Listen to more stories from skeptics and atheists who investigated Christianity.

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Transcript

In our story today, former atheist Daniel was seeking substantive answers to his looming questions that simple faith did not seem to provide. Propelled into a godless worldview, he became passionately convinced that atheism provided the clarity and substance that he needed. That is until his ongoing questions began to reveal cracks in atheism’s intellectual facade. And now, to his own and others’ surprise, Daniel is a bold and winsome advocate for Jesus Christ. How in the world did that happen? I hope you’ll come along not only to listen to his fascinating story of finding a robust belief in Christianity from atheism but also hear his wise and practical advice to both curious skeptics on taking steps forward towards belief and to Christians on meaningfully engaging with those who don't believe.

Welcome to eX-skeptic, Daniel. It’s great to have you with me today.

It's such a great honor to be here with you, Jana, and so wonderful to meet you finally.

Yes. Yes, yes! Wonderful to meet you too, Daniel. As we're getting started, I'd love for the listeners to know a little bit about you. Can you tell us who you are, a little bit about maybe what you do?

Sure. Well, like you said, my name's Daniel, and I am a Christian. I am passionate about Christianity and about my relationship with Jesus Christ. And I am a former atheist. I consider myself to have been a lifelong atheist. And right now one of the things I primarily do is I have a Twitter account named Darwin to Jesus, and I'm trying to outreach to atheists. And I'm challenging them, and a lot of them may not like me. And I felt the same way about apologists when I was an atheist. But I'm engaging with them, trying to have conversations with them, and ultimately the idea is to lead them to Jesus Christ, lead them to the Savior. And one of the things I’ve started doing recently is Twitter spaces, where it's basically an open chat room, and I invite an atheist in to come talk to me for about two hours. And we talk about my reasons for why I believe in God. And we talk about their reasons for why they don't believe in God. And the whole point is just to create an atmosphere where it's not a debate. It’s just a friendly conversation between two people who respect each other, and there's no rhetoric, no insults, no sophistry. It’s just two people trying to understand each other. And so that's one of the things that I've been doing lately that I care a lot about, and I'm looking forward to doing more.

That’s fantastic in this day of tribalism and us/them mentality, Daniel, it’s so great that you have a place that is conducive to just congenial conversation between two people who have opposing ideas. What a novel idea that is, and I don't know why it’s so unusual, but it is these days, and I just applaud you for creating a space like that, especially between atheists and Christians. So that's wonderful.

We will make sure that we have Daniel's Twitter name in the episode notes. That’s Darwin to Jesus, so that you can have it for future reference and find those spaces in and through his Twitter thread.

All right. Now let's get to your story, Daniel. Why don’t you paint a picture for us? Because obviously that atheism didn't come out of nowhere. Let's find out a little bit about how you were raised and how you were raised to think about God and your world as a child.

Absolutely! So if you asked my mom and dad about me becoming an atheist, they would have said it absolutely came out of nowhere, because I was raised Christian. I was raised Pentecostal, and for anyone who doesn't know what that means, essentially, Pentecostals are the ones that put their hands up in the air during the worship hour. And that always made me feel pretty strange whenever I would be at church. But I was raised Christian, and one of the things that my mom says—and I believe that it's true, but I don't remember this—is that I even got baptized when I was about six or seven years old. She says I went to a Christian camp during the summer and got baptized there and came back and I was on fire for God. I have a terrible memory, and I don't remember any of that. What I remember is always hating going to church, and my parents would make me go to church every Sunday, and I never wanted to go, and I would just dread it, and while I was there, I couldn't wait for it to be over, and I was always relieved when it was over. So it was just one of those things that, growing up, was something that I dealt with, as far as I remember.

And unfortunately, my father called himself a Christian, and he did not act very much like a Christian. And I think, looking back, that probably had a lot to do with some of the choices I made in my life as far as how I felt about God and where I ended up going at certain points, because I think that a father and how he represents Christ to his children is really going to affect their view of God. Because my father was abusive and he was intimidating and he was just not a kind man to myself or my mom or my brother or my sister, it really did not impress me that he called himself a Christian, because he was really just a hypocrite. And I was not impressed with Christianity as a result of that.

And then there came questions as I got older. There were questions when I was ten, eleven, twelve about Christianity that I had, and I would ask these questions, and my mom and dad just couldn't answer them. I would ask questions about things like, “Well, if God is all-knowing, then how is it that we have free will?” Which is a good question. And I get asked that now, but it's a question that I would ask my mom, and she would say, “You just have to have faith.” And that started to really rub me the wrong way, because I started thinking to myself, “Well, people in India, children in India, are raised in a different religion. And they probably have questions like I'm having questions, and what are they told? Are they told you just need to have faith? Because what they believe and what I believe are not the same thing. If I'm right, then they're wrong, and if they're right, then I'm wrong. So it seems like, ‘Just have faith,’ isn't really going to cut it. It seems like we need some way to know if what we believe is true. Because if what they believe is true, I might be in big trouble. And if what I believe is true, then they're definitely in big trouble.”

So I just bring this point up because, if any Christians are listening, I really would encourage you to study apologetics, especially if you have young children or teenagers, definitely teenagers. I would really encourage you to study apologetics and try to have answers. No one has all the answers except God. But we can have some answers. And we can definitely have some good reasons to be Christians other than just blind faith.

It must have been disconcerting for you when you did have those questions as a child. You’re obviously a thinker, asking big questions. I mean, things like, “If God is all-knowing, how can we have free will?” is a significant question for a child. And it may have been too much for your mom, but to come back with just, “Have faith,” which I think a lot of people go to that, like, “You don't need reason. Just have faith,” was inadequate for you. So what did you do with that?

Well, I eventually just began to really resent those types of answers, in that it made me feel like questions were not welcome. And when you start to feel like questions are not really welcomed, it makes you want to ask even more questions. And it makes you think that what you're being told is not true, because it should be able to hold up to scrutiny if it's true. So it makes it just seem incredibly suspicious, whatever those claims are, when you are not able to give answers and when you just give avoidance instead every time, or at least the vast majority of the time. And so eventually, I just became really disenchanted with Christianity, because I wasn't getting answers, because my dad was not representing Christ. And what ended up happening was my dad, being the kind of man that he unfortunately is, had an affair and she tried to salvage the marriage. She said, “Stop the affair, and we'll stay married.” He refused, and so they got divorced, and that happened when I was about twelve. And I was really thankful that they got divorced actually, because I think that, if he had stayed in the home with us, I probably would have ended up dead or in the hospital, because I was about to be the age where I was fed up with how he treated me and I was about to start standing up to him. But he was much bigger, much stronger, much heavier than I was, and it would not have gone well for me. But it was very close to happening.

And then I became the bully, unfortunately. About that age, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, I became a lot like my dad. But instead of being a physical bully, I was more of a mental bully. And I would terrorize my brother and sister and my mom to some degree and I was very cruel, and I would terrorize them mentally, and obviously it's not something I'm proud of, but it's the truth, and that’s pretty much what I was doing until about the age of 15 or 16, and I was still going to church with my mom, but at about that age I went to church with my mom for the last time. And I was just dreading it so much because I always had, and I got out of the car—we drove there, and I got out of the car, and I looked at my mom, and I said, “I'm not going in there. I'm going to walk home, and you can't make me go to church.” And I knew that it was true because I was bigger than her, and she knew that it was true, and after that I didn't go to church anymore.

And once I stopped going to church, that’s when I really started to get into atheism, because, before that, I was more just, “I don't like to go to church,” and, “I don't think that Christianity is true.” But when I stopped going to church, I started looking up atheist videos online, and I started hearing arguments that were against Christianity. And a lot of those arguments, I thought, were really, really good. I grew up in the time where the Four Horsemen of atheism were very popular. So those horsemen were Harris, Hitchens, Dennett, and Dawkins. And my favorite of the Four Horsemen was Hitchens by far. I thought that he was just brilliant. I thought that he won all of the debates that he was in, which is funny, because now, when I go back and I listen to the debates that he did, he really didn't do very well at all. It was mostly rhetoric, maybe even entirely rhetoric. It really wasn't any arguments when he debates.

So I got really, really deep into atheism. I got really passionate about it. Started pushing back on my mom while I still lived there, became even more of a terror to her because now I was asking questions, not in good faith, but to try to destroy her worldview, to destroy her faith. Because I thought it was bad. Once you become the type of atheist that I was, you feel like you're smarter than pretty much everybody else You feel like you’ve figured out something that nobody else knows. You figured out that God isn't real, and everybody believes that God is real, so they're all wrong. Everybody’s being duped, but you figured it out. So you're a lot smarter than everybody else, because they're all being fooled and you figured out the truth. And it's very much a superior way of thinking, meaning that people who think this way think of themselves as being better than others.

And that's absolutely how I was. I definitely thought of myself as being better than others, and I had very little empathy for other people, and I was very selfish, very prideful, and I basically continued on that route, in that way of being an atheist, for about four or five years, probably. Just passionate. Passionate about atheism. I thought that all of the world’s problems came from religion, and I thought that we needed to destroy religion and usher in the great atheist utopia of reason. And it's very naive now, but that's how a lot of atheists think. It really is.

Yeah. It sounds like you were just a real follower of Hitchens. Religion is poison, and God is not great-

Oh, absolutely!

… and it’s all bad. You had been completely convinced, and it worked its way out through your life. The way that you’re describing yourself, and like you say, not everyone has that sense of rational superiority or the other negative traits that you mentioned, but that’s certainly…. At least in my research, I found that to be a very prominent characteristic, a sense of intellectual superiority, particularly over the deluded religious person. So you said that you were a passionate atheist for four to five years. What happened from there?

Well, I stayed pretty passionate after that, but at about the four- to five-year mark, something happened that really shook me up. This was 2012. And what I saw was The Bill Maher Show, and it was Sam Harris was talking with Bill Maher. He was on his show, and he was talking to Ben Affleck.

Sam Harris was saying as rational atheists, we should be more against Muslims than we are against Christianity, because Muslims are way more conservative, they also believe in God, and they’re committing terrorism all over the world, which Christians aren't doing. And I'm like, “Yeah. That’s all true, obviously. So he's totally right.” Well Ben Affleck then proceeded to slander Sam Harris, and he called him a racist on live television, on The Bill Maher Show. He said, “You’re a racist.” Now I thought that was pretty much the most absurd thing that I had ever heard, basically, because, one, Islam is not a race. Anybody can be a Muslim. You don't have to be a particular race to be a Muslim. Sam Harris was disparaging a religion, not a race, so calling him a racist is just flat out ignorant.

But what I found to be even more heinous than that, which really shook me up, was that the next morning after this had happened, about half of the atheists sided with Ben Affleck and not Sam Harris, and that really, really surprised me, because I thought that Sam Harris was obviously correct. To see them side with him really surprised me, because I thought that atheists were these enlightened beings, like myself. We had figured out something no one else knew. We had seen through the veil, if you will, and yet here are these atheists that don't even understand that Islam is not a race and that Islam is more conservative than Christianity. So if you're going to be against Christianity for being conservative and religious, why would you be less against another religion that is more conservative and also religious and more violent? This was the beginning of a split in the atheist community. And the split was basically the true liberals, like I considered myself to be, versus the people that had gone off the deep end.

And I didn't know what those people were doing, but I knew that they were wrong. It was something that really shook me up, and I started to ask questions, because I became a little bit unnerved about my atheism, to see that.

And so I guess the next thing that really changed the way that I perceived all of this, because now I considered myself a classical liberal, was I was doing CrossFit at the time. I was really big into it. And there was this CrossFitter that I really respected. He was the number one CrossFitter in the world, and his name was Rich Froning. And he was just a really good sportsman, a man of character. He would help people when they finished. He would finish first most of the time because he was the best in the world, but he would help people come across the line, shake their hands, give them a high five, and I just thought he was a really awesome, awesome guy. I looked up to him. Obviously, he was a very, very hard worker and everything. And so one day, I was watching a Netflix documentary about Rich Froning, and I saw that he was there with his family. That's what the documentary was about, basically his normal day-to-day life. And he would drive around on these four-wheelers and spend time with his family, and his children just adored him. You could tell. And I was just thinking, “What a great guy. I'd like to be like this guy someday.” And then, as I'm watching, he sits down with his family to eat, and what did they do? They prayed. And as soon as I saw him pray, I thought to myself, “Oh, he's just a stupid Christian,” and I completely dismissed him. I completely dismissed him out of my mind. I had no more respect for him in that moment. But then I thought, “Wait a second. Wait just a minute here. Why am I dismissing him?” I thought, “If I were, say, deployed, would I want somebody like Rich Froning with me? Or would I want all the atheists that I know, that I'm used to talking with, that I'm used to dealing with? Would I trust any of them? Or would I rather have Rich Froning?” And the answer was, “Obviously, I would prefer to have someone like Rich Froning out there with me if I were to be deployed or something like that. In a dangerous situation, I would want Rich Froning with me, at my side. Not even a thousand of the atheists that I knew.”

And I'm not saying every atheist is low character, but pretty much every atheist that I knew was, and I knew quite a few. And I think that that's pretty darn typical. I mean, they talk about arguments and things of that nature when Christians are speaking with them sometimes. But when I would interact with them personally or when it was just us atheists, the only things we would be talking about—or they would want to talk about. It wasn’t philosophy. It wasn't what was true. It was women, drugs, and other degenerate things that I don't really want to specify. So I did not have a very high opinion of my fellow atheists, for good reason, as far as I'm concerned. And when I realized that Rich Froning was someone that I really looked up to and respected, it actually shifted the way that I thought about Christians. Because up until that point, I thought of them as the bad guys. But in that moment, when I realized that I'd rather have Rich Froning with me than a thousand atheists, it really changed my window. The Overton window completely shifted in regards to Christianity and atheists and the way that I saw them. And it made me start to see Christianity as something that was important to our society, as something that, if it went away, might not actually be good. Because if the atheists that I knew were going to become more popular and if people like Rich Froning became less popular and eventually became extinct, well, what would a world of the atheists that I knew be like? It would be terrible. I would not want to live in that world. And when you start to realize that, you start to think, “Well, I want to live in a world with Christians, because these are the people that I can depend on. I want to live in a world with Rich Fronings.” And it made me understand that there is something under our society that our society is built on. There are these pillars. And maybe it's not such a good thing if we tear these pillars down. And these pillars in our society are Christian pillars. That is what undergirds our way of life and the way that we think. It’s Christian. And maybe we shouldn't go and just tear these things down.

 I just want to just highlight here again what you're saying, because there are so many, as you were saying, atheists who have such a poor view of Christians. What you’re talking about reminds me of that Reason Rally, when Richard Dawkins got up there and said, “Let’s just ridicule and mock the Christians. You don’t have to engage, just ridicule and mock.” And there's, as you say, an automatic dismissal out of hand without really engaging with the ideas.

Right.

But yet what I love is that had this negative view, this negative view of Christians, but you met someone who countered that, who disrupted that negative stereotype that you had built in your mind, with some of it based on good experience, because genuinely you had asked good questions that were not answered. You were given a form of faith that you felt probably not intelligent or, “Just have faith.” And you were given a bad example of what Christianity looks like in your own home, from your own father. There were a lot of reasons to dismiss it, granted, but yet those negative… the negative building blocks, I guess, that you had that promoted your view of Christians and that propelled you towards a godless worldview was then countered in this wonderful person, who disrupted your view of what Christianity is and who Christians are. I love that! And I also love what you're saying about, that I think a lot of people don't recognize that the Christian worldview is really substantive and helped build our civil society. I just wanted to again affirm what happened there, that there was a disruption of your negative negative understanding of Christianity through a beautiful example in this man.

Yeah. It really goes to show how important it is for us, and of course, I definitely fall short of this all the time, but it's so important to try to be good witnesses to others. We're always witnessing, and people are always paying attention to what we're doing. And you just never know when a good witness can actually change the way that someone else views you. Even just being kind to somebody that maybe is expecting you to be hostile to them. Or asking someone how their day is going after they've just been rude to you and letting it go. You just never know how something like that might affect somebody else down the line. And this was a small thing for me in one way, because I was still a passionate atheist, but it was also a very big thing for me in another, because it changed the way that I viewed Christianity in that moment.

Yeah. It shifted you, it sounds like, from a very closed-off perspective to a willingness to take a closer look and to perhaps even move in that direction.

It's completely different. Once you're actually open to a different way of thinking, once you can see how it is not just terrible and you're open to it, well, that's crucial to somebody changing their worldview. If that doesn't happen, it's really not likely, unless Jesus just grabs you and just draws you by the neck or something crazy like that. I'm sure that's happened for some people, but in the case of my story, that's not what happened. God works in different ways for different people, and this was something that He used to help me to see Christianity in a different light, and it’s something that is very, very important to why I started to look at Christianity in a positive way and why I ultimately changed my mind about Christianity.

So yeah. Lead us from there, then.

Yeah. So I basically became a lot more conservative after that, because I realized that these conservative values that Christians were in favor of were really the things that were keeping our society going. But I thought that what they believed still wasn't true. I didn't think that there was any good reason to believe in God And I just want to say really quickly here that one of those reasons, the main reason why I didn't think that there was any good reason to believe in God was because I was calling myself an empiricist. And I said, “I don't believe that God exists because I've never seen God. I've never heard the voice of God. I've never touched God's hand. I didn’t have the Thomas experience. If you show me God. If you show me Santa Claus, I’ll believe in Santa Claus. You show me God, I’ll believe in God. Until I'm able to perceive God, until you give me sense data evidence. I'm not going to believe it.” That was my quote-unquote epistemology, which is one’s theory of knowledge, how someone can come to know things. So I was saying, “I don't have any sensory evidence of God, so I don't believe in God.” So I thought that God just wasn't real, didn't exist. I thought atheism was still true, but I really liked what Christianity did for our civilization. I basically had the same kind of understanding as Tom Holland, if you're familiar with his book.

Yes! Dominion. Yes.

Dominion, right. Exactly. Essentially he's saying the same thing that I'm saying, which is that our foundation, the way that we think, is Christian, and all of these liberals, they’re still thinking in Christian ways. Like when they talk about how they're against racism because they have this idea that humans have dignity. And that comes from Christianity. That view doesn't make sense in evolution. Why would human beings have dignity over any other animal? So they have this very Christian way of thinking still, but they don't realize that it's Christian. They think that it's not Christian.

But as far as my story goes, the next big thing that really changed my views on things was that I talked to my cousin about why conservatives and liberals had these different ways of looking at the world, and I was confused by it still, because remember these atheists that had split, that were going off the deep end, I was still trying to figure out what had happened. What was the philosophy that was underlying their way of thinking? I knew that there must be something there. I was talking to my cousin Matt about this, and I said, “Do you have any idea what is causing this to happen?” And he said, “You need to read this book, and the book was The Righteous Mind.

So I went and I read the book, and what it talks about was fascinating to me. It explains so much. Essentially what he says is that basically there are five moral pillars.

Care, harm, liberty/oppression, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation. And what's really fascinating is that liberals are only working on two of these pillars. They're not working on all five or six of these. They are only operating on two. And those two are fairness/cheating and care/harm. And that's why whenever you hear liberals talking about something moral, they’re always talking about, “Well, does it do harm?” Or, “Is it fair?” And most of the time you'll hear harm. That's the main one. But they're missing these other pillars.

And the main next part of my story is where I went into a chat room. There were a bunch of atheists in there, and I was just going to listen to what they had to say. And they were interested in talking to me because they hadn't seen me in there before. So I started talking with them, and they wanted to ask me some questions and see if I was intelligent or not, I guess. And so I started answering their questions, and eventually one of the topics that came up was morality. And I made it known that I thought that rape was wrong, something along those lines. And they said, “Well, what do you mean that rape is wrong?” I said, “You know, it's wrong. It's immoral.” They said, like, “Actually wrong? Objectively wrong?” And I said, “Yeah, of course.” And they said, “Well, I thought you said that you were an atheist.” And I said, “Yes, I'm an atheist. What about it?” And they said, “Well, do you really think that you can account for objective moral values and duties if there is no God?” And I said, “Of course, but I haven’t really given it much thought.” And they basically schooled me about morality.

And they told me we really can't justify objective morality at all, because in order to justify objective morality, you need some type of actual objective goal giver. You need meaning. You need purpose. You need objective values, like goodness and badness.

So anyway, they went through some of this stuff with me. I thought that they were completely wrong. I thought that atheism absolutely could account for objective moral values and duties, and I thought it was the most ridiculous thing in the world that they couldn’t see that, and I was not about to say that morality was subjective, because to me that has always been absolutely ridiculous. I've always known that there is such a thing as actual right and wrong.

And I set out to prove them wrong, because I still thought that atheism was true, but I definitely did not think that morality was subjective. So I tried for about two to three years to figure out a way to account for objective moral values and duties without God, from an atheist point of view. And the more I studied it, the more I realized that it's just not something that can really be done.

atheism simply cannot account for objective moral values and duties. And when I realized this, it really shook me, because I thought that atheism was true. But how can atheism be true if it can't account for other things that I think are just as true, like that rape is wrong or that murder is wrong and these types of things. And so it-

Yes. Just for clarity, you're not saying that people who don't believe in God can't know what is good. They just can't find a basis for that, right?

Essentially, yes. You’re almost exactly right. The only thing I would add is just that, if there is no God, then goodness and badness don't exist. So I'm not saying that, if you don't believe in God, you can't be a good person. I'm saying that if God doesn't exist, there's no such thing as good or bad people. There's no such thing as how we ought to be. If there is no God, then whatever I want to do, I can do, and it just is what I'm doing. There's no value about it. And a lot of atheists, like you said, do misunderstand this argument, and they think that you're saying that atheists are just bad and immoral people because they don't believe in God. And that's not what I'm arguing. I'm saying that the existence of goodness and badness cannot exist unless God exists. These things are tied together. You don't have a God, you don't have goodness and badness.

However, luckily for us, God actually does exist, and that means goodness and badness do also exist. And so atheists can do good things, and they can be quote-unquote good people, although of course I'm a Christian, and I believe that there are none good except Jesus Christ. But thank you very much for clarifying that, because it is something that is very confusing to atheists. So hopefully they understand now exactly what I'm trying to argue on. I'm arguing the ontology of goodness, the existence of it.

Yes. So you were going along, you were recognizing that you couldn’t ground or find basis for your most basic intuitions of moral goodness or badness, that you needed a transcendent source in order to even have those categories to begin with. So walk us along then. So what did you do once your worldview started to become a little bit unraveled?

Right. Well, the way that I am, once I find a little bit of something wrong, I tend to pull on that string. And that’s what I did here, because this threw me for a loop, and it made me start to look at atheism differently than I had before in another very significant way. Because before I looked at atheists differently, but now I was looking at the atheism itself, the idea that there is no God, differently. And I was realizing that there were entailments to this worldview, that there were consequences to it. And I had never realized that before. I had never realized that there were consequences to my worldview. And that I had a worldview. And once I realized that, “Oh, atheism can't get me objective morality, and that's absurd,” it made me start to question what else atheism couldn't get me. Are there other consequences of atheism that I am not aware of? Are there things that I'm believing as an atheist that I really have no right to believe in? And so I started to actually critically look at my beliefs as an atheist.

And so one of the things that I found, once I started to really look at my worldview with a critical eye, is I realized that I was being a complete and total hypocrite, for one. Because, like I said earlier, I was an empiricist, so I needed you to show me whatever you wanted me to believe in. I'm saying it's logical to use my senses in order to perceive the world. And if I don't perceive something in the world, I shouldn't believe it. That's appealing to logic, right? That's a form of argument right there. So I clearly must believe that logic exists, but I had never seen logic. I'm appealing to it, but I've never seen it. There are three laws of logic. I believed that they existed. And yet I had never held any of these laws in my hand.

So these laws that I believed in, that I was appealing to, they didn't exist in a material way. And yet, here I was calling myself a materialist. Well, what do materialists believe? They believe that everything is made of matter. Well, if I believe that everything is made of matter, then why am I believing in something that isn't made of matter? That doesn't make sense. So what should I do?

And it was at this point when I started to realize this. And it wasn't just the laws of logic. I mean numbers also are not made of matter, and yet I believe that the number seven exists.So you've got a lot of different types of things that are immaterial and that I believed in. So it was at this point that I went into Discord to talk to an atheist friend of mine, I brought these problems up to him, and I said, “Hey, if we're atheists and we're empiricists and we're materialists, why are we believing in things like laws of logic? Why are we believing in things like numbers?” And what he said to me I will never forget as long as I live, He said, “If you keep asking questions like this, you will not be an atheist much longer.”

Yes.

That's what he said.

Wow. Okay.

And I was really taken aback by that and very, very disappointed. I mean, I felt…. Now I think about it, I felt a lot like I had when my mom would answer questions that I had about Christianity. “You just have to have faith.” Well, he's saying, “Stop asking these questions,” basically.

Right.

Which is very funny when you really think about it.

Yes. Ironic. Yes.

It is. It is very. And so that just made me want to ask more questions. Like I said, if I get a little bit of string, I like to pull on it. I've always wanted to know what the truth was. And so when he basically said, like, “You’re asking good questions, and you should stop,” that made me want to ask even more questions. And so that's what I did.

So I guess the next really big thing—and this was probably the biggest thing—that really showed me that I was wrong and that atheism was not true was the problem of knowledge. And hopefully I'll be able to explain this well, and people will be able to follow me here. But essentially what I realized is that atheism leads to a contradiction, because atheism cannot account for any knowledge whatsoever. Now, first let me explain what I mean by knowledge. When I say knowledge, I mean a belief, so something that we think is true, that is true, and that we have a justification for. Okay, so it's got to be a justified true belief.

So the reason why atheists cannot account for knowledge is because they have to start with themselves, because there is no transcendent mind in their belief system, so in their belief system, any truth has to come to them via whatever resources they just are made with, okay? So whatever we have, this is what we have to use. There's nothing else that we can appeal to outside of us that can give us what we need. We're all kind of stuck in our own skulls. Everyone is just a brain inside a skull, and we're trying to learn things. But the problem is that, when it comes to knowledge, you need to have actual justification. And if there is no God, I don't believe that you can justify any belief whatsoever.

Let's say you said, “I know this.” And I said, “Okay, well, how do you know that?” And you said, “Well, because of this,” and you're going to list another belief under that belief, right? Every time we say we have a belief, it's supported by other beliefs that we have under it. And that keeps going down. And eventually you hit rock bottom, and the rock bottom that you hit is these unjustified assumptions. So if you stack a belief on top of an unjustified assumption, well that belief isn't justified. And all of our beliefs are stacked on these unjustified assumptions, which means none of our beliefs are justified. And if none of our beliefs are justified, that means that we don't have any justification, and therefore we have no knowledge, because knowledge is justified true belief.

So, if we are starting from ourselves, if there is no God, then knowledge becomes impossible because of this problem. However, that creates another problem because to say that I know nothing or I can't know anything, those are actually knowledge claims.

Right.

And that's a contradiction. That's like saying the truth is that there is no truth. It's a truth statement itself. It's a contradiction.

And that's a huge problem because if atheism cannot know anything, then that means that atheism is a contradiction, If atheism leads to this contradiction, well then atheism is false.

And not only this, I want to kind of cover the other side of this, because a lot of atheists will probably say, “Well, how do you get around this problem as a theist?” And the way that I get around it is by showing what is required for knowledge to exist, okay. And I argue that any knowledge entails necessarily an all-knowing being.

if any knowledge exists anywhere, then an all-knowing being must exist, and that all-knowing being must be the source of how we have any knowledge at all. If we have knowledge, then that means that an all-knowing being must necessarily exist, some type of transcendent mind. So that’s the theistic answer. It's not strictly speaking Christian.

And so once I understood this about atheism and that it actually just leads to a contradiction, well then I realized that atheism was just absurd and that God existed. I knew that if God existed, He must be good, right? Because I believed in objective morality still. I didn't believe that morality was subjective. So if God does exist, then He's the source of objective morality, and I care about morality, well, then shouldn't I be serving God? And didn’t He make me? So if He’s really Someone that exists and made me, then shouldn't I be on His side. Shouldn’t I be serving Him? And to me it seems like the answer was, of course, “Yes. I should be.”

And I went and I talked to my mom about this. She had been praying for me all this time, and she was so excited. She said, “Daniel, why don't you just get down on your knees and pray to Him now, and I said, “Well, I don't want to yet, Mom.” Because the truth was that I wanted to sin more. I wanted to be my own boss more. Something that we all kind of understand intuitively, I think, is that to become a Christian really is a form of death. The person that you are is no longer there when you surrender to God. You're no longer your own boss. You remember the way that you used to be. There's a connection. But the person that I was is no longer the person that I am. And we all kind of understand that when we make this move to truly surrender to Christ, to truly go to God, that we're going to die, that we're not going to be the same, and it makes sense to me why so many people hesitate, because that's what I did. I hesitated. I waited three months after this, three months of sin, and I wouldn't have put it that way, but that's what it really was.

But eventually, eventually, I got tired of what I was doing. I got tired of waiting and procrastinating. And I got down on my knees, and I prayed for the first time in many, many, many years, maybe the first time I could really even remember. And I said, “God, I know that You exist, and I know that if You exist and You do, then You’re good, and if You’re good, then I want to serve You. I want to give you my life.” And it was a pretty simple prayer, but it was a heartfelt prayer, and I meant every word, and I got up from that prayer, and I walked to go get food, and it was night time, and I looked up at the stars, and I just remember thinking, “I've always known that God is real. I've always known that He existed. I've just been suppressing the truth.” It's like what Romans 1 says. It's true, we do, and I wasn't thinking about Romans 1, but I was just realizing I've always known that God is real and He’s always been here. He's always been at my side, and He’s just been waiting. And it was so incredible to look up at the stars, and instead of seeing this endless void and eternal nothingness, like I used to see, because the stars represented death to me. We were all just going to become stardust again, essentially. But now when I looked up at the stars, I saw magic. And the world became magical. We weren't here for some mindless reason. We weren't just some accident anymore. I was here because a loving God had made me and wanted me to be here. I had a reason to be here, we all did, and there was just such a transformation in the way that I saw the world and the way that I saw people that night.

And I was walking to go get food, and I had the stupidest smile on my face. It was really incredible! And people probably looked at me like I was an idiot, and you know, I am an idiot, so it's okay. But yeah, it was just a wonderful night, and for any Christians listening to this, you're probably thinking, “Well, what about the gospel?” And I'm just telling you the way that my story happened.

Yes.

And the way that, you know… with the gospel is so interesting because I knew that God existed. I prayed to Him, I gave Him my life, and then after that, about two weeks after that, maybe a month, I don't know, I heard the gospel. Basically…. I don't remember exactly how. I think I was watching a YouTube video or something. And suddenly I heard the gospel about what Jesus Christ had done for us, how He went to the cross and died for our sins. And this was something I had heard a thousand, thousand times before, as an atheist, and it had never made sense. It had just been completely absurd. I was like, “Why does Jesus need to go to the cross and die for our sins?” Like, “What? Why did he…. That doesn't make any sense to me.” And suddenly it made sense, suddenly it all clicked into place, and I realized, “That’s what Jesus was doing on that cross? I'm a sinner?” And it was just such a crazy realization that this truth that I had been denying, or not understanding, this entire time was so plain suddenly. And I knew that Christianity was true. And I became a Christian, like right there. I was like, “Okay. Jesus, You’re real, and I'm a Christian now. I believe that Jesus Christ has died for my sins and that He’s the only way that I can possibly go to heaven.”

when I got saved, when I started believing in God and everything, I didn't really think that there was anything wrong with me initially. I thought that I was a good person and everything. And then God just started pointing things out to me. I started to hear people swearing needlessly and using the Lord's name in vain. And I would think to myself, “Why are they doing that? It sounds so vulgar. Why? Why do they need to talk that way?” And then I realized I was talking that way. And I started to think, “Well, why am I talking this way? I shouldn't be talking this way.” And God just started to change the way that I saw things. I used to love Hollywood. I used to love movies. I was a huge movie buff. After I went to God and got down on my knees. I started to watch movies, the same movies I had always loved, and I would think, “Why did they need to put that sex scene in there? Was that really necessary?” And the way that I thought about things, the way I thought about myself and my behavior, just started to change. Even if you don't see anything wrong with yourself, God starts showing you, “Hey, this needs to change,” “Hey, that needs to change,” and of course, He’s still doing it, and there are still so many things that I need to change about myself.

But I just wanted to give God the glory on that and appreciate the changes that He has made. I mean, my wife, she knew me when I was an atheist, even though I was an atheist conservative, and she knows how I was, and I didn't care about people. I was still a total narcissist. I had no empathy for her or for anybody. And now I care about people. I even care about my enemies, which is crazy. I mean that's what Jesus talked about, and it's so bizarre. But even people that hate my guts I care about. I mean Jesus Christ has changed my life completely, inside out.

Wow. It sounds like you’ve made such a radical transformation, Daniel. Listening to you, one can’t help but be impressed. It’s been such a thorough transformation, mind, your heart, the way you live, the way you think. Everything about you seems to be very other than how you were, and praise God for the work of God in your life. Just listening through your process as you were actually questioning naturalism or atheism, and you were honest. You were willing. As you say, truth mattered to you. And you were willing to pull on the strings and to look more closely and to try to make sense of reality and the way that you understood it. You could see that atheism had its own problems and you were willing to really look into it and look beyond it as to where is the source of truth? How do we have knowledge? How can we know what is morally good or not? And I wondered, for those who might be listening. I know that the will has has a lot to do with it, too. Like you say, you became open. How would you encourage someone to take a next step forward, to perhaps peer more closely at their own underlying presumptions about what they believe, why they believe it, how they can ground it, and whether there's something more?

Well, it's difficult, because most people, I believe—what they believe is not based on reasons. Most people—what they believe is based on what they want to be true, and then they supplement their desire for what they want to be true with reasons on top of it, and of course, people don't tell you that this is what they're doing, but it is what most people are doing. At the time before I got saved and everything, I really loved the things that I did. I loved my sin.

And that's mainly why we believe what we believe when it comes to God, is we don't believe in God because we want to sin. It's not because of all these philosophical arguments. It's not because of all the reasons. It's not because of the problem of evil. It's because we don't want to surrender. It’s because we want to be our own boss. We want to decide what is good and bad. It all goes back to the garden, the Garden of Eden. What did Satan say to Eve? He said, “Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil, and ye shall not surely die.” Those are the things that human beings still want. We want to not die. We want to be our own gods. And we want hidden knowledge, forbidden knowledge.

So, to your question, what would I say to someone to get them to potentially look more at their worldview is, “Do you really care about what's true? Do you care about what's true, no matter what? Because if you seek for the truth, I believe that you'll find the truth. That's what Jesus said. And I follow Jesus, and He said, ‘Seek and ye shall find,’ and don't give up! I sought the truth, and it took me years to figure out that Christianity was true. It took me years to find Jesus Christ, but the most important thing that we can do in this life is figure out why we're here. Why are you here? That is the most important question that we can ask, and there is an answer to it, and if you're not diligently pursuing that answer, then what even are you doing?”

So, “Do you care about what's true?” is my question, and if you do, seek it. Spend time focusing on your ideas. Introspect. And I would challenge you to look into Christianity. Look into the evidence for God with an open mind, because whether or not God exists is the most important question that we can ask.

That's wonderful. I’m curious. Just very quickly, looking back at your story. As you were going through this journeying, intellectual journeying to try to figure all those things out, was that independent? Were you doing that on your own? Or were you getting any input? Obviously, you were reading, but anybody walking you through that? Or were you just coursing that path alone?

I would say most of it was alone, but of course there were Christians that I talked to that took the time. And I would talk to them because I was trying to talk them out of their beliefs, but of course they were trying to evangelize me.

And those types of things do help, even though it seems like they don't, and that's why I'm so patient with atheists, because you just never know what is going to affect somebody. You never know what conversation might put a little grain of sand in someone's shoe, and it could turn into something much better later on down the line. So there were people that were helping me, to answer your question, but it was mostly something that I was doing on my own. There were Christians in the road at certain points for sure, and I really appreciate all of them, and it's so good to have Christians that care about their faith and want to talk to you about it. And to any Christian out there that feels discouraged because they talk to people and it seems like the people just don't listen, don’t give up. Don't give up. It does mean something to that unbeliever. So don't get discouraged, because it's not something that happens overnight most of the time.

I'm thinking of your mom, who was praying for you all those years. She never gave up. She never gave up on you and was prayerful. And you are someone who actually engages, obviously, with atheists all the time. You mentioned that at the very beginning, especially in your Twitter spaces. Is there any other advice that you can give us as Christians as to how to engage? I know you’ve talked also about living a good life,

Rich Froning.

Yes! Who was so pivotal in your journey, I think. His life on its own was such a powerful witness.

I would just say that ultimately unbelief is a matter of the heart. It's not a matter of the mind. So, even though I care deeply about all the reasons that I have for why I'm a Christian and I do share those reasons quite often with atheists, my ultimate goal is to get to know these atheists and to become friends with them, because that is really where we need to be as Christians. It's not going to be an argument. It's going to be a friendship that changes someone's mind. It's going to be you caring about that person. Even though they disagree with you, we can disagree about something and still care about that person.

So I would say the most important thing is to be patient and to pursue friendships with people that you don't agree with. And you’re not always going to be successful in it, but I think friendships are better. I use arguments and I use reasons in order to generate conversations, in order to spur thought, but ultimately what I want is to make friends with people that don't believe in God, and hopefully I can be a good witness, and eventually they might say, “Hey, really, do you really believe that God exists?” And I'll have a chance to say, “Yeah, I really do.” And we’ll have that conversation, and maybe I'll be lucky enough to lead someone to Christ.

There's no doubt in my mind, Daniel, that your life is making a difference in the lives of those who don’t believe. I mean, just again for the number of those who are willing to engage with you in such a meaningful way, as you’re so winsome, to represent Christianity and Christ in such an intelligent but yet winsome and caring way. It’s obvious to me that you lead with your heart, but your mind is as sharp as ever. So you are a beautiful ambassador for Christ, and especially just so articulate about how you came to reject and even more so how you came to embrace the God of the Universe, Who, as you say, purposed you, Who has loved you, Who has made you in such a beautiful way to be in relationship with Him, that with Christ in your life, it’s obvious that it brings everything into focus. It makes sense of all of reality, and of your life.

I can't thank you enough, Daniel, for coming on and spending this time with us to help us see things, to even see God more clearly and how He’s necessary for every part of us, every part that we deem important and valuable, that He is necessary, but more than that, that He loves us so much that He gave us Christ and a life that is abundant. Like you say, He’s the good God.

Absolutely!

And that He’s brought us to His side and made life good. So thank you so much for coming on. I just so appreciate you.

Well, it was an absolute pleasure and honor to be here and get to share my testimony, and I hope that it can benefit someone out there. I really just want to bring people closer to Christ, ultimately, at the end of the day. I just want people to know the joy and the peace that I have, because I know what it's like to not believe, and it’s awful. It’s terrible. You have no hope, and death is looming over you. And I now no longer fear death. And I know where I'm going when I die. And I know that God loves me and that He's good. And Jesus Christ is literally the truth. And I just want everyone else to know that, too.

Yes. We pray that would be so, that many will come because of your testimony. Thank you again.

Thanks for having me, Jana.

You're so welcome.