Spirit. The Spirit of God took the Word of God and showed me the truth of God and revealed to me the Son of God and changed my life. And my next question was, “What do I need to do to be a Christian?” and God led me to, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.” And that has been the very basis of my faith ever since, because I was like, “Oh, God, it’s easy to love You. You have done so much for me. You’ve forgiven me so much.” And I do not deserve His grace, mercy, forgiveness whatsoever. Loving people, on the other hand, is going to take a whole lot more work. And I’m still working on that. That’s the sanctification process. Oh, yeah. Living is messy, right? People are messy. We all are. Sometimes unlovable, seemingly unlovable. Yeah. Well, and to bring it full circle, there was a little chapel that some of these guys I talked about, Charlie and Russ and a guy named Mike and the sergeant major, they literally went down to this one room, turned a footlocker on its side, and it wasn’t much bigger than a one-car garage, and the sergeant major played the guitar, and somebody would sing, and then somebody would preach. And so I began to go to this little chapel. And it was on Father’s Day of 2002. So what would that have been? Father’s Day’s in June? One of the guys—I don’t remember who it was—got up and shared about God being our Father. And I realized, “Wait, wait, okay. God is my Heavenly Father. He is my Father. He’s the Father I’ve never had. He was there with me. He was walking with me. He was talking with me, and He’s real.” And this means that all of those expectations and disappointment I’d had towards my earthly father didn’t really matter anymore. And I remember having a conversation with a guy about this in the laundromat as we were sitting on the washer, and we’re talking about our deadbeat dads and all this kind of stuff. And I remember being impressed by the Spirit. “You need to forgive your father.” So I literally went and picked up the phone within a few moments and called my dad after that conversation and said, “Dad, I just want to tell you that I forgive you.” I forgive you for all the things you did do that were awful and all the things you didn’t do. But I’m a Christian now,” and I remember telling him, Jana, “God is my dad, and I will love you as my earthly father, but God is my dad, and He provides me all that I need as a Father.” And I don’t know how that sat with my dad at that point. I was still thousands of miles away from home. But that was a turning point in our relationship, that now, looking back, I was able to love this man who had had so little impact but so great impact at the same time- Right. … on my life. Yes. That I was able to love one of the most unlovable people that… I mean, I still have siblings that still can’t forgive him and love him. And that made all the difference in the world. When I came back, we became very good friends, and I got to spend a lot of time with my dad before he passed many years ago. Wow, what a beautiful redemption story that is. Truly. It really is. I’m thankful for that gift. Yeah. I just got chills, actually. The thought of being able to love someone who has, intentionally or unintentionally, harmed you deeply, in so many ways, but yet, you can love with the love of God, the love of Christ, through the love of Christ, the one who is unlovable. Because that’s what Christ did for us, right? So it becomes… It’s never really easy, is it, to do that, but yet, you were obviously compelled by the Spirit of God to do that. And what a relief for you, and I’m sure for him as well, the grace that you were able to extend in that moment, I’m sure, had a tremendous impact on him as well as you. I would like to think so. But it was a great gift that I had with my dad, that friendship that we could have, but it was only through the power of God to have the love of God in me. But it was like, “Okay, if God can forgive me of all the things that I’ve done against Him and Him only, and I’m not like, ‘I can truly forgive somebody.’” But it was also this provision of God, like the provision of God was, “Okay, I provide all that you need,” emotionally, obviously spiritually, even physical strength at times, to get through difficult, long days and things like that, you feel God just give you energy to get through these kinds of situations. Yeah. What a relief it is sometimes. When we put so much pressure on other people to be a certain way for us and towards us, and certainly, we all desire a healthy relationship with parents and all that, but the reality is we live in a broken world with broken people, and no human will ever fulfill us or love us in the way that we desire, other than a perfect God with a perfect love, Who’s willing to give, when we just come to Him. And I love that you were obviously humble. I mean you came to a place of humility when you came to ask God, “If You’re real?” You were humble enough to do that. And then how gracious of Him to so immediately provide for you, to show you in such tangible ways. What a gift that must have been to you. It sounds like that there was really no doubt after that happened. There has not been any doubt in my mind the existence, truth, reality, and; even the Person of God and the personality of God as my Father and as my Lord Jesus Christ. There’s no doubt that has been in my life in those years. There have been doubts about where I’ve stood and doubts about where I’m living and doubts about obviously trying to figure out living out and working out your own sanctification. There’s doubts with that, but there’s never been a doubt about the reality, truth, existence, and awareness of God in my life in twenty something years. That is a huge gift. I would imagine the difference between those years of living without God and then living with God in a much more contented, settled, loved place, where I presume there’s no fear of death anymore. Talk to me just a minute about how things have changed for you, juxtaposed to your life before and after. Now, I don’t want to put too academic on it, because I’m not an academic guy. I am a public schoolboy from Kentucky, with a basic education from college, but there’s this idea of redemptive lift that happens when you give your life to Christ. I got off drugs. I got off alcohol. I quit smoking. But then the Lord provided real friends. Like, all my drinking bodies immediately went away. I mean all of my party buddies immediately went away. They wanted nothing to do with me. So I was without friends. And then immediately He provided Mike and Adam and some of these other men, and then we began to study the Bible. So He provided community immediately for me and deep friendships, like a true source of koinonia fellowship, of a bondedness with these man through the spirit of Christ that I didn’t have within my own brothers, my own blood brothers, and then, once I got back home and began to go to church, I began to see what a godly father was. I began to understand a lot more truth about God. Now, I had several years that I was… I didn’t know how to live out the Christian life. Literally, growing up, there were only a couple of family members who were married. I didn’t know what any of this was. I didn’t know what life looked like. I didn’t know what life could look like. So a lot has changed in the simple fact that God showed me there’s a different way to live. A lot has changed. Some people take this the wrong way when I say it, but there’s two sides of it. I don’t know if I can…. Jesus says he who has been forgiven little loves little and he who has been forgiven much loves much. I’ve found that to be true with a lot of the really, really strong brothers I have been around in life, who really made a mess out of their life. When they get into a deep vine and pruning vineyard attendant, a sheep and a shepherd relationship, a very close father/son relationship with God, they’re just on fire. And they love him because they know where they’ve come from. God has brought beauty from ashes, it sounds like, and restored the years that the locusts have eaten, all of those things, in the last 20 years? You said since 2002? It would be 2002, so now yeah. It’s been 21 years that I’ve been walking with the Lord. Yeah. Yeah. Which is wild. I mean, I tell these stories to people, and it’s like I’m talking about a different person. When I came home, Jana, I mean it was the music, how I dressed, how I talked, things that I thought about, my dreams. I mean I have all kinds of dreams about God. Just everything. I literally was a new creation. Same skin, same flesh, same background, but I’m literally a brand new person. And people didn’t recognize that. Yeah. Oh, I’m sure. I’m sure. It’s like, “Where did Jon go? And who is this guy?” Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So now it’s funny, 21 years later, when I tell these stories, I’m like, “Who is that guy?” I mean, you get to telling some of your story and you get used to sharing some things, but we’ve skipped a lot obviously. It’s been 21 years. But it’s like people don’t even recognize that guy. Wow! There’s such beauty and power in that kind of transformation, though, Jon, that’s so inspiring. Truly. I think that you can reach so many people with your story, because so many people are in that same place, are trying to figure it out. And I’m thinking about those, even who might be listening right now to your story, saying, “I’m that guy. I’m that guy,” or, “I’m that woman,” who is a hell raiser, or just whatever, and, “How I would like to find something different or something more, or actually have a piece of that obvious love that you have and contentment in life and change.” You know that change. I think, if anything, you demonstrate that change is possible. All things are possible with God. Right. If He loved a sinner like me first, and that’s why I know what love is. Yeah. So if somebody is listening like that today, what would you say to someone like that? How could you encourage them to… Is it saying a prayer to God? “Are You real?” Is it connecting with Christians? Reading the Bible? I can think of…. You actually took time to try to figure something out even though you were on your own for quite a while. How can you guide someone towards Christ? I would challenge people to just pray that prayer. “God, I need you.” When you get to that little moment in life. “God, I need you,” and I have faith that He’ll show up. I have faith that He will walk into your situation and help you understand where you are and what you need. And He’ll show that He’s real, and He’ll show that He loves you. I would love to see people have that experience with God, where, you know, I first had a truth encounter with the word, and then I had an experiential encounter with God in that way of providing people. I would also say you can’t discount the Christians that you know are around you. We’re all not perfect in what we do, but sometimes just asking the question, like, “What happened to you? I don’t expect you to be perfect, but how did you come to know God?” I mean just asking that question, because we do that all the time. “How do I fix a shingle?” “How do I change a tie rod?” We look up things on YouTube. We look up things all the time. We ask other questions all the time. So if you’re struggling in your faith, if you’re trying to figure out if God is real, just, one, ask Him. And, two, ask other people, because God uses His people, as broken and as messy as they are, He used people. He’s still sovereign, and He’s still going to work it out, but literally His people are a representation of Him, even in their mess and their struggle in life. People of faith still have a lot that they can share, and the Spirit of God is in them, and so the Spirit of God can speak through them to you and guide you to scripture and give you wisdom in life that you just would never have expected. That’s perfect. And then, again, it seems like there were several touch points, that God had Christians or believers in your life at different points, even as a child, you saw that beautiful family as representative of something good. And then later, those men in the Army who were again just touch points. Maybe not pushy. They weren’t pressing. But they were living in such a way that you knew that they were different. What would you say to Christians in terms of how we can best engage with people who are… some may be looking. We don’t know it. Some may not be looking for God. We, in this world, it has become so polarized and so vitriolic, I guess is the word. And so politicized. It’s hard for some people to separate, when they’re looking at Christians, the politics from who they are as people. So to Christians, I would say, just do the best you can when it comes to how you’re living. I’m literally at the pool yesterday, and I’m there by myself. The kids are off with the grandparents and stuff. And my neighbors are out drinking. So I just get in the pool. It’s hot. I get in the pool. I go over there and just sit down and talk to them. They’re drinking. They’re talking. And the guy’s, like, “Hey! Would you like a beer?” It’s like, “No. No, thanks.” And so literally I hang out with them for like an hour and a half. And we’d talk about some pop culture, we’d talk about some music, some movies, some news that’s happening. But through the conversation, I would just kind of drop little things. “Oh, you know what? I’m just kind of a straight-laced guy. I don’t drink and do those kind of things anymore.” But then, through that friendship evangelism, one of my mentors and friends, he wrote a great book about contagious faith. And it’s different styles of evangelism. With my neighbors, they obviously know something’s different, and I’m hoping those conversations will come up. And they see me obviously get ready for church and come home from church. They’re not hearing me cussing. They’re not seeing me drinking and hanging out. But those little things that I saw were, “Okay, there’s something different about this guy,” but I’m still relatable and I’m still fun, and I’m still cool enough to hang out with that they don’t really care if I’m not getting drunk with them. And sometimes Christians… I guess here’s the thrust of my answer, Jana. Christians get in their bubble so much they don’t know how to hang out with sinners anymore. Yes. And that is a sad thing, because our Lord walked with people to the point where they thought He was one of them. Even though He never partook in the same life that they did, and they accused Him of all kinds of horrible stuff. I don’t want to be accused of false accusations or anything. But if people see me hanging out on my porch over here with these neighbors that drink a lot, I’m okay if they question where I’m at. Right. Not because I like to hang out with them and drink and they watch a lot of basketball and football, and I don’t watch any sports. But they know, “Hey, we can talk about anything.” And we can hang out, and I’m not going to judge you. I’m not going to be angry towards you. But when the bottom falls out of their life, I expect that they’re going to talk to me. And I’ve found that to be true over these 21 years of following Christ, that if I can just be a constant witness that’s not judgmental, that’s not angry, and not living like the world, sooner or later, when the bottom falls out, they’re going to pick up the phone and call me. I think that’s beautifully said. I think there’s something very, very powerful about just being in relationship with someone. As I’ve heard many say, just play the long game. I mean, be in relationship with genuine friendship, not project-related friendship, but genuine friendship, so that, as you say, when opportunities do come, and they’re at point of need or desire for something more, that they know who you are, and they know what you have, what you hold, and that you have something different, and you have something to offer. Yeah. Jana, the Lord put a lot of people in my life really quickly, and I wouldn’t be where I am today without those people, who said, “Hey, you need to do this Bible study.” “Hey, you should be learning what it means to fast and pray, and you need to really be sharing your faith,” and I had other people say, “You need to stop cussing when you’re talking about Jesus,” because I didn’t know that was really a taboo thing. And then, “Hey, you really should start tithing.” All these people that God bought in my life just helped put the structure of obedience in my life. “Here are ways to obey God.” When I was like, “Okay, God. How do I follow You? What do I do?” He provided all that. It didn’t all come overnight. It came over a few years, but don’t discount the community of God. Yeah. That’s a really good word. I think, too, what’s interesting about your story is you kind of came to faith as a Lone Ranger, as it were, so I appreciate your emphasis on the fact that your growth, your becoming a Christian and knowing what that means, what it looks like, what it is to live as a follower of Christ, all came in the context of community, and that that community provides such support, not only spiritually speaking and guidance, but also just in every other way. It’s really beautiful the way that God has designed things, that we are meant to be together and to belong together, and like you say, be in a right place, where it’s not just about receiving. It’s about serving, and it’s about giving, and it’s about growing. Which, obviously, you have done all of those things. So thank you for commending us there at the end. I think that’s a word for probably a lot of people. So thank you, Jon. What an extraordinary story! Again, I never, ever tire of seeing God show up when people are calling out His Name to see if He’s real and then to hear and see the difference that He can make in someone’s life. What a beautiful testimony that you’ve given us today. Thank you so much for coming on and telling us your story. Thank you very much for allowing me to share. I obviously can’t take the credit for it. It’s God’s story of what He’s done in my life, and He’ll do it in anybody else’s, too. Yes. Well, thank you. Thank you for being such a strong man of God. Thanks. All right. All right. Have a great day. Thank you. Thanks for tuning in to Side B Stories to hear Jon Wilke’s story. You can find out more about him in the episode notes below. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can contact me. Again, our email is info@sidebstories.com. Also, if you’re a skeptic or atheist who would like to connect with a former atheist with questions, please contact us on our Side B Stories website or again on our email, and we’ll get you connected. This podcast is produced through the C.S. Lewis with our wonderful producer, Ashley Decker, our audio engineer, Mark Rosera, and our video editor, Kyle Polk, who posts these podcasts in video form on our YouTube channel. If you enjoyed it, I hope you’ll follow, rate, review, and share this podcast with your friends and social network. In the meantime, I’ll be seeing you next time, where we’ll see how another skeptic flips the record of their life. | |||
| The Case for Christ – Lee Strobel’s Story | 10 Nov 2023 | 01:18:11 | |
Former atheist Lee Strobel investigated Christianity in order to disprove it, but surprisingly came to believe it was true based on the evidence. Lee' Resources:
Resources mentioned by Lee:
For information for CSLI events and resources, visit www.cslewisinstitute.org | |||
| Celebrating Three Years of Side B Stories | 30 Oct 2023 | 00:03:05 | |
Side B Stories is celebrating three years of stories and honest conversations with former atheists and skeptics who are now Christians. Listen and celebrate with us! Side B Stories Instagram @sidebstories Side B Stories Facebook www.facebook.com/sidebstories Side B Stories X/Twtter @sidebstories www.sidebstories.com | |||
| Militant Atheist Encounters God – Dave Glander’s Story | 27 Oct 2023 | 01:02:09 | |
Former skeptic Dave Glander grew up in difficult circumstances, pushing him away from God. After years of self-destruction and militant atheism, he challenged God and found himself on the side of belief. Dave’s Resources:
Resources/authors recommended by Dave:
For information on C.S. Lewis Institute’s Resources and Events, visit www.cslewisinstitute.org To hear more stories of skeptics and atheists becoming Christians, visit www.sidebstories.com | |||
| Science, Philosophy, and Reality – Pat Flynn’s Story | 13 Oct 2023 | 01:08:39 | |
Philosopher and former atheist Pat Flynn assumed belief in the naturalistic story of reality but eventually found it lacking. Through further investigation, he found the Christian worldview made most sense of the universe and of himself. Pat's resources:
Resources/authors mentioned by Pat:
To hear more stories about atheists and skeptics becoming Christians, visit www.sidebstories.com | |||
| From Secular Humanism to Christianity – Susan Leonard’s Story | 29 Sep 2023 | 01:17:48 | |
Former skeptic Susan Leonard was a secular humanist and worked as a successful professional on Capitol Hill. She saw no need for faith until she encountered Jesus Christ in a way she couldn’t ignore. Resources/authors recommended by Susan:
Atheists Finding God book by host Jana Harmon https://sidebstories.com/atheistsfindinggod/ | |||
| A Scientist Searches for More – Dr. Alister McGrath’s Story | 15 Sep 2023 | 00:57:02 | |
Former atheist Dr. Alister McGrath dismissed Christianity and embraced science as the only way to understand the world until he began to see problems with this limiting view. Once he opened the door to alternative views, he found the biblical worldview provided a more comprehensive and grounded view of the world and of himself. Alister’s website: http://alistermcgrath.weebly.com/ For more stories of atheists and skeptics converting to Christianity, visit www.sidebstories.com Episode Transcript Hello and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to Side B Stories, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist or skeptic but who became a Christian against all odds. You can hear more of our stories on our website at www.sidebstories.com or through our YouTube channel. We welcome your comments on these stories on our Facebook page, and you can also email us directly at info@sidebstories.com. We do love hearing from you. In the world of ideas, some people are experts in their field. They are scientists or historians, theologians or philosophers. They have a particular understanding of the world from their unique expertise, academic training, and personal perspectives. Sometimes, however, a concentration on one area of thought can skew the vision of the whole. The risk is that some become so specialized that all other sources of knowledge become subdued to their own unique slice of understanding of the world. With expertise in one area, it can become harder to see how that one piece of the puzzle relates to the bigger picture of reality. It can lead to a false confidence that their small area of knowledge explains the whole when perhaps it may not. In our podcast today, you’ll hear from former atheist Dr. Alister McGrath, who holds three PhDs from Oxford, one in science, one in theology, and another in intellectual history. He’s also the author of more than fifty books. Although he dismissed belief in God due to his belief in science and the naturalistic worldview, he changed his mind. Now, he is one of the world’s greatest proponents of the necessary integration of a wide range of knowledge in order to best understand and explain what we observe in the world and in ourselves. And because of his broad academic accomplishments and years of coursing through the strengths and weaknesses of diverse ideas, including atheism and naturalism, he has the unique ability to see the big picture, integrating sub-specialties into a whole and making sense of all of reality. Through his erudite mind, he contends that the Christian worldview is not only the best explanation for what we see and experience in the world, it also provides the best story for our lives. In his view, the Christian story best answers the big questions of who we are and why we’re here. It best fulfills our deepest longings, as compared to other worldviews. I hope you’ll come along today to hear his story of moving from atheism to Christianity. Dr. McGrath is also going to introduce us to his new forthcoming book, Coming to Faith through Dawkins. Many of you might recognize the name Dawkins as referring to Richard Dawkins, a recognized biologist and one of the four horsemen of the New Atheist Movement. This book is filled with twelve stories of former skeptics and atheists who were once enthusiasts for the claims and the writings of the New Atheists, but they became disillusioned by the arguments and conclusions of Dawkins, causing them to look deeper and with more objectivity at religious faith and became Christians. They became convinced that the authentic Christian faith is in fact more intellectually convincing and robust than atheism. I’m looking so forward to today’s podcast. Welcome to Side B Stories, Dr. McGrath. It’s so great to have you. Well, I’m delighted to be here. Thank you very much for having me as a guest on your program. Terrific. As we’re getting started, Dr. McGrath, you come to the table with much gravitas, I must say. And I would love for our listeners to know exactly a bit about your academic background, your three PhDs at Oxford. You’re an author of over fifty books. There’s so much to say, but I also know that you have a new book coming out, Coming to Faith through Dawkins. So could you introduce us a little bit to who you are, your academic background, and even your new book? Yes. I’d be delighted to do that. I’m a person who began as an atheist and a scientist, and then I went to Oxford University and began to realize that things weren’t quite as straightforward as I thought. I was an atheist when I was a teenager. I thought life was very, very simple, that science disproved God. I came to Oxford, discovered it wasn’t really quite that simple, so I discovered Christianity, and that was wonderful. And then I moved on from there to begin to explore the relationship between science and Christianity, eventually studying theology, and then moving on to begin a detailed study of the Christian faith and also learning how to teach it. I think that was very, very important for me, because being able to teach faith is really important. It helps to understand what’s really important and what really matters. And, as you say, I’ve written lots of books, including textbooks, but the most recent book I’ve written is this very interesting account of how a lot of people in effect felt moved to read Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion, and then, when they began to read it, discovered it didn’t make sense at all and actually that it seemed to be rather inadequate and instead discovered Christianity. So we’ll talk about that later, but that was a very exciting project. That’s really wonderful. So, let’s get back into your story. You encapsulated it there, as an atheist who came to Christ, but let’s start at the beginning of your story, because, as you know, we all embrace a story with our world, with our worldview, and I wonder of the worldview in which you were brought into the world. Talk to us about your childhood, where you were born, your family. Was God part of your family? Was Christianity or worship in any way a part of your world? Well, I was born in Northern Ireland back in 1953, which is a long time ago. And my family were conventionally religious. I suppose that’s the best way of putting it. And I couldn’t see what faith was all about. It made no sense to me at all. What I discovered as I was growing up was that I was really interested in the natural world around. In other words, I really knew I wanted to be a scientist. I think that was a thing that really drove me. And as a teenager, I think I bought into this idea that science and religion were at war with each other. And therefore, if I wanted to be a scientist, I had to say no to God, no to religion. And I did so without really having looked at that critically, so I did that and became very involved in atheism. I became interested in Marxism, which gave added intellectual resilience to my atheism. And then I began to have some doubts about my atheism as I prepared for moving up to university. I think that it seemed to me initially that things were very, very simple, that atheism was just the obviously right position for a thinking person. And I then began to realize there are problems here. I mean, I believed there was no God, but I couldn’t prove there was no God. It was a faith position. And that rather unsettled me. And so I began to realize that things were just not as simple as I had thought. So- Oh, okay- So I said, “Well, look, when I get to Oxford University, I’ll sort everything out,” but it didn’t work out the way I expected it to. Wow! Okay. There was a lot there. I’d love to slow walk through a lot of that. Let’s go back to even when you were starting to question your Christian… you said the conventions of Christianity in which you were raised. You started to question that. You started to doubt that, as it sounds like a teenager or in your earlier years, when you started encountering science. Let’s kind of camp out there for a minute. What was it about science that you understood at that time in your life that was incompatible or made you push back against your Christian upbringing, as it were? I think the key thing was this: Science proves everything. Religion, Christianity, just asserts various things and isn’t able to prove it. So I think I was intolerant of uncertainty. I wanted to be sure about things. And therefore I wanted to inhabit a world where I could know everything for certain. And so I think that led me to the conclusion that science would be able to answer all of my questions. And if it couldn’t answer my questions, then they weren’t real questions in the first place. So I think that was the really important thing. It wasn’t so much that science disproved Christianity. It was that it offered a different quality of knowledge, much more secure, much more reliable. And that’s what I was looking for, something that was safe and secure. Okay. So would you say that they were, in that sense, non-overlapping magisteria, in that Christianity and God and that world, they, like you said, made assertions, but they weren’t seemingly grounded in as concrete a way as what you could find in the sciences. So it sounds as if you were moving toward more of a scientific view or lens of the world, but, with Christianity, was that something that you weren’t dismissing? You were just saying that it perhaps didn’t give as substantive answers as science, so you were turning your attention to something else. It wasn’t as if you immediately went into atheism. That form of knowledge was not as robust or confidence building as what you could find in science. I think, to begin with, it was exactly as you’ve described, that in effect my initial feeling was, “I want something that is reliable, that I can trust, that can, in effect, give me secure answers.” And that was saying, “Well, Christianity is a different kind of thing.” But then I began to buy into this idea which I heard from many people, which was that Christianity and science were incompatible, that they were at war with each other. And that moved me in a slightly different direction. In other words, saying, “Well, look if I love science, I cannot be a religious person, because these are incompatible. They’re at war with each other.” Now, you might reasonably say, “Well, where did you get that idea from?” Well, it was in the intellectual and cultural environment. I just bought into it rather uncritically, and in fact, I spent the rest of my life kind of undoing that. But I think it was very, very… That was a very widespread perception at the time, and certainly I bought into that. So in many ways what you could say is, I began, in effect, by saying, “I’m looking for secure knowledge, and I don’t think Christianity gives it, but that doesn’t make Christianity wrong. Science gives that to me.” And then, taking this one stage further and saying, in effect, “Because science is so good and because science and faith are incompatible, that means I have to choose. It’s one or the other. I choose science.” So I think that’s really the kind of teenage logic that lay behind my decision. So when you embraced science then as incompatible with religion or faith, then did you, at that time, label yourself or identify as a naturalist, a materialist, an atheist, even in your teenage years? Yes. I did self identify as an atheist. I would say, “I’m an atheist.” And I would make it quite clear that I was saying not that I don’t believe in God, but I believe there is no God. It was a much more positive, aggressive form of atheism. And I think also there’s a cultural element here, which is I found religion rather stuffy back in Ireland. And proclaiming myself as an atheist kind of gave a sort of frisson, a sort of edge to life. I felt I had a sense of superiority over other people because I was intellectually superior. Now I know that sounds very, very arrogant but that’s the way I was back then, when I was a teenager, and it seemed to me atheism put me on the right side of history. Back in the late 1960s, that was the way things seemed to be going, and I wanted to be part of a movement that had a future. So there are a whole series of things, science and culture coming together and moving me in that direction. Culturally speaking, there was a lot of religious unrest in Ireland. Did that feed into your perspective of: “Religion perhaps may not be true, and it may not also be good.” I think you’re right. I think that one of the thoughts I had was this: In the late 1960s, religious violence did become a problem in Northern Ireland. My logic went like this: If there was no religion, there’d be no religious violence, so get rid of religion, all the world’s problems are solved. So it was very simple. In fact, it was really very simplistic, but that’s the way I thought at that time. So in many ways, I think I was kind of, in a way, buying into a number of reasons why I fought religion was wrong. Violence and inability to intellectually justify itself. And also this perception: Science and religion are incompatible. So I felt I was moving to an intellectually coherent position which was a stable position. And that’s one of the reasons why I think I did not expect to review my positions at all as we moved ahead. So yes, it felt like a safe, secure perspective. As you say, I think it’s often the case that those who are intellectually driven find that atheism or at least presume that atheism is a more intellectually superior position as well. And that I’m sure in some ways felt, as well as the way that you thought, that it was the right place to be for you. I think that’s right. I think that I felt, “This is the right place to be,” and more than that, that I’d sorted this question out, that I now know what I think, and I won’t need to revisit this question. So I thought that I’d closed down the discussion and could move on to other things. So at that time, when you had decided that science was the direction you wanted to go, what did you think religion was, other than it may be potentially dangerous? But how did you perceive Christians, Christianity, during that time? I had read some Sigmund Freud, and I knew about this idea of religion being a wish fulfillment. And that seemed to me to be a self-evident truth, that actually religious people were inadequate people who in effect needed something to give them stability and security, and there was no God, so they invented a God. And I thought, “Well, that’s all right for them, but I don’t need this.” Now the problem was that, deep inside me somewhere, I think something said to me, “Maybe atheism is your wish fulfillment,” in other words that actually maybe I was constructing a worldview that suited me, rather than one that was true. Now, that thought went through my mind several times, but I did not follow through on it, I think partly because I found it a little bit disturbing. I thought I sorted everything out. I didn’t want to reopen the question. Yes. And when you close the door on another worldview and think you leave the superstition behind, it’s not something you want to reopen, in a sense. I can imagine there would be some resistance to that. As you were pursuing what seemed to be a very positive aspect of being grounded in the naturalistic worldview, did you… I mean you’re obviously a very intellectually driven, logical, analytical person. Did you look at the logical implications of that worldview? You obviously were very well read. I’m sure you read Russell and Nietzsche and those people who actually understood that all that glitters is not gold, in a sense. There are some dark sides or despairing sides if you embrace fully the naturalistic worldview. Well, I agree with you completely. What I realized was atheism was very bleak. It was very austere. There’s no real meaning in life. What you see is what you get. But actually I persuaded myself that, because it was bleak, I had accepted it because it was right. In other words, there was nothing to attract me to this position. I’d accepted it simply because it’s intellectually right, and therefore, in effect, there was no benefit to me in doing this at all. I simply being moved by its truthfulness. Now, of course, one of the things that began to trouble me a little bit by 18 years old is, “Well, have I really been as critical about atheism as I was about my early viewpoint?” And of course the answer is no. That kind of why I had bought into this was because it seemed to me to be progressive, it seemed to me to be what the future was going to hold, and some rather clever people I knew held this position as well. But I think I did have face up to the fact that if atheism was right then life was pointless. There was nothing to do, really, other than trying to make the world a better place and live a good life. But deep down I had this nagging feeling. “I don’t think it’s quite as simple as this,” but I didn’t have a way forward. I felt, “This is where I’m going to stay, and therefore I’ve got to face up to the fact it’s bleak, it’s austere, but that’s the way things are.” So you had to, in a sense, live with this dissonance, whether it’s cognitive dissonance or existential dissonance or something that you had a deep longing, perhaps, for something more, but that’s just the way that it was. And you were sober minded, and you were intellectually honest, so you wanted to maintain this path that you had set yourself on, I guess. So how long did you live in this, in a sense, state of tension? Or did you ever start questioning naturalism itself? I think I stayed in that position for about two years. And I think that there were a number of things that made me realize, “This position might not be right,” but that didn’t immediately mean I was moving towards Christianity. It just meant, “Maybe this position isn’t as safe as I thought it was.” And I got a place to study chemistry at Oxford University, got a scholarship to go there, and while I was waiting to go to Oxford, I began to read some books on the history and philosophy of science, and one of the things that troubled me was that I began to realize that many scientific theories that people had thought were secure or were right were subsequently abandoned because they were seen to be wrong. And so I began to realize, “What about what we presently believe? What will happen then? Will, in the future, somebody say, ‘Well, we used to think they were right, but they’re wrong actually.’” And I began to realize science was rather more uncertain than I had realized. I think that began to make me realize that perhaps things were not as simple as I had thought. And also, alongside that, I began to realize that I could not prove that atheism was right. I think that’s a very important point, because I had told myself this is right. But every now and then I’d say, “Well, how can I prove that to myself or to somebody else?” and the answer came back, “Well, actually you can’t.” And I began to realize actually it was a form of faith. “I believe there is no God, but I can’t prove that,” and so it seemed to me I had simply chosen a different faith position, which made me realize, “Maybe there are other faiths I should be thinking about, but up to this point hadn’t really considered at all.” But that was really as far as I got, because I thought, “Look, when I go to Oxford University, there’ll be lots of clever people there. They can help me sort myself out. And I’m sure they’ll be able to resolve all these questions, and then I can be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.” But that didn’t work out like that. I’m curious. There are a lot of clever people at Oxford. I wondered if there were any clever Christian people who were also scientists who were in your world who could give you an embodied example of someone who actually was intelligent yet embraced God and science at the same time. Well, the answer is, once I got to Oxford, I discovered lots of people like that. One thing that I began to realize was actually there were lots of very intelligent scientists who were also Christians who could give very good reasons for saying there isn’t a problem here. And I hadn’t really met people like this before. So the personal witness of these people was very significant and saying to me, “You may have got this wrong. You may have, in effect, not thought this thing through properly. You’ve got some rethinking to do.” So I think that was a very important moment for me as I began to realize that perhaps I’d been a little bit precipitate in my judgments, that perhaps there was more to be said about this. And I think that really began this process of rethinking and reconsideration, which eventually led me to embrace Christianity. Before, Christianity was, in a sense, wishful thinking. That was the category you had for it in your mind. So I would imagine moving from that place intellectually to a place where you could actually believe it as something that represents reality in some way would have been a process. It sounds like you are, again, an intellectually honest enough person that you wouldn’t believe it just because it sounded good. It had to be substantive or robust in some way in relating to reality. It had to be true. That’s quite right. And I think there are two things here: One was that these were intelligent people I was meeting. And it was obvious to me their faith was real. That in effect it was something that had captured them, that had animated them, that was giving them purpose and direction. So it made me realize there were some very intelligent people who clearly saw this as meaningful and were able to live this out. So again, you know, personal witness, embodied witness. “Here is someone who has internalized this and is living this out.” That was very important because I tend to think of religion as kind of thinking certain things, but it makes no difference to you. But these people were saying, “No, no. It changes my life. It gives me a reason to live,” and really living this out. So that side of things was very important. But also, I think, beginning to express the questions that were bothering me and realizing that actually there were answers to these questions. Maybe not always ones that I could entirely accept, but really there were answers there. And I began to realize that I had kind of not really encountered Christianity in its most vigorous forms, that actually I had rejected, if you like, a misunderstanding or a caricature or a diluted version of the real thing. So that’s always been very important for me now. When someone says to me, “Alister, we don’t think Christianity is up to much,” my primary question is going to be, “Well, have you understood what it really is? Let me tell you.” Because very often people misunderstand or perhaps misrepresent, but they don’t really get what this is all about. And I think, for me, discovering what Christianity really is, about the head and the heart, I think it’s very, very important, not simply for our own personal lives of faith, but also in trying to explain to people outside the realm of faith what Christianity is all about and the difference that it makes. So I think you’re very, very right about that, that oftentimes Christianity is caricatured and reductionistic in the way that people perceive it as almost a throwaway and a dismissal without really looking at the robust nature of it. Again, to kind of tease some of this out, when you started questioning naturalism. I mean, there are a lot of assertions and presumptions, I guess, that are made by those who are atheists or naturalists that in a sense science will provide the answers. What things about naturalism in and of itself were causing you to question it that also helped you open the door towards a better or more full explanation? I think there are a number of things that did trouble me. One was that naturalism does raise a lot of questions. And you’ve mentioned several of them. Why is there something rather than nothing? What about the capacity of a human mind to make sense of things? I mean, you can say, from a naturalist perspective, that the way your mind works might be understandable. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it finds its way to the right conclusion. So I found myself wondering if, in effect, naturalism was a kind of circular way of thinking, which in effect had to presuppose its own conclusions. And so I found myself worried by that. But I think also one of the things that really, I think, brought this home to me is that science is simply unable to answer many of the deepest questions of the human heart and the human mind. And you know, if these are valid questions, and they must be valid because we have raised them as thinking human beings, then perhaps the inability of naturalism to answer them, other than saying, “Well, you know, that’s the way nature works,” suggests that naturalism isn’t adequate, that more needs to be said. So I think, for me, really I began to think we need more than the natural sciences, we need more than naturalism if we are going to make sense of our world. I think the problem I had was that I found there were different kinds of naturalism. The form I rejected very strongly was my core dogmatic naturalism, that there is only the natural world, and that is it. I could understand somebody saying that there is a natural world and that is our most secure form of understanding. But for me, even built into human nature is this deep desire to ask questions, the kind of thing that C.S. Lewis talks about in his argument for design. We have a sense that there’s something beyond, there’s something really significant that we haven’t grasped yet. And all a naturalist can say is, “Well, that’s just delusion.” But it’s a very important delusion. And if we’re thinking those thoughts, maybe we’re meant to be thinking those thoughts, maybe they’re clues to the meaning of the universe. So for me, naturalism was really inadequate. It seemed to, in effect, shut down questions before you really got into getting good answers. So I began to look for better answers than that. You know, Lewis is so amazing, but even rationality itself, he elucidates that there’s not even grounds for your own rational thoughts if you are coming from a naturalistic worldview. There are so many presumptions that are made that we are rational beings. And this is the most reasoned way to look at the world, naturalism, but yet they can’t ground their own rationality itself. Or the predictability or rationality of the universe, the intelligibility of the universe. How do we even conduct science if there’s no predictable, rational, intelligible universe, and where does that come from? How do we explain that? But yet there are a lot of things that are taken for granted within the naturalistic worldview that are not explainable apart from a transcendent source that informs reality itself. So those were the kind of things that were causing you to question, I presume. Well certainly those questions were all going round in my mind. And I would add one more. And it’s this: Science has to work on the basis of the uniformity of nature. But how do we know that’s right? In effect, one of these assumptions we have to make, which we can’t actually show to be right or prove to be right, we have to make that assumption. And it helped me to really understand that there were certain grounding assumptions we have to make that we can’t prove to be true, but nevertheless we think are reliable. And I began thinking that that’s also true about God, actually. This is a grounding assumption, and it makes complete sense of everything. And if it makes so much sense, why not just say, “Look, it’s right. Let’s step into that way of thinking and see where it takes us.” So as you were observing this embodied Christianity that was… they were intelligent, and it was informing their life, and you were seeing something different. I presume that you were seeing the holistic nature of how things can all fit together, heart and mind, but also the fullness of the universe and how it explains all of reality. Can you… for those who are listening, I’m sure there are some thinking, “Well, how can Christianity explain all of reality? That’s not what Christianity does.” But yet all of these big questions, whether they’re in the universe or in our own humanity, it does seem, when you look at it fairly, that it does provide the best explanation for what we observe, both in the cosmos and universe and in our own humanity. I think you’re probably one of the best people to understand the fullness of the whole story of Christianity and how it explains life and all that we know it in the best possible way. Well, I think I draw a lot on G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis, who I think are very good at making this point, that Christianity gives us a big picture. It’s not just saying, “This is right. That’s right.” It’s saying, “Here’s a way of looking at things which makes sense of the world and makes sense of us.” And in many ways faith is about stepping into that big picture and experiencing and realizing how well it works out and how well it can be lived out. And to me that’s very, very important. In fact, it says to us, “Look, things make sense. The world is coherent. You can live life out.” In fact, your individual story is given meaning and dignity and purpose by the bigger story of God Who created us and redeemed us. So it’s very much about realizing that actually Christianity makes sense of our world and makes sense of you. And for me, that’s one of the things that’s so important. Christianity gives us a lens through which we can look at our world and ourselves, and it brings things into focus. And for a lot of people, they are looking at the world through the wrong lens. Richard Dawkins says when you look at the world, you don’t see any purpose or meaning, but he’s using the wrong lens to look through. That’s why I think it’s helpful to think of Christianity as a lens that brings things into focus, that gives you this better quality of vision, that allows you to see things as they really are and figure out how you fit into this big picture. Yeah. That’s beautifully said. So as you were back at Oxford, and you were wrestling with these questions, how did you start investigating Christianity or taking it seriously? How did you pursue that? Was it through reading? Was it through looking at the Bible? Was it through having conversations with other intelligent Christians? How did that look? How did you start to make those changes or transitions? How were you questing towards truth? I think all of those things you just mentioned were part of the picture. I was talking to Christian friends. I was reading the Bible. I was going to talks. I was thinking about things. And I think that what really helped me was beginning to realize that, first of all, I had misunderstood what Christianity was, and secondly, beginning to find those questions I had about it were resolved. For example, here’s one of them: One of the arguments I had against Christianity was, “Look, God’s in heaven, wherever that is. And I’m here on earth, in space and time. And I do not see how God being in heaven can be of any relevance to me here on earth.” And I think one of the things that my Christian friends explained to me is the idea of the incarnation, that God enters into this world in Christ, comes into our world to redeem us and to show us what He’s like and tell us what’s right. And I began to realize, “If that is right, that makes sense of so much.” And also, it tells us about a God Who cares for us, Who loves us, Who comes to where we are, to bring us where He is. And that really made a very, very big difference to me. So there are a whole series of things going on, but really important was this constant dialogue with my Christian friends, who helped answer my questions, who moved me along, and then I think I got to the point where I felt, “I now know enough. I know understand enough. I can step into this worldview and say, ‘I want to be part of that.’” So that was a very important step in my life, where I said, “I can now see this is where I belong,” I stepped into that world of faith, and I’ve been there ever since. And love it. For someone who you said had a very positive sensibility that God did not exist, and then you were entertaining the idea that perhaps God did exist, were you convinced of that through understanding the cosmological argument? Or was it more questioning naturalism and its inadequacies? Or did you entertain positive arguments for the existence of God? Those kinds of things? Or did it just cohere and make sense when you’re looking at the bigger picture and how the presence of God does provide the best explanation for even how we do science? Everything, it just fit together. It wasn’t a particular, let’s say, argument to prove God’s existence. I think it was the big picture argument. In other words, if there is a God, and if this God is like what we read in the Bible, then that makes so much sense of things, including why science works so well and what its limits are. In other words, you come to realize that the fact that science works so well is grounded in the Christian doctrine of creation. But you also realize there are lots of questions science cannot answer, like, “Why am I here? What’s the point of life?” As so I began to realize, if you like, whereas I had thought I had to choose either religion or science, and it’s going to be science, that actually, if I chose God, then I didn’t have to give up on science, because it actually made an awful lot of sense of science but helped me to recognize there were limits to naturalism and that those limits were, in effect, dealt with by the Christian faith. And therefore it seemed to me I now had a full, reliable, comprehensive way of making sense of myself in the world and also living meaningfully within it. So it was a very wonderful feeling. It’s like you’re taking a set of spectacles. You look through two lenses. You see things stereoscopically, in depth. So for me science and faith gave me that depth of vision which I felt really helped me understand why God was so important to understanding this world. Yes, yes. Again, I just love the cohesive, the whole-story understanding of reality and your life within it and even our understanding of everything in the world through that lens. Did you ever question the integrity or reliability of scripture as you started to read it? There’s so much skepticism about the Bible, and I know you’re very aware of that, and so that people dismiss it and say that it’s not worthy of belief because of all manner of reasons. But did that skepticism inform your reading of the Bible? Or were you just coming into it, looking at it again more holistically, like this story… it informs reality in the best way, but in a sense, again drawing C.S. Lewis into this, it’s not just a myth, it is the true myth. It is the one that’s not only a good story that informs all of reality, it’s historically grounded, it’s reliable, it’s believable for good reason. Well, I think it’s more the kind of ideas you were talking about, the end of what you were saying, where I wasn’t really reading the Bible skeptically. I was reading it in a sort of way of trying to grasp what it was all about. And inviting my Christian friends to tell me what they saw there because I was a novice to reading the Bible. I realized I needed help to get it right, to know what to look for. I think that that is very important. We need to read the Bible in company, so actually, we are able to see things that others have seen that otherwise we might miss. I think I was worried that if I read the Bible in a very untutored way, I might misread. But I did read the Gospel of Mark shortly after I decided to commit myself to Christianity and found that illuminating in so many ways, in terms of the emphasis on the need for repentance to see things properly and in terms also of the impact that Christ has on people. Now, of course I had questions, like: What does this mean? What does that mean? And I would ask my friends lots of difficult questions, and they go a bit impatient with me and eventually said, “Why don’t you start reading C.S. Lewis?” And so, when I took that advice and began to do that, actually that really helped. He was a wonderful tie to help me find my way and go much deeper into my new faith. And obviously you’ve gone very deep into a faith that is far from new anymore. In your career, in a sense, you’ve gone on to write and debate and the foremost atheists in the world, I guess revealing the inadequacies of New Atheism and naturalism. the resistant would say, “Oh, there’s no evidence. Science still is the winner here. There is no God,” but yet, like I say, you have debated and conversed with those from other worldviews, particularly atheism, for years. So I’m wondering how you consider that. Why is it that sometimes, for some, the evidence is convincing? They can see the fullness of the Christian world as a greater explanation for themselves in the world. But then there are others who remain in a resistant, closed-door perspective. I think that’s a very good question. And I think that one of the big issues here is that, for a lot of people, they do not want there to be a God. They want, in effect, to be the captains of their souls. They want to be in charge. They don’t want anyone else to be able to tell them what is right, what is wrong. They want to make up their own minds on everything. And C.S. Lewis was like that. When he was an atheist, he said, “I don’t want God to interfere with me, and I want to be my own master.” But one of the things I’ve found is that, being someone who used to be an absolutely certain atheist, who began to realize things were more complicated, that kind of helps me begin to challenge this assumption of atheist superiority. And one of the things I’ve discovered in debating atheists is that very often they use criteria to assess Christianity that they do not apply to their own beliefs. And so, very often, someone like Richard Dawkins will say to me, “Well, prove that you are right.” And my response would be, “Well, I’m happy to try and do that, but you’re going to have to prove to me that you are right.” You can’t just say that it’s enough to argue that Christianity is wrong. You’ve got to persuade me you are right. And of course, that’s a problem with New Atheism. This is what I call an epistemic asymmetry. They, in effect, do not apply the same standards to their own beliefs, that they apply to other people’s. And when you press them and say, “Why do you believe that? How do you know that is right?” Well, in the end, they have to say, “Well, we don’t know.” I mean a very interesting debate at Oxford about 2012, between Rowan Williams, then Archbishop of Canterbury, and Richard Dawkins, was all about this. And actually halfway through the debate, Dawkins said, “Well, I suppose I’m an agnostic, really, because I just can’t prove that there’s no God.” And that’s very, very revealing, because of course, his whole case is built on the rationality of atheism, but he cannot show it’s right. I think that is very, very important. We do need to ask those hard questions. And the other thing I’ve found very, very often is that actually many atheist authors have a very inadequate grasp of what Christianity actually is. And very often you can disarm stereotypes and say, “Well, look, maybe that’s what somebody’s told you, but that’s not right. Let me tell you what it really is like.” And so you take it from there. So I do need to reassure your listeners. There’s a lot we can say here, partly by saying, “Why are you right? Prove to me that you are right?” And also by saying, “Look, I don’t think you quite get what Christianity is all about. Let me try and tell you why it makes so much sense to me.” I think you’re so right about that. It oftentimes seems that people are very intent on saying what they don’t believe, Christianity or God, but they don’t really know exactly what they do believe. And they put the burden of proof on the believer, right? And they don’t recognize. They lack a belief in God, they say, so they don’t bear the burden of proof, but there’s an implicit understanding that they do believe something, and they believe that God doesn’t exist, and there are implications for that and beliefs that come along with that. That only nature exists, right? So I appreciate your counsel there. If there was a skeptic who was listening in, Dr. McGrath, and he’s thinking, “Wow! Dr. McGrath is really, really bright. He’s debated the best and the brightest on the other side, but yet, here he is defending the substance of the Christian worldview.” And they may actually be willing to open the door to the possibility of God’s existence and Christianity’s truth. How would you encourage that skeptic to make a step forward towards exploring the possibility of belief? If I were to say to that skeptic…. If you were an atheist, I would simply say to you, “Can you prove that is right?” Now, you won’t be able to do it, and the best minds in the world are trying to do that. And very often, what many of my atheist friends will do is use rhetoric to justify their position. “Only a thinking person can be an atheist,” or, “Only a fool would believe in God.” In other words, they’re not arguing. They’re asserting. They’re making rhetorical judgments. I want you to just ask yourself, in the depths of your heart, “Can you show that you are right? Prove that you are right?” Because if you cannot, then you have a belief system. And what I want to say to you is that it’s the nature of human beings that we have to believe certain things we can’t prove to be true. And once you realize that your atheism is a belief, I want to invite you to ask whether there might be better beliefs. Beliefs that, yes, can’t be proved to be true but actually might give you better answers, might open up a better way of thinking, because many atheists I know will say, “I cannot be religious because it involves belief.” Your atheism already is a belief. My invitation is to try some other beliefs. I’m going to tell you that Christianity will give you lots to think about. And in my case, I can tell you, in effect, give you a transformed vision of yourself and the world. I just want to invite you to think about stepping inside Christianity and seeing what it’s like and just asking what might it be like to live there. Yeah. That’s good. That’s very, very good advice. Just giving it a chance, really, to see through a different pair of lens or glasses, I guess, to try that on. So, again, you have been such a wonderful example for us as Christians in coming forward and speaking truth and with boldness and clarity into a world and into a culture that does not always want to embrace it. And I wonder if, again, from your experience, how would you encourage us as Christians to best engage? I know you’ve spoken a little bit about good question asking and sharing the burden of proof with the other. And I also think of those embodied Christians at Oxford that really gave you a beautiful example of what being a brilliant scientist and a Christian could look like. But it required you being with them, right? And having conversations with them and seeing how that can actually work out its way in your heart and mind in real life. So how would you encourage us to Christians to engage with those who don’t believe? Well, I think I’m going to say two things: One is that there’s a danger that we’ll come across as being critical. In effect, we’re saying, “We’re right. You’re wrong.” I think it’s very helpful to use the language of exploring. In other words, “I’m going to share with you what my faith is all about, and I’m just going to tell you how I found the difference it makes to me. And, you know, at this stage I’m not saying it’s right. I’m just saying let’s explore together. I’m going to tell you the difference it makes to me. And I’m going to invite you to think about, as I talk to you, whether you feel you can say the same about your naturalism or your atheism, whether it, in effect, gives you the same basis for living, reason for hoping that I’m describing to you now.” I think that’s a very important point. The second point I’m going to make is this: Very often people have kind of picked up from the wider culture a very distorted idea about what Christianity is all about. So I think what you may need to do is just say, “Let me tell you very simply what I think Christianity is all about, what it means to me and the difference it makes.” And you’ll find your friends will listen to you. What you’re doing is in effect giving a testimony. But the testimony you’re giving is not simply, “I think this is right,” but, “I think this is real.” In other words, it makes a difference to me. It gives me a reason to hope. It gives me a reason to live. It helps me to position myself. One of the points I found in talking to many atheists is they feel, “Well, actually, I may be right, but it doesn’t do any of these things for me.” And therefore, in effect, introducing these new set of questions. Is this real? Does it give me a reason to hope? Does it, in effect, give me a new sense of purpose and direction? These can be ways that may not in effect change somebody’s life, but they might be questions that open up recesses in their minds where a transition can take place. So don’t be discouraged if you get nowhere. Just feel you’ve planted some seeds, and in the Lord’s good time, these will grow if they’re meant to. Yes. Again, a very good word. I think sometimes we’re so keen on trying to prove ourselves or to be right, like you say, but to your point, I think, especially in today’s culture, where there’s such a crisis of meaning and purpose and we’re seeing that everywhere, it’s not just trying to communicate that God exists, but that God matters. It matters, and it makes a difference. And it’s based on something real and true. So thank you so much. That’s just very, very wise counsel. Before we end, Dr. McGrath, is there anything you think I might have missed in your story that you wanted to say or anything else you wanted to add to the end of our conversation? Well, I’ve very much enjoyed our conversation. I think I might just end by going back to this book, Coming to Faith through Dawkins, because it’s a very interesting book because it’s a story of twelve people who read The God Delusion and found it played a major role in bringing them to faith. Now I think that’s very significant, because what happened was they realized, “This book isn’t actually very good. The arguments don’t stack up. That Christianity clearly isn’t what they say it is.” And in effect, they went away from reading Dawkins saying, “We’ve got to look at this more closely. We’re going to read Christian books. We’re going to talk to our Christian friends and see where this takes us.” These are stories of coming to faith through Dawkins. I think that’s really interesting and really encouraging, because it means that each of us can tell our stories, and those may help other people come to faith. I would encourage everyone to take a look at that. I presume that they can just get it online anywhere? Amazon or whatnot. So that’s Coming to Faith through Dawkins, right? So thank you so much, Dr. McGrath. It has been rich and a wealth of knowledge and wisdom, I think, more than that. You come to the table, like I say, with so much gravitas, and we are so grateful to hear your wisdom and your wise counsel, and more than that, just to see a transformed life, that God has done something extraordinary in you and through you, and we’re so grateful to you. So thank you so much again for coming on. It’s been my pleasure. Thank you very much for having me. Wonderful. Thanks for tuning in to Side B Stories to hear Dr. Alister McGrath’s story. You can find out more about his books, including Coming to Faith through Dawkins, in the episode notes. For questions and feedback about this episode, you may contact me through our email, at info@sidebstories.com. Also, if you’re a skeptic or atheist who would like to connect with a former guest with questions, please again contact us through email. This podcast is produced through the C.S. Lewis Institute through the excellent work of our producer, Ashley Decker, and audio engineer Mark Rosera. You can also see these podcasts in video form through our YouTube channel, through the excellent work of our video editor, Kyle Polk. I hope you enjoyed it and that you’ll follow, rate, review, and share this podcast with your friends and social network. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll see how another skeptic flips the record of their life. | |||
| Looking Past Hypocrisy to Christ – Loren Weisman’s Story | 01 Sep 2023 | 01:07:58 | |
Former skeptic Loren Weisman rejected the Jewish beliefs of his youth to embrace atheism. Although he encountered bad examples of Christianity in his search for truth, he looked past those experiences and found Christ. Loren's Resources: https://www.lorenweisman.com Resources/authors recommended by Loren: The Case for Christ, Lee Strobel Cold Case Christianity, J. Warner Wallace I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist Norman L. Geisler, Frank Turek
www.sidebstories.com
As a reminder, our guests not only tell their stories of moving from disbelief to belief in God and Christianity, at the end of each episode, these former atheists give advice to curious skeptics as to how they can best pursue the truth and reality of God. They also give advice to Christians as to how best to engage with those who don’t believe. I do hope you’re listening to the end to hear them speak from their wisdom and experience as someone who has once been a skeptic but who is now a believer. There are different stories of reality, and we live within some narrative that defines who we are, how we got here, where we’re going, what’s broken, and how it can be fixed. Some stories are closer to truth than others. Sometimes we look at people who are living out of certain stories and beliefs and make a judgment about the truth of that story. If someone says they believe one thing, but their lives reflect something else, something that is rather unattractive and hypocritical, then those looking on often think that that story must not be good or true. Many have rejected God because of bad experiences with or observations of people who say that they are Christians, but their words and actions don’t seem to line up with someone who’s supposed to be following Christ. In my research with fifty former atheists, right at half of them, 48% to 50%, said one of the reasons that they rejected belief in God was because of a perceived sense of hypocrisy among Christians. Of course, although someone’s behavior may not, and often doesn’t, align with their beliefs, it doesn’t mean that the beliefs themselves are not true, but hypocrisy can and does fuel reasons why people walk away from God. In our story today, former atheist Loren Weisman encountered Christians who lived as if they were not. That is, their attitudes, words, and actions did not reflect well on their faith. Surprisingly, despite these bad experiences and exposures, Loren’s heart was open, and he was willing to seek towards truth to see past those negative examples to look towards Jesus. Now, Loren strives to live a life of authenticity and truth in order to be a positive, winsome ambassador for Christ. I hope you’ll come along to hear of his journey past the obstacle of hypocrisy to come to know the real and true Christ. Welcome to Side B Stories, Loren. It’s great to have you with me today. Thank you for bringing me on. Terrific! As we’re getting started, let’s paint a picture for our listeners of who are a little bit. Give us an idea, Loren, a little bit about you, about your life now. My life now. I'm a messaging and optic strategist for the Fish Stewarding group, and what I look at for this organization is how we share our story, how we share what we have for products, and looking a little deeper than the idea of here's how we market or advertise, but much more so how can we be heard organically, authentically, with authority, when a lot of people say a lot of things. So, to me, it's almost like the first step before marketing to know if that story is true, if it's moral, if it's honest, if it's real, and when we build that foundation, regardless of what we do or who we are, we're building on a rock and not on the sand. Wow. Okay. That is very intriguing to me, especially in light of the story that you're going to give us today. If those values you hold dear are truth and transparency and authenticity, I'm anticipating an amazing story of your own. So let's go back. Paint a picture for us of your childhood. Talk to us about what your life was like and the family that you grew up in. Did you go to church? Was religion or God or any of that a part of that picture? It wasn't. As you can probably assume from the last name, I grew up Jewish, Passover was fun. Hanukkah was presents and lights. I went to Sunday school, preparing for a bar mitzvah. I do remember being a little child and frightened and saying, “What happens when we die?” and being told nothing. That was a terrifying thing when I was smaller. I grew up in Amherst, Massachusetts, which is the center of a five-college circuit area. You had the University of Massachusetts, the Ivy League Amherst, Mount Holyoke, Smith, Hampshire. It was a very broad experience in growing up at that time. And my parents, things did not go well with them. I make the joke of it was the uncommitted divorce that took many years. I think they got together and separated numerous times until finally divorcing a little bit later in my youngest years. But that back and forth was a bit of a thing. I'm sure that had a little bit more of an impact. I was a lot more emotional than my brother was. My brother seemed to hold it all in. I was emotional, and in some ways, I feel like that let it out. And, in growing up in that, I found the drums. And the drums were everything. I found the drums at 13. And I didn't want to do anything else. I had had a drum set from a neighbor for about two weeks, and nothing was interesting to me. I needed to be a drummer. Mm. So it completely captured your heart, or your passion, immediately it sounds like. Yeah. So before we get into that and your musical career, so this home that you grew up in. You had a Jewish heritage, in the sense that you went through the motions of Shabbat and high holy days and bar mitzvahs and things like that. What was that to you? Was that just some tradition that your family took part in? Was there something real there? Or was it just something that you did? I'm sure we'll go in later in the conversation, but I’ve kind of enjoyed sharing this quote a little bit, that I learned more when I became a Christian about Judaism than I ever learned about Judaism growing up steeped in it. And again, that's why kind of the first-gear Jew concept of, you know, Passover. We would read about the sons and the Elijah cup. It would sit on the table, and we'd ask questions, and sometimes it was, “Oh, we're going to celebrate Shabbat,” but then we're not. And Hanukkah was lighting candles and even going to the synagogue occasionally. It was all very ethereal and not directed. When we were learning Hebrew—Hebrew school was on Wednesdays and Sundays, preparing for the bar mitzvah. And what we were learning inside of the Torah was how to read Hebrew and not understand the words that were written. So the focus in the Jewish community of Amherst, and I'm not trying to bad mouth, but it was a sense of, “Here’s the alef. Here’s the bet.” My Hebrew name is Eliezer Ben Shimol, and the most that I understood is that it's your name, son of your dad's name. And we'd sing the stories about Noah and the forty days, and we'd sing small things in the seven days of creation. But none of it was ever put together or delivered, even for a kids’ level, in anything that to me would plant seeds. So would you say that these stories that you were taught, were they merely stories, some mythology? Or or did you think that there was some historical veracity behind them? Obviously, the Jewish people, over centuries, have been celebrating things like Passover, and that's historical, right? But I guess what I'm trying to ask is: Did you think that there was something real to even the Jewish God? Or was it just a story or a ritual? During especially inside the separations, I wanted it to be real. It didn't feel it. It didn't exhibit anything. But it seemed very allegorical. It felt like, “Okay, maybe this is just a story to teach you a lesson.” And, “Okay, they're roaming around the desert for forty years.” None of it seemed anything outside of fiction. The closest that I had, my grandfather. I remember going with my grandfather a couple times to a synagogue. And the heart that he had in it, and the way he prayed, those were a little sparks of maybe there's something more. But then there were times years later, going like, “Maybe this is just kind of like a boys club or a thing to do.” It didn't feel rooted or anchored in anything beyond tradition. Okay. All right. And how long did you stay… I know you mentioned that your parents divorced, and your mother had actually taken on a Jewish identity, I presume because of your father. So once they divorced and separated, did you continue in any kind of Jewish practice at all? Or was it just something you left behind once they separated? Well, the bar mitzvah, which… and that was closer. I mean they had divorced finally shortly before, but the bar mitzvah was sort of like the out. It was, “You have to study,” and then it was Hebrew school and Sunday school and a Hebrew tutor, and getting everything ready for, I think it was June 13, 1989 or 1990. I can't remember exactly. It was getting the suit. It was inviting all these family people. I mean, even walking around the bar mitzvah afterwards, it was like it was for everybody but me. And, again, not trying to make it a selfish thing, but it represented, in a way, “I don't have to do this anymore.” And then I would go to synagogue for my grandfather, and I would do certain things, but I mean I was kind of skipping out on most of the Hanukkah stuff and Passover. Passover was kind of a weird thing at my family on my father's side of: It was the same jokes done each year. I mean, Passover at that time was a whole bunch of food with a pre-game of ritual tradition. And then find the afikomen and get a couple bucks, and it was very… I don't know And I'm not trying to disrespect my grandfather in any way, but it was just… it was out there to me. So that was something that was easy to leave behind. Oh, yes. And your attention then turned towards the drums. So it sounds like that captured your full, or at least primary, attention. Talk to us about that part of your life, in adolescence. So you were kind of leaving this religious thing behind, and of course your parents had separated, and you're an adolescent, so that's a very interesting time of life for anyone. So talk to us about that part of your life. There was a confidence, and there was a fun in the drums. I think I picked up the drums, and a couple months later, I had a girlfriend! Oh, yeah! You were suddenly cool! Right? Oh, yeah. It was great! So, you know, I don't know if I was shy as much as a little withheld, and the drums gave a confidence. And there was an assertiveness in, “I want to be a drummer.” And then I got to meet a girl. And then there was an opening of just a fun direction. I didn't want to be a lawyer like my father. It was just nothing. I mean, I would visit his office, and there was nothing about that that I enjoyed. I was looking at what different people were doing, and then some people would say, “Oh, you'll get into what you want to do later.” It was immediate. I mean, sitting at the drums, everything felt in place. And when I was playing the drums, the divorce wasn't an issue, or school wasn’t an issue, or God wasn't an issue, or…. You know, at that time, if we die and turn to dust, at least I have this time with the drums. And so the drums became everything to me. So you had mentioned a couple of kind of big questions that you had asked as a child. What happens to you when you die? And that sort of thing. But you said, when you played the drums, it filled you with so much joy, and you were able to escape into it, essentially, for a while, and obviously you were very good at it. I mean obviously, with the breakup of your family and all of those big things that you deal with, Were you still asking some of those big questions? Or, I guess, was the drums just a way forward out and through all of that and to a different life? It was both. I mean, the drums were a way forward. I had a great fear of death, and I had a misunderstanding about the universe, and I listened to the things that we learned about, and it didn't add up. And there was something that was just off, and it took me in later on, which made more sense in the apologetics journey later down the line. But I remember being in eighth-grade science class and just the stories at that time about, “Well, everything's just been here, and it's always going to be here, and, oh, the sun will burn out.” So how did this happen? And these other elements about the Earth and these other things, they were bothering me. I mean, when I was in ninth grade, I remember—and again, I was tucked away in the world of drumming, but I found myself asking the questions of, “Well, if there's nothing, why do we have to be nice? Why can't we rob a bank? Where is this law set that, ‘Okay, so we have to follow these laws,’ and there's nothing?” And then, at the same time, this chaos theory that's been so scientifically explained, and yet, if there's nothing, why are we not in chaos? And I think some of that was anger at the chaos of my parents and just watching relationships and watching things happen. I was, even as much as the pleasure that I got from the drums, I was angrier in that eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh grade. Yeah. Because obviously you had experienced some personal brokenness and chaos, I guess you could say, in your personal world. “If this is a godless world, what does it mean?” You know? Right and wrong, good and bad. Where does it all come from? How do things all fit together, whether it's in the universe or in the world or in my mind? Those are all big, big questions. So talk to us from there. What did your life look like as you were continuing to pursue music, I presume. Was that something you pursued professionally? Or what did that look like? Yeah. I went to Berklee College of Music. Not the California one. Right. Berklee College of Music summer program. And after that, and for many of the drummers that I admired, they all went to Berklee. And I explained to my mother that I was going to apply to one college, and if I didn't get in, I’d get good enough to get in. And my plan was to go to Berklee. I felt Berklee was where I belonged, where I wanted to be, and so I put all the eggs in one basket. I did get in, and I remember opening the letter and being like, “Okay, is this really stupid?” And I got the acceptance, and I make the joke about, if you graduate Berklee College of Music you become a professor or a teacher. If you drop out, you've got a chance of becoming a drummer, or a musician. And so I was only there for a couple semesters and began to work with different groups. I only wanted to be that hired gun. And I learned about how there were other drummers covering Ringo Starr's parts for The Beatles, and I understood about The Beach Boys and all these people that were considered ghost musicians. And they would come in, and they would clean up things, and they would not get the popularity credit, but they get the call, and it became this idea that I really enjoyed, and then I began to meet more people, and I met guys that were becoming famous in Boston, and I liked the idea of the discretion, of the quiet, of the being behind the scenes. I mean I enjoyed playing live, but I didn't need the credit or the popularity. And so it was a TV show and a movie theme. I got called in while a drummer was sick, and he got credit for it. But I got paid. Right. And then I became a contact. And then I began to build that life of being this behind-the-scenes guy. And it was a lot of fun. I mean it took a while to build, but to go in and have something… it was like trying new dishes or traveling to new places. I didn't know what the music required. I didn't know what the music was. I didn't know what had happened. I didn't know why I was coming in, and the other guy or girl was going out. So it was constantly exciting. It was all new. I look at some of my friends that are in bands that they've been in bands for thirty, forty years, and they play the same songs every night. God bless them for the money they've made, the chance they've had. I would have been bored out of my mind. And so to be able to jump in and almost play like the Columbo detective, of finding out what's missing, what went wrong, where does it need to go? And, you know, I'm out the door, and nobody knew I was there. It was a lot of fun. I bet. I bet that was really exciting. It allowed another side to see things, and even then, in some of the anger. I mean, not to point it. I did a Christian album. I’m not going to name the band right now, but I found myself, even in that anger based around faith of like, “If you are all you claim to be, how can you be this crass, this mean, this insulting? If you're preaching this whole love thing and then saying the things that you're saying….” I found so many people in that time turning me away from faith. And I mean like being mocked. I came in, and they're like, “Are you a Christian?” I’m like, “No.” And they’re like, “Okay, well, we need you for this.” And then I'm hearing Jewish jokes. And it didn't hurt that much because I wasn't that close to it, but to hear some of the mockery and some of the condescension that I was getting from Christian sources, made me go, “I want to stay as far away from this as possible.” No doubt. And so, when you were being exposed to hypocritical forms of faith, and it just—I would imagine that it pushed you farther and farther from even considering God in any kind of a serious way. Did you label or identify at any point, as like, “I'm agnostic,” or, “I’m atheistic.” Did you ever take on that label or identity? I took on atheist for a while, and then it was—I still remember. It was a recording session. I was sitting in a beautiful wooden drum room, and we were redoing a part. We had done a part the day before, and there was something off, and I was going to pack up my drums and return the next day to go over other stuff, not playing the drums. And I felt at that point: “Leave the drums. We're going to need to do this again.” And I came back the next day. It was one of my first real, what I look back on and think it may have been a spiritual experience with God. And I came back that next day, and I felt this gratitude for being there. I felt this gratitude for waiting. I felt this gratitude for the particular song, that just… it drew me in, and I felt this thing where it flipped the switch to me not saying it was the Christian God or the Jewish God or Buddha or anyone else, or Muslim. It was just a moment that made me question atheism, and it was a shift. I mean, it's interesting. I’ve forgotten many things. I can still remember seeing what I saw, where I was sitting, when I just had this moment and went more toward the agnostic of, “I think there's something out there. I don't think it lines up with this Jewish God or this Christian God or any of this, but this seems like something more.” And I felt like that was a moment. Hmm. So what did you do? How did you respond? When you have those moments, an epiphany or a feeling or a sense that there's something more than the atheistic worldview, which is there is nothing beyond nature or matter. There is no God. So did that, in a sense, startle you in a way? Personally? Did it make you question your assumptions? Again, was there something arising up in you that said, “Well, maybe there is something more.” What did you do with that, essentially? Well, it wasn't the best story in the end of it, because I tried to pray, and praying had been what it was when I was a little kid, where it just didn't make any sense with…. You know, your sort of TV dinner Jewish prayers. Read this prayer. Read this prayer. Read this prayer. So I tried to pray for a second and give thanks, and then it just felt stupid. And so I packed up my drums afterwards. I kind of had this moment, and then I went off to see some friends, and we went out drinking. It was a moment that was incredibly brief. It was left behind. It didn't stop me. It shifted me a bit to think that there might be something more. But I kind of made the joke of, as I put my hands out, I'm like, “What am I doing?” And then it was, “Well, I'm not going to my knees.” And then after that it was, “Let’s go get a drink.” Okay. And so it was more dismissed. Okay. All right. So what was your life like? Whether it was during your period of expressed atheism or not, this kind of reality of living in a way that God isn’t part of your life, it's not part of your picture. Was it a good life? Were you still asking the big questions? Or were you just kind of going through the motions, enjoying your drumming, and really not thinking about the big questions anymore? I was enjoying the drumming, but I was angry. And I think that people that knew me would say I was angry. And I was a loving person, but there was always an anger. And I never really got in fights. I got in one fight in ninth grade, I think. And it was each of us passed two punches, and it was over, and we were in the principal's office. And I'm a big guy, I'm six four, but it's never been like a physical thing. But I was angry at my mom. I was angry at my dad. I was angry at my brother. I was angry at different bands. I was angry at lack of—I mean, for me, there was something very important about following through and drive and learning. And I was angry at lazy people. I mean it was just a strange anger, and at the same time it became an inspiration to not be lazy, to maintain drive, to go after things. And I look back on it now, and had you asked me then, I wasn’t angry. I mean I got annoyed and annoyed a lot more back then, but I was pushing through. And in a way it was a darkness, and it was a wilderness, and I’d go after things, and I enjoyed alcohol, I enjoyed drumming, I enjoyed doing things sometimes and making money in ways in music that were not the most moral and reputable. I'm not 100% by any measure proud of some of the things that I did. Yeah. Well, I think all of us could say that, right? So we've all lived compromised in some ways, but it sounds like there was an underlying anger, but yet you had… it sounds like a busy life, in many ways a fulfilling life, that you were accomplishing things, that you were setting goals, that you were pursuing your life, your profession, with gusto. And so it sounds like, too, that you weren't bothered necessarily by big questions, not any kind of existential crisis, or really thinking towards the end of a worldview without God or anything, but yet you had this moment. That appeared for a moment, and then it passed. So then what happened next in your life? Well, I mean, it was a number of years of that. And I think that some of the anger, for me, might have been that constantly having questions and not having an outlet of a place of answers. I attended a church. It was one time. I'd run into a friend, and he's like, “Come to my church.” “All right.” And it opened up a lot of questions for me, and when I found that not a single one could be answered, and everything was countered at this particular church with, “You’ve got to have faith.” It didn't feel balanced. And in everything else, if I was going to learn this or I was going to study that, with music. If you want to be able to do this, you do this, this, this, and then you get there. And there were different ways to understand and balance and juggle those studious elements, the strategic elements, and when I went there, I brought that same state of mind, and this particular one church, “It had no answers.” The pastor then—and I remember this, and this was shortly before I moved to the West Coast. A pastor took me out to lunch at a Chinese restaurant somewhere in Massachusetts, and he explained to me that my grandfather and my grandmother were going to hell—or were in hell. This was after they passed—because they were Jews. And even back then, thinking about messaging, going, “Well, this isn’t a great way to open!” And there was a moment of like, “Oh, my gosh! Is this true?” and then another moment, going, “There’s something very off if you are the representation of a church, and this is how you're opening doors to people. There’s something really off there.” That bothered me. Yeah, you know, especially considering—I don't know what it took for you to actually even consider going to a church. I mean it was pretty amazing that you had a friend who asked you to go and that you actually went, but then to receive that as a welcome, it makes no sense to me at all. But what were some of the big questions that you were wrestling with as you were looking for answers? As you were going into this church environment? Well, I was looking on a bigger level of saying, “Okay….” It was interesting with where I grew up. There was a Muslim community. There was a Buddhist community. There was a Jewish community. There was Christian. And it was like, “Okay, well, what's the difference between this Catholic thing and this Protestant and these Baptist people over here that scream?” There was his one guy I knew who just seemed like a cool Christian. And he seemed to…. When we looked at girls, he looked at girls with us. He’d talk about this, but he was not available Sunday mornings. He was in church. And there was something about that, of going. I almost wanted to see, “Is there more like that? Is there something a little bit more organic? Is there something where somebody could talk about this?” And so I went four more times to this one church, because I wasn't trying to be, “Oh, I saw this once, and it was nothing.” And I came to him, and I'm like, “Hey, I'm a drummer, and I don't know if you ever need the help. I can handle this music and would be happy to support.” And again, beyond the pastor saying my grandparents are going to hell, it was a worship leader that's like, “You don't quite have the Spirit in you. I don't know if you can handle these songs.” “I'm the best player among all of you. I can lift this up musically,” and maybe, looking back on it, maybe by doing that it could invite me into something. But your ego of your subpar worship team. Another door was shut. I’m sitting here open to just listening, hearing, connecting, and I was having doors closed. I'm sorry. I get a little amplified thinking about it. No! No! It’s a strange memory. Right! I'm sure that it was. I'm sure that it was. And what a shame. Really, I wonder, in going to that church, did they invite you to open the Bible or to read it for yourself or anything like that? I wondered what you were hearing, what you were seeing or reading. It was forced. It was, “You’ve got to get baptized. You’ve got to accept the Holy Spirit. You’ve got to know Jesus.” I did get a Bible, and I started to read through it. And the one mistake I made: I jumped to the end. And so I said, “Okay, I want to skip to the end and see what's going on here.” It's a lot of what I used to do as a musician. You’ve got to figure out, “Where’s this thing ending up?” and we'll go back to the beginning and start. And then I'm in Revelation, and I'm like, “Okay, so there are dragons. There's some harlot. There’s Babylon.” I mean, it was not the place to start. Everyone says start in John now. I hear that. Starting in Revelation? Wrong answer. Yeah. That’s a difficult place to start. It’s a difficult place for most Christians who’ve been in the faith for a long time. Yeah, I can imagine. I'm sure you were scratching your head with that. I presume you did not become a worship drummer at that moment, so you left that, again, that experience of church behind as a potential open and shut door, it sounds like. And then what- Very quickly. And so guide us from there. Well, and then I was involved in some projects that took me to Seattle, took me to Los Angeles. I started shifting into being a producer more. And there was one guy that had me produce an album, and I said, “I'm not a producer.” And he said, “I'm going to be very frank with you: Because you work with a whole bunch of the producers that I love, you work with them often, I think you know their style, and I know I can pay you a lot less.” “Okay.” So I started my hand in production, and one of the little early albums I produced was a gospel album. It was a gospel R&B album. And that was another experience of trying to… I almost wanted to hear a little bit more. It again turned me off, and I walked away from it. I had a really…. At the end of the production of that album, talking to the guy and saying, “Look, this is what you may want to consider when it comes to music,” and, “Here’s what's happening,” and the arrogance and belligerence of how he chose to share things. I said, “You’re supposed to, from what your faith claims, be all open to this stuff and hear this and listen to these things, and right now, you just think you're going to be a star. And it seems like it's ego and greed and all the stuff you're supposed to be against.” And so that was again a turnoff. Again, it was a strange time, and it was more of, okay, all these people I was coming across that had faith just seemed to be something I didn't want to have anything to do with. While I was still searching out faith for myself. And this was probably the time when I was drinking—again, I was never an alcoholic. I needed to stay in control. But it was a time I was drinking probably the most. And the angriest at those times, of being like, “What is this? If there is anything, why is it being represented by these people?” And so poorly. Right? If there is a God, why do these supposedly God people look and act in these very unattractive ways? So you're being perpetually, it sounds like, pushed away, really, even though you were open, which… anyway, surprises, [40:33] well it doesn't surprise me, in a way, because we're all broken people, but it's disappointing, isn't it, when you expect something more of someone who represents Christ, and that's not what you're seeing, so you continued to get these really bad pictures of what a Christian is supposed to be. Who they're supposed to be. Who they’re representing. It wasn't anything you wanted anything to do with. But yet you were still, it sounds like, in a searching mode? So what were you finding next? Well, it was strange at that point, and I look back on it now, and it seems to have a strategy to it. There was another Christian artist, a reverend, had me produce his album. And he was a little bit better. He still had a little bit of an edge to him, but he was a gentler individual. And then I started… I was asked by a bartender, who said, “You should write a book on music,” and so I wrote my first book, and it was a dumpster fire. It was awful. I wrote a second book on the music industry, which is the one I'm the most proud of. And that started taking me on a different journey, and I was starting to get hired by businesses outside of music. And I was kind of seeing this walk away from music. And I loved everything I did with the drums. I loved all the albums I was on, I loved the production. I was doing some stuff in television that didn't feel clean to me, so I did it while I did it, but then the book…. At the end of the book, I did this book tour. It was one of two book tours, and I gone back to Los Angeles, and I was finding myself around more and more people of faith, and none of them were pushing me. And so the agnostic elements seemed to lift up a little bit, and it seemed like, “Okay, there's something here.” And I found myself talking to a lot of people that were in faith. And eventually I left Los Angeles, moved with—it was a girlfriend at the time, who became my wife—to Florida, and it was in Florida that again I seemed to be surrounded by more people of faith. And I still was in a very agnostic mode, but when my daughter was born, this was around 2015, there was something that was lifting that agnostic thing to a different level. I would walk out on our back porch in, it was Vero Beach at the time, and I found myself praying, walking up and down the porch holding her and just thanking and praying that she's safe and healthy, and it didn't feel foolish, like it had the years before, and there was something just a touch different that felt very organic. So the birth of a child can make a difference for a lot of people, in terms of when you're holding that beautiful baby. And seems so miraculous in so many ways, and you expressed gratitude, but the question is, for an atheist or agnostic, grateful to whom? And so, when you're praying, there's a presumption, right? That there is someone to whom you are expressing gratitude. So at that moment, I guess you were willing to acknowledge the possibility of a God? Is that right? I was. And I laugh about when I read, I think it's in Acts, now, where Paul makes a mention about, “and you have this idol to the unknown god. Let me tell you about Him.” As I was sitting there, holding Olivia, I'm just saying, “Whoever you are, however this is, thank you. And can she be healthy? And what am I supposed to do? And can you tell me what I'm supposed to do? Because I don't feel like anyone else that's been down here that's told me has really been on point. Or if they're really listening all that well.” Okay. So all of those Christians who you were surrounded by, you said they weren’t pushy, so they were living out their Christianity kind of around you but not really directly. They didn't confront you in any way or ask you particular questions or invite you to church or anything. I presume, after your past experiences, you weren't really making a lot of steps towards them, even though you could see perhaps they were better than what you had experienced in the past. But obviously the door had been opened once more through the birth of your daughter to an unknown god, some god out there. So did you pursue that god? Or try to figure out who that was? Not really. I started doing a little bit more in the aspects of doing strategy and consulting outside of music, and I was having fun with it. I was having fun having a baby. I was having fun being a father. I was brought into a group of business individuals, and they were saying, “You’re saying things in a whole different light, and it's great!” And I ended up meeting a pastor and his wife that invited me to their church, not to the church, but to promote and work on the messaging of their programs. Okay. There was almost a little part of me that wanted to, in working on their messaging, learn more about faith. And we worked together for… it was a couple months. But then I got a phone call, saying, “We want you to meet this guy, Peter Lowe,” who used to apparently be a Christian and motivational speaker, and he’d talked to the presidents and Muhammad Ali and all of these people, and we had connected just gently. And he had a cruise, called…. It was Rollan Roberts and Peter Lowe. It was this Christian business cruise. And everything about it just seemed so off to me. It was just so much hype. But I kept talking with Peter, and then Peter invited me to be a part of it and come on the cruise. And I was the only non-Christian speaking on it. You’ll like this: I’ll keep it brief. The night before I was supposed to go, Olivia had, whatever, macaroni and cheese. There was something off. She was getting sick. She got violently ill in her crib the night before I was supposed to leave. I mean just throwing up all over the crib. It was awful! And the whole plan, at that point, “I can't go, I can't leave my daughter. I can't possibly leave my daughter.” I still did the next morning, and that was the next time. It was like from the session drumming and then today are like, “I'm supposed to go,” and nothing in me wanted to. Absolutely nothing. I wanted to be there for my daughter, but I knew I had to go on the cruise. That was my second moment of…. It wasn't audible, but it was very clear I was supposed to be there. And I made the cruise. So what was your experience like on a boat full of a lot of Christians as an outsider, in a sense? Well, I wasn’t wrong, and I said this thing is over hyped. There aren't going to be that many people. I wasn't wrong. There was too much hype in what was presented, not as much by Peter, but the other person. And I still found it intriguing. I wanted to meet some of these people. And I went to the dinners, and I talked to some people. And I listened to what they had to say. And then there was one individual who said, “Look, a little later, I’d like to meet in your cabin and talk a little bit more about faith,” and as I'm opening my mouth to say, “Thanks, I’m good,” I said, “Okay.” Okay. It’s like, “Where did that come from?” kind of looking around. Exactly. “What?” Like, “Who said that?” And I mean, he wanted to…. I didn't get it at the time. He wanted to have me be saved, and for the first time, in letting my guard down, I allowed it, and I was open to it, and I don't know if it had been the number of days. I don't know all the different pieces, but there was something where I felt a little bit more open. And looking back at my entire career and my life and in that moment all the things, it just seemed to connect. It seemed to make sense. So I prayed the prayer with him, and my favorite part was he said, “First, I want to apologize for Christians that you’ve met.” I’m like. “Okay. Good opener.” Yes. That kind of brings down a barrier or a wall there. I wasn't looking for the answer. I wanted direction, and he gave me direction. And so I was saved on a Christian businessman's cruise. Wow! And it went very slowly for a bit. I mean I was starting to watch a couple of documentaries. I watched that NBC series. I was digging a little bit into a Bible. It was a slow lull time. It wasn't like… I had kind of envisioned, “I'm saved, and ahhh!” I didn't share it with my wife, and I began to just very slowly get my foot in, but it was briefly after, just a couple weeks after, where I was asked by the guy that was part of me being saved to come see him in Orlando. And Fish Stewarding Group, Doug Fish, he was there. And we were sitting there at the table, and he turned, and he goes, “I came here to meet you.” I was like, “What? You barely talked to me on the cruise.” We exchanged very little. We sat in a Starbucks and talked for four hours. And I have been with Doug since. At first, he called me, and he said, “Help me with my messaging,” and then he brought me on board this, and he's helped me. “Here’s where to go in the Bible.” “Here's where to look outside the Bible.” “Here's where to take your strategy here.” “Here's what I want from you.” And that friendship, as well as business partnership, has been the biggest thing for doing what I do and what I love, and at the same time, sleeping better at night, as well as exploring deeper into faith. You had been around some Christians who had changed your perception, perhaps, of Christians or Christianity. Maybe they're not as bad as you thought. You had a child. In a sense, there was an openness to you, obviously. Just your willingness to go on a Christian businessman’s cruise and position yourself there in that space. This gentleman was able to provide some substance for you. So not only that there is a God who loves you and wants a relationship with you, I would imagine, and that it's true. But he was able to help you start to put some intellectual pieces together, that it made sense to you in your mind, as well as your heart, it sounds like. Because you are very bright individual who likes things, like you say, to have a linear, logical, rational, reasonable support to them. Not just grabbing something out of the air because it feels good. That there actually has to be something that's true and real after your conversion or belief, that you were able to ground, in a sense, what was true about the Bible, that it's not just story. That there really is some good reason to believe that you had found what was once the unknown God. You found the one true real God. So can you help us understand what it is that helped you ground that perspective, more than just your spiritual experience there in conversion? Doug helped me find the proof to, for me, amplify the faith, where, in many cases, so many people were just saying, “You have to believe. You have to believe.” Doug helped me identify—and I don't say this in a derogatory way—the hypocrite in what I was hearing or what I wasn't able to hear or how I would take a presupposition with this experience, or these couple experiences now have given me a false conclusion. So it was Doug who… and he spoon-fed very slowly, and he respected where I came from in music and television. He respected my messaging and my optics, but at the same time he treated me like I think I needed to be treated. He brought small verses together. He showcased patterns of Old Testament to New Testament connections. My deepest, now analytical study has been about the last two and a half years. Of the five, it was two years or so kind of this wavering and then slowly digging in deeper. And then it was looking at Lee Strobel. I liked his journalist, his anger, his atheism, his approach. I love J. Warner Wallace. I love detective stories. I find cold case homicides to be very cool, and how do you break that out? The validity for me—and I get it's different for other people—but to see proof laid out, When Doug sends me something, I'm going to listen to it. And then when I listen, I listen from the standpoint I'm not an atheist anymore. But what Doug has taught me the most that has made me more, I believe, more of faith is I listen with the atheist viewpoint, I listen with the filled with faith, and I listen to the on the edge. And then I'm sitting there in what he has me doing inside the Bible, and I think Missler is known for saying, “Making the Bible my hobby,” I found it analytically, strategically, objectively, and at the same time, to grow my faith to know that, “Right now I'm connecting. Right now I'm not connecting. I can pray this way. I can pray from knees. I can continue to look at these things. It’s okay to doubt.” For me and who I am, to walk in this path with someone like Doug is so much more real and vetting and proven than these people just saying, “Oh, you’ve just got to believe.” Right. Sorry, that was kind of a rant. No, no! That’s an important rant, to be honest. I mean, especially for people like you who are analytical thinkers, who need to know that what they believe is worth believing, that there is good reason for belief. And that's really fantastic and especially that you have someone in your life who is challenging you in a very substantive way towards growth. Of your mind, as well as your faith. So, since you’ve become a believer, it sounds like your passion and pursuits have been changed a little bit and perhaps your life and your perspective. You are a messaging guy. You talk about having presumptions of knowing what the atheist thinks, someone on the edge, and your current perspective as a Christian. You’re able to see things, I think, in a holistic way, really looking from different perspectives. And I just wonder how your perspectives have changed from moving from atheism to calling yourself a follower of Christ. How have your perspectives and your life changed since then? I presume that seeing those hypocritical Christians earlier in your experience probably makes you want to live a more authentic…. Authenticity and truth are big values to you. So I would imagine that you would move into a life or a lifestyle, perspective of living, that is authentic and true and that you want to represent Christ in a way that is unlike maybe some of the bad examples you had before. But anyway, talk to us about your life since you've found Christ. It's been a long process, and I judged it when I saw other people saying, “Oh, I'm saved.” Like, “Well, why aren't you better?” And I didn't admit or openly wear a cross or leave my Bibles out or have multiple Bibles to be able to look at things. I would never… I mean, it was a couple years before I shared on social media. I think one of my first shares—and it dropped a whole bunch of people when I made a share—I think it was earlier in the spring, where I said, to celebrate certain Jewish holidays, “I consider myself a Christian or a Messianic Jew or both,” but I said, “I'm learning more from Christianity, and I'm challenging myself to look at all those sides.” I was the hypocrite before, that I saw what I saw in one person or in a small group of people, so that inside of that group study that I concluded all of this evidence from all of these other areas null and void. I think that that's the problem with Christianity right now, and I think that part of that problem lies within us Christians. We have a heart to save, to share the gospel, yet much of our hearts, or many of us, are sharing from a standpoint that doesn’t consider the perceptions, the negative connotations, the assumptions, and presuppositions of others. And when we do, when we take a step back to breathe, and perhaps consider the one over the ninety-nine, we might bring in ninety-nine of those ones. I’ve found that what has kept me away from faith is the exact thing that I want to try to disarm with people that say, “Wait. You’re a Christian now?” I want to walk away and say, “Okay, maybe….” I forget who the guy was. I think it was Greg Koukl who mentioned something about, “I want to put a stone in your shoe.” Yes. “I don't want to save you, but if I could put a stone in your shoe, to say, ‘Okay, you've experienced all sorts of bad people. Great!’” But isn't it amazing that a story, beyond everything before, but of a man, just shy of, what are we? Nineteen hundred ninety years ago. That a story like that could still maintain, that so many of the countering arguments, the opposite side, the objections can be disproven, and brought out that, of all the stories, of all the fiction, have this limited amount of shelf life. Or to take Warner Wallace, the chain of evidence going backwards. And yet all of this is here. So if it's an analytical person like me, let's do analysis and I continue to have questions. I believe, when we approach people where they are and don't try to fix them, don't try to necessarily invite them to church—and these churches, which include some of the ones I've been to here in Florida—“Oh, you came the first time. You’re family. Get baptized next weekend.” Cut! Stop! Pause! Take it down a notch. As opposed to the next-step programs that every one of these template churches have been putting out, why can't we have a next-step coffee. Why can't we take it just a little bit slower to take that great Koukl approach? Why can't we leave someone alone? Just like with my friend that’s up in Massachusetts. I brought out some stuff. I said, “Hey, you might want to have a look at this. I'm not going to invite you to church. I'm not going to have you read a Bible. I just want you to look at that and notice it's a little bit different, that some of this stuff might not be conspiracy. And some of this stuff might not be fiction.” And if we guide with the love that we're supposed to, and if we tell the story with the understanding of the context of now. And in that learning, it brought me to faith, and I think that, in that learning of other people, not trying to save them, but potentially support them with a small seed. That's where it grows. I think you're right in that sometimes we try to move too quickly. And again, to quote Greg Koukl, sometimes we’re meant to be gardeners, planting seeds. Not everyone is a harvester. And not everyone needs to be harvested in their first… when they just need a seed planted. Thank you for that wonderful wisdom. What about those who might be listening to you, Loren, who… they may have those moments of thinking, “Maybe there's something more. Maybe there is someone. Maybe there is a God, an unknown God.” And they do have those points of openness. How would you recommend that they take a step forward in their journey of faith? I would imagine some of that would be saying, “Ignore all the hypocrisy that you see around you.” I'm just guessing. But what would you say to someone you actually earnestly has the questions? They wonder. Well, I don't know if this is the right thing to say or not. It’s what I feel. But if you're having a question or a thought, it might not be time yet to go to church. It might not time yet to open up a Bible. If you're planting a seed to learn about these things, what about a Lee Strobel Case for Christ book, and at the same time when you buy that, buy one of the books that is something a little bit more comfortable, something atheist. See the yin and the yang, for lack of a better word. I've shared to friends that are open to hearing, but a little bit more on the edge, Frank Turek and Norman Geisler’s I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist. It can be… and again, I prefer to recommend go to the audios. Maybe it's in that time that you're in the car. Maybe it's in that time you're in the gym or you're out for a walk, and you just have a listen, and yeah, okay, those audio books are long. Listen to thirty minutes. See if it makes you want to listen to thirty minutes more. For anything that we look at, to look at the counter element of it, you never know where it could go. And it's not just necessarily walking into a church, or if a church is for you or a Bible is for you, you don't have to start at the very beginning. I had a lot of friends say—and I would have done this myself—starting in John or even searching things online and realize where they show up. “The writing's on the wall.” I remember laughing when I went through Daniel. I’m like, “Oh! They grabbed that from there.” I was joking with a friend. I’m like, “Okay, pawn shops came from Leviticus. If you can't afford this, you bring this here. They offer 20%, or you can buy it back, or you can sell it to somebody else.” The funny elements of whether you believe in God, as what I believe, as what many others believe, as what Jana believes, to just beginning to see these little elements. They can spark something, or they can grow a little green, or spark a little bit more of a firing, and surprise you at all the nuances. If you approach it from a researching, learning, and understanding, I believe, belief will follow. If you are just picking up or going to a church and expecting the end result to be belief, it may be a much harder journey. Yes. I mean, I think that it would be for most of us, who, if we’re being asked to believe something we don’t feel has credibility or substance behind it, why would we do that, right? So all you’re asking is to actually research and see, come and see. Come and see. And I also like that you are encouraging people to really look at all these. I mean, because if it is true, if the Christian worldview is true, if God exists, then it doesn't hurt to look at other worldviews, because truth will be found where it is, and sometimes it actually helps to compare. Because I think a lot of people will put down belief in God or Christianity and really not even research their own side. They know what they’re against, but they're not really sure what they're for. And then when you actually start looking at both sides from a strategic or intellectual perspective, and you go, “Okay. Well, maybe Christianity does have substance behind it, but I didn't realize that it's there, and it makes sense of reality and makes sense of what I see in the world or whatnot.” So I appreciate that, just taking a step where you feel comfortable. That's pretty wonderful. Loren, is there anything else that we might have missed, whether it’s your story or advice that you would want to capture here. I believe… in the end, I think I was the last person to ever open up enough to see faith and see it as viable, and yet that's been my life, look at this, analyze this, support this, figure this out, and dropping that presupposition for a moment, considering something you might never have thought, looking a little bit deeper beyond the hearsay or the claim. There are many things that have been presented as objective facts that are purely subjective opinions. And it's fine for us to feel, to think. But if we're going to state a fact, shouldn't we know all sides before we do that? And if someone else is stating a fact in the day where we are, doesn't that deserve—especially if our God, this God, is true—for us to look at all sides and explore it for ourselves, to find out for ourselves, as opposed to accepting and subscribing to the headlines other people want us to read? Yeah. That’s definitely a challenge, I think, that a lot of us have, in terms of a lot of people presume a lot of things based on headlines and bullet points and desires, things that their friends believe, whatever, without doing actually due diligence to look for themselves. So I appreciate that, because if you seek after truth, true truth, you will find it, right? Truth in the person of Christ. Wow! You’ve given us such a beautiful story, Loren. So much there. So much we could talk about, but your story arc is really, really beautiful. Again, I love not only the transformation, and the passion is very evident in your voice, but your desire for other people to know the Christ Whom you’ve found, the Christ Who is truth. And obviously He’s made a big difference in your life and the way that you see reality. But I also love the fact that you just haven’t decided, “That’s it,” and shut down. You continue to study. You continue to grow. You continue to test. You know, we’re called to test and see what is good and true and to hold on to that. And that's what you're continuing to do, as an analytical thinker, as a man who wants to know what is real, and to live like that, in truth and authenticity, and your message coming across is very authentic. And we need more Christians like you, Loren. So thank you so much for coming on to tell your story today. Thank you for having me. I enjoyed talking about it. Thanks for tuning in to Side B Stories to hear Loren Weisman's story. You can find out more about his work and his books and his recommended resources in the episode notes. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can contact me through our email at info@sidebstories.com. Also, if you're a skeptic or atheist who would like to connect with a former guest with your questions, please contact us, again through our email. This podcast is produced through the C.S. Lewis Institute through the wonderful help of our producer Ashley Decker and audio engineer Mark Rosera. You can also see these podcasts in video form on our YouTube channel through the excellent work of our video editor, Kyle Polk. If you enjoyed it, I hope you'll follow, rate, review, and share this podcast with your friends and social network. In the meantime, I'll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll see how another skeptic flips the record of their life. | |||
| Chasing Achievement – Dr. Vince Vitale’s Story | 18 Aug 2023 | 01:23:56 | |
A Princeton and Oxford graduate, former skeptic Dr. Vince Vitale valued autonomy and pursued high achievement as the greatest good in life. When investigating Christianity, he found it to be worth his ultimate belief, value, and trust. Vince's Resources:
Resources/authors recommended by Vince:
Jana Harmon's book: Atheists Finding God. Use code LXFANDF30 for a 30% discount offer at Rowman & Littlefield To find more stories of atheists and skeptics converting to Christianity, visit www.sidebstories.com There is a common idea in our culture that religion, at its foundation, is nothing more than a fairy tale to help those who are scared of the dark, that faith is blind, that only uneducated, weak people believe. There’s a sense that religion is nothing but merely wishful thinking for those who aren't themselves thinkers, that Christianity is a man-made religion with no connections to facts, reality, history, or evidence. But that begs the question: What of those who are thinkers, who are academically accomplished, who take their beliefs seriously as something substantive, worth believing, and for good reason. There’s something more than wishful thinking. Are they all deluded as a skeptic might suppose? Or could it be that an intelligent, thoughtful, serious-minded person may actually have investigated the claims of Christ and Christianity for themselves and found them to be convincing and true? This especially raises eyebrows for those who were skeptics of faith and then find themselves to become one of Christianity's most passionate proponents. Such a dramatic shift, from disbelief to belief, causes you to lean in and question what comparing evidence it must have taken to cause someone like them to change not only their views about God but change their entire life, helping others to see and know the truth about Christ that they’ve found. Today's story is just that. Vince Vitale was a thinking skeptic who did the hard work of investigating the claims of the Christian worldview and did not find them wanting. Rather, he became convinced that they were not only true, but they led him to the Author of all truth, Jesus Christ, and that his life has never been the same. Come and listen to his fascinating story. Welcome to Side B Stories, Vince. It’s so great to have you with me today. Oh, it's wonderful to be with you. I appreciate the invitation. Excellent. So the listeners can know a little bit about you, Vince, before we get started, can you give them an idea of perhaps where you life, a little bit of your life, maybe your academic background, and the things that you’re involved with now? Sure. I live currently in East Palo Alto, California. I've been here for just over a year. My wife, Jo, and our two kids, Raphael and JJ, now four and two years old. We were in Atlanta before that. We drove out here in our little Kia, and once you… At the time, they were even a bit younger. So once you include their two car seats and the pack and play and the stroller, it wasn't much room, so it was quite an adventure. Oh, I bet! But we loved it. We loved it and seeing a lot of the country. We’ve been out here for about a year now. We're part of a house church community that has really been family to us, welcomed us with open arms at a very difficult season in our lives. So we've been so thankful for that, and we’ve just felt like this has been a place of provision for us in a time when we really needed it. And we're close enough to the beach that I can get out to surf every couple weeks, which is a particular joy of mine. So I’m very thankful for that as well. Before that, we were actually in England. My wife is from England. We met in graduate school there. I was there for twelve years and then, before that, in New Jersey, which is where I was born and where I grew up and stayed through college. So you graduated both Princeton and Oxford, right? Yes. That’s right. Yeah. Princeton was my undergrad. And what was the focus of your study? It was both philosophy and theology, religion. Interestingly, I got to Princeton not as a Christian but as somehow knowing that I wanted to study philosophy, even though I had never taken a philosophy class in high school. It wasn’t offered at my high school, but somehow I just knew those were the types of questions I asked and the way my mind worked. And I've always thought there was a faithfulness of God in that, in that He put me on a trajectory that aligned with what I ultimately was called to, even before my heart was in a place where I could understand why that would be the case. That’s fascinating. Really interesting when you can look back and reflect on that and see God's hand in your life and the way that you were guided. And one other thing: Don’t you have a new opportunity in your life, something to do with Unbelievable? from Premier Radio? Yes. That’s right. Thank you, Jana. I'll be one of the hosts for the Unbelievable? podcast, which I’m really thankful for, especially because I feel like those types of conversations, as I assume we'll get into more even on this podcast, conversations between Christians and non-Christians in a constructive manner were such a big part of my own story. The questions I was asking initially, it would have been very easy for Christians to dismiss me, and they didn't. They actually disagreed with me really well. And so that’s part of my story. Wonderful! And we will…. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Unbelievable? podcast, we’ll put a link in the episode notes, so that you can find it. All right. It sounds like that you have had an intriguing life. I am curious, as someone…. Obviously you’re a deep thinker. Even going into college, you knew you were asking big questions. So let's back way up. Let's start in your childhood. And, Vince, tell us about what your family home was like. Where did you live? Where did you grow up? Was God a part of that picture? Did you go to church? All of that. Let’s start there. Sure. Okay. I grew up in New Jersey, Italian-American cultural background. I guess if you had asked my family if we were Christians, people would have said, “Well, of course. We’re Italians. Therefore, we're Christians.” It was part of the ethnic heritage, an important part of the ethnic heritage, but didn't generally reflect what we believed or how we went about our lives. So that's my cultural background. And from a religious perspective, again, it was cultural, ethnic, something we didn't think about too much throughout the year, and then, at like 10 pm on Christmas Eve, somebody would say, “You know what? We should go to Midnight Mass!” And then we’d gather up everyone and once a year maybe we would go to church. So I don't remember, as a young person, meeting many people who thought very seriously about questions of faith or for whom belief in God made a very significant difference. In terms of whether people believed in God or not, I wasn't able to discern a significant difference in terms of what life looked like, so I guess that's a bit about my background and maybe why I was asking the big questions of life but not clearly coming to the position of belief in God. So it was just something out there that you did on occasion, on Christmas, and really not much more than it. But again, you referred to yourself in a sense that you were a question asker. You were inquisitive. Yeah. Even as a child, I guess you were starting to just think about things, think about life or questions. What kinds of things were you thinking about? Yeah. That’s right. I mean, as you were saying that, I was just remembering. So I came across this letter to Santa a number of years ago. It was actually written on a paper plate. And so I have this paper plate, all yellowed around the edges, and as kids, my brother and I, we used to put letters in the chimney, and then Santa would, whisk them away, and we would hope to get what we asked for from Santa. And so, one Christmas—I think, based on the writing, I was just learning to write cursive, and so I think I was probably like six, seven years old, and I wrote on this paper plate, “Dear Santa and God, was God ever born?” And I put it in the fireplace. So there's a couple of interesting things about that. One, at a very young age, I'm realizing there are some difficult questions. Like there's a little bit of explaining to do when it comes to God. Okay, was God ever born? If not, can something just not have a beginning? So I was starting to ask questions like that, which explains a little bit the philosophy education later. But it's also very interesting that I wrote, “Dear Santa and God,” because I think, in my mind, I had trouble pulling them apart. They were conflated. Santa and God were both people who could see the way I was acting, were keeping a record of good and bad. You didn't want to be on their bad side. You might get good things if you're good. You get bad things if you’re bad. And they come by…. Again, maybe we’d go to church once a year. They come by once a year, and they don't stay long enough to say hello. It’s not something that would be relational, but both Santa and God were both this far off, disconnected thing in my mind. So yeah, that paper plate in some ways encapsulates my early childhood. I was asking difficult questions, seeing that there were these difficult questions that needed to be explained in some way, if God was going to make sense, but also having a very thin understanding of who God might be and having trouble differentiating between Santa and God. So then, I think, at some point, when Santa didn't exist, when I learned that Santa didn't exist, it then raises the question, especially if you think of Santa and God as very similar. “Okay, that was just a myth. And maybe this is just a myth as well.” So is that where you landed there for a while? It was just this concept, that perhaps was a childish way of thinking about good and bad, and maybe it was motivating me to be good for a little while, but that’s not really real. Yes. I think that's right. I think when I started to ask some of my hard questions about God to people who believed in Him, I often didn't get very robust answers. Maybe I had some reasons to question, “Why would God exist?” if Santa didn't, but it was also convenient for me, because I wanted to be my own god. I didn't like the idea of someone being superior to me, being better than me. I wanted very much to have control over my own life and very much had a philosophy of life which was, “You take control of your own life. You work hard. You are successful. You win this one big competition. You’re better than other people. You work to be the best, and that's where your value comes from.” And so if you, in a sense, surrender control of your life to someone else, well, then, “How am I supposed to have any value? Because all of my value comes from me controlling things and putting in the effort, and therefore being rewarded with things because of what I’ve achieved.” And there were things going on in my culture. There were things going on in terms of my family background, beginning to ask hard questions and maybe not getting robust answers, but it also was convenient for me to not take God very seriously because of the way I wanted to be at the center of things. So it was easy to leave behind and blaze your own trail, I guess, especially, like you say, as someone who's driven towards achievement. So as you were growing up, you were pushing those kind of questions to the background, at least with regard to God and religion and faith. I'm curious. As you were growing up and just maybe dismissed that, did you give any thought to really what that was? What was religion? As a thinker, I'm thinking, “Okay, if that's not real, if that’s just perhaps made up, or maybe nobody really believes it,” what was religion in your mind? All these people who went to services on Christmas, what was all that even for? What was that? Yeah. That’s an interesting question. I think to some extent I probably felt like it was something for the weak to some extent. If you needed someone else to tell you what was true about life, if you needed someone else to do the things for you in life that you can’t do for yourself…. I remember even at times in my youth coming up with my own philosophical, spiritual, metaphysical, whatever word you want to use paradigms for what was valuable in life and how you were supposed to order your priorities, but it was very much I, Vince, in the late 20th century, as an individual. “I'm going to figure out the way it's supposed to be. I'm going to figure out the correct philosophy. Everybody else has it wrong, and now, of all the billions of people who have lived….” Again because life was one big competition. And I, in sports and in academics, I had done well at things, and so it reinforced this idea of, “Okay, yeah. That’s a way that I can see the world and I can do well and I can have value. Because I can do well at sports, be better than other people. I can do well in academics, be better than other people.” And so now, when it comes to the deep questions of life, “Okay, let me create my own philosophical mindset.” That kind of thing. Nobody else was smart enough to figure this out yet. “It's of the universe, but now I figured it out.” And it sounds very silly and arrogant, and it was, but it's kind of the natural conclusion and the natural place that you come to, if you think life is all about one big competition. Whatever it is, sports, academics, or your philosophy of the universe, you need to create it yourself, and it needs to be better than everyone else's. And yet, even during this time, when I think I was just resisting God in my heart in a really serious way, I now look back, and there are a few moments where—probably many moments when He was reaching out to me. But there are a few that I now look back on and think, “Whoa! How gracious of God to interact with me in that way, give me that experience, at a time when I had my hand up to Him saying, ‘No, thank you.’” Just one example: I was in high school, and I rear-ended a car in front of me. And so we get out of the car, and the man says we should exchange insurance. And so I go back to the car. I’m thinking, “Oh, this is terrible!” I go back to the car and get my insurance. Sick to my stomach. We walk towards each other. I go to give him my insurance card, and it's like something just stopped him. I would now say the Holy Spirit just stopped him. And he looked me, and he said, “You know what? My family's going through a really hard time. Why don't you just agree to pray for us, and we'll just leave it at that?” Oh, my! That’s unusual! Yeah. Right? And at the time…. Now, I reflect back on that, and I think, “What an incredible encounter!” Here’s someone…. My mistake had a cost for him, but he was the owner of that car. He had the right to say, “You know what? I'm going to take this cost on myself.” He still had to go get that car repaired. “In taking that cost on myself, instead I'm going to invite this stranger, who's done nothing but actually harm me and my property, into relationship with me and my family.” I mean, it was this beautiful depiction of the gospel. At the time, I wouldn't have been able to put any of that wording to it, but I did walk away deeply moved and thinking, “That is not how I would have responded in that situation. There’s something going on in that guy’s heart which is different from what’s going on in my heart.” So even amidst all of this keeping God at arm’s length, God was very gracious and reaching out to me in a variety of ways. Yeah. That was a beautiful picture of grace. But it seems to me that you were, like I think a lot of people…. All of us find ourselves in this situation. And many times where we’re independent, we’re fine on our own. “I’ve got this.” You obviously had some skill, some talent athletically, intellectually. You were able to achieve what you wanted to achieve, and so it sounds to me as if you had no felt need for God. Like you say, that you were the strong. You were the one who's got it in control. You’re the one who's going to figure it out. And that you had no need of God. And I think a lot of people find themselves in that place. They don't need the control or the interference or however they perceive God to be. But yet you've got this amazing picture, like you were in a little place of need- Yes. … and you received grace. That's incredible! Yeah. That's a great way to put it. That's absolutely right. I think that's what it was. It was God prodding me, trying to show me, “You do have need. You do have need. You couldn’t take a breath if it wasn't for me.” And part of it, I think, was, you have to do quite a bit of self-deception to get to the place of feeling you don't have any need. And part of that, for me, was always rationalizing that I had been right, and other people had been wrong. When there was conflict in relationship, when I had hurt people, it couldn't be the case that I was actually wrong and in need of forgiveness, even in need of a Savior. So I needed to use my persuasive abilities as a budding philosopher to always convince others and convince myself that I had been in the right and they had been wrong. So I think you're right. I think I was in this place of not thinking I had a need. Part of that was because circumstantially I had been able to be good at some of the things that you’re told to be good at as a kid, but then it also required quite a bit of self-deception on my part as well, to always find a way, persuasively, philosophically in my head to place myself in the right and other people in the wrong. Right. Yeah. I think sometimes it’s easy to put ourselves in those places. You had mentioned that, even prior to going to Princeton, that you were a young man who liked to think about big ideas. That, going into Princeton, that’s why you pursued philosophy. What kinds of questions or ideas were you considering even as a high schooler prior to college that made you want to go on that trajectory? Oh, yeah. Testing my memory now. I remember thinking about questions like, “Where did everything come from?” Which I still think is an amazing question and one that people spend far too little time thinking about. Sometimes we can go our whole lives without taking a few steps back and going, “Where did all of this come from?” Right! And the intricacy of the fact that we're sitting here as cognitive beings, talking to each other over a technological platform that’s somehow beaming stuff through the air. It’s all just incredible. So I think I had—maybe it was God given—an innate sense of awe and wonder at the reality of life. And that caused me to think hard about things. I think I thought quite a bit about love and purpose, some of the big questions of life. I thought about what it meant to live a good life, what was the good life. There was quite a bit of idealism, I think, in my childhood as well, that sort of… partly because I hadn't dealt with much suffering yet, I had been good at the things I put my hand to, and so there was kind of sense of, “Anything is possible,” which I now think is true. True with God because of His power, not because of my power and my ability. So, there was this sense in which a lot of what I was striving towards and my thinking and my mind, there were remnants of truth in it, but they didn't make full sense if I was at the center of the universe and I was the one who needed to both come up with these answers and live out the ideals that I had in mind. Right. So yeah. If you're skeptical of God being present or pervasive in this world in any way. I would imagine trying to figure out some of those big questions and issues would have been somewhat challenging without kind of a source of reality. When you were asking those big questions, and even going into Princeton when you’re starting into a rigor of asking those big questions, did that prompt you to think, “Well, how is all of this possible if God doesn’t exist?” Did it cause you to reconsider that as an option, as more than just a Santa Claus figure that you had dismissed? Yes, I think so. At least to the extent of: Did there have to be some sort of cause to the universe? Did that cause need to be intelligent in some respect? But even as I began to think about some of those questions, even as I began to take philosophy classes at Princeton, it was also still very convenient for me to keep any conception of God that I might have—I don’t know if I would have used that language—even any conception of a first cause—as still quite detached and far away, more of a deistic understanding. Something that would allow me to explain certain things that seemed to need explaining but also wouldn't have much bearing on my own life, wouldn't infringe on my life and my control of it and the way that I wanted to live it. And probably I thought more along those lines until I came into contact with Christians and a Christian community in particular, where… I think up until then it was like, “Well, I have some thoughts about these big questions of life, and everybody else does, too. And nobody has very much confidence in them, and I've been able to reason better than those people to this point, so my thoughts are probably better than most people's thoughts.” And then I encountered a community of people that had a confidence about their understanding of the universe and God’s place in it, and that was drastically different than anything I had experienced to that point, and that caused a lot of cognitive dissonance for me. I didn't know what to do with that. And they seemed in a much better place than me with respect to their understanding of and their experience of reality. And probably even the competitor in me was bothered by that, and me wanting to do more thinking. Right. Yeah. So who were these people exactly? And how did you encounter… because oftentimes we, especially if you think that you're fine without God and religious believers are a little bit weak-minded and those kinds of things. I’m just curious: How did your paths cross? I’m presuming you’re speaking of Christians that you encountered or some kind of community of Christians? Yes. How did that happen actually? Yes, yes. Who were these people that turned my life upside down? Who were these people? Yeah! Who were they? Right. And it was amazing. In some ways, it's a superficial answer. Soccer teammates. Okay. One of the amazing things about sports is that you bring together in not just a superficial way but in quite a deep, “We’re bonded to each other,” way, a great diversity of people, all because we happen to be able to kick a ball reasonably well. And so I was on the soccer team as a freshman, just starting at Princeton. And there were two sophomores who were serious about their faith, who were Christians. I didn't know this at the time. They invited me to a meeting of Athletes in Action, which is a Christian fellowship. I didn't know what a campus ministry was. I didn't know what a Christian fellowship was. I didn't know what the word evangelical meant. I mean, all of this would have been outside the box of my awareness. I knew it was something Christian, and I had a kind of cultural Christianity in my background, but the bottom line was it had “athlete” in the title, Athletes in Action, and I was being invited by two teammates of mine, so that was enough for me to go along. We were a few minutes late to this first meeting, and I remember walking in the back of the room, and one of the most impactful split-second moments of my life was when I walked in and I saw these Princeton students, peers of mine, other people who had fought their whole life to be the best, to be praised as perfect, and they were singing their hearts out to this invisible God. And I instinctively immediately knew, “Whatever these people mean when they say that they’re Christian is different from what my family and cultural background means by that term.” And then I began to just observe this and even listen to the lyrics of some of the songs, and I realized, “These Princeton students are praising, worshiping this God, precisely because of how much greater He is than them.” But remember my philosophy of life was that life was all about being the best, being better than other people. If somebody was better than you, that made them an enemy, and then you had to do everything you can to try to top them, and here were these successful Christians students humbling themselves, singing their hearts out, and this intimacy, treating God like their best friend, when the fact that He was greater than them should have made Him an enemy. So I don't know if I could have put all that language to it at the moment, but I do think that that's what I was experiencing and what I was feeling. And I walked out of that meeting, and I can remember that I began to pray an agnostic’s prayer. I thought, “These people know something and have experienced something that I don't know and I haven’t experienced,” and bothered me. And I can remember philosophically reasoning to myself that, “If there is a God, He would honor a prayer of this sort: God, I don't know if I'm talking to anyone, but if I am I would really like to know about it.” And I began to pray that prayer after my experience of that meeting. Was that prayer answered in any way? It was. It was eventually. And that was a process. And I'm so thankful for this community that came alongside me. This Athletes in Action community came alongside me in that journey. I was challenged to read the Bible. I started with the New Testament. I hadn’t really read through it before. And I was challenged to read before I made a decision about faith, and when I first began to work through this Bible that I was given, I would actually cross things out, when I disagreed. I would add things, what I thought I knew better. I actually have this old Bible where I'd write a big “BS” in the margin where I disagreed. Not for Bible study. Right. Unfortunately. And so looking back now, I think, “Well done, Christian brothers and sisters,” because I would have been so easy to dismiss. Like, “Here’s a guy. We tell him to read the Bible. He’s literally crossing things out and writing BS in the margin of his Bible.” It would’ve been easy for them to just say, “Hey, let's move on to the next guy. This guy is just too far from that. He's too arrogant in his own thinking.” Yeah. I- But they journeyed with me. But how amazing that you actually took the challenge. Yes. And you opened a Bible. And you actually read it for yourself, rather than just presuming what you knew was in it or dismissing it out of hand. You actually opened it and started reading. The things that were giving you trouble, were they the miraculous? The seeming supernatural? Or, like, “Oh, this can never have happened!” That kind of thing? Or were there also some surprises like, “This is not what I thought it was. This is more historical in nature.” Or any thoughts? What were you thinking as you were reading through the Bible for the first time? Yes. All of the above. And I like how you point out, “But, hey! You did take the challenge.” And even in that, there's a real graciousness of God, because it was probably partly my competitiveness, which in some ways had been my downfall in terms of my understanding of spirituality and what was in my heart. And yet even that God was able to use as part of my story. Maybe I wasn't that interested, but nobody challenges me, and I don't do it, so, “I'll take the challenge, I’ll read the Bible, and I'll read it faster than anybody else read it!” So I didn't like the idea that other people knew the Bible better than I did. They were able to speak with competence about the Christian ideas in a way that I was not able to. So there were probably very mixed motives in my heart, some good, some bad, but God was able to use even that. And I began to read through, only having read snippets before. I found myself very drawn to the person of Jesus, the way that He carried Himself, the way that He treated people. “You who are without sin, throw the first stone.” “Pray for your enemies.” “Love your enemies.” “Pray for those who persecute you.” “Do to others as you would have done to yourself.” I’m reading of all of these noble lines, and I'm attracted to the person of Jesus, but then, like you said, I then get to claims of virgin birth and resurrection, and I think, in part, I just thought, “It’s too crazy to believe.” But then I took the challenge, and I kept reading, and in particular, when I got to the Acts of the Apostles, that history of the early church after the Gospels, I started to come across all sorts of words that I never expected to see in the Bible, words like “examined” and “convinced” and “explained” and “debated” even “proved.” “Persuaded.” I read that the Bereans were more noble than the Thessalonians. Why? Not because they took some blind leap of faith, but it says, “Because they examined the scriptures daily to determine if what they were being told was true.” And the more I read through in particular Acts of the Apostles and saw how much the early church was spending their time reasoning with people and saying, “This is believable.” By the end of that book, I had to say to myself, “Okay, this is actually not a faith that’s asking me to take a blind leap of faith or to park my brain at the door,” and that was very important to me because I was already studying philosophy. I felt that would lack integrity, and I had to come to the conclusion, “This is a faith that's asking me to love God with my mind.” And that at least opened the door for me to pursue that further. Wow. So you invested enough to be willing. It sounds like curiosity, competition, challenge at the beginning, but then there was something that grabbed you. Of course, the person of Christ grabbed you, and then the narrative grabbed you, and then the seeming intellectual rigor of it somehow grabbed you. So take us along this path. What happened? Did you continue to… I mean obviously you're wrestling with some difficult issues of what you're finding, but I guess it's still pulling you in the direction towards belief. Yes. And at this point, it's a whirlwind going on in my mind as I’m trying to get my head around all of these new ideas and keep up with my classes and sports. But I was. You’re right. I was grabbed by the person of Jesus, and that kept me investing. Even by the time I got to the end of the gospels, I realized, “Boy, Jesus made some really incredible claims about Himself.” And maybe, having read snippets, I knew that to some extent, and I probably thought, “Oh, people probably made up a couple of those later.” But it wasn't until I read through in its entirety that I realized, “These are all over the place. There’s dozens of them,” you know? Yeah. For those who are listening, what kinds of claims was Jesus making about Himself? He’s claiming that your eternal destiny is dependent on what you believe about Him. That if you believe in Him, even though you die, you will live. He's claiming that He’s the Lord of the Sabbath, when it was talking about what we're allowed to do on the Sabbath or not. I mean, the Sabbath is one of the ten commandments from a Christian perspective. He's the Lord. He has authority over the Sabbath. He’s referring to himself most frequently as Son of Man, which I learned around the time refers back to Daniel 7 and this sort of eschatological picture of God coming on the clouds of heaven as the Son of Man. He claimed to exist before Abraham, who existed thousands of years ago. All these claims! He claimed to forgive sin, not just sin against Himself, but to just be able to blanket make a statement that someone sins are forgiven. And that's a very weird claim. If one person sins against another, I can't just pronounce that the person's sin is forgiven when it's not even against me. All of these claims. And I feel like the force of that when I read through the gospel straight through and saw that there are dozens of these types of claims popping up. I thought, “Boy, there’s a really good case to be made that historically Jesus was making some absolutely radical claims about Himself,” which leaves you with only so many options in terms of how you think about Him. He could have been a vicious liar, but it would have to be a vicious liar, because He knew full well that his best friends were getting persecuted and ultimately going to be killed for believing what he was telling them. It could be that He was severely mentally ill and had deep, deep deceptions about who He was, and that just doesn't align, to me, with the composure that you see in His life throughout the gospels. It could be that He’s actually telling the truth, which seemed remarkable, but if you don't have any other good alternatives, then all of a sudden it becomes viable. So that was significant for me. I kept reading, I got to 1 Corinthians 15, you know? The gospels had spoken about Jesus' resurrection, but then, in particular, when I got to 1 Corinthians 15, and there's this list of people that Jesus appeared to after He clearly had been killed. And I learned around the time that scholars take much of that beginning of 1 Corinthians 15 and in particular the content of it to be extremely early, to be dated to within months or a couple of years of Jesus' death. Not just Christian scholars, but scholars in general. And that was extremely significant for me, because I had just sort of assumed that the idea of a resurrection would have been something that developed in a legendary way over time. Nobody really believed that in the first generation but probably six, seven, eight generations later, you have slow, incremental changes, and now people believe something crazy. This passage, this early creed in 1 Corinthians 15, which predates the letter, it confronted me with the reality that, in that first generation, there were many people who were walking around utterly convinced that they were spending time with this man, after He clearly had been killed. And so it then raised the question, what explains that? And I understood that, from a Christian perspective, that is explainable by the actual resurrection of Jesus. When I then went looking for other alternative explanations, I found them to be very wanting or even nonexistent in many cases. And so again, gradually, through this process of reading through the scriptures and thinking my way through the scriptures, in the context of community, I was coming more and more to the realization that this is a rational faith. This is a faith that can be defended, and it's quite amazing. In the same way that the apostles were doing in the Acts of the Apostles, you know? Acts 17. It also says God has provided proof to everyone by raising Jesus from the dead, and that's what they were persuading people of in that first generation, and now, 2000 years later, I'm reading through and having conversations with Christians, and it's the very same arguments that are having an impact on me. So it sounds like, through your study and through your conversation with those who were informed, you yourself were becoming more convinced that perhaps God exists, and Jesus is God, and that He died and rose again, and that resurrection was not just some historical event, but it meant something for you personally. Yes. And that's why it was so significant that I was going through this intellectual process, but it was in the context of a community I was observing, and again, I don't know if I could have put this language to it, but I think it was almost like I was saying, “Okay, this is what the conclusions that my reasoning seems to be coming to. In the community that I'm seeing live together, am I seeing lived out in practice the conclusions that I'm coming to here?” If there really was a resurrection from the dead, if the scriptures are actually accurate in saying that the same spirit that rose Jesus from the dead comes to live within the believer, am I actually seeing a difference in this community that would make sense of that? And over time, I found that that was the case. And I feel like it was experiences with this community aligned with the conclusions I was coming to by reasoning things through, that really made me feel, “This makes sense in my head, and it makes sense in my heart,” and that's what I would expect. If God made all of me, then he would want His existence to make sense to me in a holistic way. So I'm sitting here, thinking of this young man who, prior to coming to Princeton and meeting this amazing community, you were a young man who… you described yourself as arrogant. And pursuing self achievement and competitive and not wanting anyone to tell you what to do basically, that you had it figured out. Now, when it comes to this Christian community and seeing the humility involved with their faith, like you had described earlier, that they were worshiping a God Who’s bigger and greater and grander than they are. And that somehow they had submitted themselves in worship to this person Jesus, Who received worship, Who claimed to be God and He received worship. And somehow He’s worthy of it. I'm thinking how you might have been wrestling with coming to grips with the idea of, “What if this is true? What does this mean for me, for my life, for the way that I see myself, the way that I see my own life? C.S. Lewis says, “Is this the hound of heaven, coming to interfere? Break and be the iconoclast who breaks all of my- Yes. … my preconceptions of who He is and who I am,” and I'm sure that there must have been some wrestling? Or was it just a simple kind of like, “No. This is true,” and somehow, like you say, in your heart, you kind of turned towards, “This is really what I want. If this is true,” then your desires kind of conformed to that reality. Yes. I think it's a very perceptive question, because I probably could have gotten to this point in my journey and still never really surrendered myself to Christ. I could have gotten to a point of intellectual assent and even admiration for Jesus and for the community that He had set up, or that I had experienced in this context, at least, without actually being this sense of, like you said, humbling myself and actually worshiping Jesus. That was another step on my journey. And for me, it really came later in my journey. This happened over a period of about nine months, from when I first went to that meeting to when I actually gave my life to Jesus. But later in that process was a point where, and I think the Lord just knew when the right timing was for me, when knew enough to experience this in the right and most helpful way, but I really felt the conviction of sin in my life, and in some ways, really, for the first time in a deep and sustained way. Again, because I was so adept and in the habit of rationalizing and explaining away my sin beforehand. But now it was clear to me—and I think that was gift of the Holy Spirit. It was clear to me that certain things were wrong in my life, certain things I was doing were wrong, and I can remember…. So now I'm in sort of like two worlds, right? The Holy Spirit’s convicting me of sin, but there’s still part of me that's like, “But I'm in control. I’m powerful. I'm the divine one. I can make what I want of my life.” So I had this conviction of sin from the Spirit. And I sort of accepted that. And I can remember thinking to myself, “Okay, well, if now I believe that that's wrong, I'll just stop doing that. On my strength. I’ll just sort of flip the switch, and we won't do that anymore.” And I can remember trying to do that and falling flat on my face. And then thinking, “Okay, I obviously didn't try hard enough. Okay, now I'll try harder.” Flat on my face. “Okay, now I need to try as hard as I possibly can. Okay, now let me try as hard as I possibly can.” Flat on my face. And it was sort of the first time in my life where I came to and was willing to accept the conclusion that I'm actually weak. There's sin in my life that I am helpless to do anything about, to even understand fully without the help of Someone Who’s greater than me. And that was very much the most significant place that I needed to come to in my heart. And it was really essential that I came to that place before I made a commitment to Christ. I had to get to a place where I was ready to see Jesus as my Savior. I think, before then, I might have even been willing to say, “Look, logically it makes sense. Rationally, yep. He’s God. He’s the one that actually created the universe,” but that's different than saying, “And I required saving, and He saved me.” So that was a very important part of my story. Yeah. Sometimes it just is a process, isn’t it. And I think sometimes we need to be patient with ourselves and with others, as they're trying to figure things out and moving in the direction of God. I love your honesty there. It's very transparent. Because we are all guilty. I think the word says we’re all guilty. And we are. Yes. And we all need saving from ourselves. And that takes such a posture of humility, that is oftentimes, for all of us, unnatural. It’s an unnatural state. But once you get there, it seems like there's a lot of freedom that comes from that, and a burden that is lifted once you give that burden to Christ. So I'm wondering. I'm sure your life changed quite a bit after you came to that place of surrender, not only in your life, in your pursuits and the way you answered questions, but it probably, in a sense, as a thinker, I would imagine asking these big questions, you can see how the reality of God really does bring things into focus, in terms of it does help answer the big questions of life. As a philosopher, how is it, through being a believer in Christ, you believe the word, and that it’s not for weak-minded individuals. It’s actually a pretty robust worldview to believe in. How has it shaped your understanding, really, of things intellectually and in your life? Yes. I love that you used the word freedom. That's probably the word that most characterizes what my experience was of making that decision to surrender my life to Christ. Not everyone has a specific moment, but for me, there was a moment in my dorm room. I was in 122 Joline Hall, and it wasn't… I was reading a book at the time, but it wasn't like there was something very specific in that book. I think God just knew it was the right time, in terms of the process He had taken me on in both my head and my heart and the context of community, to give me the gift of faith. And I just somehow knew in my spirit, in a way that so far transcended any of my calculations or philosophizing, that God was real, that Jesus was Who He claimed to be, that He was present with me, that He loved me, what He had done for me. Nobody was in the room, but I dropped to my knees, and I exclaimed out loud. I said, “Oh, my gosh! This really happened!” And freedom, I think, was the experience. And since then, this freedom to stop competing to be loved and to start enjoying it. There was no rest before that, because I always had to compete for my value and to be loved. And now I could rest in that and just enjoy being loved. And yet I competed harder than ever, whether it was on the sports field or with my academic studies, but it actually wasn't a competition against other people. It was an opportunity to worship God in gratitude for what He had given me. Now it’s like, “Well, I’m not doing this for myself. I’m doing this for the God of the universe.” So, interestingly, sometimes people think, “Okay, well God gives us our value. God loves us no matter what, so we don't really need to work hard at anything.” At least my experience was I felt the freedom to work harder and to really pour myself into the things that I was passionate about because now it was, “Well, this is not just my individual preference. This is a calling given to me by God. There's something eternal about this. The good things will last for eternity. They’re not just transient. They won't just pass away. This isn't just for myself. This is honoring Someone Who has done so much for me, Who gave their life for me. And this is my opportunity to give my life back to them in service.” So I found that there was a freedom, a rest, but even in that rest, a passion to pursue the things that I had been inclined to with even more tenacity. That’s so beautiful. What a tremendous paradigm shift, really. In the way that you… Like you say, I appreciate that, that you're still working… You’re working hard, but it's with a different lens. It's with a different perspective and a different motivation. And you're still striving for excellence. It’s just the motivation is different. That’s right. And the goodness of God that, again, He actually wove into my story things that he had given early on in life, even when I didn't know what to do with them, like an ability to persuade. From a young age, I was good at persuasion. I debated with people a lot, but I generally just used that to my advantage. How could I persuade people that I was better than I was? Persuade myself into a situation? Persuade people that they were wrong and I was right? And yet, there was something in the persuasion that was good. It was just corrupted. Now, in the context of my Christian life, I wound up on a missions trip. I didn't know what a missions trip meant. I just knew we were going down to this conference. I knew it had a Christian element to it, but it was actually a trip where you walked the beach and shared the gospel with other people who were down there for spring break, looking for lots of things other than hearing the gospel, but an older brother in Christ sort of took me under his wing. We walked on the beach. He gave me a couple opportunities to just share about what God was doing in my life and the journey I had been on. And as I did, there's one man whose face I can still remember, because as I shared with him, I don't know exactly what happened in his heart, but I remember seeing in his eyes like something was making sense. Some sort of burden was falling away, and there was kind of a clarity, and he was seeing Jesus more for who Jesus really is. And it was like, in that moment, I knew that's what I was made for. I knew I was supposed to spend… I didn’t know exactly what forms, but in one way or another, I was supposed to spend the rest of my life telling people about Jesus, and persuading people of Jesus, not in a manipulative way, but sharing with them the truths of both the mind and the heart that I had experienced. And so there's just this beauty where I knew in some ways that I was geared toward persuasion. That’s why I was already choosing to study philosophy before I ever came to faith. But now it was like, “Oh! Now I get it. Now I understand why I have such this inclination towards persuasion, because You’ve actually built me to share You with others,” and I would have been just chasing a perishable crown of getting people to think better of me or getting myself into situations I didn't really deserve to be in. Now I'm actually using the same gift, but for an imperishable crown, for things of eternal significance. So, I was so thankful for that, and yes, a lot changed, in terms of both my intellectual perspective on things and my personal experience of life. One of those things for me, which I'm so thankful for, was about asking for forgiveness, because before I came to think I would never ask for forgiveness, never ever, because that meant I was wrong, which meant I wasn't better than other people, which meant I wasn't valuable, which meant I was a lovable, and, you know, go down the whole spiral. So I couldn't ask for forgiveness. And so I then had to live with a lot of self-deception about why I was right and other people were wrong. And this was partly cultural. In my Italian-American background, in my family, people really didn't do reconciliation. They got mad at each other, and then they didn't talk until no one could remember why they were mad in the first place. And then one person would show up at the other person's doorstep with a tomato plant. And it was always a tomato plant, Italians. And then they'd say, “Oh! Brother!” And then they would hug it out. But no words exchanged, no apology, no forgiveness. And then things would just kind of move forward. But all that to say, the week that I came to faith, one of the next mornings, I woke up with a flood of conviction about ways that I had hurt people in the past, all instances where previously I had rationalized to myself, got myself to believe that I had been in the right and they had been in the wrong. And now the Holy Spirit was giving me actual clarity of thought about these situations and where I had actually hurt people. Not condemnation, but conviction, almost a freeing conviction, the freedom to actually live in reality and acknowledge truth. And I felt this compulsion to sit down, and I began to just write letter after letter to these people, acknowledging ways that I had hurt them and apologizing, and I saw God do some beautiful reconciliation and peace making through that and have sort of fallen in love with forgiveness, given and received. But as someone, I mean, again, just to remind our listeners, you are no slouch when it comes to intellectual rigor and you went on from Princeton to Oxford to pursue a degree in philosophy there at the doctoral level. So what prompted you to do that? It was the goodness of God that I was already studying philosophy. Even when I was not following Him, He sort of set me up to be able to do that, to study something that was aligned with what I was called to. And so my interest became more and more theological but retained a philosophical element as well. And I really got into philosophy of religion, arguments for and against the existence of God, questions about the nature of God. Some of the questions that really can act as obstacles to people taking faith seriously. Some of which acted as obstacles to me to taking faith seriously. And so I had a passion to study those questions. Really because I began to share the faith with people after that experience on that missions trip at the beach. And as I would share my faith with people, people would then have questions. Sometimes very good questions. Sometimes very hard questions. And so, for me, it wasn't just a philosophical interesting questions for the sake of questions. I did have that kind of naturally. I feel like God maybe gave that to me because of what He was going ultimately to call me to, but really the primary motivation to dig deeper in this area was sharing the faith and people asking questions and realizing part of what it meant to love them well would be to take their questions seriously and try to provide them with good answers. And so, even though I was studying philosophy at an academic level, I always thought of it as part of my service to actual people that I was going to meet in a taxi or an Uber or getting a haircut or in the context of community in some way. Yeah. That’s pretty beautiful. I mean, again, your heart was directed towards God's inner purposes, and that is a sacrifice in itself, that kind of rigor that you experienced but was for the sake of the Lord and for others. That’s amazing! And I'm thinking, Vince, of those who are intellectually driven, and they, for personal reasons, have resisted the person of God and think they're fine without him. But yet, curious enough, maybe your story has sparked in them an interest to think, “Well, maybe it is true.” What would you say to someone like that, who might be willing to move towards maybe reading the Bible or even saying that agnostic’s prayer or something? How can you encourage someone who is… It sounds like you have these kind of encounters with skeptics a lot, so what would you say? Yes. Yeah. Thank you. One encouragement I would give would be not to dismiss Christianity because it seems crazy, not to dismiss it because it makes extraordinary, incredible claims. I think that was a mistake that I made. It was almost like all the different philosophies or worldviews were lined up on a race on the starting line, but Christianity starts three steps further back than everyone else because it makes these claims about a virgin birth and the resurrection from the dead. And I think that that was bad reasoning on my part. And so I would encourage people not to think that way. I mean, there are so many things in the world that just are extraordinary. I mean, even at the moment, some of our best versions of quantum physics suggest that the same particle can be in two places at once. That's crazy! But when a quantum physicist says that, we think, “Cool!” But when a Christian says that God is omnipresent, that He can, in some significant sense, be in various places at once, we think, “Oh, that's too crazy to believe.” Don't dismiss Christianity because it seems extraordinary. Actually take a step back and think that through. I mean, even when you think about that question that we started with, “Where did all of this come from?” There are only three options: Either God created it, it just burst into existence out of nothing for no reason whatsoever, or it's just always been here. It just extends infinitely back in time in this universe or through a series of universes but again with no explanation for why that's the case. And from my perspective, I'm willing to put my hand up and say, “Okay. The idea of an immaterial God creating the universe? That’s extraordinary! That’s awe inspiring!” I'll put my hand up and accept that. But criticism without alternative is empty. Maybe that's the phrase I would leave people with. Don't just criticize a Christian faith because you think it's extraordinary. Think through the alternatives, and you might come to the conclusion, and you think, “Boy, Christians believe in a virgin birth. That’s extraordinary! But you know what? I sort of believe in the virgin birth of an entire universe, because that's the best scientific explanation I have for it. Wow! That’s extraordinary, too!” I think we live in an extraordinary world, and so we shouldn't be surprised if the explanations for that world are quite extraordinary as well. So don't dismiss Christianity. Actually look into it. Don't criticize without having an alternative, whether it's the beginning of the universe, origin, or whether it's questions of meaning or destiny or purpose or morality. Put the different ways of seeing the world side by side, and even if one seems quite extraordinary say, “Okay, what is the alternative?” And if you can't find an alternative that answers all the questions of life in such a robust way and in such a coherent way, then I think you really need to take Christianity seriously. And maybe one more thing I’d say, Jana, if that's okay- Sure. … is I really believe that… I resonate with what Pascal said: This is sort of a paraphrase, but he said, “God's given us enough evidence to believe rationally but not so much that we can believe based on reason alone.” And I think that's because He doesn't want just intellectual assent. He wants us to use our minds to pursue Him, to seek Him. He wants our whole selves. He wants that. But also, at the end of the day, He doesn't want people who just intellectually assent to Him. He wants us to know Him in a deeper way, in a relational way. And G.K. Chesterton said there are two ways to choose a coat. One is to look at the dimensions of the coat, what size it is, how long the arms are, the shoulder width. The other way is to try it on. And I think both are important. Like, for me, on my journey, I never would have picked the coat up and tried it on unless I was able to look at the dimensions of science and philosophy and history and say, “Yeah, that looks like it's roughly the right size. That looks reasonable.” But for a season, I felt that, “You know what? I'm not gonna take any sort of vulnerable relational step of commitment toward God until I have all my questions answered, I have perfectly analyzed all of the dimensions, and then I will know with certainty what I want to know to such an extent that then it will be easy for me to make a faith commitment to that thing.” What I actually found, in my experience, is that the confidence and assurance, the type of knowledge that I longed for, was actually only possible through an act of personal commitment and trust. So there does come a point in this journey where you say, “Yeah, this is rational. This is as rational as any other faith system or worldview that I've been able to compare it to,” and yet at the end of the day, the Lord does say, “Taste and see. Clothe yourself in Christ.” There's a knowledge that transcends just the knowledge of philosophy or history. And there's an invitation to open the door to that knowledge, to take that step when the time is right. So I think we all, as Christians, are sitting back in admiration in some ways, of you as a very educated Christian, someone who has a heart for engagement ever since that moment on the beach. And we all, I think, want people to know Christ the way that we do, as true and loving and full of grace. But we don't always know the best way to engage with those who really don't believe, and those who are skeptical, those who push back. And so, sitting where you do now, having lived and engaged for a number of years, how would you encourage us as Christians to think about stepping out or stepping forward or engaging in a way that's meaningful as ambassadors for Christ? I love that question. I'll try to keep it concise, because this is where my heart really gets excited, when people get excited about sharing Jesus with other people, and I think the opportunities are boundless. Take a very simple question, like, “How was your weekend?” How many times will you be asked that question over the course of your life? Say you get asked it five times every Monday for the rest of your life. I mean, that's thousands and thousands of times that you're asked the question, “How was your weekend?” And so often as Christians, we just say, “Fine. Thanks. How was yours?” But if you worshiped the living God in the context of community on a Sunday, I mean, that's not even an honest answer, right? 1 Peter 3 tells us to be prepared to give a response to everyone who asks us for the reason for the hope that we have. And I think sometimes we take that much too narrowly, like, “Okay, let me be prepared for the specific instance where someone says, ‘Hey, can you tell me about the hope that you have in Christ?’” And we don't realize that those opportunities are there all the time. If you have worshiped the living God in the context of community on a Sunday, the question on Monday, “How was your weekend?” is an absolute gift, and it should not take you by surprise. You know full well that question’s coming on Monday. So put some prayer into it, put some thought into it, that you can have this creative, engaging, not manipulative, real answer to that question on a Monday. I find that oftentimes we find it so difficult to wind up talking about Jesus in conversation because so often we're trying to get from shooting the breeze to Jesus and that's a big jump. But if we could spend more of our time in the middle ground of asking creative questions, having meaningful conversations about things that matter, Jesus makes His way into those conversations quite naturally. I would say to people… I would say don't water down the faith in your desire for people to commit to Jesus. God doesn't need us to be His marketing campaign, where we try on our own to make Him more appealing to people or think, “Oh, okay. If I put it this way but don't mention that and don't mention that, maybe it'll be a little bit easier for them to make this commitment.” Just remember, Jesus said, “Whoever would come after Me, be My disciple, must deny themselves, take up their cross daily, and follow me.” So be honest with people. We actually…. You used the word surrender earlier, Jana, and I think that's the right word. We do a disservice to people if we make an invitation to Christ but water it down and make them think it's something less than surrender. Because that's different. It's even different than commitment. There are lots of things I'm committed to. I'm a committed New York Yankees fan. My dad was before me. My son hopefully will be. I’ll be a New York Yankees fan the day I die. But I'm not surrendered to the New York Yankees. Right! That’s a very different type of relationship, and I think sometimes we have this tendency to think God needs us to sort of re-calibrate His gospel or what it means to follow Him in some ways. Resist that. Resist that temptation. Pray for God's heart for people. I think that is so significant, because at the end of the day, God will use you when your heart breaks for the lost. So pray for that, because we all can have that. It’s not something we can manifest. It’s something God can give as a gift, and I believe will give to those who ask Him. And then the last thing I would say is just an encouragement, an encouragement that God is always doing more than we can see, nevertheless. Not too long ago I had an encouragement in this respect with regard to my own story. So I told you that I came to Christ in 122 Joline Hall. That was my dorm room. That's where I dropped to my knees. A few years ago, I was telling my story somewhere, and I didn't normally mention that specific room number, because most people… that doesn't mean anything to anyone. But I happened to say that room number, 122 Joline Hall, and afterwards a woman came to the front, and I could see she was teary, she was emotional, she was moved, and she said, “Did you say 122 Joline Hall?” And I said, “Yes. That was my dorm room.” And she said, “Well, I'm about 15 years older than you, and I went to Princeton, too, and I lived in 121 Joline Hall, next door.” And she said, “I spent my four years in college praying for the salvation of the guys in 122 Joline Hall.” And she said, “All these years, I’ve felt like God didn't hear that prayer, because I never saw that prayer answered, but as you said that from the front, I realized that God not only heard my prayer, but He answered my prayer word for word for the salvation of the guys in 122 Joline Hall.” And so just the graciousness of God, that 15 years before I even would have given Him a second thought, he had someone literally praying for the floor on which I would drop to my knees and give my life to him. And I guess if you're of a skeptical persuasion, like I was, you could chalk that up to a very great coincidence. But maybe, and I would invite anyone who's listening to consider the fact that maybe God is pursuing each one of us like that, where even years before we thought to give Him the time of the day, He had specific people praying for us, praying for the very locations we would be in, the very times and places in which we ultimately would give our lives to Him. And how gracious, too, thinking of that woman, just to bring it full circle, to allow her to see, even in this life, the effect that her prayer… I mean it was a blessing for both of you. That didn't need to happen. What are the odds of her hearing your conversion story? I don't know. The more I know about God and walk in this life, the I'm just astounded by the way He’s so personal and so intimate to reveal Himself to those who are looking for Him and who are longing for Him and who have called Him their own. And I'm so taken by that story, but also just, Vince, your life, and it's just such a beautiful testimony to what the Lord can do and will do in people's lives who are willing to look in His direction. Yes! What a blessing to think how infrequently maybe we see that situation. She happened to be at that talk, I happened to tell that story, and we make that connection. But what a great hope to think, “Wow! How many times will that happen in the context of eternity? How many people will we meet one day, where we said, ‘Whoa! That happened to you? I prayed for that.’” And it gets me excited. And again, just reflecting on that story with you, it just makes me think that so often our conception of the universe and of reality, it's just so narrow. And accepting Jesus into your life, allowing Him to be the bedrock of existence. There’s a freedom, and it expands our imaginations for what could be possible, the way that we're connected to each other, and what it means to love each other well and to love God well and to be able to enjoy that in the context of community for all eternity. Yes, I couldn't say anything that would sum anything better than that, Vince. Thank you so very much for coming on the podcast today, for telling the fullness of your story. I feel like in some ways we just scratched the surface. I just feel like there's so much more wisdom and experience there to glean, and I hope that those who are listening will tune in to Unbelievable?, will seek out not only your ministry but also your beautiful wife, Jo Vitale, just such a beautiful, again Oxford grad, just an amazingly beautiful woman of God who expresses the love of Christ and the intelligence of Christ in such compelling ways. So I just am so grateful again for the privilege of having spent this hour and a half with you. What a blessing! Well, thank you so much. And thank you for your ministry. Jo and I have just received your book, and we're very excited to dig into it. Wonderful. Thanks for tuning in to Side B Stories to hear Vince’s story. You can find out more about him and his work and ministry and how to connect with him in the episode notes. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can contact me through our email at info@sidebstories.com. I'd like to also thank our amazing Side B Stories team for helping with this episode production, Ashley Decker, our producer, Mark Rosera, our audio engineer, and Kyle Polk, our video editor, and of course, the C.S. Lewis Institute for including us in their podcast network. Also, if you are a skeptic or atheist and you would like to connect with a former atheist or skeptic with questions, please again connect with us by emailing us at info@sidebstories.com, and we'll get you connected. I hope you enjoyed this episode, that you'll follow, rate, review, and share this podcast with your friends and your social network. In the meantime, I'll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we'll see how another skeptic flips the record of their life. | |||
| Exploring the True Story – Dr. Josephine Thomas’s Story | 04 Aug 2023 | 01:20:32 | |
Archeologist, world traveler, and former skeptic Dr. Josephine Thomas once thought all religions were fictional stories until she finally encountered the 'true myth' of historical Christianity. Resources/authors recommended by Josephine:
The Resurrection of the Son of God, N.T. Wright Visit Side B Stories' YouTube Channel at https://www.youtube.com/@sidebstories For more stories of atheist and skeptics' conversions to Christianity, visit www.sidebstories.com | |||
| Finding Real Answers to Real Questions – Nigel Goodwin’s Story | 21 Jul 2023 | 01:06:14 | |
English gentleman, actor, and former atheist Nigel Goodwin was raised within a Marxist worldview. He saw church as fabricated theatre until he found the real God.
Podcast episode notes:
Nigel’s Resources:
Atheists Finding God book Rowman.com/Lexington Promo Code: LXFANDF30 | |||
| Searching for Something More – Neil Placer’s Story | 07 Jul 2023 | 01:00:30 | |
Former skeptic Neil Placer was apathetic about the question of God until his own dissatisfaction in life led him to search for something more.
Neil's Resources:
For more stories of atheist conversions to Christianity, please visit www.sidebstories.com Side B Stories YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@sidebstories416 Hello and thanks for joining in. I'm Jana Harmon, and you're listening to Side B Stories, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist or skeptic, but who became a Christian against all odds. You can hear more of these stories at our Side B Stories website at sidebstories.com. We welcome your comments on our Side B Stories Facebook page about these episodes, and you can also email us directly at info@sidebstories.com. We always love to hear your comments. As a reminder, our guests not only tell their stories, but at the end of each episode, these former atheists and skeptics give advice to curious seekers as to how they can best pursue the truth and reality of God. They also give advice to Christians as to how best to engage with those who don't believe. I hope you're listening to the end to hear them speak from their wisdom and experience as someone who has once been a skeptic but who is now a believer. Also, please know that many of these former skeptics and atheists have made themselves available to talk with anyone who has questions about God or faith. If that's you, just please connect with us at our email at info@sidebstories.com, and we’ll get you connected. If there's something common to us all, it's that we want a life of meaning and purpose, to know and be known, to love and be loved. We want a life that feels important because it is important. It is valuable. The inevitable question before us though is how do we find that kind of love, that kind of life, that kind of meaning and value? Can it be found on our own in a world without God? Or do we need to look beyond ourselves to find what our hearts truly long for? C.S. Lewis is a former atheist who recognized the important difference that it makes to live with and without God. He knew that if God was real and Christianity was true, there was nothing more important than that, saying, “Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.” In other words, God makes all the difference in the way that we can and do experience and see life. For those who believe, it should mean everything. In today's story, former atheist Neil Placer moved from being completely apathetic about the question of God to now holding Him as of infinite importance. How in the world did that happen? I hope you'll come along to find out. Welcome to Side B Stories, Neil. It’s great to have you with me today. Thanks, Jana. It's great to be here. Wonderful. Tell us a little bit about yourself, so the listeners have an idea of who you are before we get into your story. Yeah, absolutely. So my name is Neil Placer. I'm 46 years old. I live in Chattanooga, Tennessee. I'm trained as an engineer, so I'm a mechanical engineer, but I would say that I'm probably an atypical engineer, in the sense that, well, number 1, I like communication. Although I consider myself an introvert, I do like to communicate. I do like to think deeply about things and really communicate those truths to others. So yeah. I've just always been someone who likes to consider topics, and part of what we're going to talk about is how I came to faith and how that was a bit of a journey for me, very analytical, yet also leaps of faith. That sounds intriguing, Neil. Why don't you start us back at your story, at the very beginning. Tell us about where you were raised. Were you always from Tennessee? Tell us about your family. Was religion or God or church any part of your family life? Yeah. So I think if people are tuning in from Tennessee, they'll pick me out instantly and say, “That guy's not from Tennessee.” So I actually grew up in the DC area, which is kind of the international, cosmopolitan land where there really isn't an accent. So Northerners think I'm a Southerner, and the Southerners think I'm in Northerner, so I can't win. But, yeah, I grew up in the DC area. My father was Spanish. I say, was; he recently passed away. So his background, being from Spain. If you're not familiar with that, you're basically born Catholic, right? It's just part of the culture. Everyone kind of just connects themself to it, but from a spiritual perspective, that really didn't mean much. So they took us when we were kids to Mass, and we participated. I think they wanted the influence of it, but sooner or later, as my brother and I were getting older, we kind of became like Easter and Christmas Christians, if you will, right? So we just showed up for the major events. And they were… it was more like an event, so there wasn't really a strong focus on that, even though there was a religious component to my life. Okay. So it was just part of the tradition or ritual, I suppose, of your family. It was something you did, not necessarily, I presume, something you've believed? Or did you have any kind of a tacit belief in God because this was part of your life? No. I mean, I didn't really think about it much. I was thinking about this. I didn't really have… Growing up middle class, upper middle class, I didn't have a need for God, right? I had everything that I wanted materially. My parents kind of let the rope out pretty long, so I felt like I could do whatever I wanted. I was an athlete. I played soccer. So I just felt like I didn't… that was kind of for a goody goodies. And I was, by definition, truly just agnostic. Like I didn't care. I wasn't an atheist. I wasn't against it. I just didn't care. I didn't detect any need for it in my life. Yeah. So just, I guess, what they might call apatheism, right? Yes. Yeah. You just don't care. It wasn't important to you. You obviously didn't need it. So, was this the case throughout your growing up years? It sounds like you were very occupied, had a great family, great life. And did you have any touch points at all of what you would consider to be authentic Christianity in your world? Yeah, it's funny how, when you reflect back in the past, you kind of see where God was working. So I think the first moment was, my senior year of high school, I remember going back to the Catholic church on my own. So my parents weren't going, my brother wasn't going, but I wanted to just kind of explore. Instead of being the kid that just sat through it and said, “When is this over?” I wanted to actually seek. “What are they talking about? Is this a viable pathway of life?” My parents didn't even understand it. They said, “Are you going to impress some girl?” like, “What are you going for?” But I just said, “I just want to find out. What are they saying?” And I did that for a little while, and my conclusion, and I think it was a shallow search to be fair, was, “Yeah, this isn't really for me. Now I've actually listened to it with open ears, and yeah, this is not for me.” But that was kind of the first moment of considering something outside of myself. What made you… I'm just curious. What sparked that curiosity? Was it some kind of dissatisfaction in your life? Was it just some intellectual curiosity? Or something that your friends were doing? Or it just kind of came from nowhere? I honestly don't know. I mean, of the categories you just gave, I think probably intellectual curiosity was probably the answer. Other people were not doing it. I don't think there was some major gap. I think I was just curious. I've always been a curious type and willing to explore things, even if the crowd's not doing it. So, again, I think looking back, I think God was working on me. I just didn't realize it that way. So I don't really have a great answer. No. That's fine. Sometimes we just do things without real, deep thoughtful considerations to something we're motivated to do. I'm also curious. You went to go see what it was, and you felt like it wasn't for you. What did you think religion was at that point? You knew it wasn't for you, but what was it, did you think? Was it just a place where people gathered. They needed community. What was it, did you think? Being that it was Catholic, I thought it was very ritualistic, right? So it was just very, you know, up and down, knees. Liturgies, there was a lot of formality to it. But in the end, I just kind of thought it was empty. I just felt like people were going through the motions, checking the boxes for whatever reason, to make themselves feel good. I mean, it's kind of connected to my background. Like, why did we go as a family? I don't know. It’s just because that's what we did. That was the culture, right? So that was my conclusion. It just kind of felt a little bit empty, although, again, I'll say my search was shallow. I don't know that I was on a truly deep search at that point. Okay, okay. So you tried it as a high schooler, which is admirable. Before you went to college. And so walk us on from there. How did your life look? Then you left high school, went on to university, and what happened? Yeah. So my first year of school… so I played soccer in college. I went to Virginia Tech. And I would categorize my life, my first year of school, as kind of living in the joy of sin. And now that sounds funny to say. But like I really… I enjoyed the sin, right? I felt like I had all things going for me, right? I was studying engineering, so I was doing things hard with my mind. I was an athlete, so I was working my physical self. And I was also partying, so like I had all elements, I thought. And so I enjoyed sin. But the thing is sin has a season. Sin has an ending, because sin's pathway is alluring at first, but as Scripture says, it's sweet in the mouth, but then it's bitter in the stomach. And sometimes that bitter takes a while to realize. So I would say I really… I'm not going to say sin isn't fun. That's why people do it, right? Right. But I think that whole freshman year was kind of like that. And then, after that, I started to realize…. I didn't make the soccer team the next year. School was much… the first time I struggled with school. Like, “Maybe I'm not as smart as I think I am.” The whole partying scene became empty and old. “What what am I doing? What's the point?” So I would say after that was really the journey of struggle of, “What am I here for?” So God kind of pulled it apart. But I'm kind of saying it that way because there's people that just don't want religion because they think it's oppressive or it's going to wreck their lifestyle. But I would say, “What is this lifestyle that feels free and sinful really giving you?” Because, at the end, it doesn't give you much. So you were feeling empty and spent and challenged, and life wasn't as pristine, I guess, as it had been prior. There were challenges coming in your path. So it caused you to introspect, I guess. And I think sometimes those difficulties are disruptors that cause us to step back and take a look at our own life, the way that we think, the way that we live. And so what did that disconcertion or tension or challenge do for you in terms of what were your next steps? Well, it got me thinking and wrestling with things. I mean, I said earlier I'm kind of an introvert, and in terms of, like, to recharge, I need to go off to the side, and I need to think. So I just thought about topics, and, like, “What am I here for?” I mean, college is just kind of a good season for that because there's a bunch of people around you also that are going through that. And I don't remember all the bumps and turns, but I do remember concluding that it must be about love, right? All this other stuff is superficial. So it must be about love. And in the context of no God, then that means a human relationship, right? Like another person, that must be kind of…. The holy grail of happiness is that, which involves also kind of a, “It's not just about you. To make a relationship work. You have to mutually bring that joy and benefit to one another,” so that's kind of where I landed after sort of years of struggling through it. And guess what? Surprise, surprise. That pathway became empty, too, right? There were some relationships that you thought would be going in a good way and they didn't. And so it was at that moment—and this is just to kind of walk you through the timeline. So freshman year was all about fun. Then, I would say it was closer to… I did 5 years of school because I was an engineer, and we did a co-op, so it's just kind of built into the program, but it was right around kind of that senior year or right before it that I just kind of said, “Okay, relationships don't work either.” So now I don't know. Now I'm like… I'm really lost. I don't know what the answer is. And I'm about to graduate. And I'm about to get some job. And I kind of, for the first time, maybe categorized it as hopeless in terms of a deep meaning of life. I could have gone and done the job and done what everyone else does, but that was the moment where it was just like, “All right. I don't know what the answer is.” So I guess you knew that religion, at the time, wasn't for you, prior to all of this. And you understood…. Did you, I guess, understand the logical [17:00] implications of atheism, that it does not bring objective meaning? I mean, were you that thoughtful about it? Or was this just something you were experiencing because you were just doing life without God? Yeah, no. I wasn't thinking about sort of those apologetic arguments about atheism at all. v And I think that's where the story gets interesting about that's where God's hand is… like God's hand was always working, maybe more subtly. We don't know how God works, but He kind of lets you get to a place where you're ready. And I feel like, at that point, I was ready. And then He really started to press in, and again, I think the story becomes interesting there. Yes. I've heard it said. Well Os Guinness said, actually, “When someone becomes dissatisfied with their own worldview then they become open towards another.” And it sounds like you reached that point of dissatisfaction, so that you became willing or open to see, “Is there something more than this flat immanent frame,” I guess, as Charles Taylor would say. Is there something more? Or is there something more that I'm missing? I guess you felt that kind of earnest need or that angst in a sense. So what did you do with that dissatisfaction? Again, it sounds like you were willing to look for something more. What did you do? Yes. So like I was saying, it got interesting. There were kind of three distinct people in my life. So I had my friend John, who I went to high school with, that he actually was kind of a professing Christian in high school, and then once he got to college, he kind of fell away from it. So I had him in the circle, this buddy who kind of knew faith and now doesn't have faith. So he kind of becomes more important at the end. But then there were two other people, and they were both ladies on the soccer team. So one was just a good friend of mine. And ironically, believe it or not, her name was Trinity. Now, she wasn't a believer, but what was really interesting about our relationship is that we both reached this point that, as friends, we were pushing each other towards faith, and we didn't believe it. So I'll give you an example of just kind of one of these moments: I love these pause moments that God gives us to kind of just reflect. So we're out to breakfast, and again, I told you I studied engineering. It's a lot of work, a lot of reading, a lot of homework, and so we're talking about faith and religion, and she said, “You know, maybe we should pick up the Bible every once in a while and read it.” I said, “Look, I don't have time to read the Bible. I have all these tests. There’s no space for it.” And she said something that was profound. Again, she's not a believer. She said, “Well, if you think about it, if God is really true, then there's nothing more important than knowing about Him and you do that by reading this book,” like nothing else matters. What else is worth as much devotion of your time? And I just kind of thought about that and said, “It’s kind of weird that you're saying that because you don't really believe this, but number two, you're right. Like, just from a logical perspective, if that's true, you're absolutely right about that.” So it was kind of moments like that where God was working or like other times when…. And we started to go to church. And so mornings where, like, I'd call and say, “Hey, are you going to church?” “No. No. No. I'm not going.” “Come on. Let’s go. Let's go.” We were pushing each other. And so, like I was saying, God was really working. So- Wow! That was a key element. And then the third person is another girl named Kara, which I was more of an acquaintance with, but she was actually a firm believer in faith. And so what was unique about her is she… you could see something different. So there was a smile on the face. There was a joy. But not only that, there was…. We’d go out and play soccer together, and her work ethic was different. I remember going, “Why is no one else trying except for her?” And it was just kind of a fun game. But she demonstrated something different about Christ. So think about that. You have this guy that kind of fell away involved. You have someone who's challenging you who's not a believer, and then someone who really is a believer, all kind of in the picture together, kind of working at the same time. And I remember going to a church service, and my eyes were still blind. They kind of gave that classic picture of like you have the two cliffs, and the only thing that can split the divide is the cross splitting in between. You probably heard that at some point, right? Mm-hm. And so they're, like, giving this clear gospel message. And I remember Kara looking over at me and going, “This just doesn't get more clear than this and, they were like ‘what do you think about the message?’” And I was like, “Oh, it was great. Loved it!” But I had no clue. It went over my head. I had no clue what actually was going on, so it was really interesting. My eyes were starting to open, but they had not been fully opened at that point. So, for those who are listening who may not be familiar with that reference that you're speaking of, the sermon reference, can you explain that a little bit more and what that means, what the gospel means? Yeah. So imagine there's kind of two big cliffs, and basically, what it's trying to say is that our sin separates us from God, and we can't ever cross that chasm. There's nothing we can do on our own power, but that there's a clear separation. And the only thing that can split that divide, or really fill that divide, and they drop a cross in there, is the cross of Christ. Which that’s not about the cross. It's about the fact… not the cross itself. It’s Jesus. It's the fact that Jesus paid the cost for our sins and basically became a mediator for us to God the Father, who is going to judge us for our sins. So that cross allows you that pathway. So it's basically saying you need Jesus to become your Lord and Savior, and He is the way to get there. So again, it's a very clear like, in that service, “Hey! You, Neil, need to surrender to Christ,” but I thought it was a great message, but didn't get that I needed to do that. That it wasn't for you, but evidently Trinity was being taken in by this message. Was it something she responded to at the time? So, well, let's…. She and I, we actually…. Let me finish the story, and I'll tell you about it. She and I actually came to faith at the same time. Okay. And so where this all led to was actually a moment in time where I gave my life to Christ. And so let me just give you the build-up. It was like an exam week, and so I was really busy. And Kara and my buddy John were actually going to go to this Fellowship of Christian Athletes retreat. It was a few hours up the road. And they said, “Hey, you want to come?” And I was like, “Look, I just can't think about this. I need to focus on my tests.” So it's literally Friday. I've finished my last exam, and I'm driving home, driving to my apartment at school. And I'm thinking, “Well, I could spend another week here and kind of just go downtown and drink and do whatever else I was going to do, that I’d done over and over, and it's getting old. Or I could go hang out with these wacky Christians.” And I thought they were kind of wacky. I mean, at that point, I'm like… And I was always up for a new experience. I was like, “You know, what do I have to lose?” Right? So I called them, and they were literally about to go. I said, “Look. Do you still have room for me to come tag along with you guys?” And they're like, “Yes, absolutely,” especially Kara, who was the firm believer. She's like, “Yes. Yes.” And I think Trinity had already decided she was going to go. So anyway, we get there, and that was the moment where I had really never exposed myself. It was like a little world of Christianity, right? Everyone there was a Christian. There was no one like… I was surrounded by something I've never been surrounded in. So I was just kind of like this foreigner, right, in this town of Christianity. I was an outsider. And so you participate in all these Bible studies, and I'm just listening the whole time, because I have nothing to add. I have no clue what they're talking about. But I'm- [27:08] Can I interrupt you for a moment? Obviously, so Bible studies, and you had mentioned that Trinity thought that reading the Bible would be the most important thing if God was real or true. Had you read the Bible prior to coming to the retreat? Did you take that as an invitation and start reading with Trinity before any of this? Maybe we were reading a little bit, but not too intently. Okay. So the whole thing with the Bible was a little bit intimidating or you hadn't really gone there yet. Okay. Yeah. And I remember I was carrying around, now that you mention that, like some old seventies Bible, and the people at the retreat were like, “What are you? What are you carrying? What is that thing?” Because they didn't know what my what my story was, right? I think they just assumed that I was some Christian, too, right? Because I wasn't sharing anything. I was just listening to what they had to say, and it really just kind of blew my mind to see something different, that people were living for something purposeful. And again, God was then really, really working on me. And so the end of the story is, like, at the end of the weekend—and the speaker was some…. It’s the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, so they usually have some sort of athlete. But he was actually some kickboxer, professional kickboxer. And at the end of the weekend, he said, “Does anyone want to give their life to Christ?” the classic sort of altar call, if you will. But I remember that moment, like, everyone's eyes are closed, and it's like just raise your hand, and I remember that there was this war inside me like, “No! You can't do this. You can't do this. You're going to give up all the things you like.” There was this war. But at the end, I just stuck my hand up. And that was the moment. I really did give my life to Christ. And what's cool is…. It’s just so funny. I think God has this kind of cool, humorous, awesome way of working. That was Valentine's Day weekend, so my search for love, right? Like, He gave me love on Valentine's Day weekend. Yes! Yes! So I'll always have this marker there of that conversion. And I remember, at the end, they're kind of sitting in the circles, and they're like, “So, what did you think about the weekend?” And everyone's kind of like, “Ehh, normal weekend. Okay,” and I'm like… the first time I spoke. I’m like, “I think I just gave my life to Christ. I'm not even sure what this really means. But I just did it.” And one guy there, who I'm actually still friends with today, had the wisdom to say, “Number one, that's awesome. Number two, come get plugged in.” Like, here’s the FCA president or soon-to-be president at that time. He said, “Come get plugged in. Come join the community.” Very, very wise and good advice. Wow. So I'm sitting here thinking you were someone who didn't care about God growing up. It became an issue that you actually started caring about, that there had to be something more in life, and then you found that something more in the person of God and Jesus and that He’s worth it. And you found, in a sense, the love that you had been longing for and searching for, and I presume the meaning that comes along with that. It sounds like you felt there was this internal wrestling and this battle of kind of laying down your own life for being part of a grander story. At any point, did you question or doubt, is this really true? Or does it just sound like a good story? Something that I can give my life to? Yeah. So what was really cool about my conversion experience is that I think it was really out of character. What I mean by that is I'm a pretty analytical person. I think when I was giving my testimony at college, I’m just remembering this now, when I actually got baptized at the church at school, I said, As an engineer, you have these…. There's this green graph paper that we used. And it's like, “given,” “find,” “assumptions,” and then it's like, at the end, you double underline the answer. And so I wanted that sequence with Jesus Christ double underlined, but I kind of just jumped right to the end, and so it was very much a leap of faith for a very analytical person. And I think the impact of that is that I describe it as kind of Jesus… Or like being held by a father, like a baby being held, because I literally had no real Christian knowledge, no Christian experience to lean on, not even people. I was just getting…. There was nothing. And so, I viewed it like I was being held like a baby, like you do everything for the baby. I was just on cloud nine. I was loving it, so there wasn't really a period up front of me kind of doubting what did I just do, because I was experiencing something amazing. And the people around me even, they said stuff like, “Your face looks different,” which… The Bible talks about your countenance, right? They’re like, “You literally look different.” Like, instead of a grimace or weight, you have a smile. So people even saw what I was experiencing. So what’s cool about that, Jana, is that not everyone has…. I don't think everyone needs to have that story. Like for my kids, I’m like, “You don't have to go through a lot of chaos. You really don't have to.” But the good thing about that is like I'll always know, pointing back, what happened, and no matter what argument anyone throws at me, if there's ever seasons of doubt, something miraculous happened, and I cannot deny it. It's undeniable. And others saw it, too. I didn't just make it up in my head. Right. So I remember coming back and my roommates, nonbelievers, they were like, “So did you find Jesus?” like as a joke? And I'm like, “I think I did.” And then they got freaked out like, “Oh, my gosh! What does this mean?” Yeah. Exactly. I mean, that is the question. What does that mean? What did that mean for your life? I mean, you were, in a sense, a meaningless empty existence. So what did knowing Jesus, having Jesus, mean for your life? I mean, it ultimately over time, you realize what it does, or what the value of it is, or just kind of… And I got off cloud nine, right? Eventually, you realize, “Oh, wait. Life is actually tough,” and this isn't a straightforward… it’s not just like a…. Christianity is actually not an easy path. I mean, Christ says that not if we will face struggle, but when, right? There is struggle. There’s tension. It's just part of it. But I think, to answer your question, Christ talks about building upon a firm foundation, not on top of sand. And I think that's really real practically. No matter how tough life may be. Sometimes I’ve felt like all areas are not working well, right? Like my relationship with my wife, my work, my friendships, my church environment. I can feel like all those things are not working well for whatever reason at a given moment in time. Yet I always have this security to know, “Wait, but I'm sealed in Christ. I know what my ultimate destiny is, and I know that He is seeking to bring me comfort and peace and joy and that I can rest in the confidence of what He did.” It’s not just experiential, but there's historical validity and logical validity. That rock matters for me to stand on, to have that foundation. So I've realized that over time. But to think about not having that and where I was before, that chaos is really scary and really sad and empty, and I would never want to return there again. So you went from this really miraculous experience, which I don't doubt at all. I know that so many people have had just a real touch point with God that is life transforming, and they know it's true and real. Now you speak of building a foundation that's historical and logical, and as an analytical person, could you flesh that out a little bit? What does that foundation look like in terms of… even though your mind wasn't perhaps a deep part of the journeying of accepting Christ, but it sounds like there is a foundation where you love Him with your mind as well as your life. What does that look like? Yeah. And that's actually really important to me, Jana. I think Christianity cannot just be about the experience. Obviously. So what I'd say is, God created our brains and also our hearts, so the experience and the emotion matters. Absolutely. But God also gave us brains to think. I think sometimes, as Christians, we take an approach of just kind of acceptance of the truth without wrestling it. And so then when you're challenged, you don't know what to say. And I think that's a very bad…. Well, scripture urges us not to live life that way. In any season, you should be ready to defend your faith and have an answer. I mean, I think there's just a few, like if I'm talking to someone who maybe is questioning what to believe. There’s kind of a few… I call them high-level apologetics, because apologetics can get very deep and wrestling with specific issues. But if you just, first of all, just look around you, look at creation, look at the human body. There are so many examples of just wonder and how you have to think that that all kind of just came out of nothing is really illogical. It really doesn't make sense. And I think that… I mean Romans 1 tells us that that's proof enough, that we are without excuse in just seeing creation. And creation really… I like hiking, so that really does it for me, like, seeing and just… you can't even take it in, right? Anyway, so that is a really, to me, solid argument in itself. But beyond that, the evidence of it. If you go back and explore… I mean The Case for Christ is a great book where that whole story of Lee Strobel as a journalist kind of exploring the facts. But the validity, the historical validity, of the Bible is unquestioned compared to other historical texts. The fact that Christ came, was a man, did miracles, he died, he was resurrected, is all historically validated more than most any other source. And the connection of all that, the history, what we see now, what I experience, it all makes sense and logically touches all of the pieces of what we experience as human beings. And one interesting thought that I've had about that, Jana, is sort of like we have an enemy working against us, right? And just kind of as a matter of another apologetic, if you compare Christianity to any other spiritual system, every other spiritual system is about works. You have to do something to be good in the eyes of that god. Christianity flips it on its head and says, “Actually, you're saved by grace. You need a savior, and there's nothing you can do on your own.” And so the thought exercise I went down on that one is like, “Why does our spiritual enemy not try to throw at us a counterfeit kind of grace argument?” Like a religion or something that was a grace alternative, because there aren't really that many grace alternatives, if you study them, and what I think I concluded is that that's how it all comes together, is that you can't create a duplicate for what Christ did. You can't duplicate a man coming, doing miracles, dying, resurrecting, seeing Him again. You can't replicate the amazing story. So it's combining history. It's combining the emotion of what people saw in those miracles and the resurrection. Imagine seeing a resurrected man! And how that connects to the Creator of the universe. You can't duplicate it, and so I think the enemy doesn't even try. Yeah. So it sounds like it's just really fully orbed with you. It's your emotion. It's experience. It's your spirituality. It's your mind. It's actually how you're living your life. I'm curious, too. You said there were three key people in your life, in your story, as God was really pointing you or bringing you to Himself, and I'd love to tie a bow on some of those, because you mentioned the friend who was a Christian, left Christianity, but you said came back, and we haven't heard that bit of it, nor have we heard of Trinity and how she became, I guess, a friend in Christ as well. So talk to us about that. Yeah. I’m glad you brought that up, so John actually recommitted his life to Christ that same weekend. And really did. He really started walking a new path. And what's really neat about that is he and I are still friends today. Our wives actually were roommates at one point, which is even a funny connection. Our kids know each other and like each other. So we actually visit them annually. So it's a really kind of cool connection, how He brought us together on that one. Trinity, I actually have lost touch with her, but sadly enough, I think she kind of walked away from the faith. And I don't know if she ever returned. She did give her life to Christ, and that's when you kind of ask herself, “Did she really? Did she not?” So I think she struggled. It was kind of your question earlier. I think, after that experience, for her, I think she really started to question. I think it was kind of in connection to her family, and they didn't believe, and what were the consequences of that? So I hope she returned to faith. I hope it was a true conversion, but I don't know. And similarly with Kara, I've lost touch with her, but yeah, God just used those different pieces together. So it's just a really, really great story. That is great! It sounds like…. Your story has such a beautiful kind of story arc, in the sense that you were just dismissive of God. It was just not something you were interested in, not anything that you needed, and then you've had a felt need and an earnest search. I mean, it was earnest in the sense that you were willing to actually go where God was leading you, and then you found Him. You found what you were looking for. And it sounds like it's made an enormous change in your life, and for the better. You mentioned something about coming out of chaos. And I presume that you've moved towards shalom. From disorder to order. From restlessness to peace. It reminds me of Augustine, where our souls are restless until we find our rest in Him. And it sounds like you have found that and then some. I just really appreciate that. As we're thinking about those who maybe, like you were, maybe a little restless, maybe a little dissatisfied, unsure of where to go or look for something more. How could you speak to someone like that, who might be willing to take a look at what God has to offer? Where would they go? What would you recommend? Yes. So I mean the first thing I'd say is don't discount faith in Christ for some fuzzy soft reason, like not thought out reason, like just because someone said Christians are losers, and maybe you just held on to that simple…. Or they’re goody goodies. I held on to some simple, “That’s not for me.” Don't hold on to that. Or equally, I think sometimes I've encountered people that have some hurt because of some Christian connection. Someone did something, and it's pushed them away. And so now they will never go back because that hurt. I would encourage people to press through that, because the hurt isn't the truth. Truth is truth. And I believe Christ is it. And so if you are open to explore it…. Basically, don't push yourself away for either superficial reasons or even deep hurts. Press in anyway, and I think if you are, Christ is faithful to kind of… If you knock, he will open it. He will answer. He’ll show you the pathway. And the second thing I'd also say is, like… I kind of touched on, I think, on again, some high-level apologetics for people to consider that I think are valid. But then I'd also say, flip…. Instead of pointing the finger at Christianity, why don’t you point the finger at what you believe and say, “Does it have merit? Is it delivering in my practical life?” To what you just said, “Is it really bringing peace?” Be honest with yourself. Don’t just cast stones. And don't judge other systems, especially ones you haven't explored, but ask yourself about yours. Because I think you will find that there's again, like, you were talking about atheism. If you're a true atheist, you have to believe that there is no sort of system of right or wrong, law and order, of meaning for people, so we're basically… I could shoot you right now, and that doesn't really mean much, right? Because who says that that's right or wrong? And you have no value, and I don't have value. Question the impact of what that does to your thinking and your emotions and how to live. That messes you up. That's not a healthy place to live, so really question that. And explore and find…. Obviously, you can dig into the scripture whenever you want. And I think if you do that, honestly, God will work with you. But also just try to find… try praying for someone, some authentic Christian to come into your life that can help lovingly guide you through and answer your questions, because, again, I think if you pray, you start to knock and open that door. Even though you feel uncomfortable, I think God will work. Yeah. That's all really, really wonderful. If someone does open scripture or the Bible, do you have a place that you would recommend them to start? Because I know that the Bible can be rather intimidating at 66 books. So where would one start? There's probably different answers for different people, on types of wiring, but first I’ll say that the Old Testament is probably a hard place. There are some parts of that that seem dry or are hard to understand, although the exception to that is Genesis. I think I the beginning especially of Genesis is pretty awesome for kind of setting up how things originated and where we go. So I think that's important. I think if someone is kind of more emotionally inclined, like kind of that artistic and singer like, Psalms has a lot of emotional wrestling that is authentic and real that people could get into. Proverbs if you're kind of intellectually wired. It has a lot of good logical argument of how to live life and challenge yourself. In fact, that's what I actually prayed when I first became a believer was, “God, I know nothing; help make me wise. I want wisdom. I need something,” and I spent some time in Proverbs. Ecclesiastes. I love the book of Ecclesiastes! Some people hate that book because it feels too open ended, but it just kind of tells you life is a vapor. Everything you can pursue is kind of meaningless outside of God. It's a great searching book. But I mean, then coming to the New Testament, obviously, I think a place where to lead people is natural is like the four gospel accounts or the first four books of the New Testament; Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John really help you to understand the story of Jesus, what happened, His work with the disciples, and then obviously His death, burial, and resurrection. So I mean, there's so many good places. But those are some things I'd say. Look into it. And just be patient with yourself. You can't fully grasp God. You never will but just be patient with your questions. Some questions I still don't know the answers to, but I'm patient with it and believe in it. So just kind of trust the process. Don’t try to get everything answered in the first day, first week, but open yourself to what God can teach you and start trying to pray. Praying is just being authentic before God and having a conversation. It really is. It’s not certain words. So just start doing those things. Don't be afraid to press in. Wow! That’s just so rich. And for those Christians who really want to meaningfully engage with those who don't believe. You’ve mentioned Kara, of course. She had evidently a beautiful embodied picture of what being a Christian looked like, and that in some ways was attractive to you or at least piqued your curiosity as to why she's different. How would you recommend that Christians live or speak? Or what attitude should they have or whatever? Well, so I think first it comes with a heart posture of surrender. I've just become more and more convinced that life is really about surrendering yourself to Christ. And either… I think there's two options: We're either trying to control things to the way we want to or we surrender them to Christ. And surrendering feels like dying, but actually that's where you're finding life. When you're dying to yourself, you're finding real life. And I say that because that's the answer to nonbelievers or that's the answer to the most seasoned believer who knows… maybe is just a genius, just has all the elements, they still need to surrender. And I'm saying that because, if you don't do that, then how you approach someone else is going to be impacted in some way. Maybe you start treating them like a project or you lack the compassion maybe just to sit there and be silenced and listen to them for a little bit and just listen and then maybe later have a conversation. I think if you're trying to strategize and do it in your own strength, “I'm going to walk them through this six-week study and then….” Really surrender yourself to what God wants you to do in this person's life. I think it's crucial because you can just mess things up. I think that is how Christians mess things up. They start spouting off on social media, and they're not surrendered. They're just taking their own approach to it. And that's very… I think people want to see authenticity, and you're not going to be your true self, the person that God designed you to be, until you surrender yourself. And so it's an ongoing day by day, minute by minute exercise, but especially as you're going to engage someone, you really should focus on doing that. Yes. I don't think there's probably any wiser counsel that you could give right there. It sounds like you have been listening to the word and reading books of scripture and Proverbs and whatnot, because you are a man of wisdom. I can hear that. And it also sounds like you really have engaged in the larger story and God’s story, that you have surrendered your life to His story, which is the best story of all, right? You have found true love. And I think that's what we all seek, is to be fully known and fully loved, and it sounds like you have found that. Thank you so much, Neil, for coming on to tell your story, for your insights, for your wisdom. We just so appreciate it. Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure. Like I was telling you earlier, I really enjoy what you're doing here. I think helping people hear stories…. Well, Jesus taught in stories. Something about stories catches our attention. So I really appreciate what you're doing. I think this is very helpful to unbelievers and believers alike, to kind of just hear how God is really at work in real people's lives. So I hope this is an encouragement to someone to take that next step, whatever that may be. But keep doing what you're doing, and I think it’s a big encouragement. Thank you, Neil, for those kind words. It is a true encouragement. Thank you again. Thanks for tuning into Side B Stories to hear Neil's story. You can find out more about his podcast, as well as other information, in our episode notes. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can contact me directly through our website at sidebstories.com or our email. Again, that is info@sidebstories.com. I'd like to take a moment to express my deep appreciation for our amazing audio engineer, Mark Rosera, of the C.S. Lewis Institute, and our producer, Ashley Decker, also of the C.S. Lewis Institute here in Atlanta, both for their amazing and excellent ongoing work. I always appreciate them. I hope you enjoyed this episode and that you'll follow, rate, review, and share this podcast with your friends and social network. In the meantime, I'll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we'll see how another skeptic flips the record of their life. | |||