The Sean McDowell Show - How the Co-Founder of Wikipedia Found Christ

Episode Date: March 12, 2025

Larry Sanger is not only the co-founder of Wikipedia, but he has a Ph.D. in philosophy from Ohio State University. He left the faith of his family as a teenager and became an agnostic in high school. And yet he came back to faith in his 50s. What arguments and experiences led him from being a skeptical nonbeliever to a Christian? Join us for an in-depth conversation about his philosophy and life.READ: How a Skeptical Philosopher Becomes a Christian (https://shorturl.at/6AFMV)*Get a MASTERS IN APOLOGETICS or SCIENCE AND RELIGION at BIOLA (https://bit.ly/3LdNqKf)*USE Discount Code [SMDCERTDISC] for 25% off the BIOLA APOLOGETICS CERTIFICATE program (https://bit.ly/3AzfPFM)*See our fully online UNDERGRAD DEGREE in Bible, Theology, and Apologetics: (https://bit.ly/448STKK)FOLLOW ME ON SOCIAL MEDIA: Twitter: https://x.com/Sean_McDowellTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@sean_mcdowell?lang=enInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmcdowell/Website: https://seanmcdowell.org

Why would the co-founder of Wikipedia, a skeptic for 35 years, who earned a PhD in philosophy from the Ohio State University, become a Christian? How did he originally lose his faith as a teenager? And then what were the arguments and experiences that led him back to faith in his 50s? Our guest today is tech guru Larry Sanger. Larry, thanks so much for joining me. This is a treat. Thanks for having me, Sean. I know about your work and I appreciate what you do. And I'm delighted to be able to sit down with you. I got a ton of questions for you from the recent blog that you shared online.

But the big question I'll start with is, why did you decide to share your conversion story now? Well, it took me a while to write that. I just sort of worked on it off and on for a year. Yeah, so basically when I finished it, I posted it. But I didn't want to announce it. Like I deliberately put off announcing my conversion for a few years because basically I didn't want to go

out into the public and to loudly declare myself without being able to defend doctrine, you know, both theology and the Bible. So, and I have studied both quite a bit in the last five years. So, I'm not saying that I'm ready. Of course, of course. five years, so I'm not saying that I'm ready. Of course, of course.

Oh, but yeah, I'll do my best. Oh, you're going to do great. I've always kind of wondered what kind of mind created Wikipedia. And then when I've read your account and how much you love truth, seek truth research, I'm like, now it makes sense. Now, you formally describe yourself as a skeptic, a non-believer, but you were not an enemy of faith. Maybe tell us a little bit of the kind of non-believer you were.

And I'm also really curious what you thought of the new atheist movement. Well, I described myself as an agnostic, so I didn't take a position for or against. A lot of atheists today simply say if you lack a belief in God, then you're an atheist. Well, I lacked a belief in God, but I didn't call myself an atheist. I called myself an agnostic, which was to say I withheld the proposition. That's what philosophers say. So I neither affirmed nor denied that God exists. I said, essentially, I don't know,

or I haven't made up my mind. I will say, though, that I didn't think too much about it. So it wasn't what William James called a live option. It was William James, wasn't it? Yeah, that's right. So it wasn't a live option for me. I mean, but that being said, I was willing to concede that it was possible to be a rational Christian, right? So in that sense, I wasn't opposed. I just was unconvinced.

I thought that the arguments were not very good. And also, so to get to the other part of your question, basically, I found the new atheist representatives with a possible exception of Daniel Dennett, who is sort of a special case, obnoxious and unreasonable, in the sense of being closed to actual reasoning that people would give them. Now, I know this isn't the case always. And there are a lot of people who will argue, you know, seriously argue at length. But the ones that I encountered, the atheists that I tended to encounter, I guess these are mostly

the rank and file, were, as I say, obnoxious and unreasonable. They tended to be, again, just in my experience, ignorant of the Bible, like I knew more the Bible. I didn't know that much about the Bible at the time. And I knew more than they did. And even, you know, people like Sam Harris who portrays himself as a philosopher, he clearly doesn't know very much philosophy. I always thought that, you know, and I actually picked up some books here.

I can find one. I actually bought here. Where is it? It doesn't matter, does it? Yeah, it's okay. You don't necessarily have to find it right now. I found it. Okay. You don't necessarily have to find it right now. I found it. Okay.

For God delusion. I got this actually in 2020, I think, or maybe it was 2021 after my conversion because I thought, okay, I'm going to sit down. I'm going to try to see what serious arguments somebody like Richard Dawkins will make. They're not serious arguments at all. You know, it's exactly as I had as I had experienced before. They're lightweight. They don't show an awareness of the intricacies on either side.

the intricacies on either side. So, you know, it'd be somebody like Michael Martin, who wrote a thick book called Atheism for philosophers who would be a better representative of atheism. Anyway, so maybe I'm going too long here. No, no, that's really helpful. I was just curious because you were an agnostic during the time that they were dominating the public conversation. So I was curious your assessment of that movement. Totally helpful. I agree. There are other representatives much more sophisticated that raise good objections like Michael Martin that need to be taken seriously. Now, let's go back to your childhood. I found it fascinating that you described back to your grandparents and your parents. Your parents were born in

the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod. Before we come to your... Oh, go ahead. My mom was, my dad was not. Okay. Yeah. My dad converted to Lutheranism when he was 10 or 12, I think. A friend brought him. But then he joined the church and they actually met and married there. And they stayed there for a long time.

Did you go to church? Did you practice? Was that a part of your life growing up before your teenage years? Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Now, we went pretty much every week from the time I was born until I was about 12. And then, well, my parents got divorced and we stopped going to church after that. So, but it was actually right around that same time that I was confirmed within the Lutheran Church. And yeah, so, but I, you know, I remember Vacation Bible School at St. Paul's Lutheran Church, Anchorage, Alaska. We didn't do a lot of Bible reading, but we did some. I did some. I remember having my Bible and looking through it.

And I didn't understand the basic sorts of things that really ought to be taught to every child who reads any piece of the Bible. Like, yes, you have to read it long parts all the way through. You can't, it's not a book of aphorisms. You cannot be treated that way. Other basic stuff like that I didn't understand. So I did pray a fair bit.

And I asked a lot of questions, but I did not get a lot of guidance in answering them. I got some. I got some. But I was told by various people in my life that I asked too many questions. So, yeah. I can understand that. Now we're going to come to the reasons for your deconversion as a teen. But what was it like when you went to your parents and grandparents and said, I just don't believe this anymore?

I can't really remember very well. It wasn't a big deal. It was really, I mean, they, at that time, so that I would have like told them probably when I was 17 or 18. My dad was sort of a new-ager temporarily. He returned to the faith after another 10 years after that, I think. My mom was, I think she was more bothered by it.

But she told me later that she prayed very regularly that I would return to the faith. And then when I told her that I was, well, converted again, she said, oh, my prayers have been answered. That's cool to hear. So what are the factors? You're a teenager. What was it that made you just say, I don't believe in God,

I'm not a Christian anymore? Well, it was a number of things. So first of all, we stopped going to church. I had fallen out of the habit of praying. And so I just didn't think about God, generally, very much. And when I did once again start thinking about God, it was actually in the context of a philosophy course that I took. The second semester of my junior year of high school is a great course. And it actually is what sort of led me to take up philosophy. And one of the questions that we would have asked there is,

you know, does God exist? And so we would have reviewed the traditional arguments for the existence of God and that sort of thing. It got me thinking about it even more, but newly, you know, interested in it. And I came to the conclusion, just looking at, because you have to remember, this is like, I am a child of the 70s and the 80s, so my older siblings and like a half generation older than me were

hippies or influenced by hippie culture. Okay, right. Interesting. So there was the drug culture was big and that just started screwing people up a lot. And I saw a lot of these screw ups. I'm not saying my family was, but I knew them. I knew, I didn't know very, I knew a guy who was very big into drugs and who actually murdered his girlfriend.

And I, it made, not just that, but all of these things made an impression on me. And it occurred to me, especially after taking that philosophy class, that these people all had just a lot of false beliefs. And the thought just lodged itself in my head that if there were certain beliefs of theirs that changed, then they wouldn't do the things that they do. And then I took the next step and said, well, if that's the case, then it's really important that I know the truth. And well, then I thought, well, what are the requirements for really knowing the

truth? And I said, well, first of all, you have to be able to clearly articulate what it is that you believe. If you don't even know what you believe, then you don't have knowledge. And second, you have to have conclusive reasons. I didn't put it quite that way. That's sort of myfalutin philosophy talk, but I had to have really good reasons to believe. And the reasons have to support that particular claim. And I said, Well, I know practically

nothing then by those standards. And it actually bothered me because well, then, then maybe I'm going to end up making similar sorts of mistakes that I can't even anticipate. Right. And, and so I said, Well, one of the things that I could be wrong about, that I might waste my time on, for example, is the existence of God. So I'm just going to withhold, I didn't use that word, but that's what I meant. I was going to withhold that proposition, neither believe nor disbelieve that, and a number of other things. And it was only until, I don't know, 10 or 20 years later,

beginning when I was a graduate student, that I sort of left my state of Cartesian doubt and started saying, okay, I actually do believe, you know, that, you know, there are a number of different things. I started taking positions on philosophical questions. That's really helpful. You weren't on this anti-theistic crusade. You're just trying to figure out what truth is and orient your life in a way you didn't make mistakes of the people around you.

And that meant thinking about God at least a little bit and you weren't convinced. Now, there's one story you share. I just got to highlight before we get back more to your kind of your deconversion so to speak, is you describe calling up a pastor, not to have an argument, you were just skeptical and you had questions and this pastor responds with contempt, like what happened?

Well, yeah, I'm sorry to speak over you there. Yes, he did seem to treat me with some contempt, but that might've been because I was treating him with insufficient respect. It's not that I was a teenager and all, simply faced, braced teenager. A simply faced, braced teenager. And I, yes, but I did have legitimate questions for sure,

you know, that I hoped maybe he would have some interesting answers to, but he really didn't give me any substantive answers. He was probably the wrong one to ask. I just, you know, luck of the draw. I can't remember who it was. It was not the pastor of the Lutheran Church, I think. I think it was someone else. So yeah. And that's okay. We're not trying to call anybody out and not every pastor is necessarily trained in philosophy and apologetics, but could have listened and directed you to somebody that could help and been a little bit more gracious. It seemed to solidify in your mind that this is not a pastoral response and your questions aren't welcome here.

It seems to push you maybe further away from God during kind of your college years. And then you go study, graduate, get a PhD in philosophy. You're teaching philosophy to students, and I love that you describe, you wanted your students to not know where your position was. So a third are like atheists, a third are like agnostic, and maybe a third were theists, and you're like,

job well done. So at this point when you graduated with a PhD, you've kind of left your faith behind. You're not thinking about it a ton. What did you make of the arguments for God's existence? When I was in graduate school, I had both studied them as an undergraduate and taught them to undergraduates, and I thought that they were pretty lightweight. I didn't know of any, well, let's put it this way. You know, I took these matters seriously, and I would, at least seriously enough to do more than just read the books

that I was teaching out of, but actually look at some of the deeper, more advanced source material. And whenever I did that, I never really found anything that addressed the sorts of issues that I had. So there's one general thing that I came back to, although each different argument had problems of its own on my view. But in general, none of the arguments actually established, even if you grant the premises, none of them seem to establish the ultimate

conclusion that God exists. But the first cause argument, all it does is establish that there was a first cause outside of the universe that caused the universe to come into being. And this we call God that comes at the end, that's an enormous leap. It doesn't follow. I still think that is true. It doesn't follow. There's a lot of other things that you need to say before you can draw that conclusion. But it's a very important conclusion, I now think. You know, it's very important that we be able to say that there was a first cause or that there is a causal explanation of different elements in the universe. So, yeah. So you weren't convinced, but you gave them a lot of thought. And they just so in a sense,

I thought it was interesting you said somebody could Rationally believe in God, but they're certainly not compelling and didn't compel you to believe in God So well, I mean, yeah, I was intellectually Modest enough humble enough at the time to Admit that maybe I just don't understand things as well as I should. Right. I mean, that was again part of my skepticism. If you're going to be truly a skeptic, then it doesn't involve denying things. It involves withholding the proposition and being and having epistemic humility, right? So you don't know, not you deny. There's a big difference between those things.

So, yeah, I thought that, sure. Like, for example, one of my heroes in epistemology, a guy who influenced my dissertation a lot, is William Alston. And he's, you know, a close associate of Plantinga. And I read most of what Alston wrote, at least in epistemology, and I got my hands on a book called Perceiving God. And it, I didn't read the whole thing,

maybe just the first couple of chapters, and I just found myself mystified because he seemed to presuppose a religious experience that I didn't have, which is okay because that's the nature of that kind of argument. That kind of argument, what it does is it's an attempt to understand the religious experiences that people have, right? So it's based on the premise that people have a certain kind of religious experience. I didn't have that religious experience at all. I said, well, maybe, maybe in the

future I will have such a religious experience myself. And you know, maybe I'll have a reason to believe that I don't now have that's what I told myself. So you're open to it. Sounds like which is great. There's a time. I didn't take it seriously though. Nearly being open to it and actually taking it very seriously. Now that, that leads me exactly to the next question.

Cause you said you had this thought for a while that kind of I don't know if you said troubled you or bothered you that maybe you hadn't really given Christianity a fair shake. Where did that thought come from? Why did that affect you? And what did it mean to say? All right, I'm going to give it a fair shake. There's at least two questions there.

I mean, the reason that I concluded that I hadn't given it a fair shake is quite frankly, my repeated encounters with atheists and with the new atheists and all of their followers. And it had by that time been like, I don't know, five or 10 years since I had even taught a philosophy class. 10 years since I had even taught a philosophy class. So 2010, 2015. And I, I thought maybe I'm like those people myself, but in a more low key way.

Maybe maybe I'm not really being properly intellectually honest about the possible case that could be made for Christianity. And I'm just too glibly and easily assuming that there's nothing to the arguments. And I remember actually, I remember thinking this, it's like, well, maybe I'll get back into it, maybe I'll start like studying it again

and I'll change my mind, but I just never took the time to do that. But it did seem to me important that I do that. And it was actually important, ultimately, that I go through that process when I was more open to actually. But I didn't think that I was going to have any great revelation, to be quite honest. I was totally convinced that there really was nothing to the arguments to the existence of God. Again, there might have been for all I knew,

but I was pretty well convinced that there wasn't really. And I never would have thought that it would be reading the Bible that would like give me a new perspective on Arguments for the existence of God. It's like how How would that help me but it did I mean it's like it opened my eyes in so many different ways Now I love that I want to hear more about that, but I want to ask you a couple questions first leading up to that time You talk about two significant events that were a key part of your about that, but I want to ask you a couple questions first leading up to that time. You talk about two significant events that were a key part of your philosophical and

spiritual journey, which is your marriage and the birth of your first child. How did those two things just influence you and your thinking? Well, I'm a little embarrassed to admit that, you know, between the age of about 16 and 26, I was a somewhat of a devotee of Ayn Rand. So I liked her libertarianism and her devotion to rationality. There are certain things about her philosophy that I never really was quite on board with. But she she definitely served as a kind of model, I guess, of my own non-belief. You know, it's like my reasons for not believing in God would have been perhaps similar to her reasons. And, well, one of the things that Ayn Rand is famous for is the so called virtue of selfishness. And really what this amounts to is, yes, we have obligations to other people and, you

know, we ought to treat them, you know, with justice and so forth. But that ultimately can only be defended, justified in terms of our own self-interest. In other words, it's ultimately good for me to treat others with justice, essentially. And even, I thought, even to do good for other people. And maybe it's because, I don't know, makes us feel good or, well, there's more to it than that. But at any rate, okay. because, I don't know, makes us feel good or, well, there's more to it than that. But at any rate, okay, then I had a wife and, you know,

after five years, I had a child. And I reflected, you know, from time to time that I would die for these people, of course. And then that raises the question. from time to time that I would die for these people. Of course. And then that raises the question, if I'm willing to die for them, then what is the ethical egoism justification of that?

It isn't in my self-interest, it's in their interest, and I am deliberately placing their interest ahead of mine. So I said, well, Ayn Rand was wrong about that, and therefore maybe she was wrong about other things as well. Now, don't get me wrong. I didn't take Ayn Rand as sort of like my benchmark philosopher. If anyone, that would be Thomas Reid, the Scottish school of common sense, who I still like. But no. But that made an impression, right? So, yeah, anyway, I've answered your question. Yeah, that's great. You totally did.

That's a fascinating piece of your journey. And I'm going to come back to this, but it seems to be a combination of experiences you have with people and the way you thought. Both of those are coming into play in a very fascinating kind of intersection. I'm going to have you in the future reflect back on that, but there's some parts of your journey that I read, I'm like, okay, I've heard this before, I expect this. There were a couple of things I stopped, I'm like, I did not see this one coming.

And one was your interest in the occult and what your takeaways were from when you started researching that. Tell us about that, if you will. Okay. I wasn't interested in the occult. I know why you say that. It kind of, what I wrote kind of makes it sound like that. It's a little more complicated.

But it's a little more complicated. My, I was befriended by this guy who was very, well, let's just say he opened my eyes to to all the evils that Jeffrey Epstein had committed, and any number of other sort of high profile pedophiles, and all of the people who were surrounding them, and for all I know are surrounding them. And there's so many different instances of these groups throughout society. And we know about crime. You only see the tip of the iceberg.

So there's more than we know about, for sure. And these are, again, you can call them high profile elites, pedophile elites. And one thing that my friend insisted on, I don't know how much he was right about this, but a lot of the people who get into that sort of thing are occultists. They are like Freemasons or they are into, you know,

other branches, or Oskrussians, or, you know, creepy new agers or whatever, you know, especially in Hollywood. And he was like encouraging me to like use my voice to speak out against these people, which I did to a certain extent, but I didn't get too much to the occult side of things because I wasn't totally convinced. And he said, well, you know, you need to read these books. So I looked at some of the books that he recommended, and I was like, ee, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, And one of the things that I had learned through my investigation of these things is that according to these occultists, it is the knowledge itself which has a consequential spiritual effect. You know, it opens spiritual doors, right? And they'll even put it that way and be proud of themselves

for opening such doors. Well, I didn't want to open any such doors myself, that's for sure. And yet, I, again, because of what my friend had told me and because I could see it myself. Like the Freemasonry is full of Old Testament symbolism. If you didn't know it, it's true. You can look it up. All right? And basically a lot, a lot of the sort of symbology that is involved in the Rosicrucians and New Age and all the rest of that stuff is drawn

pretty much directly from the Bible, you know, and they've got their own traditions and so forth, but the ultimate source is the Bible. And so I said, OK, one thing that it would be safe for me to study if I'm going to try to understand these people more would be to read the Bible. And I went through that thought process in the summer of 2019, but I didn't get around to actually starting to read the Bible until that December. Hmm. It strikes me that there's almost like a healthy fear beginning of like opening

up these doors, what this means that's not fully at home in kind of an agnostic materialist worldview, but then you recognize kind of the occultist derivative from a larger supernatural biblical worldview. So kind of invite you to consider, okay, what's the source of this? So what what got you to the point then where you're like, alright, I gotta study the Bible. And I think you describe it as like careful and obsessively wanting to study it. What shifted where you had that mindset and you're like, I'm all in to understand this. had that mindset and you're like, I'm all in to understand this.

I'm not sure I really ever really understood why I got so obsessed with it. Maybe I was led by the Holy Spirit. But I, so I mean, at first I was just gonna read it for bedtime reading. And I did that for maybe three or four days. But then, like, I just it was so fascinating. I actually read parts,

the same part that I read to my son a few years before hadn't made no impression of this sort at all. But this time I was doing something different because I said, okay, look, I'm not just like reading this to my son so he's familiar with like the verbiage and the concepts and the characters and so forth. No, I actually want to understand it on its own terms. I actually wanted to understand what the Christians believe. All right. And this this meant and this is something I would insist on strongly now that if you're going to study the Bible and understand it you have to understand it the way that the people who believe it understand it.

who believe it, understand it, not the way that modern scholars understand it, because they're wrong. They don't take it the way the ancient Hebrews did, the ancient Christians did, or modern Christians do. So I actually used gotquestions.org, isn't it? Yeah, it's great. It's a good website. It's very reformed, but it's got a lot of solid stuff in it, a lot of good answers. My hat is off to those guys. And plenty of videos. Might have watched a video of yours at some point.

Oh, okay. And so forth. You know, I so I would like ask a question. So I think that actually is what what did it right? Because it was my it was my intention merely to understand. But then when I started doing that, it became really interesting. And the thing that that was. amazing to me, the more I actually looked up answers to my questions, which initially I didn't necessarily believe, I was just acquainting myself with the answers, you know. But what I was amazed to discover is that the 2000 year old history of theology had been asking and answering these questions and their answers, at least given sort of modern formulations that were palatable palatable to me. They actually made sense. You know, they weren't incoherent. And I'll

tell you this other thing, this is going a little bit beyond this point in the in the narrative, but I actually started writing a commentary of Genesis, it ended up being over 500 pages long. Oh, my goodness. It is basically study notes. It's questions and answers. And I asked every question that I could think of about the book of Genesis as I went through it. And some days I would spend like over an hour writing out answers.

And I was able to answer every single one. And that that was shocking to me as I as I proceeded through. In other words, let's put it this way. I'm not saying that I could give a logical proof of the the compelling, you know, nature of a particular doctrine. No, that's not what I mean. What I mean is that I could ask a certain question about what was meant, you know, Like, what was meant? You know, why did, why did Israel,

why did he make his family and his followers wash before the sacrifice, for example. All right. Ask them. And there's an answer. Not just a, it's a fascinating answer, right? Why did these characters keep getting renamed by the god or by kings, you know?

All sorts of questions like that. And it's not and there were answers that, okay, not only were there answers, but the more of the the answer or questions you asked, the more it actually made sense. So it didn't just withstand questioning, it encouraged questioning. It encouraged questioning in a way where you actually will not understand and you won't believe it as well

if you haven't asked the questions and learned the answers. So, like, okay, I'll give you a good example of that. So. Why was Sarah when when she was captured by the second of Bimalek? Right in Genesis 20, I think it is. Why was she sexually attractive to him?

She was 90 years old, right? That doesn't make any sense at all. Well, okay, I thought about it. There's different theories about that. I read different commentaries, you know, there's free commentaries online that are nicely organized. So it wasn't that much work. And and I well, I came up I came up with the following answer, which I haven't heard very much, but I think it's pretty persuasive.

Look, there was a miracle that God that God promised, right, that she would conceive and bear a child at age 90. Well, how is that possible? How would it happen? Well, there's two different ways for that to happen. Either her womb was rejuvenated or the whole woman was rejuvenated. I say the whole woman was rejuvenated or the whole woman was rejuvenated. I say the whole woman was rejuvenated. And now the Bible doesn't say that. It's very, very telegraphic, which means it only says the minimum necessary for you to be able to piece the story together properly, right? So you ask that question and it becomes then, it's, yeah, you can see that she was entirely rejuvenated.

She was made sexually attractive to Abimelek, the king. And that's how the, that's actually why that story appears there, right? Because, I mean, she's, there's, it's a weird interpolation, right, another Abimelek story. Some scholars think that it shouldn't be there, some scholars think that it shouldn't be there, that it was evidence actually of there being different textual sources.

It's cited in the order of the documentary hypothesis. That's BS. It's wrong. The reason is that Sarah was being shown to be sexually attractive, and this had to have happened at exactly the time when she conceived, right? And so, yes, it's illustrating, but you wouldn't know that if you didn't ask the hard question. So nobody thinks about this. Now, I actually think you have to do this with every part of the Bible. Amen. If you don't really carefully analyze the Bible, you're not going to learn all the things that there is. And the thing to get back to the point,

the thing that I discovered is that when you ask the hard questions and you really try to get to faithful answers, the answers of the sort that the people who believed the text had in mind, the original recipients, the smartest of them, what they understood, what they had in mind the original recipients, the smartest of them, what they understood, what they had in mind, then you will, you will discover, um, all sorts of things that, that you can't see in the text. This is the only proper way to understand the Bible and it's the way to make the Bible the most persuasive. So anyway. I love hearing you say this more than I can describe, Larry, because I've heard from so many people growing up that ask questions like you did. I was a question asker and my dad was like,

let's talk about it. Tell me your questions was not threatened by doubt. So many people afraid to ask questions turned away and understandably don't feel welcome in the church. And yet, I tell my students the same thing. I'm like, if you actually go to the text and you look for answers, the vast majority of time, it might take some research and thought. You can find them. And you see this, one of my favorite commentaries in the Old Testament is by Dennis Prager, who's a Jew.

And he starts by saying, we should ask questions of the text. And when we do and we probe, because Israel means wrestle with God, it's amazing the responses that we can find. So it seems like your story is kind of coming full circle from somebody, you know, not kicked out of the church, but not welcomed because of questions, to finally saying, wait a minute, I'm a question asker, I'm a philosopher, there's a place for me, a seat at the table, so to speak,

and if I use my mind, I actually find that this is true. I love that. I just have to emphasize it for all my viewers that we will not turn people away asking questions to the church, but invite them in and not be threatened by it. One of the next things you talk about, I thought again, this was so interesting,

is you talk about an experiment of talking to God. What was that experiment and why did you do it? So, okay, so I told you how when I was a child, I prayed, and a lot of times my prayers took the form of me saying to God and then just imagining what God would say in response. But even as a child, I remember this, I didn't think that God was speaking to me in response. I know there's a lot of people who think that is true. It's not true. You're just using your imagination.

And if it's based on the Bible, it's much more likely. Now, is possible? It's possible that the Holy Spirit is actually guiding you in imagining the answers. You must not assume that it always that he always is. All right. So that's that's all I want to say. We are not prophets because we can imagine God answering us.

That's all I'm saying. OK, so. When I was older, When I was older, I sometimes had like deep, mostly moral questions for myself, needed sort of moral guidance. And so I would imagine a wise, this is going to be kind of strange, but I'll tell you anyway. I imagined a white haired individual appearing outside my window in a floating car. It was just a way it was just a way to make it all right. Interesting. Okay. Okay. And, and, and I I would like take a gangplank and get into the car. And I would imagine asking this person questions, you know, and getting answers. I even wrote down little dialogues, you know, of this. But of course, I never thought that I was doing anything other than a dialogue with, even sometimes I would say a dialogue

with God about topics related to God, because I wrote a lot about philosophy that never published. It was crap. It's all bad. But anyway, at any rate, so I decided to start doing that again, experimentally, but directing my conversations to God. And that just segued imperceptibly. That was never a time when I said, well, no, I really am talking to God now.

No, I just that that sort of turned into into prayer. Like, at first, I was talking, talking to God about the details of philosophical arguments. And, you know, it was often things like when I got into Psalms, like Psalm 19, I think, and 121, I believe. So some of the Psalms are very philosophical. And not just there, other places too. Just sort of like almost casual aside, you start analyzing, just start asking questions about them as I was doing. It's like it placed things into a new perspective.

And so I cannot. I had these sorts of these sorts of. Imagine conversations and. But I think it was the. I will say this, I continue to have these sorts of imagined conversations. I am not a prophet. I do not claim that the things that I imagine God saying in response are actually said by God to me. No, I insist, in fact, that it's just my imagination. But I do think that the more that we read the Bible, the more that we understand doctrine, the more accurate our imagined answers will be. Right? So I think we have to, in other words, to put this, if you don't want to talk about play pretend, this isn't play pretend, this is serious pretend.

If you don't want to put it in terms of play pretend, the point is we have to imagine what God would say to us. In other words, what the creator of the universe actually thinks about the about various things going on in our lives, thoughts in our heads and so forth. We have to allow God to interrogate us, essentially, you know, imagine it. God to interrogate us, essentially. You know, imagine it. But unless you root that in the Bible and understand the Bible and doctrine, which is to say what you can infer reliably from the Bible, then your answers are gonna be half-baked a lot of times.

You're kind of hinting at what C.S. Lewis said, God in the dock. God is not the one on trial. We are the one on trial. And I think just one quick point before we keep going, is one of the things the new atheists would do is they would just not, they would go surface deep on the Bible and go, slavery, misogyny, genocide, God is terrible. And those are, those are fair objections that we need to respond to. But I was reading Jordan Peterson's, you know, Jordan Peterson's recent book, We Who Rest With God, and it's like this massive text where he says, let's first just dive in and wrestle with what does this mean and what's happening. And then we address those stories.

with what does this mean and what's happening. And then we address those stories once we've understood in the context, in the time, what's being said. And I have so much more respect for that approach. And I think that's what you try to do. Like, I want to understand it on its own terms. And maybe God's telling me something about holiness and righteousness and judgment. That's a very different way of reading the Bible.

Now you said earlier that when you're reading the Bible, it made you reconsider some of the arguments for God or at least view them differently. How do you reconsider them? Do you think the arguments are good now? Yes, I do think the arguments are much better now. I think that you have to proportion the strength of each individual conclusion to the premises of that particular argument. So all that the argument from contingency establishes is that a necessary being

exists on which the universe is contingent. That's all it establishes. Doesn't establish anything more, in my opinion. Now, I don't necessarily. I still try to be intellectually humble. So maybe there is a reason to immediately leap to the conclusion God exists on that basis. But here's the point. OK. If you say that that has a modicum of support, that's a very interesting thing.

That's that bare thought is what sort of that helped me to understand the Bible and the Bible helped me to understand that. Just when I had started studying what God meant when he was saying, and is it Exodus 2? I think when he's talking about his name, you know, Exodus 3, I just preached on it this past Sunday. Right. Exodus 3. And he says, I am that I am.

That's right. My first thought is, that is not grammatical. What does that mean? And so I looked it up, of course, and I said, why is it translated that way? And actually trying to come to it, I, you know, to make a long story short, I learned the typical thing that is said about that, namely that it means that God is essentially existent.

God is essentially being. And and what that means is that God is life and sovereign. And there's a reason I say that, because what life is most essentially is an organism that keeps itself in its structure, homeostasis. It keeps itself alive. God is the most alive thing because he is entirely self existent apart from all other. Things, which then leads you to the part about sovereignty. So if he doesn't depend, if his existence doesn't depend on anything else, then everything

else depends on him. If he is, in fact, the creator of everything, which, you know, there is reason to believe. So then that means so. Just interrogating that passage and why God introduces himself that way, you know, asking a lot of hard questions about that, you know, helps a lot of hard questions about that, you know, helps you to understand better the very notion of necessity, of God's necessity, which just cast the argument from contingency in a new light.

So the argument from contingency simply says, a bird flies outside my window, I expect to see an explanation of that. Well, hatched from an egg and this is what birds do, birds maybe they evolved or maybe they came from somewhere and they're part of this whole system. And ultimately you trace causes back to an initial cause and the bird also at a different level follows different laws

and those laws can be rooted and explained into in terms of some fundamental laws and so forth. You expect an explanation of all of these things. You certainly expect an explanation of why the bird flew by my window at that moment. You think there's a reason that makes that necessary, right? Well, why isn't that true of the entire universe and everything that's in it? Right? Including the laws and the constants and so forth. Well, that would be a necessary being.

And that necessary being that stands in a sort of explanatory relation to the creation. Now, obviously, the big question, the, you know, the sophomore question to ask about this, the question I asked when I was, you know, 10 years old, you know, talking about these things. Well, what explains God then? You know, what explains?

And the point is that there's a difference between the contingent facts of the universe, which it seems could be otherwise, right? And we're trying to understand those contingent facts in terms of something that couldn't be otherwise. All right. So the reason why God or something, we haven't said that it's God yet

at this point in the argument. We're saying it's a necessary being. The reason that there must be a necessary being if you're going to think there's a sufficient explanation of all of these different things is that, well, yeah, I just said it. There has to be a sufficient explanation of all of these things. And it has to be necessary in itself.

And otherwise, you haven't really explained anything. The regress of explanation continues. Anyway, I'm getting into the weeds here. Yeah, that's okay. I just find it fascinating that you didn't find those arguments compelling. Then when you read the Bible and start to have a change of worldview, you look back, not expecting it to be compelling, but the teleology argument, the cosmological argument,

some of the other ones you talk about in your article are compelling. I agree with you that it's a part of a cumulative case, and it's the best explanation is the way to look at it. Now, I also found this super interesting. You described not having a mind blowing conversion to faith. What was it like when you all said and just thought, okay, I'm a believer. And was there a sense where you had a realization

of the weight of your sin as a part of that conversion? Well, I sort of, I felt kind kind of this is a little too dramatic, but it gets at the idea. I was dragged kicking and screaming into interfaith. I didn't I didn't. OK, I am not just philosophically but constitutionally a skeptic and a question asker. And therefore, I don't change my mind on trivial,

for trivial reasons. I don't like to make up my mind about things. And I certainly don't like to make up my mind very quickly. And it's distressing to change your worldview, because this required that I, you know, if it's true that God exists, then there's a lot of things that I previously believed that wouldn't be the case. Maybe the most important would be materialism, actually, was a well, I was a kind of physicalist. I was a property

dualist. But at any rate, but I didn't believe necessarily in a spirit world of any sort. I thought that the ultimate explanations of the mind, mental stuff was, you know, in physical terms ultimately somehow. And that, but, well, like, I changed my mind about that, because, you know, it's hard to, well, let's put it this way. I decided to take seriously the possibility that I had been wrong about that. And when I started investigating that question, I found that the reasons that formerly seemed insufficient are now sufficient. A lot of the thing a lot of what made a difference for me is that I and this is what really made it a

struggle is that I was committed to methodological skepticism. Right. So like, I'm really serious about not believing something, unless I had really good reasons to believe it. And I understood it very well. And generally speaking, my standards of belief, I thought were very high. So like, skeptical about, I thought it was basically impossible to know anything about anything very complex. And I said, Well, if I'm gonna, I'm gonna want to make up my mind, maybe I should have put this in my document there. But if I'm if I'm going to make up, I'm gonna want to make up my mind for or against the existence of God at some point, that actually is one

of the things that I that I remember thinking. And I said, Okay, if I if I did decide to make up my mind, then how would I decide? And, you know, the more I read the Bible, the more I thought about the questions, the more I wrote about the questions, because I was writing a lot about philosophy of religion, essentially, natural theology, it's called sometimes in 2020. and I haven't stopped since then. Well, I, the more I wrote about it, the more I became convinced that the case for the cumulative case for the existence of God really was stronger than otherwise.

So far it's going to make up my mind. I'm going to go ahead and do it. But yeah, the thing that I can barely comprehend myself at this point is why I is why I abandoned methodological skepticism to that extent. I guess a large part of it is I got old enough that, like, I had no ego involved in that, you know? I think there is a certain amount of ego involved in cherished, cherished beliefs of all sorts. And, and right, something like that.

Yeah, that makes sense. A lot of your journey is getting older, seeing things differently, getting married, having kids, different life perspective, which makes total sense. If I can ask you just the last couple questions because you've been really generous with your time. I'm curious if you can parse this one out for me. One thing you said is, this is early on in your journey, said, I observed Christians on social media, though not always behaving with maturity and grace, while their critics often acted like obnoxious trolls. Some of my favorite people were Christians too, and some of them were extremely intelligent,

strange. You also describe at a different time feeling warm about Christianity, finding it, quote, positively likable. Looking back now, how would you kind of assess these different factors at play? Was this a rational journey, a relational journey, an emotional journey, or all of the above in different fashions? I'll tell you this, had a 100% honesty. At the time, I thought that it was more irrational than rational. I thought that that that the reasons that I had, like I said,

kicking and screaming were were insufficient. And yet, looking back, the more I understand about the case, the stronger I think it was. I actually think that I was, in fact, proportioning my belief to the evidence as I understood it. And my understanding of the evidence and it's how compelling it was changed in a period of about a year or half a year. So that in the end. Well let's put it this way. The reasons that I had for disbelief had all fallen away, right? And that sort of left me free to consider the proposition sort of neutrally on its own merits. And again, as I say, if I'm just going to make up my mind and come to the best

explanation of all of the different arguments or the premises of all the arguments for the existence of God, indeed, the preponderance of the evidence seemed to be in favor of the existence of God. the preponderance of the evidence seemed to be in favor of the existence of God. Now, did it matter that that there were, you know, Christians that I knew and loved, admired, respected? Of course, actually, that mattered a lot. respected. Of course, actually, that mattered a lot. And if I didn't have any good examples of that sort, I'm sure I never would have taken the faith seriously, doctrine seriously. I think so that was again, that's like one of the things that kind of one of my reasons for disbelief dropped away because to be honest, and I'm not mean to be

disrespectful or anything. But when I was younger, maybe I was disrespectful when I was younger. When I was younger, I didn't have as much respect for believers. I thought that they were kind of dupes. I thought that they were... Well, I mean, there were some really, really brilliant people. I never denied that, who were Christians. I mean, it's obvious. But you know, they had, you know, it's possible for brilliant people to convince themselves of all kinds of ridiculous things. I mean, isn't, as time went on, I began to appreciate the graces that, social graces, moral graces that Christians demonstrate in life.

demonstrate in life and I think they started making a lot more they started carrying more weight it started being a lot more important yeah that's a wonderful answer I just want to emphasize to my audience the combination of good evidences and rational arguments and answering questions in the Bible, but also Christians being charitable, Christians being kind, Christians living out their faith with authenticity. Seeing that was a huge piece of your journey. We need both.

So, love that you pointed that out. You're working on this 550 page project called God Exists, a philosophical case for the Christian God. Now you didn't ask this, but I want to tell you someone in the world of apologetics, write that. Keep working on it. I think this could be a huge gift for the church. Even just some of the insights you make in this paper alone.

I have a master's in philosophy or religion. I'm an apologist. You made a couple insights. I was like, wow, I'm not sure I quite thought of it like that. So please keep plugging away. Let me know if I can help in any fashion with this, big or small, would love to encourage you along in this journey. And want to thank you for coming on.

And how can you... I'll send you a copy. Oh, I'd love it. Yeah, that'd be great. How can people follow you? Is it your blog or they just kind of track with your continued thinking? Yeah, I need to. There is a sign-up form that I'm going to add to my blog soon. If you just leave a comment, then I will add you to the mailing list, but I'll try to get it up before this video goes live. There's a Telegram Bible study group, but that's Bible study.

If you want to read the Bible, we'll probably start again closer to the beginning of April. We're finishing up. It's going to be my fifth time through since starting. So, there's a link to that in the essay. And you can always follow me on x.com, you know. So, L. Sanger there. L. Sanger at X got your blog. People can follow and I love that you invited people in the article into a Bible study with you.

That's a great invitation. Larry, I have thoroughly enjoyed this. This has been so wonderful to get to interact with you a little bit. Thanks for coming out and sharing your your journey and your story. Phenomenal. interact with you a little bit. Thanks for coming out and sharing your journey and your story, phenomenal. Folks, before you click away, make sure you hit subscribe. We've got some other story, conversion stories coming up. We're gonna talk about Islam. We've got the Dead Sea Scrolls coming up, more on near-death experiences, and a lot more you won't wanna miss. And the stuff we've talked about today,

we go into depth on this. At Talbot, we have a Master's in apologetic program and and philosophy religion is a part of that. We also have a full distance MA fill program one of the top rated in the world in terms of the number of students we're sending out into just top rated programs. So information is below we would love to have you. Larry it's been a joy. Let's do it again and sometimes talk about the backstory to Wikipedia and how you discern truth. That'd be a whole other conversation in itself.

All right. Thank you so much. It's been a great, it's been great fun. I appreciate it.