From Atheist to Christian

KEVIN HARRIS: Dr. Craig, let’s check out some clips from what I think is a very moving and interesting interview of a young man who was raised as a believer, became an ardent atheist, and then rediscovered his faith in Christ. What he says I think really brings home some of the things you’ve talked about in your work, like the role of reason in the Christian faith, how the Holy Spirit can use arguments and evidence, and so on. This is from the “Exploring Reality” podcast hosted by Than Christopoulos^[1] who interviews C. J.^[2] I wanted to give him a shout out. Here’s the first clip.

C. J.: That's where I was confirmed in the Lutheran faith. Confirmation was 6th, 7th, and 8th grade. I would say, to sort of give you a picture of my faith at that time, I didn't really understand what Christianity was for probably that entire time. I could have told you that it was about Jesus. I could have told you that the Bible had something to do with it. And I could have told you that I believed in God and heaven and angels. I could have told you the general stuff, but if you would have asked me, “What does it mean to be a Lutheran as opposed to a Baptist or a Catholic or an Anglican or anything like that?” I would have said, “What are those things, and who are you?” because I wouldn't have been having those conversations.

KEVIN HARRIS: In all fairness to our Lutheran friends, they would say that was what the confirmation classes were for that he took – to explain the Christian faith. Nevertheless he came away not knowing much of anything.

DR. CRAIG: I, myself, also went through confirmation classes at about the same age in a mainline church as a non-Christian. And I have to say that they were just meaningless to me. I was clueless as to what this stuff was about. So I can testify personally that it's possible for a Christian to go through all these classes, and it just goes in one ear and out the other.

KEVIN HARRIS: I want to play this next clip because many of us can relate. C. J. talks about his pesky attitude and motivation. Next clip.

C. J.: Sometimes philosophy and theology can be a little bit pesky when you're talking to people about their worldviews. For me, it was just . . . I was leaning too heavily into that, and more importantly than that, I wasn't arguing with people because I was interested in them or their beliefs. I was arguing to win. I was arrogant, and I was frustrated, and I wanted to feel better about myself at the time. There was no better way to do that than to arm yourself with a bunch of useless political knowledge and throw it at people at the speed of light when they were least expecting it.

KEVIN HARRIS: I think we've all been through that. There was a time when I would argue with a fence post and was mostly interested in hearing myself talk.

DR. CRAIG: I think it's odd that he apparently knew some philosophy as a non-Christian but apparently he never thought to apply it to his Christian belief. He would argue about these other things, but he never seemed to reflect philosophically upon his own Christian worldview, which I found rather odd.

KEVIN HARRIS: In this next clip, C. J.'s friend starts asking questions, and C. J. has no answers.

C. J.: I had always thought that God existed. I never really had any serious considerations of “Are there different kinds of Christian theological perspectives?” “What does it mean to be a Christian?” “Why do we affirm various ecclesial commitments over others?” I didn't really understand these kinds of things. So when he started bringing up questions about the LPE (the Logical Problem of Evil) or the Evidential Problem of Evil or questions of God's omniscience and omnipotence and whether or not God can do things that are seemingly logically contradictory, this is all very basic stuff – this is nothing novel – but if you're raised in a faith tradition that's exclusively devotional and not intellectual in any sense, you don't have any of the tools or any of the hardware to deal with these questions.

KEVIN HARRIS: His friend had him with the problem of evil, and he talks about being raised in a devotional versus an intellectual faith tradition.

DR. CRAIG: Yes. It's such a shame that these seem to be regarded as mutually exclusive. We need to have a marriage of both the mind and the heart that inculcates a deep devotion to God and to Jesus Christ but also a kind of tough-mindedness that asks the hard questions and thinks long and deep about these issues.

KEVIN HARRIS: In this next clip, C. J. does a search on YouTube to get some answers.

C. J.: I started asking some Christian friends around me, and some of them may watch this video and I just want to let them know (because they'll know who they are) – this is not a condemnation of you. We were both in the same position of not really having an intellectual approach to the faith. Because of that, when I asked them these questions, too, because I finally let myself be curious about these kinds of questions, they either didn't have an answer or gave me answers that I found were incredibly lackluster. Part of that was because I started getting . . . I remember distinctly the first night when I actually went on YouTube and I looked up Christianity because I was just . . . I'm just confused. I don't really know what's going on. So I'm like, I'm going to look up Christianity, and I found the debate between Bill Craig and Christopher Hitchens. That was one of the first things that came up. I certainly wasn't watching that whole thing, but I watched a little bit of it. I think I only watched Bill Craig because I thought Christopher Hitchens was scary so I didn't like watching Christopher Hitchens. But I was watching. It was like this British guy who was like really intimidating . . .

THAN: Hitchens is terrifying if you don't know anything about philosophy.

C. J.: And the funny thing is, I'm listening to Bill Craig and I'm listening to his case for the resurrection, and I didn't even (I'm going to be totally honest with you) I don't even think I could have told you what a resurrection was. I think I knew what it meant for Jesus to be raised from the dead. I think I knew that's what I thought, but I never heard it spoken of in terms of resurrection, arguments for resurrection, historical arguments for the resurrection. I'd never been familiar with this. But my YouTube feed started getting popularized with these videos of like “Christopher Hitchens destroys” or like “Sam Harris exposes theology” or something like that. I started getting those kinds of videos, and I couldn't help but start clicking on a couple of them. I got the conversation between Sam Harris and Bill Craig where he goes on talking about how the God of the Old Testament is some psychopath who oversees suffering on a level that would embarrass the most ambitious psychopath, and rhetoric like that. I watched those videos and I was like, I don't know what to say to any of this. I mean, is this really what I think? And I started asking those questions. Well, then I started putting up blocks. I was like I shouldn't be watching this kind of stuff because I've always been told that Jesus Christ is the way, the truth, and the life, and without him, without belief in Jesus, I couldn't even be a good person. So I was like, I need to shut this down right now because if any of this starts meaningfully eating away at my ability to believe, I don't know what I'm going to do.

KEVIN HARRIS: I think this is important. The YouTube algorithms are populating his feed with mostly atheist material that apparently crowded out your material, and he starts to absorb it against his better judgment. Now, if you and I say that we should avoid those atheist videos, we could be accused of not pursuing the truth or not hearing both sides or self-censorship, etc. What's the answer here?

DR. CRAIG: I think that he's absolutely correct that the untrained person should avoid these sorts of sources because he's simply not equipped to handle them. It's like throwing someone who can't swim into the deep end of the pool. Before you begin to venture into the deep water you need to get some training. You need to learn how to swim. We don't send people out to war without having them go through basic training first. So I think that his naive attitude actually is correct. Before you begin to watch this negative material you'd better be sure that you understand what you believe and why you believe it. And it's pretty clear that he didn't have that.

KEVIN HARRIS: Next C. J. takes concerns about his faltering faith to one of his church staff. Here's what happens.

C. J.: But eventually there was a moment where I had a conversation with who at the time at my Lutheran Church she was one of the education directors there. I had sort of expressed to this person my concerns and my doubts just very briefly. I got a very, very poorly written and very accusatory response of like, “I'll talk to you about this, but I don't want to debate about it. I'll tell you the answers, but I don't want you to be disagreeing.” I think part of that was because I had a very disagreeable temperament and because I tend to be very difficult to deal with. But I also think part of it is that that kind of conversation probably would have been novel to this person who was raised in that same faith tradition, and I don't think that she really wanted to have the kind of conversation that would meaningfully challenge both of our faiths.

THAN: I almost want to say I respect that. It's just the way she probably . . . I don't know what the letter was like, but based off of the way you're describing it she probably could have worded it better and just been more honest and upfront with. Humans, we tend to do that a lot. . . . I'm imagining her, let's put it that way. If I'm writing you that letter, it's a lot easier to say I'm going to give you the answers but I don't want you to give objections. It's a lot easier to be like that than to say I know some of the answers but I have no clue how to talk about the topics. I don't understand the topics. I just know the answers. So I'm not the right person to talk to about that kind of stuff. That's harder to say because you have to kind of swallow your pride a little bit. I almost want to say I respect her. I respect that answer that she was giving. That's at least better than some of the stories I've heard in the past of some other people.

C. J.: I think initially my reaction to it more than anything I think I was just hurt. It really felt to me like I was asking these questions in good faith, and I was asking these questions with an honest desire to remain Christian, and it really felt like everybody that I asked either didn't have an answer or didn't want me to argue with them about it. The only way that I knew how to vocalize my doubts was to be argumentative and to ask a lot of questions. I can totally see how that would be difficult to deal with. And I can totally see how that may even be disrespectful in the way that I went about it many times during that time. But I look back at it now and all I can say is I don't think anyone did anything wrong. She set clear boundaries and wanted to have a conversation that wasn't super-contentious, and what I needed was a contentious conversation to reckon with these kinds of things. I think we just both needed different things.

KEVIN HARRIS: Is there anything church staff can learn from this clip?

DR. CRAIG: Oh, I certainly think so. C. J. is incredibly gracious. He bends over backwards not to blame this Christian ed. staff director for the way she handled this, which I think was reprehensible. She didn't want to debate. She didn't want to have this conversation. I think that's terrible. I love conversations like this when people come to me after Defenders class, and we'll talk about things they've been struggling with. I think of Tim Stratton and his experience as a youth pastor. Tim said that a young man came to him and wanted to talk to him about doubts he was having as a result of reading Stephen Hawking's work and the work of other scientists. And Stratton said, “I didn't have a clue what he was talking about.” And he said – I'll never forget his reaction – he said this young man broke into tears and left Tim's office, and he said he's never darkened the door of the church again. That really awakened something in Tim Stratton. He said there was a language here of the youth culture that I did not understand, and I was not equipped to deal with. So he began to pursue education in these areas. I think that this is a wakeup call for our church staff. They need to get equipped to be able to deal with these kinds of questions. In a recent podcast, we talked about Justin Brierley's prediction that there may be coming into the church refugees from the meaning crisis in our culture that has been occasioned by the New Atheism. He asked the question: Are we ready to receive these refugees? We better be ready. We've got to be equipped to deal with people like C. J. who have got serious and honest questions lest we alienate them from Christ for the rest of their lives.

KEVIN HARRIS: Next, C. J. is overwhelmed by what he calls theistic objections. He means arguments against theism. Check out this clip.

C. J.: It wasn't necessarily any particular argument. I was sort of overwhelmed by classic theistic objections with no meaningful way to address any of them. Funnily enough, it was no particular argument that I said, “This is the argument that convinces me that God doesn't exist.” And I didn't even initially say “God didn't exist.” In fact, my claim initially was – it went from “I believe that God exists, and that it's the God of Scripture” to “I believe that God exists, but I don't really know the rest of it” and then it went from that to “I don't really know if God exists” and then it went from that to “I don't know guys; I think it's probably not true that God exists.” And then the pendulum started swinging further and further, and eventually I went into what I affectionately call an angry atheist phase, if you will. This was towards the beginning of the pandemic in 2020 where I got really interested in online conversations about theism. Even though I, at this point, still had never opened a theology book. I had never opened a theology book, but I was convinced that I was ready to go argue with theologians and philosophers about whether or not God exists. I was armed with 12 hours of clips from various online atheist shows, and I was armed with my favorite lines from my favorite New Atheists. I was ready to start putting these Christians to shame.

KEVIN HARRIS: A little knowledge is dangerous.

DR. CRAIG: Yes, indeed. When he speaks of theistic objections, it's clear he means atheistic objections – objections to belief in God – and these overwhelmed him. Yet, notice the ignorance here. He's never opened a theology book in his life, and what he learned was the favorite lines, he says, of the atheist subculture. The slogans that you can use. This is a kind of superficial atheism that is uninformed. The combination of ignorance and arrogance is so deadly. If you're ignorant but you're humble and willing to learn then that's not so bad. That's not fatal. On the other hand, if you're arrogant but you're brilliant and well-informed, that may be a bad character but it's not fatal in the way the combination of ignorance and arrogance is because your arrogance prevents you from realizing how ignorant you are, and therefore you never learn anything. I fear that too many unbelievers in our secular culture are afflicted with this deadly combination of arrogance and ignorance.

KEVIN HARRIS: Here's the next clip. C. J. moves increasingly toward atheism.

C. J.: Once I got over the initial fear of Hitchens, I watched a lot of Hitchens, a lot of Dennett, a lot of Harris. All that kind of stuff. If there was a New Atheist that was prominent and had a video of them destroying religious people, I watched it at the time. One thing that you will notice though about that story is at no point during me being a Christian or leaving Christianity did I ever articulate me gaining or understanding any kind of critical thinking skills. At this point I've still not read any epistemology. I'm not familiar at all with philosophy of mind, philosophy of religion.

KEVIN HARRIS: Again, it's widely known that provocative titles get more views, and he's attracted to those glaring titles that say “Atheist destroys Pastor” or “So and so instantly regrets it after hearing these arguments” or things like that.

DR. CRAIG: And yet it's striking that what C. J. said is that he had no critical thinking skills during this time which is very revealing.

KEVIN HARRIS: Next up, C. J. reflects on his personal attributes that contributed to his move to atheism. Check this out.

C. J.: I had some pretty extremist political beliefs at the time. I'll put it this way. Extremist beliefs in one part of your life tends to habitate extremist beliefs in other parts of your life even if you don't know it consciously. So becoming a very radical anti-theist was very compatible with the kind of political shift that I was having at the time to extremist political beliefs. So all of this stuff is sort of coalescing together, and it's all happening in the mind of somebody who's 17 years old. My brain's not fully developed. I'm smart, but I'm not really well-read, and I have a disagreeable arrogant streak that makes me unwilling to acknowledge my fallibility. All of those things concocted together to make what were the worst two years of my life. Leaving Lutheran Christianity, and then being an atheist, being an anti-theist. I had become convinced through that – through those two-years period – that I was some kind of genius that had all the answers about theology and that everyone else was just dumb or evil. But the realization came to my head that while I may have given up all of my Christian convictions, I simply replaced them with fundamentalist secular convictions functionally. I didn't get rid of the part of my decision-making process that was intuition-based or the part of my decision-making process that was completely ignorant of any kind of basic critical thinking. I didn't start investing myself in relevant literature. I didn't do any of that. I just replaced one bad epistemic commitment with another one, and it hit me like a ton of bricks that I had to start doing the work because if I didn't I was going to be doomed to keep pendulum-swinging. Initially, it was hard to do. I decided to try to throw away my pride, and that I needed to start reading more, listening more, and talking less.

THAN: That's something I had to learn a lot, too. There was nothing like talking to experts in different fields to get me to be like, “Man, I'm an idiot. I just need to shut up.” I’m talking to Oppy, talking to Rasmussen, talking to different biblical scholars about different things. Typically, I'm just like, okay, I'm here. I'm a sponge. Give it to me. Now that's what I'm like, where before, I remember when I was first studying these things when I was an atheist, I used to have that thought “Bill Craig is an idiot” which I'm sure you've heard other atheists say before. And now it's, okay, well I'm a Christian so obviously I probably like what he has to say now, but I'm still like, anytime Bill Craig is talking even though I think he's wrong in a lot of stuff I'm still like, “You know what? It's a lot easier to just shut up and listen.”

KEVIN HARRIS: Personal attacks, as suspected, are often nothing more than sour grapes and arrogance. Bill?

DR. CRAIG: What I found interesting about C. J.'s remarks was the way in which politics tended to coalesce with theology, and that extremist views in one area were united with extremist views in the other area. I think that's very telling. And, yet – did you notice? – it didn't bring him happiness. These were the worst two years of his life that he spent as an ardent atheist. And he had just switched one set of fundamentalist beliefs for another set of fundamentalist beliefs. And then it was interesting at the end. Did you notice the two people he named? He mentioned Graham Oppy and then Josh Rasmussen – one an atheist, one a theist. Very, very sophisticated thinkers that he began to read.

KEVIN HARRIS: There are several more clips that we could play here. We kind of cut to the chase here. The traditional arguments for God and the resurrection started bringing him back. He mentions Alvin Plantinga as instrumental in his journey. He was reading some heavy stuff. His situation is relatively rare, I think. A lot of people who are coming to Christ don't read the heavy stuff that he reads. Soon these intellectual grounds that he's been working on for a long time, reading gave way to conviction that it was true. But one thing that came out to me is that if you're going to go the intellectual route to God and the claims of Christ then you need to do the hard work and ensure that you read and you listen to the wealth of good information that's available from the body of Christ.

DR. CRAIG: Yes. It struck me that it took C. J. about six to eight months, he says, which is a remarkably short time. That's something that all of us could invest, I think, in familiarizing ourselves with the grounds for a good Christian world and life view. My takeaway from this whole video of his spiritual journey is that it underlines the importance of people in the church to be well-equipped, otherwise we're going to lose our youth. We're going to lose the next generation as C. J. was nearly lost. That’s the takeaway, I think, from watching this remarkable life story – we have got to be equipping ourselves in the local church in order to deal with honest inquirers of this sort.^[3]