The Sean McDowell Show - Why An Atheist Philosophy Professor Found God

Episode Date: November 12, 2024

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 what changed his mind from Christianity to Atheism and then back to Christianity. LISTEN: The Christian Atheist Podcast: https://a.co/d/bXXQQAz 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 philosophy professor raised as a Christian who became an atheist at Bible College come back to his faith 25 years later? What changed in his life and what changed in his thinking? Well, you're about to find out. Our guest today is Dr. John Wise, author of Through the Looking Glass and the host of the Christian Atheist Podcast. John, thanks for joining me. Thanks for having me, Sean. Absolutely. Since I heard your story, I've been so intrigued by it and wanted my viewers and beyond to hear it.

But let's jump right in. Before we kind of get to the dramatic elements of your life story, let's start with your upbringing. What kind of Christian upbringing did you have? My mother was as conservative an evangelical Christian as you can find. But my father was an agnostic. My dad actually was in World War II at Pearl Harbor when it was hit. And so my dad was a really sharp, smart guy. And my mom's faith was really powerful.

I had these two poles in my youth growing up that were, in a way, opposed, but in another way, complementary, that sort of guided me as I lived throughout the rest of my life. I grew up in a church that was, as I look back on it now, not very grounded in anything we would call a good Bible-centered Christian worldview today. It was the United Church of Christ. It has since gone incredibly liberal in its theology, but that's what I grew up in. I think when I was very young, my Sunday school teachers were pretty conservative and pretty grounded, and they did a pretty nice job. But that's sort of the place where I started, very young. So you went to Lancaster Bible College, and you live in Lancaster. Did you grow up in that area? Yes. Yep. Little town outside of lancaster called leola

okay got it so that's helpful what would you say you took from your mom in her christian faith and maybe from your dad who's an agnostic how did they influence you differently very interesting because our our our family dinners were always together and we were always talking about issues back and forth. And so I grew up in a family that was very intensely interested in talking through and understanding things, be it politics or science or other things. was always around the table. And I often tell people following up on the question you just asked that I got my faith from my mother and my ethics from my father. He was incredibly rigid as a military man. He really expected us to toe the line, not harsh. He wasn't mean. He had some of his own issues from the war there were carriers there there was no such thing as PTSD at the time but that's

definitely what my dad was suffering from so my dad was very rigid and I learned to look at the world in those sort of ethical colors that paint a Christian worldview behind my dad's agnosticism. My mother's faith was very warm. She was always centered on human beings and people. So all through my life, she was very introverted, but loved people. And she brought people and kids into my existence from the time I was very small. And so even though we went to a somewhat liberal church at the time, my mother had Christian radio on 24 seven. So I grew up with, you know, all of the Christian radio station, uh, preachers in my ears from J Vernon McGee and all the others from the time I was, you know, before I could even remember

hearing things, all through that, WDAC, our radio station here in Lancaster, was playing in the background. So I got a lot of Bible teaching from the time I was very small, and whether or not I was paying too much attention, an awful lot of it got in there. So would you say, like if somebody asked you in junior high or high school, before we get to your story shifting in college, you've said, yes, I'm a Christian, read your Bible, owned it. It was a part of who you were as opposed to the agnosticism and kind of wavering between the two. You were a Christian, really believed it? Yep. between the two you were a christian really believed it yep yeah in fact i had a conversion experience very clear um accepting christ when i was five or six and uh really never looked back from that moment it was always very real to me moving forward um up through bible college and

uh when i finally graduated from high school i had some lapses and then I decided, nope, Bible college is where I want to go. I want to be a pastor. And so off I went. Well, let's talk about that shift. So you went to Lancaster and I learned it's not Lancaster, it's Lancaster. Did I remotely say that right, by the way? Yes. Yes, you did. And we can very clearly tell the difference between natives and non-natives by that test. It's the Shibboleth of Lancaster County. I love it. Well, I'm not a native, but I was there last weekend and people made a big deal about this. So I'm trying. So you go to Lancaster, California, right? There is. Yeah. They call it Lancaster, California. Yes, they do. That's for sure. So you go to Bible college wanting to be a, a pastor, if I understand,

talk through what started to shift. Was there kind of a first moment or first question you had that made you just think, okay, wait a minute, maybe my dad was right and my mom was wrong. Yeah, it's the $6 million question. Um, as to what did it, I began to really study philosophy with, uh, one of the professors there, Professor Bob Willey, Dr. Bob Willey, absolutely stunningly brilliant man. He taught an intro to philosophy course. I got very interested. Lancaster Bible College offered no more in philosophy.

And so I took an independent study course with Dr. Willey, which probably would have been equivalent to like a full year of college reading. So we designed the course ourselves, and I did this really intensive reading in philosophy. But I tell people it wasn't the philosophy that led me away. I was very involved in the Christian life of the Bible College. And as time went on, by the time I was, you know, in my final year, my senior year, it felt more to me like I was trying to convince myself of the truth of Christianity through my practicing of the various tenets and the things that I was doing. And that grew more and more, even after my my graduation to the point where I said,

you know what, if all of Christianity is me trying to convince myself that this is true in the face of all the rest of the influences I'm looking at in my intellectual and academic life, then maybe what I need to do is back off and commit myself to something more basic. That is the pursuit of truth. And just see where that takes me. So when you graduated college, you wouldn't have defined yourself as an atheist yet. Were you maybe kind of an agnostic at that point? I think I hadn't even proceeded to agnosticism yet.

I was still sort of holding on to um the tendrils of christianity but it was getting they were getting a lot harder harder to hold on to they were getting slippery and sliding out of my grasp so eventually um they they slipped entirely and i just thought you know what i don't know that this is true okay so tell me if i'm capturing this correctly you went in with confidence in your faith and eagerness to be a pastor, somehow just had a love and were drawn to philosophy. And the questions that were raised and just living out your faith, just kind of slowly, step-by-step seemed to fade away itself. You had this realization, I'm trying to talk myself into

this. I just got to find out what is true and follow it wherever it leads. Is that a fair summary of your? Yeah, that's pretty good. And I didn't have, I mean, my mother, of course, was increasingly upset that that was the way I was going, but she continued to love me. I remember I didn't listen to much that you've done, but I did listen about a week or so ago to a talk that you gave, I think it was back in 2015, to a group of kids. And you were talking about, you came to your dad at one point and said to him, I'm not sure I believe this. And he said that you were expecting, you know, the lightning to strike. And he said, Yeah, that's all right.

Check, check it out for yourself and see where it leads you and um i mean that's where i've come now i'm to the point it's like i trust god truth will out if you seriously follow it ask seek and knock you know and and it will come but you've got to be serious about seeking it when did you graduate from college? What year was that? 85. Oh, no, that was, sorry, 1990. 1990. Okay. So what were some of the big philosophical questions and thinkers you were reading? Were you reading apologetics at that time? Were you reading philosophy of Alvin Plantinga? Were you reading David Hume, existentialists, or just everything, trying to get a sense of it? Everything I could get my hands on. The big players were Immanuel Kant, Jean-Paul Sartre, who became huge in my dissertation, a major player in my dissertation work.

But yeah, all that I could get my hold of, Hume, Aristotle, Plato, everybody I could read. So I was pretty and this actually reflects back on the course that I took with Dr. Willie in Bible College. We tried to really spread our interest out through the entire history of philosophy, which in college, I found out in my in my graduate studies, most people don't do that anymore. So I got a really broad notion of the history of philosophy and the progression of it, and came to really love, for some strange reason, Jean-Paul Sartre and existentialism, and then later got really involved with the intentionality of Edmund Husserl and phenomenology.

Oh, that's fascinating. So you graduate still probably a Christian, but deciding to follow truth. Is that when you went straight into your doctoral program at UCI or what were those next steps you went through? Yeah, I actually went from there down to a college in Western Kentucky, Western Kentucky University, where a professor named Edward Schoen was sort of, uh, Christian notion within the, um, uh, within the program that I thought, okay, I'll go here, see what happens. And, uh, I only stayed for about a semester. Um, and so I left that, uh, came back, got married, um, and then ended up pursuing, um, a master's degree at's degree at Westchester, not Westchester, East Stroudsburg, no, Westchester, sorry, Westchester University outside of Philadelphia. And I went all the way through a master's program there and didn't complete the final paper, the final dissertation or thesis, and was accepted into the PhD program at UC Irvine.

Was your wife a Christian? Did you have a Christian wedding? She was. Okay. Yes. We met in Bible college. Okay. So you met in Bible college, you're studying philosophy, and that was maybe a two or three year process tell us about the length and at the end of that where your faith was yeah i i was increasingly reading everything i could get my hands on and i began to understand what i really was looking for was some sort of certainty something i could hold on to and say okay here's the truth and then if i could just hold that one thing kind of cartesian i suppose in my thinking one thing that I could hold on to and say, okay, here's the truth. And then if I could just hold that one thing, kind of Cartesian, I suppose, in my thinking, one thing that I could hold on to for

sure and build my world on that. And so I never found it, but it seemed to me that where I would find it would be in the hard sciences and in philosophy reasoning, because that seemed to be the central thing of humankind that would enable us to somehow find something to hold on to with really powerful evidence and say, okay, here it is. And so I would say by the time I started my PhD work at UC Irvine, or maybe a year and a half or so before that, I had given up on Christianity and just said, I don't know. I'll stand with agnosticism.

As much as you're comfortable sharing, what was that conversation like with your wife? How did she respond? I mean, she got dragged into this and is being directly affected by it. Yeah. Tell us about that, if you will. Yeah, it wasn't good she certainly was a believer and I felt badly for her but I couldn't it's not like I could reverse the switch things that happened what I thought was what I

thought and she would come at me pretty hard sometimes about it. My mother less so, but still would talk about it. And I could see the hurt in everyone's eyes. And that bothered me deeply. But I didn't feel as though I could change for that just because people were being hurt. That doesn't mean the truth isn't being found. Truth can be very painful sometimes. We're maybe getting ahead of ourselves, but I'm curious. What advice would you give to a spouse or parent, to a child or a spouse who's deconstructing,

and we don't know yet if they're going to deconvert? If you went back at that point, not knowing how the story would go full circle what advice would you give to the people in your life just seeing you go through this well that's difficult i don't know that i have any great words of wisdom other than you know the bible says train up a child in the way they should go and in the end they won't depart from it So you've got to do your best as a parent, as a spouse, to present the right view yourself and be patient and willing to accept where someone is without being too hard. And yet at the same time, you can't compromise. And that's, if I were to say one thing that I've learned

since coming back to Christ is that compromise is always, always a mistake. And so the stronger you remain in your position, not beating people over the head with it, but you stay right where you need to be. That's think the best you can do and people are individuals you can't remake them you can only sort of deal with where they are and maybe you can point them to some other people who actually have gone through what you're seeing your son or daughter or spouse go through and say maybe you could talk to this person, or maybe you could listen to that person. And that's kind of why we started the Christian Atheist. I wanted to reach out to those people and say, look, I've been where you are. And trust me, I know where it ends. If you're willing to really follow it through and follow the logic and seek the truth,

you're going to end up back with Christ. But you've got to be willing to really seek the truth you're gonna end up back with Christ but you've got to be willing to really seek the truth and not hold on to something interim in the middle I'm gonna have you unpack a little bit more about your podcast but let's jump back into your your story here so you become an atheist tell me do you remember was it it this kind of slow process you've been describing? Or is there a sense of like, I'm an atheist. I own this now and told people. And what did you mean by atheist? Because there's debate and disagreement about what that even means. There sure is. I've gone back and forth with atheists over this so many times. I have a series on my podcast called What is an Atheist? And my view of what

atheism is, every time I approach another atheist, they have another thing to nitpick on me and say, no, that's not what an atheist is. Let me tell you what an atheist is. But the simple meaning of the term is no God. So for me, it was to use the,'s the who wrote the book the Sun also rises William Lane Craig the Sun rises or is that no the Sun also rises that the anyway there's a there's a there are two characters in there and one comes to the other and says to him how did you go bankrupt and the other says ernest hemingway and the other says uh two ways gradually and then suddenly and that's the way it was for me when i turned to atheism there was this long period of agnosticism that kept coming along

and one day i was walking across it was the I think it was the very first year of my PhD program at UC Irvine. And I was walking across campus and I said to myself, right in the middle of campus, as I was walking, I said, there's no God. And that was it. That was the moment from that point forward, I was an atheist. And I just said, there's no God. And there's an important difference between that and what different atheists sort of fudge around with, this agnostic atheist, I'm an agnostic atheist. Well then you're not really an atheist. If you're an agnostic, you're standing somewhere in the middle and you're willing to be persuaded

by either side. An atheist actually says, there's no God. You make a statement just as declarative as the Christian does, or a theist does, that there is a God. And so I took a stand right there, and I did it. I loved C.S. Lewis as a kid. I devoured the Chronicles of Narnia and loved them. And in The Magician's Nephew, there's that wood between the worlds. And I think of agnosticism as the wood between the worlds. It's that place where everything is kind of sleepy, and you don't take a position. And so everything can go on around you without you going anywhere. And I said, okay, quit being a spineless coward. Make a choice. You've been a couple of years now in this netherworld between

things. Take a choice, take a stance. And I don't know if I hadn't done that at that point, if I ever would have came back to Christ. Because I said to myself, okay, let's see where this goes. There's no God. And I moved forward with that. And for the rest of, for the next 25 years, I stood there now there's probably some people listening and going yes i disagree with your take on what it means to be an atheist go listen to the podcast go watch the youtube channel at least here's case out and then if you disagree that's fine but you said you became an atheist in the way you defined it in terms of believing there is no god for 25 years. What changed in

your life, if anything? I mean, did this make you rethink political views? Did you rethink ethical positions that you hold? Did you rethink the trajectory of your life? Like what things changed in your life when you literally said there's no God and owned it? Yes. You would think that that would make a huge change all of a sudden it didn't i still held on to everything i did i mean maybe this is maybe this is an example of the the semelweiss syndrome where you hold on to things until you find some reason to leave go of them um and i did that i held on to all of my Christian views, if you want to call them Christian views, while letting Christianity go. So I'm holding now, how do these two hold together? And slowly but surely, again, it's that gradual process, I began to trace out the

logic of atheism, of there being no God. And I don't know that my views all changed too much ever in that whole process, except there was this slow degradation of what I used to be able to respect. I looked at Christians, and they had a fairly well-outlined logical and reasoned view of the world and of ethics. And I wanted to hold on to ethics desperately. And yet I began to see that as I traced the logic of atheism, a lot of those things I cherished were undermined. I mean, I could hold on to them. I could choose to hold on to them, but it didn't add up with the logic of the position. So that ever-evolving, to use the term,

spectrum of things that were slowly being undermined by my new faith started to bother me in the way that I was bothered as a christian by the things that i couldn't make sense of okay so we're going to come to the point where you obviously shift back 25 years later but it sounds like it was kind of a process away from your christian faith but then it was a process away from your atheist belief both were kind of just step by step over time. And both took about 25 years, I guess, if you think about it, which is interesting. I don't know if that means anything. But I wonder how you could respond to this. I just sent out a tweet recently, just curious. I ask a lot of questions and I just want to know what people think. And I wrote something like, if you're an agnostic, atheist, or what I say, skeptic, do you have doubts about what you believe?

And if so, what are they? And I really was just curious about that because some Christians have doubts. Some don't. I don't know if skeptics do. And one of my friends who's outspoken skeptic, he goes, sometimes I wonder if my physicalism is false. And near-death experiences are the thing that gives him a little pause. I thought that's interesting. I asked another atheist and he said, consciousness is what gives him pause. What would you have said during that 25 years? And maybe it changed. Would you have said, I don't have any doubts. I'm certain I have some doubts, how would you have responded to that question? Again, there is a long process and a lot of things going on,

because when I graduated with my PhD and I started teaching philosophy full-time at the West, yeah, I get my colleges confused in my head. So, not Western Kentucky, um, yeah, at Westchester University of Pennsylvania, which is where I ended up teaching, I get my colleges confused in my head. So not Western Kentucky. Yeah, at Westchester University of Pennsylvania, which is where I ended up teaching after graduating. And I started teaching intro to philosophy four or five times a semester for 10 semesters. And so I went through meticulously the works of Plato over and over and over again,

plus the field of philosophy, the history of philosophy. And slowly but surely, so many of those things started pointing me back to my Christian faith. And it's like, you abandon that? And so, you know, in Plato, in Socrates. Socrates, if we are to characterize him most clearly, was someone who said, we human beings are fundamentally ignorant. That is, we don't know much of anything. And our problem is, as human beings, is that we overestimate what we think we know. And so all through that, if I'm properly answering your question here, I would have been increasingly influenced by the Socratic view that so much of what we think we know, we don't know. And if we could just get back to recognizing how limited we are as human beings

and how little we really can hold on to as true then perhaps we can start seeing our way to learning something and that was incredibly important to me and i apologize if i've wandered far afield i'm not sure i fully addressed what you've asked no that's okay that's totally fine and by the way it's understandable you've taught at multiple universities to get them confused and went to different ones. I went to Biola. I went to Talbot, which is Biola Seminary. Went to Southern Baptist. I'm back teaching at Biola.

So it's pretty simple for me to keep those dialed in. But I was asking somebody on Sunday because I got my Ph.D. in apologetics and worldview studies. I got a master's in philosophy and theology. I was asking a friend of mine who teaches at a junior college. I said, do you think the local junior college where I live would ever let me as an outspoken apologist teach a class, either comparative religions, intro to philosophy? At some point, I would love to do that. And I would see my task, even though I'm an unashamed evangelist and apologist, my job in the classroom would be to steel man both positions

and in fact, probably try to not let my students know what I think unless they Googled me, obviously. I would do that with high school students. Of course, in a Christian school, if it was age of the earth, I wouldn't tell them where I stood. I wouldn't tell them my view on Calvinism versus Arminianism.

I'd say, I'll tell you on graduation day. And sometimes they would ask me on graduation day. And usually they're surprised because I try to steal a man the other position more than my own. And if I taught a junior college, that would be my job. Now, if a student came to me and said, what do I believe? Of course, I'd share with them in office hours. But in the classroom, I think I would need to be fair. At that stage in your life, were you just taking students through that journey that this professor at Lancaster Bible College took you through? Or were you kind of like some professors, and I'm not saying all or even most atheist professors are that way. That's not my point. Were you kind of trying to talk students out of their faith a little bit and enlighten them into the worldview that you had or just educate them yep I was actually furious I don't often get furious at colleagues but when I was teaching at East Stroudsburg University we had an interim professor come in and he was the students came and told me afterwards he was telling them if you've come into my my classroom with a

Christian faith you're going to leave not believing and I was furious about that as an atheist because I said that's not what philosophy is philosophy is opening people up not shutting people down so in my classes I when I was at at East Stroudsburg I tried very very hard not to let anybody know where I stood. Afterwards, people would come to me and find out. But I wasn't ashamed of being an atheist either, but I definitely was not trying to talk people out of their faith. For one reason, for one very important reason, I actually thought Christians are at least better off than most people outside of the Christian

worldview because they have something to hold on to that's not constantly being undermined as our modern secular culture is doing and I thought that was important to have some sort of rigid not rigid but some sort of content filled background the Western tradition for for instance, the philosophical tradition of the West that the Judeo-Christian culture brought out and raised up and through it brought us the modern world that we find. And all around me, I saw that world, that really powerful powerful good world being undermined by the academic culture of today and the past like three-quarter century or so um and so i think one of the things that helped me hold on through all of it was that i was politically conservative which is kind of strange for someone who is as open to experience as me.

But when I looked around and I saw a world in which there was nothing firm to stand upon, sort of like a Douglas Murray type of view, then when that's being washed away, I need to at least give my students something to stand on. And if they were standing on Christianity, that was anchored in the Judeo-Christian Western tradition that I'm trying to teach my students. And so I was never trying to talk my students out of Christianity or faith of any sort. I was just trying to inform them of their culture, their cultural background, and teach them that that's something you can go to and say, hey, here's something I can hold on to. So a student comes to you during office hours and says, Professor Wise, what do you believe about God? And you say, I'm an atheist. And they say, why are you an atheist? What would you have said as a professor of philosophy

to that student sitting in your office hours who really wants to know? I no longer believe because I've looked at the evidence and I don't think that it supports the existence of a supernatural realm and so I I guess I just had bought materialism well enough that I would just say to them I don't see evidence of God in the world okay that that's fair enough so in a sense you say you've examined the arguments that are put forth in studying philosophy. You clearly looked at fine-tuning in consciousness and cosmology, miracles, near-death experiences, whatever it is,

and say, I don't find it compelling. Materialism is a better explanation of reality. Fair enough. So what started to crack in that after 25 years? Take us now to the second shift in your life and what happened. My world started falling apart when my wife was diagnosed with Parkinson's and everything started to fall down around me. And I had to start concentrating all of my attention and financial resources and emotional energy

into helping her deal with the things she was dealing with at the time. And so my world, external world, the things that I thought I could hold on to and that I was competent to deal with suddenly started falling apart around me in 2000 this that my wife was diagnosed I think as 2013 in 2008 the financial crisis happened and East Stroudsburg University held on to me for a couple years and then allowed me to teach a few additional courses as time went on. But eventually they had to let me go because of

financial reasons in Pennsylvania. They were no longer funding any of the universities at the level that would have allowed my department to hold on to me. So I left there. I became a full time mechanic at Sears Auto and and that was close to home so I could still be home and help take care of my wife as the years went on my wife it ended up being that the Parkinson's was an improper diagnosis it was what's called Lewy body dementia and she ended up in a home, full-time home in 2015. And then suddenly, my world opened up like this chasm of freedom. And I don't know how familiar you are with like the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, but he talks about freedom as this chasm that we walk into, and it's who we are, it's what we are.

And Sartre's notion of freedom was so real to me at that time that suddenly I realized I was in a new phase of life. And it opened up, and I don't want to be, I don't want to be disrespectful here. But my marriage, my first marriage was very difficult. My wife was a force of nature. And, you know, people talk about it, it's your way or the highway. There was no highway with her, there was only her way. And so that's how I lived most of my life. And I found my happiness. I found a way to deal with it. But suddenly, I had this open field in front of me where I was free in a way that I hadn't been for so many years through our marriage. And so I think that was sort of the shifting point where things started to open up for me and possibilities started to arise that I didn't think would ever change.

But even so, it took another three, three and a half years before I got anywhere near being able to flip the switch again from atheism back to theism. I can imagine some people listening right now saying, all right, you describe Christianity as being an anchor. You didn't have that in your faith. You became increasingly just illusioned with that. Your life falls apart, so it makes sense that you would return back to the faith of your childhood, needing that emotional anger or anchor. And you didn't go on this intellectual quest for truth like you did initially when you were in college. Now you're

just needing something because you're getting older and your life has fallen apart. How would you respond if somebody raised that question? Oh boy, there's a lot to say there. So first off, when that field of freedom opened up for me, when my wife went into the home, there was an ongoing process with that. She didn't die until 2019, February of 2019. So there was a long period in which I was still trying to take care of her through the process there and make sure she had as decent a life as she could have in that environment. But through that whole period, it wasn't like my life had fallen apart. It's like my life had fallen apart. It's like my life had come back. So it wasn't that I was looking again for an emotional crutch. And I'm not trying to defend anything here. I'm just saying the way

it worked out. There was no emotional crutch because at that point, I had to learn when it first started happening, I had to learn to breathe again and literally learn to breathe again. That's how upsetting everything was. I almost had an emotional breakdown. But when that ended, and my wife went into the home, my world opened up again. And it was like I had a new vision of everything in front of me, infinite possibilities again, almost like childhood before having gone to school it's like everything is now open again and so I'm not at this point even really thinking much about faith and I certainly wasn't

looking for God at that point if anyone had asked me at that point whether or not I would ever become a Christian again, I said, no, there's no chance. There's just no way. It can't happen. I'm too committed to where I've been, and I don't see any path back. However, there were a lot of other things still going on, because all of those things I talked about in the intellectual journey as I'm traveling, teaching philosophy, all of those things are still adding up. And I'm still discovering that the intellectual realities that I've found are all pointing in a particular direction. But I mean, when we finally get to the point of transition,

and I guess you'll ask me about that, there's some other interesting things going on there. And I do agree that there is no turn to God that is purely intellectual. There's just, there's not. The evidence is not going to convince you one way or the other. You have to do something more than that. There's something else that motivates. And I found that very clear in my life. So let's talk about what that more is. But first, maybe tell me some of the intellectual pointers that made you rethink your materialism at that stage. What was it that got your attention you're like okay maybe I was wrong about this and there's a God um sure because I as I read through and kept teaching the and I still teach I'm still teaching online for the University of Arizona Global Campus so I'm still teaching philosophy even though for the

most part my wife and I are pretty much dedicated to this ministry. All of those intellectual threads, such as Socrates, that we are trying to find the answers to questions, and yet we're not recognizing that when we hold on to a particular worldview, we don't know that that worldview is true. And so for me, one of the fundamental realizations, and this happened in the process of writing my dissertation, so now we're back another 10 years. One of the most respected philosophers of the 20th century is the existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre. And Sartre said at one point, and he's an atheist to the core, said at one point in one of his more obscure writings, and I read it while doing my dissertation, he said those who claim that, I'm paraphrasing here, that their atheism was something that they progressively discovered are lying to themselves. Because it's a choice. It is not something that you discover. In other words, it's a metaphysical position. You choose it. And

if you choose that, then of course that's a parallel to choosing the Christian faith. And I began to see as I moved forward in time through my wife's sickness and all the rest, this central issue rising up that choosing to be a Christian, choosing to believe the evidence of the Bible, or choosing to be a materialist and an atheist and rejecting all of those things was a matter of choice. And if it's choice, then it's not a matter of one side having all of the evidence and clearly winning the battle over the other side. No. And increasingly, I began to see that both of them are positions I could hold with as much intellectual, as much intellectual, what do I want to say, clarity as the other. Like both of them are legitimate positions, merely intellectualizing.

So how can I choose between them? And that's kind of where I was around the time that my wife died in 2019. I was right there at that cusp, one or the other. And I said, well, as it stands now, I've been this way as an atheist for 25 years. I don't see any evidence that's going to make the difference. There's nothing more that you could give me you can't give me a cosmological argument that somehow improved all the other the thousands of cosmological arguments i've read about and heard and studied so so there's no more evidence that you can give me that's going to make the difference and so i figured that's it i'm an atheist for the rest of

my life okay so this is fascinating so then obviously the question is what, what tip the scales? And it almost sounds like you're taking a Phoebus position. If I'm hearing you that we just kind of choose independent of the evidence, help me make sense of that because you've also, in some of your writings come out and said, you think some of the arguments for intelligent design and some of the other evidence is compelling and a better explanation of like the cell, how does that blend with what you just said? Maybe you were just describing that point you were at in your life where you've seen the evidence on both sides. Help me make sense of what seems to be attention.

Okay. It's definitely attention. And I think it's not attention tension that's really avoidable. Because when you're on one side or the other, you're going to hold to that side. And you're going to have reasons for doing it. So when I was an atheist, I could look at every piece of evidence that could be presented to me, including all of the things that when I look as we talked about in the idea, the future thing, at the evidence of the cell and see all of those incredibly intricate machines that are constructed there and still say, no, I believe that that just

came about by chance and Darwinian processes. No matter which side you stand, you can justify your side and choose it. Now, when I stand on this side, I say, you're crazy, because the evidence really is far more profound here. But at some point, you've got to recognize when you choose one side or the other, you're making a choice and you're committing yourself to something. And you're going to have to see, as Plato says in, I'm sure, I'm forgetting which dialogue it is, but he talks about faith as being stepping onto a raft and sailing out into the ocean on it. You're going to have to choose which raft you sail on, and then you're going to see where it takes you. And I've been on on both rafts and this is why i called my podcast the christian atheist i can think from both sides of this i have both tool chests in my head and when

i lay them side by side now you'd say an atheist would say of course because now that's what you believe and they're right at some level but i say say, uh-uh, I sailed on this raft. I see where it takes you. I've followed the logic. This raft has never once let me down. Not once. It did when I was back in Bible college because I was doubting things.

But this raft that I have sailed upon is far more explanatorily powerful. It fits the evidence better. And you know what? At this point in my life, if it doesn't fit the evidence better, I'm still going with this side. Okay. So if I understand, one of the things you take away from Sartre as an existentialist is that we've been forced into this existence and we can actually choose. He's not a determinist. We have a choice.

And people can stand in raft A or raft B or presumably C or D, et cetera, and explain things from within that worldview in a way that has maybe clarity and some level of consistency. But you do think it sounds like that from the Christian standpoint, it makes more sense and

things like the cell and the origin of the universe etc it makes more sense you think the evidence points there but you have to choose one way or the other when it's all said and done i'm not trying to put words in your mouth but am i capturing how you see that's pretty that's pretty good the problem is for the atheist side are the tensions that remain. Not that there aren't tensions on the Christian side, but some of the tensions that remain on the atheist side can become overwhelmingly disastrous for individuals. And I'm not trying to be a consequentialist here, but I'm saying that when you hold to that side, suddenly, everything becomes undermined. And now I'm using CS Lewis's arguments, but you're sawing off the branch on which you stand, because you want to tell me that

you're trying taking the scientific view, but under the paradigm that you're living, the scientific view is just one more view. And and it could all very well be not true because it's just happenstance and molecules coming together and there's no basis for it here like lewis says at the end of one of his sermons i i see the world um through christianity because uh how does he exactly how is my son yeah by the Sun example and because by it I see everything else and that's what that's what the final Christian message becomes it becomes it explains everything and it

all fits and it all makes sense and it justifies our most basic human needs for truth, for reality, for ethics, and for our emotional states. It's like all of those things, for beauty itself, if we're going to anchor them and say that they're real, then we're going to have to believe in a transcendent reality, which is a supernatural reality, which is God. And then we start to say, okay, how do we learn about God? Well, we learn about God by studying things and maybe start looking at the religious literature. And then you come across the Bible, and the Bible is this astounding book that absolutely, and I'm sorry, this is what I'm involved in now. Jenny and I are really getting into our Bible studies. and the more I read about it as a

philosopher a trained philosopher now I look at it and I say this has taken place over what 1,500 years of writing and all of these people tell a consistent story that ends in a very clear literary structure and it's like that's not possible and so the more i study the bible the more convinced i become that it is in fact the word of god and i wasn't there when i came back before now i understand this is a whole separate question in it in itself but you describe kind of option a option b and your life is like materialism and the Christian worldview. And you said the Christian worldview explains everything, never lets you down. The materialistic worldview can't

explain certain things and let you down. I can imagine somebody saying, okay, John, do you mean this just intellectually? Do you mean it experientially? Because I've suffered in my life, I have had unanswered prayers, and it sure seems like God has let me down. What would you say to that, or did you mean something different by your point? No, I think that's also understanding what the worldview of Christianity is telling you. Because it's not saying you're going to have a perfect life. It's not saying that the world is good now. It's saying it was originally created good, that God intended good for everyone and everything, but that we failed as a human race and therefore lots of bad things happen. And if you're going to lay it at God's feet, you better be careful because he is the infinite God of the universe.

He is a good God and that's what's been revealed to us. And so perhaps what we need to do is adjust our view of the creator of the universe. How would you coach your younger self, meaning either as a college student or really somebody in grad school where you're leaving your faith? What would you say to yourself then? You think you were really open then to hear the case for Christianity? Did you just have to experience what you experienced to see it the way you do now? How would you go back? I don't, however many years it is, I guess to the nineties, what is that? 30 ish years plus and speak to yourself then during that doubting questioning time. Yeah, I have a, I have a few letters to my atheist self on the podcast. So I have given some thought to that.

Well, I mean, I wish I had some sort of pill I could give that could turn things around, but I don't know. For me, going all subjective on this, I think I needed to go through the path that I went through. Faith doesn't come easily to me. I think it comes easier to some other people. And I think I'm a bit of a hardheaded sort of Thomas type disciple who needs to see and feel. But Jesus said, blessed are they who have not seen and yet believe. And so now, in my Christian life now,

I look at those Christians who have sat in the pews their whole life and simply believe the basic simple truths of the Bible, and I say, I wish that I could have been that. Because that sort of faith, in fact, I look at someone like Kurt Wise. Do you know Kurt Wise's story? I mean, when I look at him and what he did, when he tells his story, why I'm a creationist, and I think, wow, see, that is the type of faith I would like to have had. It's not the faith I have.

It's not who I am. But my path has been my path, I guess. And it's brought me to where I am and given me the particular tool chest that I have. And now I just hope to be able to use those tools effectively to serve, to serve God. You know, if I'm the last in the kingdom, I'm in the kingdom. That's okay by me. I'm pretty similar to you in the sense that I don't know that I have the gift of faith. I'm a natural skeptic. I question things. I doubt things. I try to read both sides and just reconsider things. And sometimes that motivates me to study other times it feels more like a burden now that

you're on this side of it do you still have doubts and questions or you just like oh I've been there I have no doubts anymore that part of me has been changed Wow I mean when I first came back when I started the Christian atheist podcast I I said that I bring all of my doubts to this side of the looking glass, all of my doubts with me. But the path of the last five years has been one of ever-increasing reliance on God and ever-increasing faith. I mean, I still don't think that I'm very good with it. My wife, she has faith at a level that I can't quite match, but I've come a long way. And I think for anything to shake me at this point, I don't see what it could be. I'm pretty committed at this point, but I'm still in the process of learning. There's a lot of stuff to get behind me.

And I mean, just as evidence of it's only been this year that I've been able to turn my back on evolutionary thinking. It took a lot of study to realize that it just doesn't make sense and that evolutionists if they were being honest really pursuing the truth would abandon it as a as a paradigm that's interesting that's a whole nother topic of conversation uh yeah i won't i won't jump down that road that's a really interesting journey what would you say to other skeptics or doubters that maybe have stayed with us and are watching this and just intrigued by your journey and your story yeah i would i would urge skeptics to be more skeptical because for the most part skepticism is an arbitrary line that you draw.

Most skeptics, and I've had a discussion, it was last year with one of the critics of the Christian Atheist podcast, and he and I went back and forth on YouTube quite extensively. And he said, you're not skeptical. And I said, I've twice in my life overthrown not just a small belief system, my entire belief system. I've thrown it to the wind. I grew up as a Christian, and I said, okay, based on what I'm finding, it's to another point where I had to decide. And the evidence is overwhelming. It's just overwhelming. And so I was skeptical enough at that point to say, okay, what I believe as an atheist, I have to be willing to say it's not holding up. And so maybe it's time to get rid of it. And I think most skeptics today are not skeptic enough.

They've drawn a line at which their skepticism stops. So they're not skeptical when they can't find the evidence, the particular kind of evidence that they're looking for for God. And they're not willing to say, okay, maybe I have a wrong view of what evidence is and look a little bit more deeply. But they say, nope, not there. And so they've closed skepticism down.

One of the common threads that I hear from people who've deconstructed to the point of deconversion is they can no longer be certain in their beliefs. And I heard you say that at the beginning. You said, I just couldn't find certainty like Descartes, who's just trying to build this system where you can't even doubt at the base and then all the way up. And I think that is that idea, which I hear in the Christian faith a lot, is like doubt

is the opposite of faith. And it's not. Unbelief is. You can believe something without certainty. Was that one of the faulty beliefs that was just somehow built into you that led to your deconstruction? And what would you say in terms of somebody right now? Would you say just look for a confident faith look for what's most reasonable how would you frame it now yeah I mean this is for me I'm you you've you hit on for me what I think is probably the central issue that I have with with atheism they try to tell themselves they lie to themselves that they are outside of faith They don't believe anything. And it's not a matter of believing or having certainty. Nobody has certainty about anything. Any honest scientists who will really look at it and say, yeah, this is what we think is the case, but we don't know for sure. And so atheists,

when I talk to them, hold on to this central core of certainty and they will not back down from it no matter what they're holding on to it with you know a death grip and they're not recognizing that they're in a faith position just as much as a christian is and that we have at least the virtue of recognizing that we are believers. And we're not afraid to, we're not running away from that. It's like we haven't seen God in the sense, in fact, we're incapable of seeing God and experiencing God in the sense of the infinitude of God himself. And so by very definition, we have to simply believe in this Creator and move towards Him as in an asymptotic approach to that which is not achievable. And so anything in moving towards God, there is a fundamental faith state to which we are

relegated as human beings. As human beings, we are faith creatures, and everybody's there. Scientists are there. Nobody has the certainty. And I took that lesson probably most powerfully from two people, Sartre and Socrates. I think you'd agree with me on this, that the problem of requiring certainty exists in the christian fold and it exists in the atheist fold even my tweet that i sent out there were some atheists that were like i'm absolutely certain no doubt and then there are others that like i do have some doubt i think christians would would respond the same it really depends on which atheist and some say it's absolutely true i have

no doubt we have it all figured out well i think that's as foolish as a Christian saying we have it all figured out. No doubt. I'm like, really? There's some tough passages in the Old Testament. There are some scientific questions we need to consider. And that's okay. You can believe something and have questions. Let's keep the main thing, the main thing. Well, even jet. Oh, go ahead. Oh, and the that's okay thing is huge because you've got to get to the point of recognizing I'm never going to get it all sewn up. That was a big point for me in coming back to Christ, being able to recognize I can't answer all the questions and I don't need to answer all the questions. that's what faith is about and having faith in an infinite Creator

makes a whole lot more sense than having faith in nothing which is what the position of atheism amounts to we are just atoms and avoid and what's there to what's there to honestly put your faith in and yet they can't avoid having faith in something. I agree with you that there's faith and trust and belief on both sides, but the idea that we have it all figured out, I think, is more an indictment of the church than it is of non-Christians, in my experience. I can't tell you how many young people start to just question Calvinism, Arminianism. They're like, we're not certain about this. Ah, everything unfolds. I'm like, what are we doing? John, we've talked a lot about your story and what brought you kind of intellectually and experientially back to faith. But what was that final piece where you said, you know what, not just I'm an atheist when you described that moment, redefine yourself that way, but you're like, I'm a Christian. I believe this again. And was there kind of another conversion experience? Yeah, it kind of was like another conversion experience. I don't think God ever let me go,

but I certainly let him go, denied him. Oftentimes I feel kind of like Judas when I think about that period of my life. I really did turn my back. But I had met in the process of all of these things going on in my life, a woman at church who was going through something very similar to what I was going through. And her husband had cancer. He died. And then about a year and a half after that, my wife died. We slowly through that process, you know, knowing of each other's issues going on. Because I saw the grace with which she dealt with the death of her husband. She had seven kids. She had homeschooled them all. And I saw that going on right before my eyes in the church. And afterwards, I began to see, wow, this is a woman of faith, kind of different from everybody else in the church. And we talked seldom, but often, seldom, but often, that's weird. We talked often enough that it was like, I was so impressed with this lady.

And as time went on, we started texting back and forth. I tried to help her. She was, you know, the widow of the church. So I tried to help as much as I could with her and the things going on in her life. I would help her work on her car. Sometimes I would do some things in her house to try to, you know, ease things for her in her new life as a as a widow but as time went on I started to realize I was falling for this this woman and for me that was having a Christian

background I knew what that meant in the Christian world. You're not to be unequally yoked. So it was like, okay, I can admire from a distance. But one day, oh, about, I don't know, nine months after my wife had died, we met at the pool and my daughter and her children were playing. And she was talking about how difficult things were. And I said to her, well, then you should marry me. And it was a quick off the cuff comment, but she looked at me and she said, you know what, John, if you were a Christian, I would pack the car tonight and we'd go somewhere and get married tomorrow. And suddenly I felt this huge weight descend on me because I felt as though this woman that I had admired from a distance and thought, wow, that's a truly great Christian woman.

She's just said something that it's like, wow, now I'm responsible. I've sort of engaged her in an emotionalirondacks with my niece, who is a Christian and also ended up getting divorced from her husband and marrying someone else. Complex situation. But salt of the earth Christian girl. And her husband as well. And so I spent the week pouring out my life and my agonies to my niece. And it was through her and her husband talking back and forth with me about agnosticism and Christianity. And I have to add one small backwards glance because I was sitting in church right after my wife died and the pastor was going through a sermon on Joshua

and it suddenly occurred to me that I was no longer an atheist. That is, I couldn't maintain my atheism. I couldn't hold on to that. And so I slid almost imperceptibly back into agnosticism. It's like, I don't know. I just don't know anymore. I can't assert there is no God. And so at the end of that time in July, I guess it was, on my way back, I got home, and that tension that we talked about before, between two positions, I finally had a motivation to switch from one to the other. And I unapologetically assert to everyone listening that my wife, Jenny, was that final thing that really was kind of empty when you trace the logic of it.

And this world in which a good God created the world and had answered the questions as well as they can ever be answered. And I said, okay, a world with Jenny and faith in God or this world that I've explored so carefully over the last 25 years and it was a no-brainer and at that point the switch happened I talked previously to people I said I can't flip the switch I was able suddenly I could have chosen either one at that point too but I was able at that point to flip the switch. And that's still a very odd moment for me. I still don't quite understand what happened that I was able to make the switch again. There's something supernatural there that I've not been

able to adequately understand or put my finger on. And I've been trying pretty hard for the last five years to figure it out i guess that's what jesus said no man can come to the father except he i draw someone no one can come to me except the father draw him so well there's so much here we could explore and i can only imagine you take some criticism from people in a lot of different ways for this story but i asked you to share your story and your experience and in some, it has some overlap with my dad in the sense that the evidence got his attention to rethink his agnosticism. But he describes it was when he understood the love of God about the Christian story that really drew him and changed his heart and changed his mind. So the evidence got his attention,

but it was the love of God that drew him. Probably for all of us, both of those are his mind. So the evidence, God is attention, but it was the love of God that drew him. Probably for all of us, both of those are at stake. So really quickly, if you were not convinced that Christianity made sense to the world, would you have believed it to marry her anyways, even if you're like, well, it's false, but I'll just marry her anyways, or did it have to be both of those for you to do that it had to be both it had to be both otherwise i'm destroying her um you know because i know what it means to be a christian and part of what i loved about her was that she was very serious about her faith so to marry her as a non-christian wouldn work. Although, to be perfectly honest, before I made the switch,

I was in my mind trying to justify that. I was trying to make a case for that. But fortunately, I didn't have to, because it's like my niece said to me, you're making this too hard. You don't want to just stand in agnosticism just become a christian again why is that so hard and it still took me like four or five days after that to make the switch but again i know i make no apologies for jenny being that to me because it's always a person that leads us one way or another um in in my atheism there were people that took me, you know, because I respected this person. And I said, okay, that seems reasonable. And so I made the switch. So why is it unreasonable for God to give us the people that we need in just the right place at just the

right time to take us over the line? You know, it says, David, the woman of Tekoa said to David, God devises means to bring the exile back. And I think that's exactly what Jenny and I have been. And ever since then, he continues to use Jenny to bring me back. She's my looking glass. She allows me to look at myself honestly and say, wow, I really am twisted in my view of myself. Here's what I need to think about now. And so it's an ongoing process. And hopefully I do the same for her. Well, I appreciate you not sugarcoating the story and just put it on the table for people to see and evaluate. Honestly, I think that's what we're called to do. And by the way, you made a comparison earlier judas judas never came back and believed i happen to think jesus would have forgiven him

peter denied jesus and came back and became one of the most influential not the most influential apostles because of the grace of jesus christ so thank god for your story tell us about your podcast and kind of what people could expect, Christian or atheist, if they go to the Christian Atheist Podcast. Well, it's incredibly dense. Most people, I find that I've limited, my wife tells me too, that I've limited my audience by the type of material that we put out. It's very intellectually dense.

Sorry, I am a philosopher. So if you're not looking for a bit of a rough ride and not willing to put in the effort, it may not be your cup of tea, at least the first few episodes or the first hundred episodes or so. Because I have all kinds of series, like what is an atheist? I talk about the curse tablet quite extensively. You've talked about with Rolston with you, you're mentioned, I think three times in that series, because you interviewed both Chris Rolston and Scott Stripling. That's right. And so I did quite a series on that, that I'm what is more one of my favorite series. So yeah, there's a lot of material in there.

And this last year, we took a bit of a change because I went through a bit of another conversion, really. I changed from a more progressive look at Christianity to a much more traditional Bible-centered inerrancy view. And that I didn't think was going to happen back in 2019. But it's been a slow progressive development, again, gradually and then suddenly. And I signal that in The Christian Atheist with an episode called The Structure of a Scientific Revolution. And that's one that was in this year. And then for the rest of this year,

I've been really working on the book of Malachi and the word Malachi. And so I've spent an awful lot of time really studying those things. And so if you're interested in, you know, the Bible from a rather different perspective than you'll probably get in most evangelical churches in the preaching um i i approach it jenny and i approach it in a i think an interesting way and so hopefully if you're interested in that that would be a good thing to go listen to you were careful the way you said sartre and lancaster so it's actually the prophet, the prophet Malachi. No, I'm just kidding. So my audience might be turned off by that, but I think there's a lot of people going, I want some depth. I'm looking for that. And although you're a philosophy professor,

got your PhD in that, obviously through this interview, you're able to explain things in a way to normal people so they can get it. So I would certainly suggest people check out your podcast. Now, maybe we'll do a follow-up at some point. People can write their comments if you want to hear this, because you just spurred a whole nother podcast for me. It seems we more often hear people going from conservative to progressive. You went from progressive to conservative. Maybe we'll do part two and walk through what some of those things are and why. I think that would be a fascinating journey for folks. So comment below if you want us to follow up and do that or not, and we'll do it. And also

check out John, your book titled Through the Looking Glass, available on Amazon. People can check that out. And before you go away, make sure you hit subscribe. We've got some other interviews coming up on all sorts of apologetics, worldview, cultural topics you will not want to miss. And if you thought about studying apologetics, we would love to have you at Biola.

We have an MA Phil program, philosophy, religion, one of the top in the world, and our apologetics program, one of the top in the world on campus and distance. And I teach classes on the problem of evil. We have classes on science and faith. We also have a certificate program below with a significant discount if you're not ready for a master's, but you're like, I'd love to formally walk through this. That's below. Check it out. John, this was really enjoyable. Thanks for sharing your story. It's wonderful to meet you

and let's uh let's do it again sounds good sean thanks so much for having me it was a blast