Theology in the Raw - How a Skeptical Philosopher Becomes a Christian: Dr. Larry Sanger

Episode Date: May 29, 2025

Dr. Larry Sanger is the co-founder of Wikipedia. Larry received his PhD in philosophy from The Ohio State University and for many years was an intellectual skeptic of Christianity. But earlier this year, he wrote an essay titled: “How a Skeptical Philosopher Becomes a Christian” (Feb 2025), which went viral. Join the Theology in the Raw community for as little as $5/month to get access to premium content at patreon.com/theologyintheraw  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey friends, welcome back to another episode of theology. And around my guest today is Dr. Larry Sanger, who is the co-founder of Wikipedia. Larry received his PhD in philosophy from The Ohio State University and for many years was an intellectual skeptic of Christianity. But earlier this year in February, 2025, he wrote an essay titled, How a Skeptical Philosopher Becomes a Christian. That's right. Larry had a conversion to Christianity, actually happened a few years ago in 2020. But as you'll see, he wanted to take a few years to really work out some of the details of his faith and respond to the questions that he had for so many years about Christianity. So I want to have Dr. Singer come on and talk to us both about his role in Wikipedia and then talk extensively about his faith. Very, very

interesting faith journey. So please welcome to the show for the first time, the one and only Dr. Larry Sanger. All right, Dr. Larry Sanger, how are you this morning? Great. Thanks so much for being on the all general. You know, a friend of mine read your viral article about how a skeptic became a Christian a few months ago. And he says, Hey, you shot this guy on your podcast. I'm like, that's Larry Sager. I can't get people like that on the podcast, but he says, well, you should reach out anyway. So I reached out and you very delightfully responded saying, sure. I'd love to come on.

So I've been looking forward to this interview for a while. Can we start with the whole Wikipedia thing? I mean, you were the founder or co-founder of Wikipedia. Can you take us back to that time? How did that happen? How did that come about? Yeah, well, to make a long story short, basically, I knew the guy who funded the Wikipedia project, Jimmy Wales. He had a startup called Balmis, and they were starting a lot of different side projects. And one of the side projects he wanted to

start, he called Newpedia. And he registered the domain name. He's looking for somebody to be basically the editor. And we knew each other sort of casually from online, a little bit offline, from the mid nineties, and he hired me basically to start a free volunteer contributor encyclopedia. It didn't go very well in the first year. We were from the ground up entirely and the people that I initially recruited

were college professors mostly. And they wanted a very rigid academic kind of process, a seven step process to make sure that articles that come from online are properly vetted. But it was so difficult to get through that it was very slow. So then a friend of mine told me about Wikis. Wikis had been around since like 1995. So they were not a new technology. Well, they were five years old anyway. And he told me about how Wikis work that anyone could edit any page on the side

and add new pages, you know. And the basic objection is, well, if anybody can add any content, doesn't that mean that it's just going to all be nonsense? It turns out that people are more motivated to add good content than to add nonsense, and they're also highly motivated to immediately remove the nonsense. It ends up being very robust. The whole system ends up being very robust. The whole system ends up being very robust. So I decided to try it out as a way to organize a faster method of getting content for Newpedia.

But the Newpedia people, these straight-laced academic types, wanted nothing to do with a wiki. And so, Wikipedia then, I named it, led it basically in its first 14 months after that. And it just took off from the beginning with exponential growth. So there was, at least when you were involved, I mean a very strong editorial hand in the articles that came in or anytime people posted something, like that would be vetted by educated people pretty quickly? There was in the newpedia days,

there was a strong editorial control, but not so much at the beginning of Wikipedia. No, we actually added more rules as we went along. It was quite free. In fact, as we went along, I had to repeatedly declare, you know, what Wikipedia is not or what an encyclopedia is not, because people were coming up with all kinds of ways to use it that weren't encyclopedic. You know, they would write their personal essays, their personal opinion, put up poetry,

but who knows what. And it was, you know, those people needed to be told, well, no, we're actually working on an encyclopedia here, and you know what an encyclopedia is. Apparently, a lot of people who want to work on one didn't actually know. So I had to explain it. So you were involved in less than two years.

What are your thoughts on Wikipedia and where it ended up going over the last two decades? Like, are you a big fan? Do you think it was a, is it a success? Do you have any critiques of the whole project now? Yeah, well, for the, it was actually a little over two years that I was actually working on the project that became Wikipedia. I was reasonably happy with it in the beginning. I didn't actually wash my hands of Wikipedia until like the end of 2004, 2005. And I just decided by that time I had decided I want nothing to do with it. And

even made an ultimatum to Jimmy Wales, you know, either you do something about your troll problem, you allow actual experts to have some role in the system that sort of dignifies their expertise. Or I'm just going to separate myself from this. And I did and I don't regret it at all. Okay. I think it has gotten gradually more biased, I think over the last 10 years since about 2016, it has become really biased following the lead of the mainstream media, really. At the same time that the mainstream media adopted the sort of news talk format of the old Fox News and then MSNBC, everything changed in changed in 2016, basically around Trump's election and

Brexit. And Wikipedia went the same direction at the same time. And it's gotten even worse since then. I was going to ask you bias in which direction. So you're saying bias just in terms of popular narratives, mainstream media, not getting beneath the surface of those headlines? Yeah, well basically if it isn't being reported by the mainstream media, if it does not represent establishment science and establishment, even theology for that matter, you know, secular theology is the only kind that really matters up there, then it's not allowed now. That was not always the case. And that's because of the now the editorial, because I mean, you can have somebody who isn't following mainstream media post anything, right?

But then that's going to be critiqued and vetted by the powers to be or? It's gonna be removed and possibly a person, if they make edits that are too aggressive in that direction, they'll simply be blocked, you know, without ceremony. Oh, wow. Oh yeah, yeah, it doesn't take long if you're not on board with the actual sort of editorial standards.

And I'm not exaggerating and it's well known. So Wikipedia has become a mouthpiece of the establishment. That's clear. Can you give us a, do you have any examples off the hand? I was thinking like, sure. JFK or dare I say like vaccines or Epstein. They were, you know, the whole idea of a Chinese origin of the vaccine, lab origin theory, a lab leak theory was totally off limits on Wikipedia. media, even now, they are very conservative in how they protect the mainstream establishment

narratives, the ideological guard Ukraine, the relative merits of Biden and Trump, you can guess what it will say. Interesting. Okay. So would you say use it with caution now for people or occasionally still use it myself for obscure biographies, some non political, historical topics, things like that traditional encyclopedia topics. But anything having to do with the culture war, you know, politics, socio political issues of any sort, it's it's

worthless unless you're unless you're a progressive, in which case it's very useful to you. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I would say I, I mean, academics don't like to admit this. So you know, like, if I had a student, I'm not a professor anymore. But when this. So if I had a student, I'm not a professor anymore, but when I was, if a student cited Wikipedia, then we get docked, even if it was accurate. But for just quick information,

when did Augustine live? Where did Irenaeus write his whatever? Basic factual stuff, I found it to be pretty really quick and easy. Oftentimes, there are citations there. You can go and click on different links and stuff. But yeah, when it comes to like opinion stuff, especially yeah, matters of interpretation, even like Augustine's theory of dualism is like, well, I don't know if I'm gonna trust Wikipedia to do that. It might get me started on kind of the big picture maybe, but I'm not going to rely

on that. But for basic facts that aren't really disputed, yeah, I think it's still helpful. Well, I mean, if the article stays fairly close to the 2011 Encyclopedia Britannica original, which when you look up topics like that, it's pretty much going to go there. Then I think that's fairly reliable. And I also think that the information that they've added in so far as it represents the current state of research, if that's actually what you're interested in. It can be okay. It can be. In science, actually, scientists will sometimes do praise

Wikipedia. But then it's relatively easy for Wikipedia to deal with science. They just open up their textbooks and copy out the information. And that's essentially how that works. But when it comes to more difficult narrative, analytic, theoretical I wouldn't trust it, not necessarily because it's extremely biased, but because it's written by amateurs. It's still written by amateurs and it is not going to be as subtle and as coherent as something written by a single, really good top expert in the field. That's generally the case, even today. All right. Well, let's talk about the stuff that you're more recently well known for.

Namely, you wrote a lengthy essay on how, former skeptic of Christianity became a Christian. And it was, I would say, it went viral. I mean, it seemed like it was everywhere. Take us back to the early stages of your faith journey. Were you raised in a church? What was your upbringing like? Yeah, well, I was born in the Seattle area, and my family moved up to Anchorage, Alaska when I was seven. Some of my earliest memories, I guess, were all church related. My dad was an elder in the LCMS when we were living in Washington, we went to, I think, a larger church in Anchorage. And nevertheless, we went to like vacation Bible school and then

this summer and, you know, sometimes went to church on Wednesdays. Real quick, LCMS, is that the Lutheran, Missouri? Yeah, it's the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod. That's right. Which is a conservative branch of the Lutheran. Yes, that's correct. So I was confirmed at age 12 or so, and at about the same time, my parents were getting divorced and we actually stopped

going to church right after that. But up until that time, you know, we went to church every Sunday. I remember, you know, putting on a little clip-on tie when I was a little kid, and so forth. So where did that take you? I mean, you ended up doing a PhD in philosophy at Ohio State. It's no slouch of a school. Take us from like your upbringing in the church and then doing a PhD where you always a philosophical type thinker. How did that interact with your faith? I mean, I had always been an inquisitive kid. I asked a lot of questions. You know, I was the annoying kid to constantly ask why. But in my teen years,

I stopped praying to God. I stopped thinking about God and religion generally as we had distance from church. I think it didn't help also that my dad at the time was getting interested in new age religion, which meant there was less attention on, you know, traditional Christianity, at least when I would stay with him. So I kind of lost my belief in God very casually. I didn't think hard about it. It's just like woke up one day when I was 16 or so and said, I don't really believe in God anymore, do I? I haven't really thought about this in a while. But the thing is, I went to, I took a class in philosophy in my junior year, And it was, it made a very big impression on me. I started thinking about philosophical topics a lot. And you could say I got obsessed. And the following summer,

I spent the entire summer writing about different philosophical topics topics and talking about them with people. One of the topics that I talked about was the existence of God, traditional arguments for the existence of God. And I found I couldn't really prove it. And at the same time, I came to the conclusion that I don't really know anything. And I think maybe the paradigm, my paradigm case of lack of knowledge was my lack of knowing that God exists. I said, basically, people believe all kinds of things that are false, like these druggies who are getting strung out on, you know, drinking too much and smoking too much weed and who knows what else, you know, I'm talking about the mid 80s here. Yeah.

They actually believed that these drugs were mind enhancing or that it gave them access to a higher plane of existence or something like that, which I thought was nonsense, is obviously false. And yet it explained their behavior. Well, what if I start adopting beliefs that are just as damaging and I just don't know? You know, there's so many things that people do believe. That's another thing that really occurred to me and that I dwelled on a lot. People have wildly varying points of view on the world. Being in another person's head, which you can do sort of if you read novels or you talk to them very much, you get a notion these people are not even living in your universe. Right? That's sort of how I thought about it. And I knew that the outlook, the worldview

that I have is deeply dependent on philosophy. And therefore, what I should do is withhold judgment about all of these basic philosophical questions. So I did what Descartes did. Now, I wasn't inspired by Descartes. I didn't really know Descartes at the time. I studied him later. But I undertook a project of methodological skepticism, which means I threw out all of my doubts, or sorry, I threw out all of my beliefs and then admitted beliefs back into my philosophers call it doxastic system, my system of beliefs, right? Not the catchiest term, but yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I admitted new beliefs back into my body of beliefs only if I knew exactly what I was believing and why I believed it. And then basically I found that given such a high bar of admission to my doxastic system, I couldn't actually justify a belief

in God anymore. And so, I ended up going to Reed College and then later Ohio State for grad school, all with the intention. In fact, I intended to become a philosophy professor before I even left high school. Oh, wow. Reed is known for being one of the most liberal schools in the country, right? Isn't that... Oh, yeah. Reed is extremely liberal. It's basically... Now it's extremely woke. Back then, it was old-fashioned liberal, but one of the most liberal colleges in the country, along with like Sarah Lawrence

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So at that point, Reed College and then into your PhD, would you have said you were wrestling with the existence of God or just like flat out like, I am agnostic or even atheist? Like, where would you be in terms of your faith at that point? I was an agnostic, right? So I was not influenced by the skeptic community very much. I was influenced by Ayn Rand, who was an outright atheist, right? And I suppose she had some influence on me, but I started having my philosophical thoughts before I read Ayn Rand. And they came from a place that was deep inside me, essentially. Like I was on a truth-seeking quest, and therefore, you know, you can't foreclose possibilities. Of course, therefore, I was not an atheist.

I mean, why would I be? Then I would be drawing another conclusion, wouldn't I? I mean, but most people, when they say they're an atheist, they're, what they really mean is agnostic, right? What'd you say? Yes, I think some people are confused about what the words mean. But yeah, yes, a lot of the people who call themselves atheists, the way they define their stance is, I don't believe that God exists. And if you press them on it, they'll say, well, I don't know that God doesn't exist. They'll say that. But the thing is, if you push on them a little bit harder, then you can get them to admit that it's not a real possibility for them.

In other words, they don't take the possibility that God exists seriously. In fact, so obviously, it is true of them that they go to great lengths to argue against the existence of God, which, you know, if they're doing that, right, and if they're undermining positive arguments for the existence of God, and they're also mounting, like, the problem of evil and various other problems, conceptual problems, then, yeah, the whole idea of God is off the table for them. So they can call themselves agnostic or agnostic atheists, but the really important question is, do you take the existence of God to be a possibility? Is it within the realm of possibility for you? Are you willing to

take the proposition seriously at all? And I think most of the people who call themselves atheists, for those people, it's not really a serious possibility for them at all. And for me, I would say I took it somewhat seriously. I was totally willing to continue to talk about it, to entertain the idea. But at the end of the day, I didn't take it very seriously. I was pretty close to an atheist. What would you say were your major hangups with the existence of God? Like, what were your top one or two arguments against there being a God at that point?

I didn't have arguments against the existence of God. I simply didn't think that the case could be made in any persuasive way. The arguments were simply not very good. The argument from contingency seemed just metaphysical. So what are we supposed to conclude from this? That a necessary being exists? Why couldn't that be the universe, for example? And even if you grant the conclusion, okay, there's a necessary being that is outside of the universe, well, that doesn't mean that it's God, it could be just some other sort of force or something. And so the idea is, if you just think hard about the arguments, in some cases not even that hard, this was my opinion.

It's just child's play to raise problems that are difficult to deal with. And especially if you have a very high standard of proof, then if you require rigorous proof for everything, then you're not going to come to any conclusions about the matter. That's basically it really did have much to do with my methodological skepticism. But I also just simply found the arguments to be not very good. I taught them actually in grad school many times. Oh, right. Because you taught philosophy in grad school. What about the argument? I always

wonder, like the argument from design, and I'm biased, I'm a Christian, you know, and never had serious, well, I mean, I would say never serious doubts about my faith. But I'm a Christian, you know, and never had serious, well, I mean, I would say never serious doubts about my faith and the argument, but I'm not a philosopher. So I've never, I never even arrived at my faith through interacting with these arguments. It was more after the fact kind of responding or thinking through some of the counter arguments. But the argument from design always seemed compelling to me, but I'm not a philosopher. Was that not, I mean, the universe seems like it was extremely intricately designed all the way down to biology and procreation. And I mean, on and on it goes, like, doesn't that give evidence that there is some kind of designer?

What's the counter argument to that? Well, back then, my attitude toward the design argument was, well, partly I was just aping what David Hume said about the argument, saying that, well, even if you admit that there was a designer, it actually could have been multiple designers, might have been an incompetent designer. Doesn't really give you very much information about the designer.

Okay. And then partly it was I had been told, I think kind of persuasively by a number of different people that they think that design argument is the strongest argument. And I always thought maybe there's something there that I just don't understand. And I tried. I actually think what makes these arguments persuasive does not actually have to do with how rigorously logical they are formulated. I think it has to do with, well, let's put it this way. When we formulate an argument like the design argument,

we are actually trying to capture something intuitive, right, that people just sort of naturally experience in the world. And I experience it now all the time, whenever I go and take a walk and look at nature around me, or look at the night sky, when the stars are shining, I certainly get the notion that this is all very brilliantly ordered.

And it's a natural conclusion for people to say, well, where there is order, then there is someone who caused the order. There's a mind behind order that we can see. It's a natural conclusion. But I simply, intuitively, it didn't make any sense to me. It's like, well, why can't it just be, why can't it just arise naturally?

So as a naturalist, now I have a different, I actually, in order to get myself to the point where I was able to concede the intuitive force of the argument, I actually had to come up with a new to me version of the argument. So sometimes the logical work does, it is an important persuader for some people, but not usually.

People are not really persuaded by the details of arguments so much as the broad outlines of the arguments. That's interesting. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if you, are you familiar with Jonathan Haidt and other people of those, that kind of school of thought, where like, you know, belief, our beliefs are rooted more in intuition and our kind of gut sense of things rather than just going from our analytical

reasoning to our gut. It's usually the other direction, you know, which is why you it's, which is why if somebody is so stuck in a certain way of thinking, you know, two plus two equals five, proving to them that it actually equals four, it doesn't actually work.

There's so many other things, there's so many other factors that work in their belief system, their tribal allegiance, past hurt, the person that told them two plus two equals four, they abused them or something, you know, there's that told them two plus two equals four, they abuse them or something. You know, there's just so many sociological and psychological factors that are bound up

in our belief system, which makes it frustrating for people like you and I who are very left brain analytical kind of thinkers. They're like, no, if I just show somebody the facts, they won't believe this lie. And it's like, that's not really how it often works. Well, I think that's probably true, even of the most logical sorts of people out there. William Lane Craig, as finely chopped as he is able to make his logic,

I'm not really sure that it is the logic chopping that actually drives his beliefs. Yeah, yeah. So take us to the time, when did you start to question your disbelief in God? When did these, the arguments for the existence of God start to be a little more compelling? Like, was that recently? And what was going on inside of your philosophical brain at that time? I would say that a lot of the impediments to my belief had fallen away by about 10 or 15 years ago. There was a period in the lead up to 2020, which is when I was

converted. So five years have passed, I didn't announce it until earlier this year, but that was for a good reason, I think. Anyway, so you know, for five or 10 years before that, I was willing to reconsider arguments, I just didn't take it very seriously, and I was still a methodological skeptic. And therefore, you know, I didn't feel any pressing need to just make up my mind about the existence of God. I would say that there were a few perspective-shifting arguments that came to me that made it more of a live possibility. Yeah. What were those?

Okay. One of them was, well, I read this book by Larry Niven called Ringworld, and it made an impression on me. In Ringworld, there is this enormous fabricated ring that goes all the way around a star, and it's many, many, many planets worth of living area orbiting a star. And it's many, many, many planets worth of living area, orbiting a star. And the whole idea is kind of absurd, right? Like how could such a thing be built? Because it was actually manufactured in the distant past in this science fiction thing. And I thought about it and it seemed to me there's a way to conceive of how such a thing might be built. I said, just imagine that the singularity actually happens so that, in other words, AI becomes so powerful,

it's able to iterate itself and through its robots, it's able to build bigger and better equipment overnight. And pretty soon there's just practically an explosion of technology. And isn't it possible that some machine or person-machine hybrid, a million years after that, would have buttons and levers that will allow him to spin up a whole new planet. It's just iterating technology, isn't it? And then, well, then the whole idea of brain prosthetics and the idea that brain waves have a certain sort of feature suggests that it can be something more like a disembodied mind that could actually do the button pressing or whatever.

And then the idea is we actually have a concept here of a creator bringing worlds, maybe whole universes into being. All right? Well, that actually gave me a reason to think that the notion of God is conceivable. See, one of my main reasons for disbelieving in the existence of God—again, I didn't take this very seriously, but it was a positive argument against the existence of God. Again, I didn't take this very seriously, but it was a positive argument against the existence of God. It would go like this. I have no notion of what God is. And the reason for that is the basic notion of God is a mind that creates things from nothing, right? So, the only minds that I'm familiar with don't create things from nothing. They,

you know, have an effect on the body and then the body, like, manipulates things and so forth. But here we're actually now thinking about a mind-like entity that creates stuff, well, maybe not from nothing. And maybe the mind itself isn't self-creating, but we're practically there is the point. So the whole idea was if science and technology get so advanced that it becomes practically indistinguishable from how we think of God as operating. That actually is some reason to think that God might exist. Not to say that we're in a simulation. That's a different conclusion. I actually thought that doesn't follow.

You know, because we could be in a simulation, therefore we are? No. Yeah. But it does follow, though, that a God-like being might exist. And if a God-like being might exist, then God might exist. So that opened up the door to the possibility. That's interesting. I've heard similar stories from other people who've had similar journeys as yours when they start thinking about the mind and consciousness and

things that are hard to explain apart from the very broad category of a higher being or something, you know, that kind of launches them on a journey. So why why, okay, so that opens up the door to some kind of theism, even polytheism. There's a lot of options there. So, why Christianity? Why the God who revealed Himself in Jesus Christ? Did you consider other options or was that just the one option that you're most familiar with? Or why was Christianity, how did that become the most credible of all the other options? Dr. Craig Johnson Well, let's put it this way. I always thought that Christianity was the most plausible of the options, certainly monotheism. The problem with

polytheism is that it doesn't actually do the explanatory work. Polytheistic systems always involved created gods, or if there is one God that created them all, then So the polytheistic option basically doesn't have the explanatory force of monotheism. And then the monotheistic systems that exist are all based on the Bible, even Islam. Islam ends up basically denying the very thing that it's partly based on, which is incoherent, if you ask me. And as I came to believe, so these are all things that I would have said before I was converted. But I don't know that I would have had a very strong opinion about Judaism versus Christianity back then. But it was only after I actually read the Bible and understood it that I understood the prophetic case for Christianity.

Like if you're going to take the Bible seriously, and you're going to take the Old Testament seriously, then you really are obligated, I think, if you read and understand the fulfillment of prophecy, the Messiah prophecies, then you're practically obligated to believe that Jesus is the Messiah. Pete So, Old Testament prophecies fulfilled in the New Testament, huh. Even beyond that, there's a profound coherency to the Bible. You know, it's not like it's just a bunch of like proverbial pieces of wisdom scattered through time. I mean, you have 66 individual books written by at least 40 different authors over a period of thousand-ish years, if not more, in two main, three different languages.

And for all of that to produce a rather cohesive story is pretty profound. Like that's... It is. I don't know if that's a nail in the coffin argument for it being inspired, but it's like, gosh, this has a very different quality than other ancient pieces of literature. As I read the Bible for the first time all the way through, I started in December of 2019 and I finished 100 days later. And I was asking all the questions that I had ever had about the Bible and looking up

answers online. And I was shocked, frankly, to discover that these questions that I had had, had been answered. They were taken seriously. And that even more questions than I had known about had been wrestled with for millennia. And that came as a shock that the people who take this stuff seriously are not actually checking their brain at the door. So that was part of what sort of cleared away the rubbish, but another big part was I actually, as I read through the Bible, finally understood the system that is biblical doctrine. So when you look at the whole arc of biblical history, what they call salvation history. It makes a kind of sense and is coherent with how we would expect the God of natural theology to interact with human beings.

My confusion on this point is one of the main reasons why I couldn't ever take the Bible seriously before. Now, I had never actually read the Bible all the way through. I think that made a big difference. But one of the main reasons that I didn't is I thought that it was just a collection of Bronze Age fairy tales that didn't exhibit the sort of coherence that you're talking about. I thought that, you know, why would God reveal himself to one people? And it's not like I thought there's no possible answer to that question. It's just that there are so many questions like that, that said, well, it has to be wrong. If there are so many problems for it to solve, then it cannot possibly be right. That's sort of the attitude that I took. But the thing is, if you actually live in the

text long enough and you wrestle with the history of theology and apologetics and so forth for a while, then you actually see that it is a really good system, that there is a reason why God would pick a single people. And He didn't pick a people, by the way. He built a people. They were made to order by Him. Right? He said, okay, you two, all right, you're going to be the first.

You're going to go over here, and then I'm going to direct when you have a child, he will be the child of promise. And then, you know, you're all going to be down for 400 years, you know, being properly humbled before you're brought up into the promised land and so forth. He says all of this in advance in Genesis, and the whole idea is he was, as it were, crafting a people. There's a reason why the Bible doctrine, the Christian doctrine, couldn't simply be unleashed on the world in many different places. The reason is, you know, wherever it was unleashed, wherever it was unleashed, and a lot of this has to do with respect for free will, which we can get into, but wherever it would be released would become a center of a cult, essentially. And then people being what they are will have their own approach. And if it is discovered somewhere else that a similar

message had been handed down to man, then they would end up fighting, of course, you know, and now God would be responsible for that. So anyway, that's just one example of how living in the text and actually trying to come to grips with your critical questions, and as long as you take the possibility of the answers being true seriously, then it actually can be very persuasive. Yeah. Yeah, there's like, I would say, an inspired character to the Bible. For instance, especially when you compare it to other ancient Near East literature, religious literature. I mean, yeah, for instance, I mean, kind of piggybacking on the point you were making, like, you know, Israel is described very negatively in the Old Testament. I didn't choose you because

of who you are. You know, I've chosen you because you're kind of a bunch of lame people that I'm going to use to fulfill my, you know, that's not that's if it was simply human generated, you typically, typically don't speak so negatively about yourselves or even like, you know, most of the kings are portrayed very negatively or even a lot of the leaders. The male leaders are often contrasted with female heroes. I mean, the opening chapters of Exodus is a, you know, is a bunch of women kind of saving the day between the midwives and Pharaoh's daughter and Moses's sister. And then Moses comes on the scene and he's like, I'm too scared to go rescue the people. And it's his wife, Zipporah, that saves him from being killed by, you know, it's like, there's so many things. It's like, this doesn't, it doesn't, again, prove a hundred percent that

this is inspired, but it's like, this is kind of odd for simply human male writers to portray themselves so negatively throughout the the story line So yes, it has a ring of truth How I put it to myself. Yes, so I know what you're talking about there very much. So Yes, this is not the sort of thing that that would be contrived. Yes and in a you know, if a human being is sitting down to actually try to come up with something that can be imposed from above on a bunch of teachable acolytes, it wouldn't be this. It's just way too complicated. And there's all

kinds of stuff that looks like nonsense at first, but if you actually dig, it makes profound sense. Anyway, I agree. Yeah. And even there's obviously a lot of difficulties, ethical difficulties, and things when we read from our modern Western perspective, we're like, wow, that seems odd. But when you read it in its own ancient context and compare it with other literature, it just, it, the, the beauty of the text comes out even more. There's a great book by a friend of mine, Paul Copan called is God a moral monster? And he does a great job, you know, looking at all these, you know, the

Old Testament treatment of women and you got slavery and violence and all these things. And he does a lot of comparative study looking at it in light of other texts and saying, well, yeah, when we read it from our perspective, it's like, it doesn't speak the way we would want it to from a 21st century Western perspective, but compared to its own context, it was profoundly beautiful and humanizing. So you were, in your own heart, would you say you officially became a Christian like in 2020-ish? Yes.

Why take five years to really come out publicly? Did you just want to really be sure about that? So basically I knew that there was a chance that people would be coming after me and the way that you have been, you know, asking me to give a justification of why I believe what I do. And by the time I believed the verse that I should be able to defend, give an account of my belief, I discovered that I wasn't really able very well. Although, I'll tell you, before I even believed that God existed, I was already writing down my versions of arguments for the existence of God. So, my belief actually emerged from my work on what is now a book draft. It's over 600 pages now in the third draft, but it's called God

Exists. Oh, wow. That makes sense though, because you are a public figure and you've been, yeah, you were going to take some time to really be able to defend your new belief. I thought maybe I would be able to finish the book, but it ended up taking much longer. longer. And I also thought that I should be much better trained in theology and apologetics and philosophy of religion in order to be able to defend the faith, essentially. I felt that one of the main reasons, perhaps the best explanation why I remained an unbeliever for so long so that by living in that perspective, I could represent it and represent Christian doctrine

to those such as I was. There aren't very many people who are like me who go through decades of unbelief as a PhD philosopher and then come to believe that God exists. So that gives me a fairly unique perspective, and I think that's actually part of my God's mission for me. That is a unique, yeah, there's not too many that go that direction. There are, it seems like, a surprising growing number of people who are former atheists, public figures, even some so-called new atheists coming to Christ, or at least people within that camp, which is interesting. Yeah, post-2020, there's some interesting things happening. Have you gotten some negative feedback

regarding your more recent essay? Are there people that were formerly excited about your disbelief in Christianity who now are not excited about your conversion? Pete Well, I didn't have too many fans of my agnosticism, to be honest. So, I didn't have any sort of following, you know, when it came to my arguments against the existence of God or anything like that. I wasn't strident enough I wasn't strident enough to attract a following. And I was perhaps a little too squishy. I was a real agnostic, in other words. And so in fact, the answer is no, there has not been very much negative pushback. A little bit. A little bit. There's one guy who made a long sort of uncharitable argument against my testimony that you can find buried deep in the comment section, which is like over 500 comments now. I responded to him at length.

But not a lot else. A few things in reaction to interviews, negative reactions. I mean, not very many. I think I disturb the unbelievers a little bit, and it's not surprising. So somebody like me does not become a believer lightly. Right. And unless you're an idiot, right, you're going to take that into account you're going to take that into account and not just assume that I have fallen prey to some simple fallacy. I guarantee I have not. Well, your trajectory adds intellectual credibility to the faith. Even if somebody isn't ultimately

convinced, they can't just chalk up Christianity as a bunch of idiots who believe in fairy tales or something. Like you're- I'm just reminding people. Yeah. Yes. I agree. You cannot chalk up my conversion to plain idiocy.

But the thing is, there have been lots of brilliant people through the years who have been Christian, and not a few who have converted to Christianity from atheism. You know, C.S. Lewis is one example, right? There have been others, of course. So I think people just like to see a recent example, I suppose. I'm not comparing myself to C.S. Lewis, by the way, either. Yeah, that's something that non-Christians don't often realize, especially critics of Christianity, that there are a lot of brilliant philosophers and professors, and not just theologians, of course, but I mean, people that are just and not just the theologians, of course, but I mean, people that are just top tier scholars who are also very committed to the faith. And it's, you know, I think part of it is

going back full circle to media, you know, like dumb Christians often make headlines and we have plenty of plenty of, well, yeah, we have dumb people in every sphere of belief. But I think Christianity does, people do like to kind of often pick on Christianity and highlight stupid things that public facing Christians say and do or whatever. But it's like, that's just not representative of the profound intellectual tradition of Christianity. You know, so. Yeah.

That's actually one of the main reasons why I remained an agnostic. My awareness that that philosophers like Alvin Plantinga and William Alston and many others, actually, especially in the history of philosophy, not so many living philosophers, but nevertheless, the fact that there continue to be very modern, top-ranked philosophers when I was myself trained in philosophy, that made a big difference to me, actually. Yeah. Well, Larry, thank you so much for taking the time to be on the Al Jarrar.

I really appreciate it. And yeah, what a fascinating story. And yeah, I hope, yeah, wish you many blessings in your journey. Are you part of a church now? Do you have a denominational attachment or? Not yet. I'm getting there. I'm getting there.

I don't want to like hint at what I am, but I have a, I'm getting a better idea of what my options are at this point. But I am going to pick one probably before the end of the year. Okay. I'm sure it'll be a very thoughtful pick, whatever it is. So yeah, thanks so much for the intriguing conversation, Larry. I really appreciate it. Thank you. I appreciate it. This show is part of the Converge Podcast Network.