The Sean McDowell Show - Leaving Progressive Christianity (and Atheism)

Episode Date: February 24, 2025

How did a Christian become an atheist at a Bible college, then 25 years later, convert back to his faith? Dr. John Wise is the host of The Christian Atheist podcast. He has taught as an adjunct professor of philosophy at East Stroudsburg University, Grand Canyon University, and is currently teaching ethics and informal logic at the University of Arizona, Global Campus. Today, he tells us more about his time as a Progressive Christian. LISTEN: The Christian Atheist Podcast: https://wisewordsforyouroccasion.podbean.com/ CHECK OUT: Their YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@TheChristianAtheist READ: Through the Looking Glass, by John Wise (https://amzn.to/4gZgPXH) *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://twitter.com/Sean_McDowell TikTok: @sean_mcdowell Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmcdowell/ Website: https://seanmcdowell.org

Why would a young Christian leave his faith to become an atheist? And then years later, as a philosophy professor, become a progressive Christian. And then why, even more recently, would he leave progressive Christianity behind to become a more conservative Christian? Our guest today, Dr. John Wise, previously shared his story of leaving atheism. A ton of people requested he come back to share the second part of his journey out of progressive Christianity. Given that we often hear people moving from conservative Christianity to progressive Christianity,

a lot of people wanted to hear this part of your story John, so thank you for coming back and being willing to talk about it. Oh, it is my delight for sure because this is deep on our hearts. My wife and I are deeply concerned about the direction of the Church today and to have this opportunity to reach out and let others know that they're not alone, those who are holding to the faith.

So I appreciate the opportunity immensely. John, you and I both have philosophical training, but one thing I appreciate you is you're not an arid, dry philosopher. You bring emotion and passion, and I know that's going to come out in this interview. That's one reason people wanted you back. But maybe just sum up for us quickly, the link is below, just really quickly before we jump into the second part of your story.

Why did you leave Christianity? And then what brought you back years later as a professor? Okay, better than I can ever do on a brief summary like this, I would suggest people buy the book or listen to the podcast through the looking glass and I tell the story at greater length there, but here's the quick the quick peanut version. I was going to Bible College to become a pastor. As time went on, I felt like I was trying to convince myself that Christianity was right. And so by the end of my Bible College tenure, I got to the point where I said to myself, I am going to follow the search for truth wherever it takes me.

And within a couple of years, I got to the point after studying science and really immersing myself in philosophy that I no longer believed in God. By that point I was working on a PhD program at the University of California Irvine and I graduated from there with my PhD and began to teach philosophy for, you know, 20 years. And throughout all that time I maintained a position of atheism. I said there is no God. And so I followed that logic progressively. And last time we got together you made a comment, well we can talk about that later, about Fideism. And my journey really from Christianity to atheism and then from atheism back was almost exclusively an intellectual journey. And so I detail that in the podcast

and in the book, how these various steps intellectually I was taken through philosophy to the point where I came in 2019. I said to myself, you know what, these are two disparate visions of the world. Both of them are rational. I'm, excuse me, atheism and Christianity or theism. Both of them are rational. How do I decide between them? And just by default, I was an atheist at the time and I saw no way to ever get back. And then through a series of events, I met a woman who allowed me to, let's say,

see myself clearly in the looking glass for the first time in 25 years. And that led me back to Christ. And so it was a slow gradual buildup that suddenly crashed down around me. And I had no point. When I came back to theism, because of my background in Christianity, there was no sort of gap between theism and Christianity. As soon as I believed in God again, I knew where I stood.

So that's the quick version. Okay, that's great. And again, people can check out your book, your podcast, our earlier conversation. So you describe coming back to the faith. How is the faith that you came back to similar and or different of the faith that you were kind of raised in and knew growing up? You just locked up on that. You got to the point where similar and then I lost you. So the faith that you came back to, how is it similar and or different from the faith that you grew up with? Right. So largely the faith I grew up with was very conservative, very evangelical, and grounded in strictly the biblical viewpoint.

But my father was an agnostic. And so I became ensconced in the scientific worldview. By default became like an evolutionist. That just was how I was taught in school. And so when I came back to Christ, I still had those evangelical leanings, but it seemed to me all the things that I've learned in between were problematic and didn't quite fit well with the evangelical view. In particular, one of the things that bothered me, and I mentioned this in an early podcast was that evangelical seemed to me to Worship the Bible instead of worshiping God and that bothered me at some level But on the positive on the more positive view, um, I

Was gonna say That's okay Um, I was going to say, lost myself. That's okay. That's not it. Um, yeah. Sorry. You're, you're doing great. You're talking about how when you came back, you felt like Christians were worshiping the Bible and that bothered you. And on the more positive side, my faith was much more grounded when I came back,

because I didn't have to have the answers that drove me away from Christianity in the first place. I felt as though I just couldn't answer these difficult questions. And when I came back, I realized, I don't have to have an answer for all of difficult questions. And when I came back, I realized I don't have to have an answer for all of these questions. But I also carried with me, like all the things that I learned in philosophy, all the things I learned about history, and all the things I learned about science,

and they didn't quite fit. So I held on to most of those worldview issues while I was a Christian and even long after I started with the Christian Atheist podcast. So it was a long period in which I was what I would call myself a progressive Christian, a theistic evolutionist. Okay, this is really interesting. So you leave a more fundamentalist faith, become an atheist for a couple decades or so, adopt certain beliefs, science, history that you would describe from the world

when you become a Christian, you bring some of those with you and then over time have shed more and more of those beliefs that you think don't line up with scripture. Is that fair in so far as it goes? Okay. Absolutely. So, looking back, when you first became a Christian,

do you believe that you really knew God at that point? I guess I'm getting at this like theologically. We can talk about evolution, beliefs about history, other stuff. But theologically, do you believe you were in the fold and then just had to shed some of these secular ideas or do you look back and go, oh my goodness, I was not even in the fold until I shedded some of these secular ideas? No, I have no doubts. Actually, I came to Christ when I was five or six years old and looking back I can see clearly the God's in my life all of that time even when I turned my back

on him. I have no, even if oddly enough, if you'd asked me as an atheist whether or not eternal salvation, what's the theological term, see eternal security was the correct doctrine. I'd say, Yeah. And when I came back, I looked back over and I said, I knew I was saved all that time. In fact, that's what my wife told me. She said, Look, I see it in you. I know you're you're calling yourself an atheist right now. But you gave your life to Christ those years ago. And she said, I know. That's true.

So yeah, I lost a lot. but I of course never lost my salvation because that depends on the Lord, not me. Now I have a million questions, but one observation is often say to people, if somebody's really saved at some point in their life, we are going to see them if they stray away, come back. Now, can that be a day, a month, a year, two decades? Only God knows, but that's-

Quarter century? That's, yeah. Well, if somebody lives that long. Okay. So let's unpack what we mean by progressive Christianity, because that is a term that can mean very, very different things. And for example, when I've had a couple of conversations with a self-described progressive Christian

by the name of Colby Martin. And he gives four characteristics. One of them is adopting kind of mainstream modern science, which he would tie to the age of the earth, evolutionary theory, other things. That's one component that he gives amongst others. That term is really flexible and debatable but maybe just tell us what you mean by that term so we understand where you're coming from.

Sure. I actually, in prep here, I wrote down something to explain what I meant by progressive Christianity because I didn't think it was really clear when we talked about it last time. Progressive Christianity, as I see it, is a willingness to compromise the biblical faith to accommodate some modern and popular notions. So it's a transfer of authority from God, the Scripture, to some other source, man, science, whatever it would be. And if you don't mind, I'd just like to read one quote from C.S. Lewis on that point. Lewis says in his Christian apologetics article, there will be progress in Christian knowledge only as long as we accept the challenge of the difficult or

repellent doctrines. A liberal Christianity, which considers itself free to alter the faith, whenever the faith looks perplexing or repellent, must be completely stagnant. Progress is made only into a resisting material. The standard of permanent Christianity must be kept clear in our minds and it is against that standard that we must test all contemporary thought. In fact, we must at all costs not move with the times. We serve one who said, Heaven and earth shall move with the times, but my words shall not move with the times.

Our business is to present that which is timeless, the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow, in the particular language of our own age. The bad preacher does exactly the opposite. He takes the ideas of our own age and tricks them out in the traditional language of Christianity. I'm sorry that was long, but I think that gives the best view of what I mean by progressive Christianity. Well, C.S. Lewis is always the trump card, so if we can quote C. quote CS Lewis, it's like case closed for the Christian. Now, I mean we could quibble this definition. I don't want to spend the whole show on it.

I suspect some people might say, all right, there's a difference between compromising to the spirit of the age and having genuine knowledge that somebody understands and trying to incorporate that into what the Bible teaches and seen it through a fresh lens. So that and that gets back to some of the particulars we won't necessarily flesh out. But as you see it if I sum it up as a whole you describe it as somebody who holds cultural ideas more as a form of authority than the Bible,

and adjusts the Bible to those ideas, and in some ways loses the heart of the Bible, when we shouldn't do that in the way that C.S. Lewis stated. Is that, in a sense, what you mean by progressive Christianity? Is that fair? Yes. Yes. When we're willing to compromise the clear word of the Scriptures, we've lost our way. I mean, the ancient paths that Jeremiah talked about, we need to be on those paths because that's where we find joy, truth, and reality. And when we abandon the Word of God in any of the ways in which we decide to abandon it, this does not mean we can't be learning new things from the Bible. I think we have a lot more new things to learn. In fact, that was a big

part of what drove us here. When Jenny and I this year decided to dive back into the Bible together, we started working on a series for the Christian Atheists called Malachi. And I had no idea when I began that series where it was going to take us. It took us from Genesis to Revelation. It took us to the genealogies of Jesus and the conflicts there and how to reconcile them. And it was just an amazing story. And all of that in the midst of all of that is when God actually brought me to the point where I said, okay, I'm back on the word of God is the authority.

Period. There are no others. So when you say in one sense, I wonder for everybody in the way you define it, that it's a temptation for all of us who are believers to greater and lesser degree. It's not in the way you're explaining it, like you just have progressive Christians and non-progressive Christians. We all have a certain level of temptation to say, am I watering down what the Bible says about hell? Am I watering down what the Bible says about fill in the blank? Whatever that may be. So really this is a

constant temptation all of us who are followers of Christ are tempted with rather than people being in these complete categories of progressive Christian and non-progressive Christian. Is that how you see it? Yeah. Yeah. Yep. For sure.

Okay. All right. So fair enough. Now I know at this point, some people are going, wait a minute, I'm a progressive Christian, this doesn't find me fair enough. We're not defining it for everybody else. We're talking about your understanding of it. And there's certainly others who see it that way.

Tell me what it was that started to give you pause. So you imported some of these ideas along with you unknowingly, have an encounter with Christ. What was kind of the first time you stopped and thought, okay, wait a minute, maybe I have brought something with me that doesn't line up with the scripture. Take us to that moment. Okay. So way back when, I'm not sure exactly when it was anymore,

the announcement of the Mounted Ball curse tablet came across my phone. I looked at it, got really, really excited. Wow, this could be from the time of Joshua. So I was so excited about that, I began to study what was going on and Chris Rolston came on and said, we need to be methodologically cautious here. And I said, boy, that guy's got it. He's exactly right. Be careful, Christians. Don't jump on this too quickly. Think about it carefully. So I began to think about it carefully. And I began to study archaeology and the things that archaeology has discovered in recent days, in recent years, over the past couple of decades in particular. I began to study

the higher critic criticism and the JEDP theory, and all of that was things that I thought, well, you know, coming back to Christ, Christ is the important thing. These other things in the Old Testament, maybe some of them are mythological. Maybe, you know, they're just myths that have theological meaning, and we can do without them as long as we can hold on to the theological meaning. I had a big discussion with an atheist critic on the issue of the Exodus. He said, look, the consensus of archaeology is that the Jews were never in Egypt, and therefore no Exodus, no conquest of the land. And I said, at that point I hadn't even studied any of it, I said, well be careful. I said, you're

claiming a bit too much on the basis of the evidence. Lack of evidence doesn't mean an evidence of a lack, right? So I said, that may or may not be the case. I said, my faith doesn't depend on it one way or the other, whether or not there was an Exodus. So that was one of the times when I started to think to myself, well, does it depend on that? Because the Bible is saying that, and I'm saying that the Bible is important to me, but if I can just dismiss those things out of hand, what position am I in and what message am I sending to others

about the nature of this holy book that we're saying shows them the way to salvation through Christ. And so the Mounted Ball thing was huge for me. I started a series called, later on after that first initial one What did I call it? the JEDP theory The Mountie bulk defixio, yeah and CS Lewis, right? So I have a very long it's like a 10 or 12 Episode thing. I got really excited by it and by the end of it I had come to realize that

So much of modern theology has just been compromised, period. And that was one of the things I still wasn't, I was still holding on to what I would call progressive Christianity at the time. So, but, but it started to crack pretty seriously there. So Scott Stripling, buddy of mine came on and he's one of the archaeologists behind it, did actually some of mine came on and he's one of the archaeologists behind it, did actually some of his announcements on the channel, had Christopher Rolston, like you mentioned, do a critique. Scott came back and responded to it and I thought I can only cover the story so many times.

I think it's fascinating on so many levels. Was it that you had a particular view of the Cursed Tablet? Or is that just the interest that got you going down the rabbit trail whether you think it's real or not that got you engaging some of these ideas? It's both. When I was over in Israel and after Bible College, our first year of Bible College, they took us over to Israel and I was there at the time that Adam Zertal was, you know, digging up the altar.

So I was kind of fascinated by that. I was actually there at the time when he was doing it. And then Stripling comes along and finds this curse tablet. And I think to myself, wow, this could be a real window if it says what they say it says, and if it is what they say it is, this could take down almost, you know, what, a century worth of liberal scholarship. It just goes away. It's just destroyed. If it's true, if it's right, I still don't know for sure if it is. I tend to think it is. I think the critics have done great damage to themselves, including Rolston, by dismissing

instead of actually saying, okay, so let's actually study this. And the more we study it, the closer we'll come to knowing whether or not there really is something there. So I said, let the lead speak, let it speak, let it tell us what it has to say, stop trying to shut it down. And so yeah, I have a fascination on both sides of that. If it's not from Joshua's time, if it's not a curse tablet, if it's a little lead sinker, whatever, I don't care, but let's look at it.

I mean, let's see what it actually has to say and not just dismiss it. Yeah. I don't know that I got the impression Rolston was just dismissing it. He came on, talked about it. He did a review of it, did his critique. He just doesn't, as an epigrapher, think it's legitimate. But with that said, tell me what kind of worldview shifted in your mind? What was taking place as you look at this curse tablet, you're reading certain liberal ideas about, say say the Exodus or about the curse tablet

Starting to be persuaded that their case is maybe not as strong as you thought it was Was that the process was it like wait a minute. I haven't studied this. There's good evidence for the Exodus Was it oh the curse tablet might be legitimate Walk us through a little bit more some of those shifts in your mind. Actually, just to answer one thing on Chris Rolston, when I do my critique on that, Chris Rolston really isn't the big target. I think he is a little bit too dismissive of it, but it was Robert Cargill that was really the target of my polemics because I thought he

was unhinged in the way in which he dealt with it. So yeah, it began to chip away at the possibility in my mind. I wasn't being fair to the evidence. I wasn't really looking at both sides. And I said, I need to look at biblical archaeology myself and see what it is that it's telling us. And just a bit of a retrogression here, when I was in Bible college, there were two instances where the tour guides made some statements that were very damaging. At the time it didn't do more than just sort of prick me a little bit, but they kept building as time went on.

And I think they helped contribute to my turn to atheism. When we went to Jericho, the guide said, no, it's impossible. It never happened the way it says in the Bible, because Jericho wasn't even a city at the time that they came into, that the Israelites would have come in. And here I am standing in Israel listening to this guide saying this, and I'm thinking to myself, there's no archaeological evidence, it absolutely contradicts things. And then once again in Jerusalem at the Pole of Siloam, which hadn't been discovered, they said, that's a myth, there is no such thing. The Bible is making up stories.

The review of the Jericho evidence by Bryant Wood absolutely makes the case that it was there. And so I didn't know the evidence well enough. And so I needed to go back and see the evidence. And I did that, and now the pool of Siloam has been discovered there in the process of unearthing it. You know, so, and there's so many more of those too, we could talk about. So yeah, there were things that, that I had to slowly tear down as certain evidence in my mind that the Bible was wrong on this and the Bible was wrong on that, and that therefore I needed to, if I'm going to believe, I have to massage things a little bit. I have to explain away some portions of the Bible. And I didn't know how to reconcile the two of them together. And so it took a lot of extra learning to be able to get to the point to say

Look, I was wrong and the critics who were so Cocksure in what they said and so certain and came across with such authority that I believe them Hmm. Now some might say okay John your philosopher. You're an outsider. You're not trained in history You're not philosopher, you're an outsider, you're not trained in history, you're not trained in archaeology. So you come in here without the right eyes and perspective and training and you see things correctly. We've been studying this for generations and doing peer-reviewed data. Do you think, like how would you answer that? And I imagine you could say something like that you have an advantage coming

from the outside because you're not tainted by certain presuppositions within the field. Is that the direction you'd go? Tell me how you would answer that. Yes. And also another big factor in my life, I remember back in Bible college reading Thomas Kuhn's, the structure of scientific revolutions. And that was absolutely foundational to my understanding of things moving forward.

Plus a whole lot of other things I studied in graduate school, including the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, my nemesis. But I think that coming from an outsider's perspective, as you mentioned, can oftentimes be a really big advantage. If you study the literature on experts, experts are usually wrong about a lot of the things that they predict because they're too close to the evidence. And that's something I would say about Chris Rolston. You actually mentioned something to him at one point in your discussion with him. You said, could it possibly

be that you're bringing something in from outside a presupposition? And he said, no, I just deal with the evidence and I go wherever the evidence takes me. But I've learned as a philosopher, not just from Kuhn, but through experience as well, that nobody comes just viewing the evidence. In fact, evidence itself is more theory-related than most of us are willing to look at. You have to be very careful on that. So I think as a philosopher, I do have an advantage, not just in looking at myself, which my wife has been more helpful to me than I have.

Like I said, she's my looking glass. But yeah, you're able to see that there's an awful lot of philosophical underpinnings beneath the surface of the certainty that so many people project in our world, theologians, scientists, all of them. So what does that look like for you in terms of saying, all right, these other people mentioned or not, they bring a certain bias in worldview, but as a philosopher, you're able to not do that. I could hear somebody going, okay, John, you're making exception for yourself.

You're the enlightened one. How would you respond to that to say you're seeing things clearly, but they're not? Right. In fact, that's one of the foundational lessons of philosophy. Socrates said, you know, that the Apollo the Oracle at Apollo called him Oracle at Delphi, sorry called him the wisest man in all of Greece And he said that's ridiculous because I know that I'm the most ignorant man in all of Greece. I know next to nothing. And so that was what Socrates' wisdom consisted of,

recognizing that he himself didn't know much of anything. And that's where I tried to go. It's one of the things that was an anchor point for the entire Christian Atheist podcast series, starting from the very beginning. It was Socrates that ultimately led me in a lot of ways back to Christ because he taught me to recognize that you think you know something, you better be careful and you better go back and examine it and see whether or not you do. Follow the logic, follow the argument where it takes you. And interesting enough, I just finished a book

by Antony Flew right before he died. There is a God, so he's the most notorious, or one of the most notorious atheists of the 20th century. And at the end of his life, he came from atheism to theism, familiar story. Tragically, I don't think, and what I've looked at, he never made the final step from theism to Christianity. He liked it. He thought it was a great, probably the best of all religions, but he couldn't make the last step. And that breaks my heart.

It's interesting. He had it last chapter in the book written by N.T. Wright on the resurrection. And he says if omnipotence was going to give a religion, you know, to beat, it'd be Christianity with a charismatic figure like Jesus and a first rate intellectual like Paul. Exactly. Yes. Love that line. Though, I mean, he's as close as someone could be potentially, but we don't know. I mean, even Habermas has said maybe in his last moments he believed.

We just don't have any positive evidence that he did. Let me go back to some statements you made before. You said, so kind of the narrative was the Exodus didn't happen. You looked into it and didn't buy it. What would it have it done to your faith at this point where the curse tablet starts to make you kind of go down this rabbit trail, so to speak, and were you open to being persuaded that the Exodus say didn't happen, or at least there's no good evidence for it? And if so, what would that have done to your faith?

At that point, I don't think it would have done anything to my faith in terms of believing in Christ, but it would have reinforced anything to my faith in terms of believing in Christ, but it would have reinforced where I was standing in progressive Christianity. I mean, where I stand now is quite different because I'm now to the point where, like Kurt Wise said, if the evidence is all against me at this point, I'm going to go with God. I'm going to go with Christ. Even if all of the evidence goes against me, though he slay me, yet will I trust him, right? Job said. Maybe that's just an evolution of faith for myself. Because at this point, this raft that I've sailed on in Christianity through the early part of my life and now through the last five years, it's my rock.

And evidence matters, but the evidence that I've been given about God in my life and Christ and in reading the Bible, especially with this Malachi series that we did, has brought all of those things together for me in such a way that the fabric is so powerfully interwoven that I can't envision anymore something that's going to shake it. Will it possibly shake some of my particular beliefs if something weird happens over here that says this in the Bible could never possibly have happened and it's kind of proved beyond? Then I would have to say, hmm, how do we reconcile this? How do we understand it? And that motion of trying to say, look, this is my faith position. How do I reconcile it with what I'm being given

is something everybody does, be they Christian, theist, atheist, scientist. I did a series on my turn back and I evaluated a book by Eugene Kuhnen, a contemporary, I think he works at the NIH right now, and he's worked in other places too, an evolutionary theorist, and it's called, what do I call it?

The Evolutionary Faith is the name of the podcast episode. And in it, Kuhnen makes clear that he has calculated the odds of two of the major mechanisms needed to arise in order to give rise to life. And he said the possibility of their coming about by chance is 10 to the 17th, one in 10 to the seventhth, no, 1,017. So that's a number that's so astronomically big. And yet he says, and yet I'm an evolutionist and I'll never stop being an evolutionist. And so that's faith in the face of evidence. And that's pretty amazing.

I mean, I don't know that my faith in God is that strong. I wish it were. That's interesting. Now, for me, the heart of the faith, I think Paul writes this in 1 Corinthians 15, is the resurrection. If Jesus is not risen, we are liars, we are to be pitied, our faith is in vain, our sin is not forgiven. Paul makes that clear.

That is the most core truth about Christianity. Now, the Exodus is pretty central to the Old Testament. It might not have the same level of, if it didn't happen historically in the way it's described, centrality to the faith, even though it's very, very important. So let's shift to the resurrection. If I heard you correctly,

it's kind of like you've had so much experience that evidence wouldn't talk you out of this. I mean, what if they found a box that just said, the bones of Jesus? Like, would that do it? I guess I'm just curious how far you would take this. Because there seems to be a, there's a balance here, right? And we all land on this differently. My confidence in what God said, which of course assumes proper interpretation of what God said, versus what the world says, how do we balance? I know every Christian says, I want to go with God, right? But they're going to differ on what the history and the science and the interpretation is.

So if I heard you correctly, you kind of frame this like, you know what, despite what the world says, I'm going with God and you cited Kurt Wise in this case. If all the evidence is against me, I'm going with God. What if the evidence undermined the resurrection? Would you say, you know what, he's risen my heart, I'm going with it. And is that what Christians should do? Like just walk me through how you would kind of navigate that.

Right. So I actually think that it's possible that that will happen. I think that's one of the things that may be, um, on the, on the prophetic timeline that they'll be saying, you know, here's Christ, there's Christ. It's possible that someone may actually say that. And so what are we going to do as Christians if they find a box of Jesus's bones? Are we going to believe that or are we going to believe what the Bible tells us? And I think I've gotten to the point now that I'm going to say, look, here's the Bible. Here are our choices. Choose to believe or

choose not to believe, just like Joshua said. Choose you this day. And you mentioned this about Fideism last time. Evidence matters, but what counts as evidence is dependent on our choices, our prior choices. And when we start with a choice that is willing to say what? This is that there is no God, and that's really what lays at the basis of the Hegelian worldview that has enveloped us, that there is no supernatural, then anything becomes possible. But if we're going to be believers in God in Christ, then we have to have something to hold on to. And other than God's Word, I don't know what else it's going to be. And so if I find evidence that is saying that this is wrong, sorry, I'm done. This is the hill on which I die. I actually said that all the way back in the first series that I had.

I said, I'm trying to find it. This is not helping me at all. All the notes I put out here and now I can't, oh, here it is. It's okay. So at the end of our Looking Glass series, when I told our story, Jenny and mine, I said this, I will be happily now a fool for Christ. So bring on the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, the honest doubts, and the malicious attacks.

This is the hill on which I die. Though he slay me, yet will I trust him." So that was me expressing my faith at that point. I had no idea what the journey ahead was going to make me actually give up to follow the logic, follow the argument that I set forth in that premise right there. It led me to the point where I said, no more. I'm done with man's word. Let God be true and every man a liar. And that's where I stand today.

So there was a lot that happened to get me there. Yeah, no, this is really interesting. What, what, when it's all said and done, where does your confidence that the Bible is the word of God come from? Like, is it your experience? Is it just reading the Bible and it coming alive to you? Does evidence play a role in that? Is it an assumption that you begin with? Like maybe certain presuppositionalists might begin with, where does that confidence come from? Right.

So I think it starts all the way back at what is evident to you. I have a series on the Christian Atheist called The Evidence and Faith. And it's quite dense, but I think it's some of our best work. It starts all the way back with your initial view of the world. You may not even choose it explicitly when you start, but when you look at the world around you and you say to yourself, this world is a good world. I can trust my sensory experience. I can trust my reason, which doesn't mean I never get it wrong, but it does mean that there's something essentially good underlying this world. And then there's another view that says, I don't see intrinsic value here. All I see is some bad things going on, some good things that I can value, but that may not

even be the substance of reality. And so I think we start there. And that is the beginning of that is Western theism. When you choose to say that this world is a good world, that we can trust the rationality that we bring to it, that we can trust our senses properly used, then you are trusting in the goodness of a God and that's where everything starts. And when we follow that logic, and you'll see that that's a motif for me. Follow the logic of your position and see

where it takes you. And I was an atheist for 25 years. I traced the logic. I was unafraid. Unafraid. I didn't like to. I traced the logic where it took me. And at the end, it doesn't take you anywhere good. This is not just an issue of subjective feeling about the world. It's a matter of objectively looking at the evidence and seeing which one of these views takes you to a more stable and more realistic understanding of the evidence entirely put together into a cohesive whole as much as we're capable. And if we take the position that the world is not a good world and we trace the logic there, it's the logic of atheism, we come to the end and we recognize, wait a second, I can't trust my experience, I can't trust my reason, and I can't trust my senses because they're all just happenstance.

They just came about in a totally random universe, and I can't trust them, not in any absolute sense. And so what's left? And so it undermines itself. It's a position that you can't end up holding with any consistency. It's still a position you can hold though. You can choose it. I did for 25 years. I'm curious what you think atheism naturally said if you draw it out to its conclusions. If we mean by like naturalism, I would say it implies that

there's no human value or dignity. There's no life after death. There's no free will. There's no meaning to life. There's no objective right and wrong. I think those naturally follow from an atheistic worldview. I agree. And I actually, I think James Sire in his book, The Universe Next Door, says the most

consistent naturalism leads to a nihilistic worldview. Yes. Now, most atheists won't, they'll push back and they'll argue and we can have that debate. I understand that. But I think there's something consistent about that. Do you agree with that? What do you, you lived at 25 years. Uh, at some point you obviously didn't live it, like walk through what you think

it leads to, and maybe when you're like, okay, wait a minute, I'm not actually living this to its nihilistic conclusions. If that's what you think atheism leads to. Yeah, and that realization was fundamental to my switching back to Christianity. It walked me back from atheism to agnosticism first because I said to myself, I am not living consistent with my atheism. In fact, I don't think any atheist can live consistently. One cannot live life, even if you're a microorganism, consistent with the atheist worldview, because even microorganisms

find value outside themselves. I tend to define life as that which values, which has an intention. It moves towards something. It values something. And so value is, in my view, objectively intrinsic to the universe that God created. But if there is no real value, then I don't even know what to do with life itself, because life is constantly in its most basic function. And now we can move forward to us as rational beings, everything we do in life is predicated on our belief, our fundamental belief, that there is value. I eat because I value what I eat. I love my wife because I value my wife. I go to work because I find value in that. The sun, the sun's warmth means I value the sun.

So even to see, even to experience, value is built into the very structure of who we are as rational beings. And when we abandon that, I just can't make sense of the world. What would you say to a Muslim who says something to you like, John, I agree with you, atheism is unlivable and I've been driven back to Islam and following Allah. God gives me purpose, gives me meaning. I've studied the Quran and it helps me live out my life. And when the evidence comes against me, I choose to go with God's Word which is the Quran as opposed to man's wisdom. How would you engage with

somebody who maybe takes a similar methodology and applies it to like Islam as yours? What would that look like for you? Well I think there's some value in the fact that we share an awful lot of what is important. I'm not an expert on Islam. I've done very little study on it. So I'm not, I'm probably not the best person to ask how I would deal with it other than I would point to Christ and say, wait a second, Jesus said, I am the way, the truth and the life.

No man comes to the Father but by me Was he a liar you you yourself as I understand Islam say he was a great prophet But if he was a great prophet and he said things like that if he made claims not just to be a wise man But to be the creator of the universe Then why would you give your allegiance to Allah when Jesus actually seems to be the God that Allah would point to? And so it seems to me not so much that your faith, Islam, is wrong so much as it's misdirected. It's just moving, it's moving towards the wrong target. And it just needs to be adjusted over to the creator of the world who is manifested

and incarnated in this man 2000 years ago in Israel. I don't know how good that is, but that's a start. That's fine. I don't expect you to be an expert. I was more curious in the methodology that you would say, okay, let's look at the claims of Jesus, how we know those claims are historical. The evidence would be a piece of that conversation with a Muslim is how you would reason. That's all I'm kind of getting at.

Is that fair? Yeah. Okay. Excellent. All right. with a Muslim is how you would reason. That's all I'm kind of getting at. Is that fair? Yeah. Okay. Yep. Excellent. All right. So tell me what other things shifted in your mindset? Were there other like moral issues that you held?

Were there other historical issues that maybe you brought with you without realizing it? As you've read the scriptures, you've been like, oh my goodness, I need to adjust that as well. Yeah. Again, I think I would go back to the beginning of this year's podcast series. Jenny and I had talked about where we needed to go and she said, look, I think we are doing way too much intellectual stuff and we're walking away from the Bible. And she said,

I think we need to concentrate more on the Bible or not. I was a little resistant, so I drugged my feet at first, but I thought, what do I have to lose? Let's do it. And so I thought to myself, well, I would really love to look very carefully at the New Testament. And another motivating thing is that Jenny and I are, I guess, highly open to experience people, and we get bored quickly with the same old thing. And so we've gotten tired over the years of listening to the same sermon preached in 12 different ways, but saying nothing new. So we thought, let's take a new, fresh look at the Scriptures and see what we can do with it. And so instead of diving into the New Testament

right away, I thought to myself, well, let's look at the transition, because an awful lot of really important things happen in transitions, like between forest and field, like that's where there's a lot of rich diversity and things. So I said, let's look at Malachi. And so we began a progressive study of Malachi, and it developed into this massive study that took us into depth, not just in the end of the Old Testament, but through the entire history of the Old Testament, all the way back to Genesis, and then to the New Testament, all the way forward to Revelation. And I began to realize that if this is God's Word, why do I get to pick and choose which of the things I get to believe?

If God is God, then he gets to tell me what reality is like. I don't get to tell him. I don't get to say, look, this little bit of evidence here bothers me a little exactly as we did with the quote with CS Lewis bothers me a little bit. It doesn't fit with my modern views of things. Therefore I'm going to sort of find a way around that. No, I think I've got to do justice to what God himself has said in the scriptures. And that I think was one of the fundamental breaking points to where we've come since

then. On conversations of progressive Christianity, not always, but often what comes up are issues tied around sexuality. And that tends to be a breaking point for many people who will say, I just can't believe in a God of the Bible who has a certain view of, say, marriage, etc. When you become an atheist, coming back to your faith, was that an issue for you or other of these other kind of moral issues that tend to divide progressives from conservatives? Or is it really the scientific historical issues that were just at play for you? It's far more the scientific and historical things. For me, I mean, I grew up in a very conservative home.

Like I said, my mother was conservative, evangelical. My dad was faithful to my mom throughout their marriage. And I didn't grow up thinking that there were options on that. And I imbibed the Christian worldview in terms of ethics so deeply that I just, I don't think there was ever a time in my life, even through my atheism, 25 years of atheism, that I thought there was a better, I have to be careful, things were starting to slide towards the end because I started to say to myself, wait a second, if you're really an atheist, why are you still holding on to these things? And so I began to justify things in my own head and think, well, maybe I could do this,

maybe I could do that and it would be okay, because after all, there's no God really there, so let it go. But for the most part, I would say I have been conservative politically and ethically the whole way through my life. So that wasn't really the issue for me. It was far more the science for me. Because like I said, it was a search for truth. Yeah, that really is interesting because so often there's the political issue that divides, conservatives progresses, the issue of sexuality, oftentimes issues tied to race and others,

but the fact that you viewed yours primarily through the lens of science is a unique approach. Now, how would you respond to someone who goes, okay, so you're trusting the Bible, but what's interesting, John, is you started by coming from a fundamentalist background that almost worshiped the Bible. Now you're bracketing your mind and just saying, I believe whatever it says, not being critical anymore.

Have you become a kind of fundamentalist without realizing it? Oh, I am a fundamentalist. I am actually in our latest episode, and I would encourage all the listeners to go to our podcast and listen to our latest episode, and I would encourage all the listeners to go to our podcast and listen to our latest episode. It's called Mice of Aslan Arise, A New Fundamentalism. And to address your particular issue, I would like to say where we went wrong as a church goes all the way back to the early 19th century when the Hegelian viewpoint allowed something like Darwinism and Marxism to take root, and the Christian church didn't push back.

Why are most of the scientists today non-Christians? Why is it that science has gone so far away from God and utterly just because Christians have ceded the territory? We gave it up. We stopped fighting. I mean, I know that there were battles fought, but we've allowed science to dominate us instead of as Christians saying, look, this is what the Bible says. I'm going to look at it and see what it says from that perspective.

Science has its perspective. It's the secular perspective. It's the secular perspective. It's the atheistic perspective. Fine. We're going to do Christian science over here. We're going to actually study the world from this perspective. And most of my life, I looked at Christian science as a ridiculous effort by people who were just trying to make evidence fit their thinking on things. It wasn't until this year when I started actually looking and reading what Christian scientists have done and the evidence and the scientific procedures that they used to discover them, that I began to realize we failed as the church. We should be doing science and we should be following it wherever it goes. We should, as I said,

there's that argument again. Follow the logic, follow the argument, follow the evidence where it takes you, but follow it from a Christian viewpoint. And that means be honest with the evidence. But it also means bring your presuppositions. We as Christians claim to have faith, and faith really is a presuppositional stance. So we're going to say, look, we're going to look at the world this way. Science claims to have no presuppositions. Yes, they do. They have a thing that they bring to it. They have presuppositions they bring to it. And that's going to affect, again, going back to my episodes on the evidence and faith, I try to lay this case out very meticulously what I'm talking about here, but science brings with it all kinds of presuppositions that colors what they find in the world. John, last question for you. I have so many questions, but tell me your hermeneutical principle, and this could be an entire conversation in itself.

So like throughout church history, there's been debate and difference over say the age of the earth. And so you're a youngerther and you would say that's what the Bible says and you're going with it and then going to do the research of science through that lens. I guess somebody might say, well, how far do you take this? I mean, the Bible says there's four corners of the earth. If the earth says it's flat, I'm going with it. Presumably you wouldn't go that far versus other Christians go,

yeah, I take the Bible seriously, believe in an older earth. Maybe just tell us some of your hermeneutical approach that you take would be helpful. I trust that the Bible says what it means, and when it says something, we should be able to understand it when we properly understand all the things that are related to it, which means we're probably never going to fully understand it until eternity, and even then, I look at the entire Christian walk, even into eternity, as an asymptotic approach to truth, which is God Himself. And so it's going to be an ongoing journey.

But what I expect as a Christian who is going to have a hermeneutic of the world, I expect that they're going to go out and they're going to find that after all, the evidence does support God's Word, because God's Word is truth, because God doesn't speak lies, and that therefore what we find in science will fit. And so I approach that with faith, and I believe it's going to happen. And it's happened to me over and over and over again. I mean, over and over and over as I've read the history of archaeology in the last hundred years, there have been critics of so many things in the Bible. They say, this is a myth. King David's a myth. Never actually, he was maybe a sheep herder. Now we find evidence.

No, there was a house of David, right, in the Tel Dan Stele. So the Hittites, they're just a myth, they said in the 19th century. No, we found the Hittite civilization. In fact, they are completely real, and they're exactly as the Bible said they were. And so what I expect moving forward is we will prove the Bible. And to show you how weak my faith is, I still laugh at myself because I'm still surprised every time the Bible is shown to be true. Right? So I continue to pray over and over again, Lord, I believe help thou my unbelief, because as much as I want to say I believe it completely, I don't believe it completely. And so I'm still fighting, I guess what Paul would call the natural man. It's hard for me to leave go of those things. But as I move forward, the more I move forward,

the more evidence mounts that God's Word is true. And I'm trying to get to the point where the evidence is not so important. As Jesus said to Thomas, right, blessed are you for believing, but even more blessed are those who have believed and have not seen. And I think, and I've said this actually in sermons, not that I preach that often, but I say you people in the pulpit who have sat there your whole lives and have just believed God's Word plainly and simply are way ahead of me. I've listened to all of this intellectual jargon going back through all of history. I've listened to the scientific evidence. I've studied the philosophers. I've studied the atheists. And you're in a better position than I am because you just basically simply believed. And that's the point of our Mice of Aslan arise episode, that's our last episode on

the Christian Atheists. It's that people who are big players in the Christian field don't really matter. They may be leaders, but they also can lead us astray, and I think that's where we are right now. And so if we're going to have a return, return unto me and I will return unto you, saith the Lord. That's from Malachi, right? Then we're going to have to do it as a church. And that means the individual people.

We've got to stand up and say, no, we reject this unbiblical things that you're trying to bring in. We reject this old earth. I have to be careful here because I don't want to be contemptuous. Less than a year ago, I was an old earth theistic evolutionist. So I understand it. I was convinced by it. But we have to stand, and we have to stand somewhere. And if we don't stand on God's Word, I think we are in a very bad place moving forward. John, there's a ton of things you said that we could discuss. I have a debate coming up, I think, in June between a Christian who holds an evolutionary worldview, one who pushes back.

That's a conversation that's coming up in due time. I don't think for just one point I pushed back on, I don't think the point of Jesus in John 20 is to say that evidence doesn't matter with Thomas. Well, neither. That's not his point. Evidence had, I'm sorry, Thomas had the evidence. He had testimony of the apostles. He had testimony of the apostles.

He had the predictions of Jesus multiple times in John 12 Mark 8, 9, and 10 that he would come back. He's saying, blessed are the, the whole point of John is that Jesus did miracles and they're recorded so we can have an intelligent faith. But people won't see Jesus physically, so they will have evidence, but evidence of a different kind than Thomas.

So there's a difference between dismissing all evidence and a certain kind of evidence. It's just one issue I would push back on. But with that said, one of the things I do on this channel is I like to talk with people who see things differently to challenge believers and non-believers. And you've done that. You're a thoughtful guy. You're on a fascinating journey. I'm glad we've connected. I've enjoyed hearing how you're fleshing things out.

And there's probably some issues scientifically, theologically, you and I might differ on, but you're called to be a fool for Christ., your call to follow what the scriptures say and not compromise, regardless of whether people agree with you on the particulars is a timeless message that the church needs to hear today. I enjoy your podcast and you pull no punches. You're a passionate, thoughtful guy.

You lay out as you see it. And so I'd invite people to check out the Christian atheist and listen to it with an open mind. In fact, I think after our discussion, the week or two after I had William A. Craig on to talk about historical Adam, you did maybe a four or five part series responding to that. So some people have asked me to have

a Young Earth perspective on specifically to respond to the historical Adam. I don't think I'm going to revisit that topic again, but if somebody wants to hear another perspective and a critique of it, they can certainly go to the Christian Atheist and listen to those and get that perspective there. John, thanks for taking the time to come on. I really enjoyed this. Oh, so did I, Sean.

Thanks so much for having us. Absolutely. Folks, before you click away, make sure you hit subscribe. We've got a lot of other conversations coming up. In fact, in the new year, I have some discussions and debates, I guess you could say, with some progressive Christians on the Bible and LGBTQ. We've got a new book out that is the most definitive case for the deity

of Christ. We're going to do an interview on that and then take your live questions. A lot of apologetic theological issues coming up. Make sure you join us for that. And if you've thought about studying apologetic citizen depth, we would love to have you at Biola. There's information below. We have a master's program and a certificate program. So we'll see you soon. Thanks again, John. Thank you. God bless.