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Keith Hess grew up in a Christian family but began to question whether or not what he believed was real or true.  His doubts went unanswered for years until he was finally introduced to solid reasons for belief.  Now a professor of philosophy and apologetics, Dr. Hess helps others find answers to the big questions of God and life. Resources Mentioned by Keith: J.P. Moreland, Love Your God with All Your Mind William Lane Craig, The Son Rises William Lane Craig, The Cosmological Argument from Plato to Leibniz Lee Strobel, The Case for a Creator Robin Collins, “The Fine-Tuning Design Argument: A Scientific Argument for the Existence of God” essay Gary Habermas and Michael Licona, authors on the resurrection of Christ

Former skeptic Carrie Sheffield suffered abuse at the hand of her religious father and developed a skewed view of God. After years of questioning and searching, she finally found the unconditional love of God. Resources Mentioned by Carrie Counterfeit Gods by Tim Keller Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis Works of Deepak Chopra Resources by Carrie Book: Motorhome Prophecies Website: https://carriesheffield.com/

Chemist and former atheist Dr. Kirk Shanahan began to see science's inability to answer big questions of life and the universe. It opened him up to the search for truth and the possibility of God.

Former atheist Dave Rankin's difficult life experiences proved to him that God could not exist.  Through his years of atheism, other surprising experiences awakened him to the possibility of something more than his atheism could explain.  Episode Notes: Book(2012): 39 Years in the Wilderness, an Atheist Walk With God (available on Amazon Kindle)

As a Christian, Adam Terry experienced an intellectual crisis of faith. His doubts and questions prompted an investigation to determine whether his beliefs were true. His journey through skepticism led him back to a more robust faith. Episode Notes: Adam's YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@curiouschristianity Adam's X (Twitter) account: @Curi_Christian

From a secular Jewish home, scientific scholar and former skeptic Dr. James Tour encountered the love and reality of Jesus, and his life was immediately changed. Dr. James Tour's Resources:  website:  jmtour.com email: [email protected] YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@DrJamesTour Resources/authors recommended by Dr. Tour: The Gospel Passion of Charles Spurgeon, Steven J. Lawson The Evangelistic Zeal of George Whitefield, Steven J. Lawson The Soul Winner, Charles Spurgeon Can We Trust the Gospels? Peter J. Williams

Former atheist Al Gascon rejected God in light of his life struggles. His study of science further convinced him intellectually of what he felt personally, that God did not exist. Now, Al works as a pastor who spends his life helping others know that God is real. Resources mentioned by Al:  Website: www.ccvbak.com

Former atheist Stephen McWhirter rejected God because of Christian hypocrisy and abuse. Looking for comfort, he plunged into drug addiction. After an encounter with Christ, he left his skepticism and addiction behind and spends his life in leading others to Jesus. Stephen's Resources:  Website https://worshipjesus.life Tiktok https://www.tiktok.com/@stephenmcwhirtermusic Instagram https://www.instagram.com/stephenmcwhirter/ YouTube https://www.youtube.com/user/stephenmcwhirter Facebook https://www.facebook.com/stephenmcwhirtermusic    Resources mentioned by Stephen: Lee Strobel, The Case for Christ

Liam Back, a deeply entrenched skeptic, had a vendetta against God fueled by personal loss. His quest to “make God pay” led him to an unexpected embrace of the Christian faith.  Liam's Resources:  Instagram: @standfirm_theology_apologetics Resources & authors recommended by Liam: Various books by Lee Strobel, author On Guard, William Lane Craig I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist, Norm Geisler, Frank Turek The Story of Reality, Greg Koukl Tactics, Greg Koukl

Former atheist Mark McGee left his childhood Christian faith to search for truth in Eastern world religions, but it eventually led him into atheism. An inquisitive journalist, he investigated the evidence for Christianity and believed. Mark's Resources: Grace Life Blog (Bible Studies) - https://gracelifethoughts.com Faith and Self Defense (Christian Apologetics) - https://faithandselfdefense.com Grace Martial Arts (Christian martial arts) - https://gracemartialarts.com Real Journalism (Weekly Newsletter for Journalists) - https://markmcgee4.substack.com/ Resources mentioned by Mark: The Philistines and the Old Testament, Dr. Edward Hindson

Former atheist Matthew Sabatine journeyed back and forth between faith and disbelief until he finally landed on a view of reality that best explained the universe and his own life. Matt's Resources: YouTube channel: https://youtube.com/@TCC595 Blog: https://www.thecommoncaveat.com/ Resources Mentioned by Matt Conversations with God by Neale Donald Walsch

Former atheist Chris Adam experienced a difficult, chaotic childhood and was drawn to witchcraft and demonology to gain control over his life. After being introduced to the Bible, he surrendered his control and his life to Jesus. Chris’s Resources https://www.xbible.com To learn more about CSLI Resources and Events, visit www.cslewisinstitute.org To hear more stories about atheists and skeptics becoming Christians, visit www.sidebstories.com

Former atheist Renee Leonard Kennedy left the God of her youth behind for what she thought was a more enticing life. After years of atheism, she was surprised to find both intellectual and spiritual reasons to believe. Resources by Renee: Website: https://www.reneeleonardkennedy.com Book: After the Flowers Die - Encouragement for Walking through Life After Loss Podcast: Moral Tea - Spilling the moral tea on culture, taboo topics, and grey areas. A podcast exposing the artificial sweeteners of the world by multi-gen duo Renee Leonard Kennedy and Anna Gray Smith. Moral Tea Podcast Instagram: @moralteapodcast Resources mentioned by Renee: The Case for Christ, Lee Strobel Cold Case Christianity, J. Warner Wallace, https://coldcasechristianity.com/ Alex McFarland, apologist Bible app - https://www.e-sword.net/ For information regarding C.S. Lewis Institute resources and events, visit www.cslewisinstitute.org For more stories about atheist and skeptics conversion to Christianity, visit www.sidebstories.com

Former skeptic Anna Gray Smith questioned her childhood faith and sought other avenues of belief to find identity, meaning, and truth. Her search led her back to a more robust, grounded faith in God.  Anna Gray Smith’s Resources: Instagram: @annagraysmithphoto Moral Tea Podcast: Spilling the moral tea on culture, taboo topics, and gray areas. A podcast exposing the artificial sweeteners of the world by multi-gen duo Renee Leonard Kennedy and Anna Gray Smith. Moral Tea Podcast Instagram is: @moralteapodcast Resources mentioned by Anna Gray: How Shall We Then Live, Frances Schaffer

Former atheist Jon Wilke had no desire for God and wanted to go his own way. After years of living on his own terms, he became open to the possibility of God, and his life completely changed. Resources Mentioned by Jon Mark Mittleberg, Courageous Faith For more information on CSLI Events and Resources, visit www.cslewisinstitute.org www.sidebstories.com Episode Transcript Hello and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to Side B Stories, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist or a skeptic, but who became a Christian against all odds. If you can hear more of our stories at our website at sidebstories.com. We also welcome your comments on these stories on our Facebook page. You can email us also at [email protected]. We love hearing from you. As a reminder, our guests not only tell their stories of moving from disbelief to belief in God and Christianity. At the end of each episode, these former atheists and skeptics give advice to curious seekers as to how they can best pursue the truth and reality of God. They give advice to Christians as to best [00:45] how to engage with those who don’t believe. I hope you’re listening in to the end to hear them speak from their wisdom and experience as someone who has once been on both sides. We have so much to learn from them. There’s something extraordinary about an extraordinary life change. When someone’s before looks dramatically different than their after, we lean in, and we want to know what happened. In the context of religious conversion, in this case from atheism to Christianity, you would expect an observable change in the way that someone thinks and lives. And that’s typically what you find. Everything changes, and not in subtle ways. Life looks and feels different in very significant ways. Former atheist Jon Wilke says that his life is hardly recognizable from the man he was before he met Jesus Christ and the man of God he has become afterward. I hope you’ll come along to hear his story of dramatic transformation. Welcome to Side B Stories, Jon. It’s so great to have you with me today. Thank you for the invitation, Jana. It’s always a pleasure to be able to share what God’s done in my life, and maybe somebody who’s listening or watching will be encouraged by my testimony. Oh, I’m sure they will. I’m sure they will. Before we get into your story, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself now. Yeah, sure. Thank you. Professionally, I am a media relations guy, so I work with a lot of reporters who want to talk to ministries and see what God’s doing in and through those ministries. I’ll share more about how I got into that maybe later. But I’m a dad, a middle-aged dad, and I love being a dad. I have an 11-year-old and 14-year-old girls. And the essence of who I am is as father. So I’m kind of your standard middle-aged guy with two kids. And I take them to the park. We go to the pool. We ride bicycles. We ride skateboards. I take them rock climbing and that kind of stuff. Well, that sounds fun! Sometimes as an adult it’s really great to have kids. They just keep you young. All right. Let’s start your story now. Tell me about your family, where you were born, your home life. Was it religious at all? Did they talk about God? Did you go to church? What did that look like? I grew up in a large southern family, so there’s a cultural side of religion that’s in there. We had a giant Bible on our coffee table. We occasionally went to church, VBS, Vacation Bible School, was a great daycare for working families. They could drop their kids off for a week at a time. So I had some of those experiences. But my family… I have six brothers, four sisters. I come from a family where my mother was widowed, and then a couple things didn’t work out, and so I am the baby boy of eleven. I have a younger sister. I have six older brothers that are all really big, macho, tough guys. But as far as religion, we would say grace at family functions. My uncle would share a prayer. Just this real simple basic cultural Christianity here in the South. You grow up with this understanding about what’s a little bit of right and wrong, what’s a little bit of morality, but not necessarily anything that’s gospel focused. My sister and I have had many conversations, Jana, about… we’re so thankful that the Lord rescued us from where we grew up from. A lot of times, you can tell a lot about a person by where they came from and where they left and where they live now. But my best friend growing up, my whole childhood, he died of a drug overdose, and that could have been me easily. The county I’m from in Kentucky is called Muhlenberg County, but it’s jokingly referred to, sadly, as “Methenberg County.” Oh, my! So there’s a lot of drug use there, and so we&#

Former atheist Lee Strobel investigated Christianity in order to disprove it, but surprisingly came to believe it was true based on the evidence. Lee' Resources: The Lee Strobel Center for Evangelism and Applied Apologetics: www.strobelcenter.com Books: Is God Real? The Case for Christ The Case for Faith The Case for the Creator The Case for Heaven Spiritual Mismatch with Leslie Strobel The Unexpected Adventure with Mark Mittleberg many others Resources mentioned by Lee: Simon Greenleaf, The Testimony of the Evangelists: The Gospels Examined by the Rules of Evidence Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus Norman Geisler, Roots of Evil J.I. Packer, I Want to Be a Christian and Knowing God Josh McDowell, Evidence that Demands a Verdict and More Than a Carpenter John Stott, Basic Christianity Frank Morrison, Who Moved the Stone? C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity and Screwtape Letters John Warwick Montgomery, Where is History Going: Essays in Support of the Historical Truth of Christ, The Is God Dead? Controversy, How Do We Know that There’s a God? G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man Thomas Aquinas, The Summa Theologica Blaise Pascal, Pensees' Francis Schaeffer, The God Who was There Bertrand Russell, Why I'm Not a Christian For information for CSLI events and resources, visit www.cslewisinstitute.org

Side B Stories is celebrating three years of stories and honest conversations with former atheists and skeptics who are now Christians. Listen and celebrate with us! Side B Stories Instagram @sidebstories Side B Stories Facebook www.facebook.com/sidebstories Side B Stories X/Twtter @sidebstories www.sidebstories.com

Former skeptic Dave Glander grew up in difficult circumstances, pushing him away from God. After years of self-destruction and militant atheism, he challenged God and found himself on the side of belief. Dave’s Resources: Reasons for Hope ministry: www.rforh.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/1truthministries.tv/ Book: How Why Where: 3 Questions that must be Answered before You Die Book: Faith Survival Guide (for leaders and students) Resources/authors recommended by Dave: Greg Laurie, Knowing Jesus Personally W. Warner Wallace, The Case for Christ Josh McDowell, He Walked Among Us For information on C.S. Lewis Institute’s Resources and Events, visit www.cslewisinstitute.org To hear more stories of skeptics and atheists becoming Christians, visit www.sidebstories.com (more…)

Philosopher and former atheist Pat Flynn assumed belief in the naturalistic story of reality but eventually found it lacking. Through further investigation, he found the Christian worldview made most sense of the universe and of himself. Pat's resources: Philosophy for the People website/blog: https://www.philosophyforthepeople.com/ Book: The Best Argument for God, release date 10/17/2023 Resources/authors mentioned by Pat: Alvin Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies Writings of Thomas Aquinas Writings of William Lane Craig N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God Dr. Brant Pitre, The Case for Jesus Taking Pascal’s Wager, Dr. Michael Rota To hear more stories about atheists and skeptics becoming Christians, visit www.sidebstories.com

Former skeptic Susan Leonard was a secular humanist and worked as a successful professional on Capitol Hill. She saw no need for faith until she encountered Jesus Christ in a way she couldn’t ignore. Resources/authors recommended by Susan: Dr. Jeff Myers, Understanding the Times Josh McDowell, Sean McDowell, Evidence that Demands a Verdict C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity Talbot School of Theology, Biola University, Christian Apologetics Atheists Finding God book by host Jana Harmon https://sidebstories.com/atheistsfindinggod/

Former atheist Dr. Alister McGrath dismissed Christianity and embraced science as the only way to understand the world until he began to see problems with this limiting view. Once he opened the door to alternative views, he found the biblical worldview provided a more comprehensive and grounded view of the world and of himself. Alister’s website: http://alistermcgrath.weebly.com/ For more stories of atheists and skeptics converting to Christianity, visit www.sidebstories.com Episode Transcript Hello and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to Side B Stories, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist or skeptic but who became a Christian against all odds. You can hear more of our stories on our website at www.sidebstories.com or through our YouTube channel. We welcome your comments on these stories on our Facebook page, and you can also email us directly at [email protected]. We do love hearing from you. In the world of ideas, some people are experts in their field. They are scientists or historians, theologians or philosophers. They have a particular understanding of the world from their unique expertise, academic training, and personal perspectives. Sometimes, however, a concentration on one area of thought can skew the vision of the whole. The risk is that some become so specialized that all other sources of knowledge become subdued to their own unique slice of understanding of the world. With expertise in one area, it can become harder to see how that one piece of the puzzle relates to the bigger picture of reality. It can lead to a false confidence that their small area of knowledge explains the whole when perhaps it may not. In our podcast today, you’ll hear from former atheist Dr. Alister McGrath, who holds three PhDs from Oxford, one in science, one in theology, and another in intellectual history. He’s also the author of more than fifty books. Although he dismissed belief in God due to his belief in science and the naturalistic worldview, he changed his mind. Now, he is one of the world’s greatest proponents of the necessary integration of a wide range of knowledge in order to best understand and explain what we observe in the world and in ourselves. And because of his broad academic accomplishments and years of coursing through the strengths and weaknesses of diverse ideas, including atheism and naturalism, he has the unique ability to see the big picture, integrating sub-specialties into a whole and making sense of all of reality. Through his erudite mind, he contends that the Christian worldview is not only the best explanation for what we see and experience in the world, it also provides the best story for our lives. In his view, the Christian story best answers the big questions of who we are and why we’re here. It best fulfills our deepest longings, as compared to other worldviews. I hope you’ll come along today to hear his story of moving from atheism to Christianity. Dr. McGrath is also going to introduce us to his new forthcoming book, Coming to Faith through Dawkins. Many of you might recognize the name Dawkins as referring to Richard Dawkins, a recognized biologist and one of the four horsemen of the New Atheist Movement. This book is filled with twelve stories of former skeptics and atheists who were once enthusiasts for the claims and the writings of the New Atheists, but they became disillusioned by the arguments and conclusions of Dawkins, causing them to look deeper and with more objectivity at religious faith and became Christians. They became convinced that the authentic Christian faith is in fact more intellectually convincing and robust than atheism. I’m looking so forward to today’s podcast. Welcome to Side B Stories, Dr. McGrath. It’s so great to have you. Well, I’m delighted to be here. Thank you very much for having me as a guest on your program. Terrific. As we’re getting started, Dr. McGrath, you come to the table with much gravitas, I must say. And I would love for our listeners to know exactly a bit about your academic background, your three PhDs at Oxford. You’re an author of over fifty books. There’s so much to say, but I also know that you have a new book coming out, Coming to Faith through Dawkins. So could you introduce us a little bit to who you are, your academic background, and even your new book? Yes. I’d be delighted to do that. I’m a person who began as an atheist and a scientist, and then I went to Oxford University and began to realize that things weren’t quite as straightforward as I thought. I was an atheist when I was a teenager. I thought life was very, very simple, that science disproved God. I came to Oxford, discovered it wasn’t really quite that simple, so I discovered Christianity, and that was wonderful. And then I moved on from there to begin to explore

Former skeptic Loren Weisman rejected the Jewish beliefs of his youth to embrace atheism. Although he encountered bad examples of Christianity in his search for truth, he looked past those experiences and found Christ. Loren's Resources: https://www.lorenweisman.com Resources/authors recommended by Loren: The Case for Christ, Lee Strobel Cold Case Christianity, J. Warner Wallace I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist Norman L. Geisler, Frank Turek   www.sidebstories.com   As a reminder, our guests not only tell their stories of moving from disbelief to belief in God and Christianity, at the end of each episode, these former atheists give advice to curious skeptics as to how they can best pursue the truth and reality of God. They also give advice to Christians as to how best to engage with those who don’t believe. I do hope you’re listening to the end to hear them speak from their wisdom and experience as someone who has once been a skeptic but who is now a believer. There are different stories of reality, and we live within some narrative that defines who we are, how we got here, where we’re going, what’s broken, and how it can be fixed. Some stories are closer to truth than others. Sometimes we look at people who are living out of certain stories and beliefs and make a judgment about the truth of that story. If someone says they believe one thing, but their lives reflect something else, something that is rather unattractive and hypocritical, then those looking on often think that that story must not be good or true. Many have rejected God because of bad experiences with or observations of people who say that they are Christians, but their words and actions don’t seem to line up with someone who’s supposed to be following Christ. In my research with fifty former atheists, right at half of them, 48% to 50%, said one of the reasons that they rejected belief in God was because of a perceived sense of hypocrisy among Christians. Of course, although someone’s behavior may not, and often doesn’t, align with their beliefs, it doesn’t mean that the beliefs themselves are not true, but hypocrisy can and does fuel reasons why people walk away from God. In our story today, former atheist Loren Weisman encountered Christians who lived as if they were not. That is, their attitudes, words, and actions did not reflect well on their faith. Surprisingly, despite these bad experiences and exposures, Loren’s heart was open, and he was willing to seek towards truth to see past those negative examples to look towards Jesus. Now, Loren strives to live a life of authenticity and truth in order to be a positive, winsome ambassador for Christ. I hope you’ll come along to hear of his journey past the obstacle of hypocrisy to come to know the real and true Christ. Welcome to Side B Stories, Loren. It’s great to have you with me today. Thank you for bringing me on. Terrific! As we’re getting started, let’s paint a picture for our listeners of who are a little bit. Give us an idea, Loren, a little bit about you, about your life now. My life now. I'm a messaging and optic strategist for the Fish Stewarding group, and what I look at for this organization is how we share our story, how we share what we have for products, and looking a little deeper than the idea of here's how we market or advertise, but much more so how can we be heard organically, authentically, with authority, when a lot of people say a lot of things. So, to me, it's almost like the first step before marketing to know if that story is true, if it's moral, if it's honest, if it's real, and when we build that foundation, regardless of what we do or who we are, we're building on a rock and not on the sand. Wow. Okay. That is very intriguing to me, especially in light of the story that you're going to give us today. If those values you hold dear are truth and transparency and authenticity, I'm anticipating an amazing story of your own. So let's go back. Paint a picture for us of your childhood. Talk to us about what your life was like and the family that you grew up in. Did you go to church? Was religion or God or any of that a part of that picture? It wasn't. As you can probably assume from the last name, I grew up Jewish, Passover was fun. Hanukkah was presents and lights. I went to Sunday school, preparing for a bar mitzvah. I do remember being a little child and frightened and saying, “What happens when we die?” and being told nothing. That was a terrifying thing when I was smaller. I grew up in Amherst, Massachusetts, which is the center of a five-college circuit area. You had the University of Massachusetts, the Ivy League Amherst, Mount Holyoke, Smith, Hampshire. It was a very broad experience in growing up at that time. And my parents, things did not go well with them. I make the joke of it was the uncommitted divorce that took many years. I think they got together and separated numerous times until finally divorcing a little bit later in my youngest y

A Princeton and Oxford graduate, former skeptic Dr. Vince Vitale valued autonomy and pursued high achievement as the greatest good in life. When investigating Christianity, he found it to be worth his ultimate belief, value, and trust. Vince's Resources: podcast: Unbelievable? https://www.premierunbelievable.com/shows/unbelievable Book: "Non-Identity Theodicy: A Grace-Based Response to the Problem of Evil” https://academic.oup.com/book/32027 Resources/authors recommended by Vince: Blaise Pascal, Pensées GK Chesterton Jana Harmon's book: Atheists Finding God. Use code LXFANDF30 for a 30% discount offer at Rowman & Littlefield To find more stories of atheists and skeptics converting to Christianity, visit www.sidebstories.com There is a common idea in our culture that religion, at its foundation, is nothing more than a fairy tale to help those who are scared of the dark, that faith is blind, that only uneducated, weak people believe. There’s a sense that religion is nothing but merely wishful thinking for those who aren't themselves thinkers, that Christianity is a man-made religion with no connections to facts, reality, history, or evidence. But that begs the question: What of those who are thinkers, who are academically accomplished, who take their beliefs seriously as something substantive, worth believing, and for good reason. There’s something more than wishful thinking. Are they all deluded as a skeptic might suppose? Or could it be that an intelligent, thoughtful, serious-minded person may actually have investigated the claims of Christ and Christianity for themselves and found them to be convincing and true? This especially raises eyebrows for those who were skeptics of faith and then find themselves to become one of Christianity's most passionate proponents. Such a dramatic shift, from disbelief to belief, causes you to lean in and question what comparing evidence it must have taken to cause someone like them to change not only their views about God but change their entire life, helping others to see and know the truth about Christ that they’ve found. Today's story is just that. Vince Vitale was a thinking skeptic who did the hard work of investigating the claims of the Christian worldview and did not find them wanting. Rather, he became convinced that they were not only true, but they led him to the Author of all truth, Jesus Christ, and that his life has never been the same. Come and listen to his fascinating story. Welcome to Side B Stories, Vince. It’s so great to have you with me today. Oh, it's wonderful to be with you. I appreciate the invitation. Excellent. So the listeners can know a little bit about you, Vince, before we get started, can you give them an idea of perhaps where you life, a little bit of your life, maybe your academic background, and the things that you’re involved with now? Sure. I live currently in East Palo Alto, California. I've been here for just over a year. My wife, Jo, and our two kids, Raphael and JJ, now four and two years old. We were in Atlanta before that. We drove out here in our little Kia, and once you… At the time, they were even a bit younger. So once you include their two car seats and the pack and play and the stroller, it wasn't much room, so it was quite an adventure. Oh, I bet! But we loved it. We loved it and seeing a lot of the country. We’ve been out here for about a year now. We're part of a house church community that has really been family to us, welcomed us with open arms at a very difficult season in our lives. So we've been so thankful for that, and we’ve just felt like this has been a place of provision for us in a time when we really needed it. And we're close enough to the beach that I can get out to surf every couple weeks, which is a particular joy of mine. So I’m very thankful for that as well. Before that, we were actually in England. My wife is from England. We met in graduate school there. I was there for twelve years and then, before that, in New Jersey, which is where I was born and where I grew up and stayed through college. So you graduated both Princeton and Oxford, right? Yes. That’s right. Yeah. Princeton was my undergrad. And what was the focus of your study? It was both philosophy and theology, religion. Interestingly, I got to Princeton not as a Christian but as somehow knowing that I wanted to study philosophy, even though I had never taken a philosophy class in high school. It wasn’t offered at my high school, but somehow I just knew those were the types of questions I asked and the way my mind worked. And I've always thought there was a faithfulness of God in that, in that He put me on a trajectory that aligned with what I ultimately was called to, even before my heart was in a place where I could understand why that would be the case. That’s fascinating. Really interesting when you can look back and reflect on that and see God's hand in your life and the way that you were guided. And one other thing: Don’t you have a n

Archeologist, world traveler, and former skeptic Dr. Josephine Thomas once thought all religions were fictional stories until she finally encountered the 'true myth' of historical Christianity. Resources/authors recommended by Josephine: Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis The Resurrection of the Son of God, N.T. Wright Visit Side B Stories' YouTube Channel at https://www.youtube.com/@sidebstories For more stories of atheist and skeptics' conversions to Christianity, visit www.sidebstories.com

English gentleman, actor, and former atheist Nigel Goodwin was raised within a Marxist worldview. He saw church as fabricated theatre until he found the real God. Podcast episode notes: Nigel’s Resources: Biography of Nigel Goodwin written by author David Porter – Arts and Minds: The Story of Nigel Goodwin Resources/authors recommended by Nigel: Francis Schaeffer books The God Who is There Escape from Reason He is There and He is not Silent Atheists Finding God book Rowman.com/Lexington Promo Code: LXFANDF30

Former skeptic Neil Placer was apathetic about the question of God until his own dissatisfaction in life led him to search for something more. Neil's Resources: Podcast: A World in Tension -This podcast explores the universal struggles of life. Externally, we encounter conflict with others. Internally, we engage in a constant debate between our hearts and minds. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a-world-in-tension/id1647690656 For more stories of atheist conversions to Christianity, please visit www.sidebstories.com Side B Stories YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@sidebstories416 Hello and thanks for joining in. I'm Jana Harmon, and you're listening to Side B Stories, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist or skeptic, but who became a Christian against all odds. You can hear more of these stories at our Side B Stories website at sidebstories.com. We welcome your comments on our Side B Stories Facebook page about these episodes, and you can also email us directly at [email protected]. We always love to hear your comments. As a reminder, our guests not only tell their stories, but at the end of each episode, these former atheists and skeptics give advice to curious seekers as to how they can best pursue the truth and reality of God. They also give advice to Christians as to how best to engage with those who don't believe. I hope you're listening to the end to hear them speak from their wisdom and experience as someone who has once been a skeptic but who is now a believer. Also, please know that many of these former skeptics and atheists have made themselves available to talk with anyone who has questions about God or faith. If that's you, just please connect with us at our email at [email protected], and we’ll get you connected. If there's something common to us all, it's that we want a life of meaning and purpose, to know and be known, to love and be loved. We want a life that feels important because it is important. It is valuable. The inevitable question before us though is how do we find that kind of love, that kind of life, that kind of meaning and value? Can it be found on our own in a world without God? Or do we need to look beyond ourselves to find what our hearts truly long for? C.S. Lewis is a former atheist who recognized the important difference that it makes to live with and without God. He knew that if God was real and Christianity was true, there was nothing more important than that, saying, “Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.” In other words, God makes all the difference in the way that we can and do experience and see life. For those who believe, it should mean everything. In today's story, former atheist Neil Placer moved from being completely apathetic about the question of God to now holding Him as of infinite importance. How in the world did that happen? I hope you'll come along to find out. Welcome to Side B Stories, Neil. It’s great to have you with me today. Thanks, Jana. It's great to be here. Wonderful. Tell us a little bit about yourself, so the listeners have an idea of who you are before we get into your story. Yeah, absolutely. So my name is Neil Placer. I'm 46 years old. I live in Chattanooga, Tennessee. I'm trained as an engineer, so I'm a mechanical engineer, but I would say that I'm probably an atypical engineer, in the sense that, well, number 1, I like communication. Although I consider myself an introvert, I do like to communicate. I do like to think deeply about things and really communicate those truths to others. So yeah. I've just always been someone who likes to consider topics, and part of what we're going to talk about is how I came to faith and how that was a bit of a journey for me, very analytical, yet also leaps of faith. That sounds intriguing, Neil. Why don't you start us back at your story, at the very beginning. Tell us about where you were raised. Were you always from Tennessee? Tell us about your family. Was religion or God or church any part of your family life? Yeah. So I think if people are tuning in from Tennessee, they'll pick me out instantly and say, “That guy's not from Tennessee.” So I actually grew up in the DC area, which is kind of the international, cosmopolitan land where there really isn't an accent. So Northerners think I'm a Southerner, and the Southerners think I'm in Northerner, so I can't win. But, yeah, I grew up in the DC area. My father was Spanish. I say, was; he recently passed away. So his background, being from Spain. If you're not familiar with that, you're basically born Catholic, right? It's just part of the culture. Everyone kind of just connects themself to it, but from a spiritual perspective, that really didn't mean much. So they took us when we were kids to Mass, and we participated. I think they wanted the influence of it

Former atheist Stefani Ruper was intellectually convinced of secular atheism, but found that it lacked substantive answers for her life. More than 13 years of scholarly pursuit of truth led her to choose belief in God. Stefani's Resources: Youtube Channel: http://youtube.com/stefaniruperInstagram: http://instagram.com/stefani.ruperWebsite: http://stefaniruper.com Resources/authors recommended by Stefani: Dominion by Tom Holland Works of William James

Negative life experiences caused former atheist Matt Bagwell to reject God and Christianity. Change in life circumstances allowed him to find an authentic kind of belief in God that he didn't think possible. YouTube: @marksofmanhood [email protected] Atheists Finding God book Rowman.com/Lexington Promo Code: LXFANDF30 Women in Apologetics https://womeninapologetics.com/

Former skeptic Joshua Rasmussen left Christianity to pursue truth through reason and philosophy. Over time, his intellectual pursuit led him back to a strong belief in God. Joshua's Resources: Defending the Correspondence Theory of Truth, 2014 Necessary Existence, 2015 How Reason Can Lead to God, 2019 Is God the Best Explanation of Things, 2019 For more stories of atheists and skeptics becoming Christians, visit www.sidebstories.com

Former skeptic Chris Waghorn left his belief in the Christian God behind to embrace an Eastern, universal view of god. After several years, he rediscovered the Christian God as the One who is both truth and real. Chris's Resources: Twitter: @CJMindBody The Bible League Australia: https://bl.org.au Resources/authors recommended by Chris for further study on Christianity: William Lane Craig C. S. Lewis Tim Keller John Lennox Atheists Finding God promo code https://Rowman.com/Lexington promo code: LXFANDF30   Hello and thanks for joining in. I'm Jana Harmon, and you're listening to Side B Stories, where we see how skeptics slip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist or skeptic but who became a Christian against all odds. You can hear more of these stories at our Side B Stories website, www.sidebstories.com. We also welcome your comments on these stories at our Side B Stories Facebook page or through email at [email protected]. Believing that something is true enough to give your life to it is not always clear or straightforward or easy, especially when it comes to religious belief, something that is not necessarily tangible in the ordinary sense. Religion not only entails answers to the big questions of life, but by its very nature, it also makes claims regarding the supernatural realm, that it is real, that God is real. And if God is real, then He can and does interact with our natural world. When someone is considering religious claims, there is a difference between intellectually believing that something is objectively true, such as God exists or the biblical text is reliable and for good reason, and the subjective spiritual sense that God is real, as felt through a personal encounter or religious experience. That is, for some, belief in God may not come easily through arguments or evidence, although this grounding may open the door towards serious consideration of God's reality. Rather, belief comes through a wooing of the Holy Spirit, as the former skeptic describes in this story today. Although Chris Waghorn encountered a substantive intellectual reason for belief and even a touch of God's presence, setting him on a path towards following after Christ, he left that behind to explore the world and its offerings. A few years later, he found the God he had left behind as both true and real. What made him reconsider? I hope you'll come and join in to find out. Welcome to Side B Stories, Chris. It's so great to have you with me today. It's great to be here, Jana. Thanks for inviting me. Oh, you’re so welcome. As we're getting started, so the listeners can know just a bit about you, Chris, tell us about who you are, where you live, a little bit about yourself. Right. I'm a Brit living in Australia. I currently live in Melbourne in the Yarra Valley foothills. My wife is an Australian, a Melbournian, so no choice in destination, although I'm not regretting it at all. We moved over here in 2019, and I'm originally from Hampshire, Petersfield in Hampshire, a small little village outside Petersfield, a traditional sort of place with a shop and three pubs, and blink and you'll miss it. So I grew up there, and then I went up to study at King's College London. Okay. All right. So you're a Brit who lives in Australia. So let's start back, then, in your early life and your British life growing up in what sounds like a very lovely small community in Britain, in England. Tell me about what your life was like growing up. Tell me about your family of origin. Did you go to church? Was it any part of your picture growing up? Well, religion was really no part of my picture when I was growing up. I was raised as a Catholic, and my mother and my father, they went to Catholic school. My sister went to Catholic school, but I didn't go to Catholic school. I had no real interest in religion, and because of growing up in England and being a Catholic, we were always kind of relegated to the chapel down the alley. We didn't have the nice big churches that the Protestants had. But anyway, I always knew perhaps there was something a little bit different there, but I don't think it was religion…. Even at school. I don't think it was really at the forefront of anyone's minds. So, even as your mother was going to Catholic church or your sister going to Catholic school, did you get the impression at all that they had a personal or expressed faith? Or was it more of a ritual or just something that they did, more of an activity than a belief? Well, just to come back to that, actually, even though my mother and my father and my sister went to Catholic schools, they didn't go to church at all. And we didn't go to church as a family. In fact, we only really went to church at Easter time and Christmas time, which I think made us what's known as C of E Catholics. So Christmas and occasional Easter. That was our experience. So no real interest. I don't think that there was really any sense

Former atheist Mason Jones thought Christian belief was an overly simplistic view of life and reality until he began to recognize its depth and complexity, its ability to better explain reality. Mason's Campus Outreach Page: https://cocentralil.org/mason-jones Atheists Finding God book promo code LXFANDF30 valid at https://Rowman.com/Lexington Episode Transcript Hello, and thanks for joining in. I'm Jana Harmon, and you're listening to Side B Stories, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist or skeptic, but who became a Christian against all odds. You can hear more of these stories at our Side B Stories website at www.sidebstories.com. We welcome your comments on these stories on our Side B Stories Facebook page or through emailing us directly at [email protected]. As a reminder, our guests not only tell their stories of moving from disbelief to belief in God and Christianity, at the end of each episode, these former atheists give advice to curious skeptics as to how they too can pursue the truth and reality of God. They also give advice to Christians on how they can best engage with those who don't believe. I hope you're listening in to hear them speak from their wisdom and experience as someone who has once been on both sides. We have so much to learn from them. Also, please know that many of these former atheists have made themselves available to talk with anyone who has questions about God or faith. If you'd like to connect, please email us at [email protected], and we'll get you connected. Christianity is often associated with a cross and with Jesus, who died on a cross outside the city in first century Jerusalem. Christians believe that Jesus not only died but rose from the dead and appeared to hundreds of people over 40 days, until He returned to heaven. They believe that these events, among others, confirmed Jesus' claims to be God, to be truth, to be the way to heaven. Christians believe that these were not merely historical events in history but that they take on spiritual significance for those who believe, that it is good news for themselves and for the world. For those who don't believe, this story can seem like childish superstition, just another myth, wishful thinking, a psychological crutch to give comfort or hope for something better than this world alone can offer. It seems completely out of touch and disconnected with anyone or anything reasonable or rational. It is an overly simplistic understanding of reality, they think. Skeptics believe it is severely out of step with scientific and sober-minded reality. It makes no sense intellectually or morally, until it does. Former atheist Mason Jones once found himself rejecting the Christian belief he now embraces, and more than that, advocates. For him, the cross of Christ held the key to him making sense of himself, of his own values, and of reality itself. I hope you'll come along to hear his story of moving from disbelief to belief. Welcome to Side B Stories, Mason. It's so great to have you with me today. Thanks. I'm glad to be here. Thanks for inviting me. Wonderful. As we're getting started, so the listeners know a little bit about you, Mason. Tell them perhaps what you're doing now in terms of your ministry and your recent history. Yeah, so I graduated from Eastern Illinois University back in May 2022, and right now I'm working with a campus ministry called Campus Outreach to plant a new region in Michigan. So right now I'm living in Illinois, learning how all of our financial systems and everything works, so I can then go and build everything basically from the ground up in Michigan, and I'll be moving this summer to go do that, and I'm really pumped about that. You're in ministry, and that's a long way from being or calling yourself a former atheist, so I'm curious how that happened. Let's get back into your story. Let's start at the very beginning, Mason. Why don't you talk with us a little bit about where you grew up. Tell us about your family life. Was there religion there? Any references of God in your world? Yeah, so I grew up…. When I was really little, my family probably would have said they were Christians, all of us, just, I think because that was the default assumption. But the God we believed in was pretty superficial, at least for myself. I think I viewed God as kind of a fairy godparent who just existed to basically take care of me, watch out for me, and make sure everything went smoothly. And yeah. I grew up, and my parents, especially my mom, really tried to shelter me from just the messed up stuff in the world, I think like most mothers do. So at least for the first few years of my life, I didn't really have anything to challenge that view of God, and I think my family didn't have a whole lot of that, either. But when I was about eight years old, some stuff happened in my family that my mom just couldn't shelter me from, just a lot

Former atheist Stu Fuhlendorf felt no need for God, achieving high level of success and power in the business world. However, his achievements were tainted by emptiness and addiction which helped him become open to his need for God. Stu's Resources: book: Wall Street to the Well: A Story of Transformation from Fortune to Faith church website: redemptionhills.com Lifeverse website: www.lifeverse.com

Former atheist Will Witt presumed atheism was true until his beliefs began to fall apart under the weight of scrutiny for grounding of his values. It opened him towards a search for God. Will's Resources: website: theflstandard.com book:  How to Win Friends and Influence Enemies social media: @thewillwitt

Former atheist Pedro Garcia grew up in a secular culture, making it easy to leave his nominal religion behind. After encountering serious, intelligent Christians, he began to question the possibility of God. website: askandwonder.com translator for Christian organizations: askandwonder.com/translations email: [email protected] church: The Donelson Fellowship To learn more and hear more stories of atheists converting to Christianity, visit www.sidebstories.com

Former atheist Malia grew up in a religious home but she never personally believed in God. When she followed atheism’s rational end towards nihilism, it led to her to question what was true. For more stories of atheists and skeptics converting to Christianity, visit www.sidebstories.com Episode Transcript Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to Side B Stories, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist or skeptic but who became a Christian against all odds. You can hear more of these stories at our Side B Stories website at www.sidebstories.com. We welcome your comments on these stories on our Side B Stories Facebook page as well. You can also email us directly with your comments and feedback at [email protected]. We’d love to hear from you. It’s sometimes thought that religious people believe in God not for any rational or evidential reason, but on blind faith alone. Some skeptics have said that religious people believe in God in the face of no evidence or oppositional evidence, evidence that actually leads away from God. Most atheists say there is no evidence for God, nor could there ever be, since He does not exist. But there are many who believe in God for what they deem to be good, solid evidence. There are many Christians who contend that Christianity is a falsifiable belief, that it is true based upon good evidence, arguments, and reasons, and that they would not believe it if they did not truly think it was the truth. Their intellectual integrity would not allow them to buy into a belief system to satisfy anyone or anything else unless they were genuinely convinced it was worth believing, and for good reason. In today’s story, former atheist Malia once thought belief in God was not compatible with reason, with evidence or science. But she changed her mind. Now she studies the rational grounding for the Christian worldview, something she once thought an irrational and impossible pursuit. How did her paradigm shift occur? I hope you’ll join in to find out. Welcome to the Side B Stories podcast, Malia. It’s so great to have you with me today. Thank you so much for having me. I’m very grateful to be here. Wonderful. As we’re getting started, Malia, why don’t you tell the listeners a little bit about yourself? My name is Malia. I am 20 years old, I live in Colorado, and I am an apologetics student. An apologetics student, okay. Where are you studying apologetics? I first started studying at the University of the Nations, and now I study at the Lee Strobel Center for Apologetics at Colorado Christian University. Okay, terrific. Wow, a 20-year-old who’s studying apologetics. That’s an interesting pathway for someone really young. You must be very passionate about what apologetics can bring. Just for the listeners who may not be familiar with what apologetics is, can you describe for a moment what you’re studying? Yeah. So apologetics at a base, it’s defending your faith with reason is the simple way to explain what apologetics is. And I’m focusing on practical apologetics, so that means I’m focusing on using tangible evidence like science, archaeology, history, really modern things to defend the Christian faith in a way that people may not think that they should complement each other. Wow. That sounds fascinating, and maybe we’ll get into that as we pursue your story. I’m sure it’s intriguing, too, for those who don’t think that any kind of Christian belief is based on evidence. Yeah. Yes. I know there are some who think that way, but obviously you’re studying a whole curriculum that is moving in the direction of a profound intellectual grounding for the Christian faith. All right, so let’s move back into your story, Malia. Why don’t we start where you grew up. Tell me a little bit about your home, your family. Did you pray? Did you go to church? Did you have any semblance of belief in God at all in your home? I grew up in Denver, Colorado, specifically this little town called Littleton. I’m actually adopted, so I was adopted into a very big family of four older siblings. My parents were originally Catholic when I was growing up, and I was going to a very small private Catholic school. When you grow up, you don’t really have an understanding of God or anything of that sort. And so for me, it’s kind of just where I was. It wasn’t my belief. It was my parents’ belief. We’d go to Catholic church, and I’d have to sit through church on Fridays at my school. We’d pray in class, but God wasn’t a common topic in my household. We never prayed together or talked much. It was kind of just, “Let’s go on Sundays, or if we can’t go on Sundays, let’s do Christmas and Easter.” And so, yeah, I kind of grow up in that sort of setti

Former atheist Ben Clifton thought religious belief was for the weak-minded, for those who didn’t believe in science. His caricatures of Christianity began to break down as he encountered authentic, intelligent Christians who challenged him to consider the reality of God. Ben’s Resources: www.apologeticsonmission.org Resources recommended by Roger: Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis Fingerprints of God, Hugh Ross, https://reasons.org William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith, https://www.reasonablefaith.org Biola University, Masters in Apologetics program, https://www.biola.edu/degrees/g/christian-apologetics-ma Tactics, Greg Koukl For more stories of atheists and skeptics converting to Christianity, visit www.sidebstories.com Episode Transcript   Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to Side B Stories, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist or skeptic, but who became a Christian against all odds. You can hear more of these stories at our Side B Stories website, located at www.sidebstories.com. We welcome your comments on these stories on our Side B Stories Facebook page as well as you listen. We all seem to possess a deep intuition about what is really right and wrong. There’s no question about that. When someone cuts in line in front of you, it feels that it’s not fair, that some unspoken rule has been violated, and that someone should do something about it. Why do we feel this way? You may recognize that example as the one given by C.S. Lewis in his book Mere Christianity, pointing out the inherent tension we feel when some commonly known and often unspoken standard is broken. We know that it’s wrong, but we may not be able to say why it’s wrong. We just know that it is. But if you ask the question why, it’s a problem, especially if you don’t believe in God. Lewis reminds us that we would not be able to call something wrong or crooked without some sort of standard of knowing what is right, without knowing what was straight to begin with. We would not be able to tell that a wall was not level without a plumb line. So it seems that some sort of standard is necessary for us to call something good or bad, right or wrong, straight or crooked, fair or unfair, of what ought or ought not to be. Without such a standard, there’s no way to make a judgment about anything for anyone except for ourselves. Somehow, this deep intuition is an unavoidable pointer to the need for a transcendent standard, for the need for God. In today’s story, former atheist Ben Clifton did not want to want to believe in God, but he felt backed into a corner by this seeming conundrum, convinced that he would eventually be able to explain our real sense of right and wrong without resorting to some transcendent standard, without believing in God. Was he able to do it? This was one of the pieces and parts of his atheism that began to crumble as he began to take a closer look at the reality of his own worldview, the reality of God, and the truth of Christianity. I hope you’ll come and listen to his story. Welcome to the Side B Stories podcast, Ben. It’s great to have you with me today. Great to be here, Jana. Wonderful. As we’re getting started, so the listeners have an idea of a bit of who you are, can you tell us a little bit about yourself? Absolutely. So I guess the pertinent thing is that I was an atheist until I was 33 years old, and God performed a miracle in my life and changed my heart and led me on a path of seeking answers for why I should believe this change that happened in me. And so that led me to apologetics. And now I’m here many years later and pretty much full time in apologetics. Okay. And you have a ministry as well? And what is that? I do. Yes. It’s called Apologetics on Mission. And in a nutshell, we take apologetics, we take these great resources that we have in the west, and we take it to regions in the world that don’t have much visibility or access to apologetics, and we train up emerging leaders, so that they can equip their communities with great answers for why Christianity is true. Okay. Wow. Okay, you’ve come a long way on your journey. Yeah. Let’s get started at your childhood, though, because we want to hear the full arc of your story. So take us back to your childhood, your family, where you grew up, whether or not religion or talk of God was any part of that. Yeah. So I was born in Eugene, Oregon, to parents who were not quite hippies because they were a little bit too old, but they were hippy wannabes. If you know Eugene, Oregon, it was a bastion of everything about the sixties. So they were living there. Both of my parents are teachers, and so we lived in that context until I was seven. Pardon me. Did your parents believe in God? You said this is kind of the culture of the sixties, wh

Former atheist Nico Tarquinio rejected a religion he thought was not worthy of belief. As a lawyer, he considered both sides in a search for truth and changed his mind about Christianity. Resources recommended by Nico: Cold Case Christianity, J. Warner Wallace Letters to an Atheist, Peter Kreeft Unbelievable? Podcast with Justin Brierley Reasonable Faith Podcast with William Lane Craig For more stories of atheist and skeptics converting to Christianity, visit www.sidebstories.com Episode Transcript Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to Side B Stories, where we see how skeptics let the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist or a skeptic, but who became a Christian against all odds. You can hear more of these stories at our Side B Stories website at www.sidebstories.com. We welcome your comments on these stories at our Side B Stories Facebook page. Oftentimes, we are perfectly content in what we believe until something happens in our lives that disrupts the status quo. New circumstances arise that cause us to rethink what we think about the world around us, about our lives, about what we hold to be true or not. At those thresholds, we are presented with an opportunity to take a closer look at our beliefs, or we can continue on, presuming our pathway in life is built upon a good foundation without examination. In today’s story, former atheist Nico Tarquinio encountered a change in life circumstances, and with that, a new opportunity to look more closely at his own and others beliefs, to search more intentionally for truth. As an attorney, he was naturally driven towards critical thinking and analyzing and debating ideas. But this journey for him ended in a place he never expected, as a strong believer in God and apologist for the Christian worldview. What did he find on his journey towards discovery that was so compelling that he was willing to move towards Christianity, a worldview he once held in contempt? I hope you’ll join in to find out. Welcome to Side B Stories, Nico. It’s great to have you with me today. Jana, it is amazing to join you. Thank you so much for having me on. Wonderful. So the listeners know a bit about who you are, Nico, can you tell us some about who you are, what you do, where you live? Sure. So, my name is Nico Tarquinio. I’m currently living in Lincoln, Nebraska, but I’m from Massachusetts originally, Southbridge, Massachusetts. I’ve lived in Maine. I’ve lived in upstate New York. I’ve lived in Boston. I’ve lived in Vermont. I’ve been a lot of places, and these days I am living in the Midwest. I work for the Federal Government. I’m an attorney and, well, non practicing at the time, but I did pass the bar exam, so it counts for something. I love to do apologetics and theology in my spare time, and I’m also raising four kids in my spare time. That little hobby on the side there. So gosh, I wear a lot of hats. Sounds like you’ve got a very, very busy life, Nico. Very full. So it also sounds so that you’ve spent a lot of time in the Northeast. Is that where you were born? Why don’t you take us back to your childhood and where you were raised, that culture, your family? Was religion or God any part of your world? Sure. So I was raised in a contentious divorce situation, so my mother and father didn’t see eye to eye. They often came to harsh words with each other, and I was primarily raised by my mother. My father, on the other hand, eventually moved to Florida for a while. My grandmother still lived in town. But my more religious side would probably be my father’s side of the family, simply because, if you couldn’t tell by my name, Nico Ramo Tarquinio, I’m Italian. And if you want Nonna’s meatballs, or at least a good conversation after she puts the meatballs on the table, not like she refuses them to anyone, you’re going to go to Mass, at least on Christmas and Easter with everybody. So that was kind of a very typical experience in the Northeast in general, but certainly within my family. And my mother, who was much more open spiritually, and she’s a very brilliant woman, but I don’t recall Bibles being in the house. I do recall seeing Tarot cards, seeing spell books. I remember her going to psychics. She was very open spiritually, and I don’t think that comes from a dark place or anything like that, but that kind of shows the kind of spiritual upbringing I had. We certainly didn’t pray over dinner or do any of the kind of things we associate with Christianity in the household. There was a little crucifix above my bed from when I was baptized. Like most Catholics and Lutherans, I was baptized as a child, but that was kind of it. It kind of becomes a point of celebration, and you get together on holidays and you go to Mass, And I would say that religion in ou

Former skeptic Ken Boa put aside his childhood faith and became a secular humanist who tested his philosophy through psychedelic drugs. After an agonizing search for meaning, he came to believe in the reality of God. Ken’s Resources: www.kenboa.org Resources recommended by Mark: Escape from Reason, Francis Schaeffer The God who is There, Francis Schaeffer Works of C.S. Lewis For more stories of atheists and skeptics converting to Christianity, visit www.sidebstories.com Episode Transcript Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to Side B Stories, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist or a skeptic, but who became a Christian against all odds. You can hear more of these stories at our Side B Stories website at www.sidebstories.com. We also welcome your comments on these stories on our Side B Stories Facebook page as well. It’s often the case that what someone believes or is taught as a child begins to fade as they encounter other ideas or other people that seem more sophisticated, more adult, more true. It becomes easy to leave childhood ideas behind, to be put on the shelf as a remnants of an outgrown time. But what happens when someone begins to find holes in their new way of thinking? When it, too, doesn’t seem to answer the big questions of life as well as they might think? What happens then? Returning to childhood beliefs seems off the table. Yet living in the tension of intellectual dissonance and existential dissatisfaction is not an option either. Perhaps indifference or distraction is the answer, confronting the tension by avoiding it. In today’s story, philosopher, theologian, and former skeptic Dr. Ken Boa once rejected his childhood Christian beliefs for more adult-seeming secular humanism and experimentation with Eastern mysticism and even occultism. He continued to be unsettled by the inability, though, to explain things like the ineffable quality of beauty or his deep need for meaning. But these conundrums were not enough for him to search for the God of his youth. What happened, then, to compel him to a profound belief in the God that he had left behind? I hope you’ll join in to find out. Hi, Ken. Welcome to Side B Stories. It’s so great to have you with me today! Thank you. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself? Yeah. I often describe myself as a writer, speaker, and teacher, and a mentor. In a broader way, though, I’m a bit of an odd duck, insofar as I love to process things with people. I use beauty, and I use goodness, and I use truth, and I seek to winsomely draw people through narrative and through story. I want people to learn how to love well, learn well, and live well. Can you give me an idea, also for the listener to understand, your academic background? Yeah. Well, as an undergraduate I went to Case Institute of Technology in Cleveland, Ohio. And another thing about me, I’m a philosopher of science. I was drawn to astronomy and math and physics and so forth. But then I started at graduate school at Berkeley in California. But then the oddest crazy thing, many things happened that led me instead to go to Dallas Theological Seminary. This was a long time ago, and I got a Masters of Theology there. And then working with different organizations. But I eventually started teaching at the King’s College in Briarcliff Manor, New York, when it used to be up there. And I was going to NYU to work on the philosophy of religion, so I completed my PhD from that. And then, some years later, about ten years after that, I wanted to go to England and just take a sabbatical. So what ended up as a sabbatical turned out to be actually going to Oriel College at Oxford, and ultimately I got my DPhil in philosophy and theology. Okay. So, Ken, you obviously have studied at the highest levels, at Oxford, areas of philosophy and theology, but you didn’t start there. And so I’d like to go back to the beginning of your story and see how those atheistic views developed. Why don’t you start us back into your childhood, your family of origin. Give us a sense of the home in which you were raised, whether or not God or religion was part of your family life, part of your culture life. Why don’t you start us there? Yeah. As I’ve looked back, I recently realized—I didn’t know this until recent inquiries that I was actually baptized in the Episcopal Church when I was four years old. My father was a bus driver in New Jersey, and he was a very, very witty and clever man, and people loved him, and he apparently had one of his passengers. He must have gotten close to him and had an impact on him. And so my father started going to that Episcopal Church. And so my godfather was this man, this other fellow. But when he died of a brain tumor not long after that, my father lost his best friend, an

Everyone in his town knew Roger Sherrer as “the community atheist.” He thought belief in God was not only childish but bad and needed to be taken down. His atheism began to break down as he suffered the consequences of his nihilistic worldview. Resources recommended by Roger: Hugh Ross, Reasons to Believe, https://reasons.org William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith, https://www.reasonablefaith.org Cold Case Christianity, J. Warner Wallace Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis Episode Transcript Hello and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to Side B Stories, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist or skeptic, but who became a Christian against all odds. You can hear more of these stories at our Side B Stories website at www.sidebstories.com. We also welcome your comments on these stories on our Side B Stories Facebook page as well. When someone takes on an identity, whether it be atheist or Christian, we often have presumptions of who they are. That works both ways. At least we think we know who they are, and they think they know who we are. We think we know what they think, how they feel about things. We presume that they will always be like that and that they will never change. And vice versa. But if you get to know someone, and they get to know you, oftentimes our perceptions will change as we begin to reveal the persons we are below the persona, below the presumed negative caricatures and stereotypes. Sometimes, underneath a hard exterior and strong anti-God sentiment of an atheist, lurks the unexpected, softer side of someone who has the same human needs and desires for truth, meaning, value, and love as everyone else. In today’s story, former atheist and strong anti-theist Roger Sherrer thought belief in God was not only childish but bad and needed to be taken down. Now, he is just as passionate about his belief in God and is an apologist for the Christian worldview. What could move someone from such an anti-God vitriol to becoming such a strong advocate for Christianity? I hope you’ll join in to find out. Welcome to the Side B podcast, Roger. It’s so great to have you with me today! Yeah, thank you so much for having me, Jana. I’m honored to be on here with you. Wonderful. As we’re getting started, Roger, tell us a little bit about who you are, where you live, perhaps- Sure. I’m a youth pastor. I’m in Lebanon, Missouri, and so here in the Midwest. We’ve got a church, on average, I would say youth wise, we run about 200 on a Wednesday. So a lot of fun that we have here in our youth group. But beyond that, I’m also a college student, and so I recently finished my undergrad at Liberty. And my degree is in Christian ministries and currently working on my masters right now and doing my thesis. And my masters is in apologetics, also from Liberty. So that’s kind of what I’ve been doing the last couple of years. Okay. It sounds like you’re very, very busy. Yeah, I like busy. All good ministry is busy ministry. So it’s fun. Yes. That’s great. Well, let’s walk back into your story and your childhood, because obviously you have experienced a period of disbelief. But as it stands now, it appears that you’re a very strong believer and a strong advocate of the Christian faith. So let’s walk back into your childhood and tell me about—did you grow up in that area in Lebanon? Or in the Midwest? Tell me about your home, your culture. Was Christianity or God a part of your upbringing? Yeah. And so no, I guess, would be the short answer. And it’s been what I tell people about my family. My mom and my dad were divorced, and so I kind of had two families. But I tell people there’s two people that have never heard me preach the gospel. Of course, I’ve preached on Sundays. I’ve preached on Wednesdays. But my mom or my dad are two people, they’ve never heard me give a message. They’ve never heard me give my testimony. And that is something, growing up, being very distant from church, organized religion, certainly something that we did not adhere to, and so what kind of started as unbelief growing up in Missouri, really transitioned from just almost an agnostic, “I don’t know if there’s a God. I don’t really care if there’s a God,” turning into a version of anti-theism, in which my identity going into high school really was predicated upon, “There is no God, and not only do I believe there’s no God, but if you believe in God, then you have inferior intelligence. You are a weak person. You are emotionally, mentally, psychologically, intellectually subpar.” And so my identity, people that knew me in Lebanon, which is a town of about 15,000 or 20,000 people, I was kind of known as the community atheist. That was really something that people knew me as. And so that very

Through a serious study of philosophy, Dr. John Wise began to doubt his Christian beliefs. After 25 years of atheism, he began to question his disbelief. John’s Resources: Podcast: ‘The Christian Atheist’: https://pod.link/1553077203 Podcast: No Compromise Podcast: Simple Gifts Website: https://wisewordsforyouroccasion.wordpress.com Resources recommended by Mark: Surprised by Joy, C.S. Lewis Episode Transcript Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon and you’re listening to Side B Stories, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist or skeptic, but who became a Christian against all odds. You can hear more of these stories on our Side B Stories website at www.sidebstories.com. We also welcome your comments on these stories on our Side B Stories Facebook page. How do we know what is really real? Can we know that God exists? How do we know that what we believe about the world around us, much less what we believe about our own lives, is even true? We may not be able to hold to our beliefs with 100% certainty, but can we at least hold to a level of confidence that our beliefs are true? And how can we know? And what exactly is faith? Where does knowledge end and faith began? Is faith simply blind? Or is it grounded upon what we can know? Do only religious people have faith? Or is some kind of faith inevitable to anyone who does not know everything about everything? These big questions about how we know things, religious or not, are important ones, especially for those who are deep thinkers, who are philosophically minded, who are intently searching for answers to the mysteries of knowledge and life. These kinds of questions can lead towards skepticism, towards deconstruction of faith and rejection of belief in God. But these questions can also be the ones that lead towards a faith and belief in God. In today’s story, philosopher and former atheist Dr. John Wise once rejected his Christian beliefs for agnosticism and then full-blown atheism. After 25 years of disbelief, he rejected atheism through a journeying back to the reality and the truth of God. After all those years, what was so compelling to convince him to return? I hope you’ll come along to find out. Welcome to Side B Stories podcast, John. It’s great to have you with me today. I’m really glad to be here. Terrific. So tell me a little bit about your life right now, kind of in a nutshell, and then we’ll walk back into your story. Perfect. Right now, I am teaching philosophy at the University of Arizona Global Campus, online. So I got my PhD from the University of California, Irvine, in 2004. while I’m teaching philosophy at University of Arizona Global Campus, my wife and I podcast together, and she does all the technical stuff. And we began a podcast called The Christian Atheist, telling my story of how I converted from 25 years as an atheist professor of philosophy back to Christ. And in that podcast, which we’ve been doing now for about two years, we do some pretty heavy philosophical lifting. And so Jenny and I do a sort of subsidiary podcast on the same channel called No Compromise, in which she and I talk together, and hopefully she’s able to soften some of my hard edges and make clear some of the deep and difficult things that I try to elucidate on The Christian Atheist. And we have one other podcast called Simple Gifts, in which I try to make the point that everything in the Western world points to God. I really, truly believe that there is no truth that does not point to God. And so therefore, I try, in that podcast—I never preach on it. All I do is read literature, poetry, whatever it is, and I invite everyone to come and listen. And hopefully, as C.S. Lewis said, all of the books, if you’re an atheist, will turn against you, and they will point you to God. Wow! It sounds like you’re very busy and that you have some incredibly substantive and intriguing things that you’re talking about. And we’ll put all of those links in the episode notes. Before you were 25 years an atheist, you were a Christian. So that gives me some indication that you grew up in a home where Christianity was present. Why don’t you take us back to your boyhood, your childhood? Talk to us about your family, your community. My mother was definitely an evangelical Christian. She had Christian radio on 24/7, and so I grew up hearing people like Charles Stanley and Charles Swindoll, Through the Bible, all of those things I grew up with. And I made a decision for Christ myself when I was five or six. It was very real to me and kept me going all through my early adulthood. But my father was—I guess I would classify my father as an agnostic. A very brilliant man. He fought in World War II. He was at Pearl Harbor when it was hit. I lost him in ‘95. But I loved my father deeply. He loved my m

Former atheist Mark Goodnight rejected God because of tragic life circumstances. After years of self-destructive living, he became convinced God was real through a series of unexpected events. Mark’s Resources: Blog: https://cyberpenance.wordpress.com/ Twitter: GospelApologist Instagram: @martyrtek Resources recommended by Mark: Tactics, Greg Koukl Forensic Faith, Jim Warner Wallace Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis Episode Transcript Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to Side B Stories, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist or skeptic, but who became a Christian against all odds. You can hear more of these stories at our Side B Stories website at sidebstories.com Also, if you’re a skeptic or atheist and you would like to connect with a former atheist with questions, please contact us on our Side B Stories website, and we’ll get you connected. It’s often thought that religious people are religious because that’s how they were raised. It is the context in which their beliefs were formed. The same can be true of atheists, who may have absorbed their beliefs on the back of their home or culture, or on the back of their life experience. Context sets the stage towards belief or disbelief in God. While context does not determine the truth of the belief, it can and does bear influence on the acceptance of a belief, upon its plausibility, on what seems true or what seems attractive, whether it is worth considering in the first place. It’s not surprising then, that someone rejects God because of bad things that happen in life, especially as a child. When life is difficult, it becomes hard to see how a good or caring God exists. If He did exist, why did He allow such horrible things to happen? Couldn’t He have prevented it? Why didn’t He? It’s also been proposed that atheism is born from a childhood experience of a physically or emotionally absent or abusive father, that it would be incredibly difficult to believe in a loving God when your own father is far from that. That could be the case for some, but certainly not for all atheists. That is, there seems to be a correlation between bad experience with a parent and rejection in belief in God. In my research with fifty former atheists, one out of every eight expressed that troubled or absent relationships with their mothers contributed to their atheism. And approximately one out of every four, about 28%, reported that a difficult or absent relationship with their father created resistance to belief. In today’s story, former atheist Mark Goodnight strongly rejected the existence of God from an early age, embracing everything that was opposite of a healthy life, moving into some very, very dark realities. Now he lives and speaks as a bold and vibrant ambassador for Christ. What happened that changed Mark’s mind about God and changed his entire direction in life? I hope you’ll come along to find out. Welcome to Side B Stories, Mark. It’s so great to have you. Thank you for having me. Wonderful! As we’re getting started, to let the listeners know a little bit about you now, can you give us an idea of perhaps where you live, what you do as work or your ministry or whatever you want to tell us? Yeah, I currently live in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Actually, I’ve lived here most of my life, and I work in IT for a company out of DC, so I work remotely, and I’ve been happily married for 13 years now. I’m currently a Reasonable Faith chapter director, and I help answer some of the questions of the week and recently changed churches, so I’m getting involved in a new church. So you grew up in the Midwest of the United States. Tell me about your early life there. I know Oklahoma. It’s not the Bible Belt, but certainly there’s a strong Christian influence in that area of the country. Yeah. We jokingly call it the buckle of the Bible Belt. I grew up with an older sister and a younger brother, and my mom and dad. We grew up in a mobile home park out in the middle of nowhere. So as you were growing up with your family, was there God or religion or faith? Was that any part of your upbringing at home? Yeah. So my grandma on my mom’s side was very devout and religious, and my uncle, my mom’s brother, was a deacon in Episcopalian Church, and mom took us to church. I probably embraced it at a young age. Probably around the age of seven, I asked to be baptized and got somewhat involved at a younger age but started questioning it by the time I was twelve. Okay, so you did have what you would consider a real faith as a child, or a childlike faith, where you went to church, you believed in God. I presume you prayed to God, believed he was real, but then you started questioning that. So why don’t you tell us a little bit about that? Yeah. So while my mom

Former atheist Kim Endraske believed in science and her own morality instead of God, yet she lived with a constant fear of moral failure and death. After her views were challenged by an intelligent Christian, she found belief and grace in God. Kim’s Resources: Book: God is Real: The Eyewitness Testimony of a Former Atheist www.amazon.com/dp/1975916328 YouTube Channel: www.YouTube.com/c/FormerAtheist58 Blog: www.TeachWhatIsGood.com Ministry to Families Continuing their Pregnancy to Term: www.AChildOfPromise.org Resources recommended by Kim: More Than a Carpenter, Josh McDowell Evidence that Demands a Verdict, Josh McDowell Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis Episode Transcript Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon and you’re listening to Side B Stories, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist or skeptic, but who became a Christian against all odds. You can hear more of these stories at our Side B Stories website, sidebstories.com. We also welcome your comments on these stories on our Side B Stories Facebook page. It has been said that there are two things in life that we can be certain of: Death and taxes. As much as we try to avoid one or both of those things, they are inescapable. For the atheist, death is the end of our physical existence. There is no soul or spirit that exists beyond the grave, beyond death, only memories that live on in the lives of those whom they’ve left behind. If that is true, there should be nothing to fear in death, for we will all experience that. And, for many, that becomes a mandate to make the best of our time here now, to live life to its fullest, to accomplish, to eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die. Or perhaps we just mindlessly pursue distractions and pleasures to avoid the inevitable. Yet for others, the fear of death can become overwhelming, even for those who don’t believe in God, immortality, and the afterlife. The fear of eternal nothingness, of blackness, can cause a fear in life of the unknown, of what will happen next, of when and whether death is coming sooner or later. In today’s story, former atheist Kim seriously wrestled with this existential reality. Fear of death was her constant companion. But that fear wasn’t enough for her to change her mind about God just to soothe a personal discomfort. After all, atheists are the adults in the room, called to soberly and courageously live with realities such as death and dying that may be personally unsettling. They are not to succumb to the childish notions of happily ever after in the afterlife. What was it then that changed Kim’s mind about the reality of God, and through that, lose her fear of death? I hope you’ll come along to find out. Welcome to Side B Stories, Kim. It’s so great to have you with me today. Thanks. It’s good to be here. Wonderful! As we’re getting started, so that the listeners can know a little bit about you before we get into your story, tell me something about you, perhaps your family, where you live, what you do. Yeah. My name is Kim Endraske. I am a home schooling mom for 21 years, but in addition to that, I have a YouTube channel at FormerAtheist58 and love to kind of share with people on my YouTube channel. I have a blog at Teach What Is Good, and I’ve always liked to write ever since I was a little girl. Actually, when I was little, I would make little newsletters and sell them to my neighbors, like a quarter apiece or something. And God has just continued that in my life, where now I’ve written several books, and I like to blog, and I’m just a teacher at heart. That’s wonderful! The world is desperate for good teachers. And good writers for that matter. And so for all of our listeners, we’ll include all of these, her YouTube channel, her blog, and all of these connections to you. We’ll put those in the episode notes, so that they can access some of your writing as well and be taught, hopefully, in some way. Thanks. So let’s get into your story, Kim. Why don’t you talk with me about your upbringing? Tell me a little bit about how and where you were raised and whether religion was any part of your family life at all. Yeah. So I was born and raised in Des Moines, Iowa. I’m the younger of two girls. I have an older sister who is three years older than me. My dad and my grandfather are both attorneys, lawyers, and my mom was actually my dad’s legal assistant. So I grew up in a very academic home. Our dinner table conversations usually consisted of whatever case that my parents were working on. And so that was always—we just had a very academically rigorous upbringing. My parents had very high expectations for my sister and I. We were both identified talented and gifted, like, from the earliest age. My sister actually skipped a grade i

Claire Dooley left the God of the Jehovah’s Witness religion behind and became an atheist. After encountering the overwhelming love of Jesus, she came to believe. To learn more about Claire and her film documentaries, go to www.clairedooley.co Hear more stories of atheist conversions to Christianity at www.sidebstories.com Episode Transcript Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to Side B Stories, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist or skeptic, but who became a Christian against all odds. You can hear more of these stories at our Side B Stories website, www.sidebstories.com. We also welcome your comments on these stories on our Side B Stories Facebook page as well. People hold a lot of ideas about the Bible from what they’ve heard or presumed. Many skeptics may or may not have personally read it, but they often have strong impressions about it, mostly negative. Considering the Bible in any serious form or positive way was simply out of the question according to many former atheists in my doctoral research. They expressed many reasons to reject the text. It was viewed as a mixture of myth, fabrication, ignorant commentary from bronze-age Jews, a tool that someone had actually crafted to control the population, or a generally non-historical false religious book. Its supernatural content alone caused nearly half to soundly dismiss it. For them, the Bible wasn’t worth taking a first, much less a second look, unless to disprove it. Interestingly, some who began their quest towards discrediting scripture found themselves in a precarious place of changing their preconceived notions. Once they got around to examining the Bible, many found it to be historically, intellectually, and even morally forceful, with a ring of truth. Although initially hostile to reading the Bible, some were even compelled towards serious, even voracious, reading, surprised by what they had found. Others found the person and words of Jesus as extraordinary and surprising and were personally drawn to Him, wanting to know more. In today’s story, former atheist Claire Dooley opened the Bible for herself, and she was changed. A storyteller and filmmaker, she was drawn not only to its compelling narrative, a grand love story, but became intrigued by Jesus, the Author and Giver of love Himself. Welcome to Side B Stories podcast, Claire. It’s so great to have you. Thank you for having me. I really love being here. Wow, that’s wonderful. I’m just so grateful for you being here. Why don’t you tell our listeners a little bit about who you are, so they have an idea before we get into your story. So I am from Mississippi. I currently live in Austin, Texas, and I’ve been making documentary films since I was 19 years old. And you’re 23 now? So for about four years? I’m 23 now, and yeah, it’s been about four years. I went to college for a year and then left school and was mentored by someone in the industry in New Orleans, and so I kind of skipped, bypassed the whole school process. Tell me about your home and your family growing up. Was there any religion, any kind of faith, anything like that, as you were growing up as a child? Yeah. So I think I kind of have a weird story. When I tell people my childhood, they’re like, “What?” Like I said, I was raised in Mississippi, and I was home schooled until I was eleven, and now I have six siblings, but at the time, when I was really young, I had three. So my mother was a Jehovah’s Witness. And my dad was not. So my dad had been to church on Easter and Christmas when he was a younger child. But my mom was converted when she was around 19 years old. And so, when we were little, I would literally go door to door preaching the good word to all of these different people. I mean, from a very young age, five years old, knocking on these doors, preaching to people. And then the older I got, the more I realized that something was off, right? My father wasn’t necessarily supportive of my mother’s faith. And she had, they ended up having three more children. So there’s six kids at this point, and she couldn’t continue going to church by herself. So me and my older sister would go a lot. So when I was eleven years old, just to backtrack a bit, we went to public school for the first time. And so that was kind of interesting, being a home schooler, going from this very more sheltered environment to a public school in Mississippi. And so me and my two older siblings, both of us were in school until we graduated after that point. And so it was interesting because I was sitting there and Jehovah’s Witnesses are very rule oriented. There’s not a lot of grace. There’s no acknowledgment of this unconditional love that our Father has for us. It’s talked about on the outside, but on the inside, they don&#8217

For two years, we’ve been sharing stories of atheist and skeptics’ journeys from disbelief to belief in God and Christianity. Thank you for listening and joining us along this journey. Visit www.sidebstories.com for the podcast archives, video library, and more resources!

Former atheist Dr. Hugh Ross, an astrophysicist, began an intensive search to discover the cause of the universe, and it led him to God. Reasons to Believe – www.reasons.org Resources by Hugh Ross: Always Be Ready: A Call to Adverturous Faith Why the Universe is the Way it is A Matter of Days: Resolving a Creation Controversy Improbable Planet: How Earth Became Humanity’s Home Creator and the Cosmos: How the Latest Scientific Discoveries Reveal God Who was Adam? A Creation Model Approach to the Origin of Humanity Episode Transcript Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to Side B Stories, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist or skeptic, but who became a Christian against all odds. There are big questions about the universe we live in. How did it all begin? Why does the universe appear to be so fine tuned for life? How did humans come to be? The answers to these and other questions are but a few of many that not only help us understand the bigger picture of reality, they also help us to understand ourselves. But how do we answer these big questions? Our guest today, a truly brilliant astrophysicist and theologian, Dr. Hugh Ross, has spent his life carefully, meticulously studying two sources which have helped him find the answers, the book of nature, that is what we observe around us in the world, in the cosmos, and the book of scripture, the Bible. As an atheist, he was searching for the best explanation for what he observed in the cosmos. Were naturalistic theories sufficient to account for the origin and fine tuning of the universe of life? Or did he need to look beyond purely naturalistic causes to substantively ground what he was discovering? As an analytical scientist, he felt compelled to honestly, carefully search until his curiosity was satisfied. Today, we’re going to hear Dr. Ross tell his fascinating story of moving from atheism to becoming a strong proponent of the Christian worldview. We’ll also hear him discuss the seeming inescapable relationship of science and belief in a Creator God. He is a prolific author, thinker, and scholar. You may have heard of him or his ministry, Reasons to Believe. I hope you’ll come along and listen to his amazing story and catch a glimpse of his extraordinary intellect. Welcome to Side B Stories, Dr. Ross. It’s so great to have you with me today. Well, thank you for inviting me, Jana. Wonderful. As we’re getting started, so the listeners know a bit of the—I will say the word gravitas, that you bring to the table. It’s such a pleasure and privilege to have you, because of your expertise in so many ways. Could you just enlighten our listening audience a little bit as to your academic background? Yeah. I have a bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of British Columbia and a PhD in astronomy from the University of Toronto. And I was on the research staff of Caltech for five years thereafter. And while I was at Caltech, I got called to join the pastoral staff of a church a few miles away and have been serving on the pastoral staff of that church for the past four decades. And it was that church that helped me launch Reasons to Believe some 36 years ago. And we’re basically a group of scientists and theologians that are developing new reasons to believe in the God of the Bible. Of course, that sets off curiosity in me in terms of how science and theology go together, but I’m sure we’re going to tease that out as we go. Let’s back up into your story as a child. Can you give us a sense of where you grew up? Let’s start there, with just where did you grow up? And tell me about the culture in terms of religious belief in the world around you. Yeah, well I was born in Montreal, Canada, and my father had a thriving hydraulics engineering business, even though he only had a 10th grade education. He had several dozen engineers working for him. But then his financial partner saw the money and basically bankrupted the company and went to Brazil. So my dad had to lay off all the employees when I was four years of age and basically took what little money he had left and moved us all to Vancouver, British Columbia. So I grew up in one of the poorer neighborhoods of Vancouver, but it was in Vancouver, attending a public school, that I really got interested in astronomy. Your parents, did they have any faith in God? Did they have any belief that God existed at all in terms of just even your home life? Well, they believed in the morality of Christianity, and so they certainly taught me and my two sisters moral principles. But they both denied eternal life, and so they just said, “This idea of a Trinity is nonsense. There’s no such thing as eternal life.” So they weren’t Christians. There were no Christians I knew of in our neighborhood. I really didn&

Former skeptic Dr. Fazale Rana, a biochemist, began to question whether evolution could explain the origin of life. He began to reconsider the need for God. Reasons to Believe: www.reasons.org Resources by Fazale Rana Humans 2.0 – Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Perspectives on Transhumanism The Cell’s Design – How Chemistry Reveals the Creator’s Artistry Fit for a Purpose – Does the Anthropic Principle Include Biochemistry? Who was Adam? A Creation Model Approach to the Origin of Humanity Origins of Life Episode Transcript Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to Side B Stories, where we see how skeptics slip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been a skeptic, but who became Christian against all odds. We all have assumptions about reality, about the way things are in the world. Most of the time, we’re pretty settled in our beliefs. We don’t question them, especially if they seem to make sense to us. They seem true to us and to those around us. But what happens when those beliefs are challenged, when we are presented with new information? We’re generally confronted with a couple of options. We can shut down any opposing viewpoint without consideration and listen to those only within our own camp and become more convinced in our own beliefs. Or we can become open to other ideas, take a closer look at the confounding issue at hand, and look for the best explanation, the one that makes the most sense of what we’re seeing or experiencing. But sometimes taking a closer look can be difficult. It can come with costs. We may need to reorient our own views in a way that seems a bit uncomfortable, that takes us in a direction we never anticipated. We all want to be intellectually honest, or at least think that we are. But that road can be both challenging and demanding, especially if we find that the truth leads us to situations or intellectual positions we thought we would never seriously consider, much less believe. As a brilliant scientist, biochemist, and author, Dr. Fuz Rana valued objective truth. His intellectual curiosity, intellectual honesty, and openness led him beyond his naturalistic presumptions to go where the evidence led him from skepticism to belief in a Creator God as the best explanation for what we see in biology, in all of reality. I hope you’ll come and join in to listen to his fascinating story, as well as his perspectives on whether and how science and belief can and do relate to each other. It should be interesting. Welcome to Side B Stories, Fuz. It’s so great to have you with me today. Jana thank you for having me. Wonderful. Before we get started into your story, I’d really love for the listeners to know a little bit about you. You’re quite an accomplished, credentialed scientist. So talk to us a little bit about who you are, in terms of the things that you’ve studied and where you are now in your professional life. Yeah, well, I have a PhD in biochemistry, earned the PhD from Ohio University, and then afterwards did a postdoc at the University of Virginia and then another one at the University of Georgia. And so my area of specialization, if anybody cares, is cell membrane biochemistry and biophysics. And after my second postdoc, I took a position in research and development for a Fortune 500 company and worked there for nearly a decade before joining Reasons to Believe 23 years ago. And I’m, just in the last few weeks, assuming the role of president and CEO of Reasons to Believe, And, you know, this is an exciting organization, where we really look at opening up the gospel for people by revealing God in science. So science played an important role in my conversion to Christianity, and so I’m utterly convinced that, through science, people can see the reality of God’s existence and be set on a journey to come to know Him. So it’s a fascinating place to work. I’ve been privileged to be here for 23 years. It sounds very fascinating, and I really would want to venture into some of that relationship between science and faith as we move through your story. Let’s start at the beginning of your story, though, Fuz. Let’s start at the beginning of your story. Tell me where you were born. What area of the country. Were you from the United States? Where you grew up, what that was like in terms of your home, and was it a religious home at all? Walk us through that. Sure, sure. Well, my father was from India, and he lived in India prior to the partition taking place, where India won its independence from Great Britain. And when that happened, the states of East and West Pakistan were created, and my father’s family were Muslims, and so they were forced to immigrate into the state of Pakistan as a result of that. My father was a nuclear physicist, and so he came to the United States throu

Dr. Sy Garte, a biochemist, was raised as a communist and militant atheist. He began to question his naturalistic worldview as he began to see the limits of science as the best explanation for the origin of life and other conundrums. It opened him to the possibility of God. Dr. Garte’s website: https://sygarte.com/ To hear more stories of atheists converting to Christianity, visit www.sidebstories.com Episode Transcript Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to Side B Stories, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist but who became a Christian against all odds. Does science point away or towards the existence of God? Does a science-driven worldview conflict with a biblical worldview? Or does it complement? In other words, are science and God friends or foes? Is belief in science enough to prevent someone from believing in God? After all, some people will reject belief in God because they say they believe in science. They believe what is rational and observable and repeatable and not in a reality beyond the natural universe, which they say there’s no evidence for. Some people think that science is king, that science is the only way to know anything, and that science can and will eventually win the day, will give us answers to the universe. It’s not the stuff of wishful thinking, such as religion. Science and belief in God cannot and do not go together, nor will they ever, or so it is thought. But what happens when a highly educated scientist devoted to a naturalistic, atheistic view of the world begins to experience the limitations of science? That it is not as capable of answering all the questions he once thought it would. Especially regarding three of the biggest questions there are: How the universe began from nothing, how life began from non-life, and how humans became so exceptional in their capacity as compared to the rest of the biological world. These conundrums were the door openers to consider the possibility of something more than the natural world as a viable explanation. These, in addition to some other very surprising events in his life. Today’s guest, Dr. Sy Garte, holds a PhD in biochemistry, was once a strong anti-theist from generations of militant atheists who long resisted the possibility, much less the probability of God, but today he writes and speaks clearly and boldly on his convinced view and the reality of a personal and powerful God and the truth of Christianity. He sees how science and faith work together well as mutually reinforcing. I hope you’ll come along to hear his journey. I hope you’ll also stay to hear his advice to curious skeptics on searching for truth and for God, as well as advice to Christians on how best to engage with those who don’t believe. Welcome to Side B Stories, Dr. Garte. It’s so great to have you with me today! It’s great to be here, thanks. So our listeners know a little bit about you before we get into your story, why don’t you tell us a little bit about perhaps your credentialing, where you live, a little bit of your life now? Sure. I’m a PhD. I have a PhD in biochemistry. I’m a retired scientist. I worked in academia for about thirty years as a professor at several universities. Then I worked at the NIH for a few years as an administrator. And now I’m retired. And I’ve been devoting my life since then to Christianity in terms of its relationship to science. I’ve written a book, and I feel that my mission, my call at this point, is to talk about my own life in the sense that it was science that helped bring me to faith. I started out life as an atheist. I grew up in a very atheistic family, three generations of atheists and communists, and at some point, I began to question that, and that was largely through science, and then eventually came to Christ, got baptized, and I’m now an active member of my church. Okay, wow! Yeah. It sounds like there’s a lot there, and a lot of ground to cover. I mean, not only your wonderful credentialing, as you’ve highlighted, PhD in biochemistry, I believe. So we’re going to walk through all of that. Let’s start back in your childhood. You said you are from generations of atheism, militant atheism. Let’s start there in your home. As you were growing up, tell me about the home that you grew up in, their view of God, their view of all things religious. Why don’t you start us there? Sure. Well, it’s actually fairly simple because the view of God in my house was that there’s no possibility that anything like a God could exist. My parents were, as I mentioned briefly, they were both members of the American Communist Party in the 1930s, and that included a very militant atheism and anti-religious view. Their view, which was the Marxist view, is that religion is an evil thing. God is impossible, could not possibly exist. My father was a chemist and a very strong materialist. He only believed in anything that

Psychiatrist Andrew Parker’s pursuit of the true and beautiful led him to consider the possibility of God, but his personal life hindered belief. After a long philosophical journey, he decided the cost of conversion was worth any personal sacrifice and gave him life beyond what he once imagined possible. Resources mentioned by Andrew: New Seeds of Contemplation by Thomas Merton Philosophers: Keith Ward, John Cottingham, Richard Swinburne To hear more stories about atheists converting to Christianity, visit www.sidebstories.com Episode Transcript Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to Side B Stories, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been a skeptic but who became a Christian against all odds. All of us want to make sense of reality, to understand our lives, the world around us and our place in it. We want to know who we are, why we’re here, how to live, where we’re going, and how we’re supposed to think about these bigger issues in our world. We wonder what is truth? What is beauty and goodness? Does God exist? Is there more than just the natural world? Are we really no more than merely physical beings? Is there more to us? How do we make sense of our minds and consciousness? And what of our desires? What should we be pursuing? And how can we know? Although we all want to make sense of all of those things, some of us think more deeply about those questions than others. They’re drawn and driven by a seeking, a searching out for answers, seriously so. For they know that the answers to those questions have great implications for how they understand themselves and others, how they live life. Today’s guest, psychiatrist Dr. Andrew Parker, is one of those few who have been contemplating those larger questions for most of his life. As a skeptic, they led him on a quest to consider the reality of God and Jesus Christ. I hope you’ll come along to hear his fascinating, inspiring, and in many ways, surprising journey. I hope you’ll stay to hear his advice to curious skeptics on searching for truth, for God, as well as advice to Christians on how they can best engage with those who don’t believe. Welcome to Side B Stories, Andrew. It’s so great to have you with me today. Thank you, Jana. I’m really excited to be here. Thank you. Wonderful, wonderful! Before we start your story, I would love to know more about who you are now, perhaps your profession, where you live. Why don’t you tell me a little bit about yourself? Yes. Well, I live in southeast London, England, and I’m 49 and single. Living the celibate, chaste life now, in fact, and I work as a psychiatrist in private practice in central London. General adult psychiatry with a specialty in addictions, and in fact, I got into working in addiction because of my own earlier brief addiction, but it was very serious, and I went through treatment myself at that time. And that part is also very important for my spiritual journey, which we’ll get onto a bit later. So I’m very settled in this life now and very happy in this path now as a Christian, but that wasn’t always the way. And I enjoy something of the solitary contemplative life. You have piqued my curiosity, Andrew, in terms of it sounds like you’ve got some very interesting pieces and parts of your journey. So why don’t we start in your childhood and your earliest rememberings of your family life and community life in terms of how did religion fall into your world? Were you born in the London area? Talk to me about all of that. Yeah. Well, I was brought up in Kent, a semi-rural, really lovely village, and I feel as if I had quite an idyllic childhood. Very happy, stable, loving family. Large extended family. Lots of fun. Lots of family things together. Very simple family in many respects. Not wealthy. In fact, quite a struggle financially at times. There were four children, and my father worked. My mother was a busy mother of four and housewife, and then she trained as a primary school teacher later, so they all had a lot on their plates, but they gave us a wonderful upbringing. There was no spirituality in the home, though, at least explicitly. We were not a religious family, although we did go to the local church family service a few times for a brief period. But it just wasn’t part of our life, religion and spirituality. That’s not to say it was totally absent, however. I do remember, in fact, my father teaching me once to pray. At a very young age. And I did have enormous curiosity about the beyond, which manifested in various ways, and I did pray, in fact, at times of distress, at several key moments in my childhood and adolescence, but they were very isolated events. So really mainly it was a very secular life but a happy one. But as I grew older, I think I realized I was very drawn by the deep philosophical questions. What does lie beyond the sensory perceptual world? What is reality ultimately? Wh

Professor Craig Keener became a convinced atheist at an early age. When philosophy left him without solid answers, his intellectual curiosity led him to consider the possibility of God. Resources by Craig: https://craigkeener.com Resources mentioned by Craig: Stephen Meyer, Return of the God Hypothesis F.F. Bruce, The New Testament Documents, Are They Reliable? Episode Transcript Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to Side B Stories, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist but who became a Christian against all odds. We all believe what we believe because we believe it to be true. We believe that our beliefs are true because they match up with reality, the way things really are in the world, and we are usually pretty convinced that we’re right, or else we wouldn’t believe it, right? Sometimes we run into people who seem to have exceptionally strong, unwavering confidence for their beliefs. In fact, they have given their lives towards deep understanding, living out and sharing their beliefs with others, but what seems even more extraordinary is that they completely shifted their way of seeing the world and perceiving reality to a nearly polar opposite view from where they once were. There was something that was profoundly convincing enough for them to change. This begs the question: What was the information, events, reflections, or experiences that opened the door for them to another whole different set of beliefs? How do we change the basic way we think about the world around us, the way we think about ourselves? Those are huge questions. Usually, there has to be something we come to learn or experience that seems to conflict with what we know, that challenges our beliefs. We begin to question ourselves and our knowledge and perhaps come open to another possibility of what is true and real, but that also takes a bit of humility, of admitting that we might be wrong, and more often than not, that’s not an easy thing to do. There are those thinkers who are seriously curious seekers who want to find answers, even if they don’t seem to line up with their own beliefs at the time. They want to find the truth no matter where it is to be found and what it is, as long as it is true. Former atheist Dr. Craig Keener is one of those with a brilliant mind who desired to discover what was true about reality. Although he once held a belief in strict naturalism that only the natural world exists, he came to believe that reality consists of so much more, and he’s now a professor, prolific writer, and scholar in biblical studies. How did that shift happen? I hope you’ll come to listen to his story today. You might also want to stay to the end to hear his advice to curious skeptics on searching for God and truth, as well as advice to Christians on how best to engage with those who don’t believe. Welcome to Side B Stories, Craig. It’s so great to have you! It’s a privilege to be with you, Jana. Wonderful. As we’re getting started, can you tell the listeners a little bit about who you are? I’m a professor of biblical studies. I did my PhD in New Testament and Christian Origins at Duke University. I’ve authored somewhere over 30 books now. One of them is 4,500 pages. It cites over 45,000 references from ancient sources outside the Bible. So that’s my main focus of research, putting the Bible in its historical context in antiquity. My wife is Dr. Médine Moussounga Keener. She is from Congo in central Africa, and she did her PhD in France. let’s go back to the very beginning, and why don’t you tell me a little bit about your upbringing. Tell me, Craig, about your home. Was there any religious belief in your home? Where did you grow up? Did you grow up in the United States or what area of the country? Did the culture affect any of your beliefs. Talk with me about your early childhood. Sure. I grew up in suburban northern Ohio, and my parents were very respectable socially and morally and so on, but there was no religious belief talked about in our home. We didn’t attend church or any other religious institution. So when I would study religion, I was studying it from the encyclopedia or things like that, studying religions, studying philosophies, and so on. Just as a matter of interest. Especially, I liked ancient Greek philosophy and so forth. But I think at least by the age of nine… I didn’t believe in life after death, because I remember having a conversation with a family member, and they said, “No, we don’t believe in that, either.” And I’m pretty sure I was an atheist by then. I was purely naturalistic, materialistic, empirically oriented, and I think by the time of age eleven or twelve, I remember having a conversation with my grandmother, who was a Christian, Catholic, and I was telling her I didn’t believe in God, and she said, “Well, what about a first cause?” And I said, “No.” I just went on and postulated