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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 sidebstories.com or on our YouTube channel. We always welcome your comments and feedback on these stories on our Facebook page and again on our YouTube channel. You can also directly email us at [email protected]. We love hearing from you.

Deconstruction has become an all too frequent word heard around Christian circles over the past few years. We often hear about Christians who once believed but had deconstructed their faith all the way to deconversion. They leave their faith behind completely without looking back. But, through deconstruction, not all who began to question their beliefs about God and the Bible leave Christianity. Sometimes their doubts take them on an earnest journey toward discovering the depths of truth that they may not have known before. Sometimes they find a rich, more robust faith than the fragile one that they began questioning. Sometimes the wandering is worth it, despite the precarious nature of not knowing exactly where their path is going to end up.

Adam Terry took a journey through skepticism to honestly search to determine whether or not Christianity was true and worthy of belief. For him, his journey of deconstruction was worth it, because his faith was reconstructed. He found a more solid foundation of knowledge, a surprising deeper experience of faith than he had experienced before. His story is a bit different than others in this podcast, in that he never completely left his faith behind. But his struggle with Christianity, as well as his resulting wisdom and advice, is worth listening to. I hope you'll come along to hear it.

Welcome to Side B Stories, Adam. It’s so great to have you with me today.

Thanks for having me.

So the listeners know a bit about who you are, Adam, why don’t we begin here by you telling us a little bit about yourself, perhaps where you live, what you do, and your ministry.

Yeah. So my name’s Adam. I live in North Carolina, currently. I grew up in a military home, so I endured twenty years of my dad going through the military, but he ultimately retired on the East Coast, and so now I live here. Currently I teach Brazilian Jujitsu, and that's a pretty rewarding process, getting to see people grow up and train and develop themselves. And before that, I actually did have a few amateur fights in the cage, for those that are familiar with MMA. So, I’ve pretty much done the fighting on all three fronts, whether it’s spiritual, mental, or actually physical. And currently I run the Curious Christianity YouTube channel and soon-to-be podcast will be coming out.

Well, let's get into your story, Adam. Tell us—you said you're from a military family. Where were you born? What was that family life like? And was God any part of your family life?

Yeah, so I was born actually in Oregon, on the West Coast, and pretty much we lived all up and down the entire West Coast. California, Oregon, Washington, and then ultimately Hawaii, and then my dad retired in Virginia. Growing up in a military household and military family can be a little bit hard, because you don't have that consistency of friendships, school, and all those things. So I did grow up in a Christian home, but the loneliness and the struggles of almost experiencing a type of abandonment with my own dad. Even though he was a tremendously loving father, and I really couldn't put it any better than he was super ideal in so many ways. There's still just a way that you kind of disconnect no matter what it is you try and stuff. There ended up being abandonment issues there for me.

But my mother actually tells a story of me being about four years old, and she said that there was this moment where she was explaining the gospel and Christianity to me, and then she asked me to pray, and she really felt like I really was understanding and taking it in, and so we prayed there in the car, and so that is the moment that she actually considers me to basically get saved. And that’s the earliest point that I can reference, but I will say I have a specific memory of being even seven years old and praying to the Lord and talking to God on the playground, and so it really was a part of my life throughout most of my young years.

In moving all of those places, were you active in any kind of a church or community? It seems like it would be hard, moving from place to place, to really be connected.

It was hard, but we were always a part of a church, wherever we went. And even if you were just in a place for a little while, we were always visiting churches. I really can't remember… there wasn't ever really a long stint in which we weren't in church on Sundays. And when we actually did live in areas, we were often there two, three times a week, Sunday morning, Sunday night, and Wednesday night. Church was very much a huge part of my life. Awana, every kind of thing you can imagine, helping take down chairs, and all those sorts of things. So church was just… that was part of our lifestyle. It was always there, always present. I'll tell you one other thing that was really interesting, because it was such a small moment, but I remember getting up early, early one morning. My dad usually left for work before we got up when I was really young. But I do remember him having a Bible on the table one time and reading the Bible before breakfast. So it was just one of those seminal moments, of actually seeing my dad take time out for his own devotions before going to work. So it stuck with me.

Yeah. So it seems, then, in a sense that your parents really… it was a real part of their life that they invested in, it sounds like they tried to live out, but you mentioned that your father was a good father, but yet there was a sense of abandonment. Was that emotional or physical? I mean was it that he was gone a lot because of his military service? Or what did that surround?

Yeah. It really was because he was gone sometimes, right? He would be gone for three or four months at a time. And I don't know what it is, but there's something just about being a child where you can't really control… or I'm not really sure how to handle that. And so it just ended up being a disconnect emotionally, and I didn't even realize it myself until I was in my later twenties. So it wasn't till later that I even recognized there was anything there.

Yeah. Sometimes I think growing up, in childhood, you just absorb the world that you're in and all of it’s bits, and that’s your normal, that’s your reality, and you don't really realize the implications perhaps until later. So as a child, it sounds like you had a real or sincere belief in God, that you prayed to God on the playground. He was a real part of your life in that sense. As you were growing older, into teenage years, did that sense of belief or appreciation for God or your faith continue? Did it grow? Or what happened?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So God was always a part of my life, it seemed like. No matter what I did, He always seemed to be a huge part of my life and even growing up in my teenage years, becoming fifteen, sixteen, all those years. Now the major struggle that I really ended up struggling with was a type of depression. I struggled with serious loneliness because of all of the changes. We were home schooled mostly. And that was good and bad in some ways. It was good because of the constant changing of areas, so we always could just bring our school with us. You didn't have to worry about changing schools and adapting to entirely new environments. But it was rough in the sense of socialization. There are just certain stints where… I remember when we lived in Hawaii, and throughout that time, we were just starting to put down roots, but we only got to stay for one year, and then we were off to the next place. And so that was incredibly difficult and incredibly hard. But when I turned like fifteen, sixteen, I really became part of a co-op, which is like a home school group, full of other home schoolers. And that actually became incredibly influential and incredibly important. Now during some of this section, as I was starting to even gain friends, I struggled with some serious depression and contemplations of suicide and those things. And I've always very much attributed… I attributed my life very much to God in the midst of all of that. I was struggling through it, but I was constantly praying to God in that process. And I was praying to God for friends, and the Lord brought them around, and those friends ended up being actually some of the friends that I still have today.

So my best friend Titus was one of the major ones I met at the co-op right there, and so he and I have been friends for over twenty years now. And he's just absolutely been one of the hugest parts of my life, and shout out to Chase as well, who I first met there all those years ago. And so the Lord did, He answered my prayers. And he brought about some friendships and really was impactful.

Wow. So God showed up.

He did. He did.

Sometimes during those periods of isolation and depression, it's just as easy to push away from God, saying, “Why is my life like this?” and questioning and doubting. But it sounds like He really provided for you during that time.

Well, and you know what? I feel like if I didn't have God, I don't know if I would have made it, because there would have been no hope. Like I had hope that God would bring something around, and I’d constantly, yeah, cry out for that help. And there were very much times of temptation, but yeah. I very much had a real hope in God.

Okay. Well that's good!

It is good!

I know you're sitting there before me, and I'm sure our listeners are going, “Wow! Okay. So you believed in God. Great!” And God provided. But you had mentioned to me that there were periods in your time where you had really pushed away. What made the turn for you, to move from this belief in a God Who cared and Who showed up and Who was real to pushing away from that.

So the real challenge came after high school. After high school, we’re on the East Coast, and personally, I hated the East Coast. If you ever been to the West Coast and the East Coast, the West Coast is far superior in beauty. And of course, I had all these wonderful childhood memories. So I decided that I wanted to go back to the West Coast. So I finished high school, had no idea what I wanted to do. Everyone's like, “Well, go to college.” And I was like, “What for?” There wasn’t anything I wanted to study. There wasn't anything I was passionate enough about to just launch into college. So I called up my grandparents and said, “Hey, I want to come and basically hang out and stay with you guys for a while and maybe figure things out.” Maybe start for myself an entirely new life on the West Coast. I hadn't really figured out what I wanted to do. And they were very surprised but very welcoming. They’re like, “Okay, yeah. Sounds great.”

And so I set off on my journey. But part of that journey was I decided for myself that I would decide if this Christianity thing was my faith, or if it was just going to be the faith of my parents. See growing up, I grew up with it. I believed it. I felt like I had a relationship with God, but I had never seriously challenged it. All of my friends were Christians. I mean, of course I had met some non-Christian friends and had some of those, but for the most part, my life was very insulated and sheltered, like most people would suspect of a Christian home schooler. So I got over there, and I got to spend about six to eight months there. And my grandparents, they live on top of basically a hill, a very large mountain hill sort of thing, so it's isolated away from the world. Civilization is almost an hour away, right? And when you go to Bob's Market, you actually talk to Bob. That sort of thing.

Yes, yes.

It’s not the same thing. So I’m far removed from the rest of civilization. And so it's here that I decided like, “Okay, yeah. I want to see what else is out there. Why do people leave Christianity? Is Christianity true? Is the Virgin birth true? What is going on? Where did Cain get his wife?” I mean, every question you can imagine, I wanted to answer all of the hard questions. And so I began my journey. I was looking at atheist forums. I was listening to their questions. I was listening to why people left Christianity. I went down to the Mormon Church. I went to the Catholic Church. The Seventh Day Adventists. I listened to Muslims. I was listening to anybody who would tell me why they left Christianity, why Christianity was false, why their faith was true.

And so this was an intensive process. I was spending four to six hours easy on this every single day pretty much. And as a result, I picked up something interesting as well, and I had no idea that my grandpa was well educated, to be honest. I never really talked to him growing up. Pretty much like when we were kids, and we would see him, he would just come home from work and sleep. And that was it. So I began to ask him things or whatever and began to find that he knew a lot of stuff. See at the time I was very much a rationalist. I was only willing to believe in things that I could understand, and so he presented Christianity and answered my questions in a way that was very different than maybe some other people had experienced. He didn't tell me what the answers were. I would ask him, “Hey, what about this?” And he would say, “Well, look. Here are the ways that some people get to this answer, and here are these answers over here.” And he was giving me the answers from the Bible or truths or explanations from different things, but he wasn't handing it to me and just telling me, “This is the answer. Ignore everyone else.” He gave me different reasons for different things. He gave me why skeptics believe this, why Christians believe this. And he gave me the freedom to choose for myself. He never told me, “You have to believe this,” or, “You have to believe that.”

And I very much have thought that, if it wasn't for him handling me in this way, that I very likely would have become an atheist, because I was very truth oriented, and at this point, I did not care at all about personal experience arguments from other people. Anyone who shared their testimony, I just could care less. I wanted the objective truth, what is real and objective beyond anyone's personal opinion or experience.

And so it was a long process, and I also had a few of my uncles. I was asking uncles, cousins, and other churchgoers. I was that annoying guy you did not want to talk to in church. Because guess what? If you said something wrong, I was about to show you where your logic went wrong. And yeah, it was a rough time for those around me in some ways. But that's all I was doing. I was constantly writing notes on paper and asking questions. And every new question I had, I was asking everyone around me. And, for me, at the time, Christianity was very much one whole piece. And that's really, really important and significant, because at this point I very much felt like, if there was a question that was an objection to Christianity and I could not answer it, I would reject Christianity. I would turn my back on the whole thing. And I was. I was prepared to do that.

But, at the end of this six to eight months, I became compelled to think that it was true. Christianity was true. And I think that it was also very important to me that I also felt a sense of the Holy Spirit with me at times. And so there was a combination of personal experience and answering the questions that I had. The Christians had. They’d answered the questions very well as to what I was wondering about and gave me plausible explanations. So at that point, I believed that Christ was true, and that was my first major challenge to Christianity.

I did have a second one in my twenties.

Yeah. And before we go there, I think it's very important…. Well, a few things to draw out there. First of all is that you had a conception that it was a rather all-or-nothing enterprise. It’s like the Jenga tower. If you pull out one piece of the puzzle, and it collapses, then the whole thing is worthless. Rather than looking at that there might be some areas that weren't completely certain in terms of answering or might provide a little bit of doubt, but yet the whole of the structure is still supported, it's still pretty foundational, supported foundationally. But yet you were in an all-or-nothing mentality.

I'm curious. As you were looking at other faiths and religions, I would imagine that they had their own Jenga towers and they had their own areas of weakness that were causing doubt or suspicion. In your honest search, did they have holes in their foundation? Or were there particular things that you just said, “Okay, I’ve looked at Islam, and that's not it.” Or, “I’ve looked at Mormonism,” or, “I’ve looked at whatever.” Were there more doubts as you looked at those than there were at Christianity? I mean, the way that it sounds is that you didn't find any holes or doubts or problems with Christianity as you were searching and looking at it more closely.

Yeah. So I want to be as charitable as possible, but here was the thing: I literally did. I went down to the churches and I talked and argued about some of the major holes or points in these other faiths.

I remember a couple different conversations, one at the Seventh Day Adventist Church. And I brought up some of the issues of their dietary laws and dietary thoughts, and one of the issues: In Seventh Day Adventism, they believe in the traditional Jewish diet, right? Well, I read what Paul says in the New Testament, and he says…. Oh what's he talking about here? He’s talking about the food and dietary laws, and “I know, and I'm sure, on the authority of the Lord Jesus Christ, that nothing in and of itself is wrong to eat”. I quoted that verse to the guy, and he's like, “Well, you’ve got to read it from its original context.” And I said, “Okay, cool.” So we started from the beginning of the passage, read the whole thing, and then he just sat back and said, “Well, but there's all these health benefits.” And it was like clear that I was like, “Dude, this is a major slam on your entire system here,” and he just decided to ignore it. And I was like, “Yeah.” So I poked holes in all of his stuff, and he didn't have any reasonable answer to me at the time.

And then we went to the Mormon church, and I poked holes in a bunch of stuff that they had brought up. And so I was. I was finding significant holes. These ideas of Mormonism, how it came about, almost certainly that Joseph Smith was a charlatan and a manipulator. There were constantly big holes in each one of these. Now, I will say, if you talk to apologists in any of these fields today, they're much stronger than what I encountered back then. So I'm not at all going to say that, “Oh, it's just so easy to poke holes exactly in each one of them today.” But it was very significant. Yeah. I definitely seemed to poke holes in so many of these ones, and I thought of each of their faiths as well as pretty monolithic. That it’s just a matter of, if I can poke holes in your faith, I wasn't going to believe it. I wasn't going to hold on to it. And so I felt like I was getting way more answers from the Christian side, and those that I talked with on the other sides, they weren't really presenting me with anything significant.

Hmm. And even all of those online discussions or presentations from atheists or skeptics, those weren't convincing for you, either, it sounds like, when oftentimes atheists are pushing back pretty hard and they can be very rhetorically compelling and persuasive, but it sounds like the due diligence that you were conducting with regard to the Christian perspective, you felt like that was more firm, more solid, and more truthful, I guess you could say, than what you were finding from the naturalistic side.

Yeah. I just wasn't finding any significant arguments that weren't, at the time, pretty much sufficiently answered. They were giving arguments like, “Oh, well, maybe the virgin birth wasn't real because, in Isaiah, there isn't really a word for virgin, and it's just young maiden,” and all these things. But ultimately, there seemed to be very plausible, very reasonable Christian answers to these objections. Atheism didn't really posit anything positive. It only takes crack shots at Christianity, right? But it doesn't really offer you something to grab onto.

Now, that was enough, though. Like, if atheism was going to be able to point out contradictions, sure, it was going to cause me to leave Christianity. I was very much focused on the arguments. The intellectual arguments were everything to me back then.

Now I will say today I think very differently. I think that there's a lot to be said for personal experience. But back then, none of it really mattered. I wanted to remove the personal experiences from the arguments as much as humanly possible.

Yeah. It sounds like you were trying to be as intellectually honest as you possibly could in that search. And then you landed in a place of confidence, that Christianity was true. You said until your twenties. And then something happened.

Yes. Yes, So then we hit my early twenties, and the new wave of atheism had just been starting to hit much more mainstream. More prominent. Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Michael Schermer. All these guys were coming on the scene. There were very few apologists back then. I really only remember a couple. And so that really got me into listening to all of this stuff, because, see, I was a rationalist. I only was was willing to believe what I could understand, and at the time, Christianity had answered all of the questions that I had. But now came the new wave of atheism. And they were asking new questions. And I was very, very seriously hunting down the answers as rapidly as possible.

What kind of questions were the New Atheists asking at the time? Do you remember?

There were a lot, because pretty much… for instance, talking about the beginning of the universe. Could the universe be eternal? And it was like, “Oh, well, if the universe is eternal, that sounded like a very good objection to me against Christianity.” The universe is eternal. Therefore, it's always existed. Therefore, it has no need of God, and God also could not have created it, right? So that sounded like a very strong objection to me. And of course, I felt like William Lane Craig’s cosmological argument was a very strong answer to this type of objection. And for me, the philosophical arguments were very, very powerful. The idea that time cannot be infinite in the past. That was a very strong refutation of this type of eternal argument. The moral argument, right? Is morality actually subjective or objective? Or what about the problem of evil? Absolutely. Those were very serious objections, and then honestly, there are a lot of other objections that are very, very intricate. I was thinking about all sorts of the interesting arguments or questions, such as, “Does God love those people in hell? Is it possible for God to love people in hell?” Or arguments such as, “Is there free will in heaven?” So the idea of free will, how does free will tie in with morality? If we don't have free will, then is God a moral monster?

So a lot of these questions were all coming up to me, and I was eager to answer all of them. But the thing I was noticing, of course, is that after a few years of trying to answer every single objection that anyone can come up with, I was getting tired. It was exhausting because, for me, the answers were more important. They were more important than simply, “Oh, now I have an answer for this.” No, it was about my salvation and faith as a whole, because I still had a very glass ceiling view of Christianity. Christianity was all or nothing. If an atheist cracked this and showed that there was a serious Bible contradiction, I was like, “Okay, that's it. Christianity's false.” And now, of course, I look at that as almost absurd. “Oh, if there's one Bible contradiction, it destroys everything!” But yeah. I was answering Bible objections, contradictions in the Bible, difficulties. What does this mean? What does that mean? Yeah. I was trying to reconcile all of those things.

Were you doing this independently? Or were you still in community, trying to ask other people and trying to absorb information from kind of a sound community? Or were you trying to wrestle through everything on your own?

Yeah. In community in a way, but I only had a few people I could talk to about stuff like this. One actually was still my grandfather at the time. I would call him periodically and be like, “Hey, so so-and-so is saying this. How do you answer this? How do you respond to this?” Some were a few other friends. The vast majority of my friends are not, or were not, apologists or anything. Like I said, at the time, there were very few. Mostly, what I was doing was I was consuming a ridiculous amount of YouTube. I watched pretty much every debate that William Lane Craig had out back then. Oh yeah. I’m watching. I'm listening to the objections and his answers. And every time I found a new question, I'm looking for, “Okay, what's the answer to this one and that one?” And so yeah.

But other than that, this was largely independent. I'm doing all the research on my own, listening to philosophers and punching in their questions online. So yeah, it was pretty independent.

So through this process… you expressed that it was tiring.

Yeah.

But I wonder, was it starting to poke holes in your Christianity? Was it causing doubt? Were any of these questions seemingly unanswerable? When the standard is certainty in every area, that's a very high bar. So I wonder did your faith or belief start to crumble at all through this process?

In a sense, yes. Or I guess I would say I did have points of serious doubt, right? When I would run into a question, and the answer was not easily available. I'm looking at it and going, “Okay, okay. This seems like a problem.” One example would be the arguments from God's incomprehensibility. It’s the idea…. Or you can say that God is logically incoherent. In other words, we always say that God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent. He’s all good, He’s all powerful, He’s all knowing. And some people posit that there's some sort of logical contradiction here. And, for me, that was very troubling at the time. And I was like, “Okay, well if that's true, then Christianity has to be false.” And some of these things, they would, right? So that's what I mean like, when I would stay up at night, and if a day went by where I didn't find the answer, oh, yeah. It was bothering me. It's gnawing on me. That voice just constantly nagging you, “Hey, what about that? What about that? What about the doubts? What about this question that you don't have the answer to?”

And so that's why it was so tiring, because I felt like I had to find the answer. It was just existentially terrifying, because I was struggling for meaning and purpose and struggling to find the answers, and that's why it was a big difference, is because I did. I felt like my entire salvation, life, meaning, purpose, hung on finding the answer. So in other words, I felt like, if I didn't have the answer, then my entire worldview, my entire life would virtually be a lie. And having all of that hanging over your head while you're trying to find the answer is pretty much like having a guillotine hang over your head. And so my ability to find the answers was my only salvation. I was my own savior. If I couldn't find the answers, my faith was false, and I was going to leave.

And then, of course, I was going to argue and fight with all of the other Christian apologists who espoused it to be true. And so it was a very serious time for me.

Yeah. Did you ever get to a point where, in order to remain intellectually honest in this all or nothing kind of acceptance/rejection paradigm…. Did you ever step back and say, “I just can't believe that anymore because I can't answer these questions?” Or did you hang on by a thread, as it were, during those periods of doubt and not leave Christianity altogether?

Yeah. I will say that I made it to the cliff, but I never made it over the cliff. One of the other ones that I want to mention in here a little bit is my brother. My brother has also been a Christian. We’ve both grown up together. And when we were growing up, we both had devotions, Bible reading and stuff like that. That was part of our homework in home school. And my mother had always prayed. She’s like,   “You know what? The only thing that I really hope and pray for is that my two boys will grow up loving the Lord.” And we have, and that's been tremendously wonderful.

But my brother has also been somebody who's incredibly knowledgeable and incredibly helpful and kind of helped keep me as well in some moments. And I think the other thing that makes all of this interesting is that, throughout some of these doubts and sufferings, I largely suffered alone. I think it's one of the major struggles in Christian circles, is that, especially back then, you can't struggle in public. That’s not a legitimate thing. Most people…. If you're doubting, then well, maybe you're not a Christian. Maybe you're going to be pushed out of the church, all those things. So I largely struggled and suffered in silence.

But oddly enough, the one who ended up helping me indirectly was my friend Chris Arledge, who is actually studying philosophy. I think he's maybe finished his PhD now, but philosophy of science, and it was during a phone call conversation, and he had no idea what I was going through and had no idea that his call would impact me so much. But he was just talking about the Bible. He was talking about what his pastor talked about on Sunday, and he's like, “Yeah, well. You just sometimes need to believe the Bible even if you can't always understand it, because if you want to only believe it when you can understand something, or only believe God when you can understand something, then you have decided to put yourself as the number one authority. You've decided to put yourself above God, and you're not willing to say, ‘I'll accept something You say just because You say it.’ And when you make yourself above God, then all of the burden is on you. But if you admit that there is a higher authority, then you can put your faith in that higher authority, even if you can't entirely understand it.”

And when he said that, it clicked for me. I totally understood what he was saying, and I was like, “Oh, my goodness! I can't believe I never thought of that or saw that before,” because skepticism was creeping in really, really hardcore in my life, but the truth about skepticism is that it's empty. And I was feeling that effect. I was feeling the black hole of the next question and the next question and the next question. Because every answer I got or every answer I gave had another question behind it, and it's just pulling and pulling and pulling you down the entire time.

And my friend’s answer helped me to understand that, in order to make progress, you have to believe first. You believe in something. You believe in God. You trust in what God said. And then, from there, you can move forward. And that was incredibly liberating. And it absolutely changed my entire Christian faith, because then I no longer took Christianity as like, “Oh, if there's just one false contradiction, if there's just one missing element, my whole faith doesn't shatter.” And so, it very much put my faith with God in a realm where it became much more personal as well. Because now I was putting my faith in the Person and trusting Christ for the answers, instead of trusting myself to find the answers. And so that was incredibly liberating.

I imagine that was a huge paradigm shift for you, particularly when, like you say, truth is truth in terms of an intellectual understanding of reality, but truth is also a Person. And is the Person of Christ.

No, no. I think what you say right there is so important.

Yeah. Why do you say that?

Yeah. For all of the eggheads out there. They're just like, “No, no, no. Truth is about propositions. It's about claims and stuff like that.” But Jesus comes and says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” And it's like, “No, no, no. Truth is a Person.” And there are deep truths that we can understand and experience that are… yeah. They’re beyond simply just propositions and words and stuff like that. You can actually get to know your Savior in a personal way. And that is a truth. Your experiences with God are very legitimate ways of knowing truth. They're not illegitimate ways to come to know God. And so I think that just encountering God is one of the most essential ways. Forget about just the arguments. You encounter God yourself. You experience God yourself. And then that can supersede all of your arguments. Someone can make all the arguments they want in the world for why we live in the Matrix. But it's like, “Well, I experience life all around me right now.” That’s a pretty powerful argument in and of itself.

Yeah, it is. It is. And I love, too, what you say, and I think, for the skeptic, for the one who's maybe listening in, when you say there's a sense of where you have to believe and then understanding will follow. I think there’s a real truth to that. When you open yourself to not only the rational knowledge but the experiential knowledge of Christ and the way that the Holy Spirit—I know those are very strong Christian concepts, again, for the skeptic who might be listening, but it's hard to explain the amount of confidence that you can gain relationally from putting your trust in the One who is over all.

But I'm also thinking of the skeptic who's going, “Well, there were holes in Christianity, and you just decided…. That’s what you've always known. That’s what's comfortable for you.” Granted you didn't get 100% certainty, but who does in any worldview. But beside that, I can imagine a skeptic pushing back on your story and on your journey, saying, “But there were holes, and you weren't willing to fill them, and you're just not wanting to go over the cliff and become completely intellectually honest and become a courageous atheist who can see reality for what it is.” How would you respond to someone like that?

So, there are a lot of different answers. One of the answers I want to give is actually an answer that I gave—and I understand that this will not be satisfying to every skeptic, but to some. I have a friend who actually has deconverted, and he's lost his faith, pretty much. And so he's not in the atheist camp yet. And this is not somebody who has just been like a baby Christian and then they lost their faith. They’d spent a lot of time in Christianity. Very, very knowledgeable about all of these things. And so we had several discussions, and we talked about Christianity and arguments. And eventually, though at the bottom of it, I was like, “Hey, look. I recognize there is nothing I could say to you. I cannot argue anything else to you for you to arrive at the truth.” Because he's so skeptical of everything else. There’s no argument. And he agreed. He's like, “Yeah. You’re right. There isn’t. There isn't anything you could tell me.” Because he has tons of information.

And so I was like, “Okay, cool. But you believe in God. You still believe in God.” And he still believes in God. And I was like, “And God knows everything, right?” And He's like, “Yes.” He believes that. God knows everything. Even for the skeptic, if you believe that God exists, God knows everything there is. And that God is ultimately the supreme source of truth. So let's just say that somebody corrupted everything else that we know around us, the Bible, personal experience, whatever it is. Ultimately, God's the only one Who can answer the question. So I said, “Fine. Then you go to God directly and get the truth. If He's the only One that has it, then the only One that can give it to you is Him. Go and ask Him yourself.”

Go and ask Him yourself. And I think that that’s something that most skeptics that I have known are not actually honestly willing to do. Now I know that there are some that, they're going to go ahead and proclaim, “I have honestly done that and tried,” and all of those things. And there's no way that I can directly speak to every individual story. But the one thing that I have seen is that every major skeptic that I’ve encountered, they have their rules that they've created. And this is what I would say: “Are you willing to let go of your rules as to what box God has to fit in?” Because if God really does exist, then ultimately you would have to be willing to submit to whatever His rules are and not the rules that you've created as to what He has to fit into. Because if God exists, then He is, what? The most loving, most compassionate, all-knowing, all good, all creative one. And so it's no surprise that, whoever the skeptic is, are you the most loving, compassionate person in the world? Most are willing to admit, “Well, no. I’m not.” Yeah, well, God is. And so whatever the answer to most of your quandaries is, I'm sure He has a much more loving, compassionate answer, and maybe He knows something you don't. So being willing to fully submit your ideas to what Somebody Else, Who is the ultimate authority, has is very liberating and freeing.

Yes, like you say, it really does take the burden off of you and puts it to the source of all truth and knowledge and love. But also it's interesting, in talking about belief towards understanding and trust in a Person, I'm sure that there are those listening, too, who would… in a sense, in their skepticism, they don't have all of the answers within their own worldview, whatever that worldview is, apart from God. They have to make a lot of presumptions for their worldview to be true. There's a lot that they don't know. There are a lot of answers they don't know. They don't know, for example, how the universe came from nothing, by nothing, for no reason. Or they can't explain how things have the appearance of design, but there is no designer. Whatever the thing is. How life started from non-organic life. There are a lot of holes in that Jenga tower, but yet there's a degree of belief in that system, even though they don't have all of the answers, either.

And so, when Christians like you and I say we believe in a Person, that there is God, and He's fully explanatory, there is, I guess you could say, a condescension towards, “Oh, you just believe. You just have faith that….” But yet, there's a faith component to even godless worldviews. Can you speak to that for a minute, in that, just because a Christian says that they have belief or faith in God, even though they may not have all of the answers, that that is a legitimate way to view a worldview or trust in reality, that they are doing the very same thing.

Yeah, no. It’s so funny. We all have our own blinders, and so much of it falls into confirmation bias and all those things. And even for those who are skeptics and atheists, they’re like, “Well, you're the one that has faith. You're the one that believes in all this other stuff.” But it's like, “Okay, cool. How does science work? Did you do all of the scientific experiments? And it's like, “Well, no.” Science is predicated on faith, right? Because even the scientists who do the work are basing their work on what? The guy who told them before them, right? You don't go back and repeat the same experiments. There's no escaping faith. And it's like, “Oh well, in Christianity, we have faith in people and what they told us from before. And we have faith in, to me, the one major thing that we have that everyone else doesn't have is we actually have faith in a God Who comes to bring revelation.”

But yeah. So all of the skeptics, they have faith in something else that's outside of them. And it's a matter of choice to some degree. What do you choose to put your faith in? Is it science? And is it because you have such faith in humanity, that other human beings are telling you the truth? Because people are like, “Oh, well science is obviously true or more ethical or believable because we can test it.” Okay. I understand. A lot of people will say, “You can test it. You can repeat it.” Did you test it? Did you repeat all of the scientific experiments that they told you about work. And of course the answer is no. They simply believe the books, and they believe the other people that came before them are telling them the truth.

So there's no escaping it. Whether you believe in scientism or Buddha or any of those things, everybody has trust and faith, because nobody can go back through and do all of the same things that have come before them. So that's just a very practical human aspect to life. You have to put your faith and trust in something.

Yes. Absolutely. Now you had characterized your earlier Christianity as being monolithic, rather all or nothing kind of, if there’s a hole popped in the balloon, the whole thing is just up in the air, right? But it sounds like you have… I don’t know if matured is the right word, but advanced in the way that you perceive-

I hope so.

… yes. Hopefully all of us are in a time of growth as we understand our world and our worldview better. But it sounds as if it's no longer an all-or-nothing proposition, that, in the Christian worldview, there is, I guess what some would call a cumulative case that involves so many different aspects of understanding reality, whether it's rationally or whether it's experientially, through our knowledge or the person of Christ, all of these things that work together in a cohesive, comprehensive way that seems to match with reality, that say you have your puzzle missing a piece here or there because of a doubt. “I’m not really sure how this piece over here works,” or that doubt, you know. “I don't have an answer to that, but for the most part, 90% of my puzzle is complete. I seem to have a pretty comprehensive and understandable and intelligible view of the world and of myself and all of those things, how they all fit together.” So that it doesn’t feel as fragile. It feels more confident. Not certain, because, again in our own limited understanding, we’ll never know everything in this life. Only God is omniscient, as you say. So how would you speak to the way that you view Christianity now as being confident, not certain, but it’s not as fragile maybe as it once was?

I'll put it this way, right? So you actually used a couple interesting terms, like confident but not certain, and all of those things. But there's a big difference between having philosophical certainty, meaning like mathematical proofs. But yeah. I can be reasonably certain, right? And I mean that like justifiably certain. I’m certain and confident that I’ll see Jesus when I die, that I'll be resurrected again, that there is one God in heaven, that Jesus Christ is the Messiah. And it's like, well, how can you know that? How can you have certainty, right? And that’s a degree of faith, right? I have faith. I have belief. I have confidence, though.

So your faith is only as good as the object it's placed in. And I believe that if God exists, then His character is something to have much more certainty than my own thoughts or mind. And so if I place all of the burden on what I know, what I believe to be true, well, then, the burden is on me, right? But if I'm placing my trust in something outside of me that is greater than I am, that knows more than I know, who is more moral than I am, then I have a much stronger foundation. And it's almost puzzling to me as to why other people don't even see this issue of…. It’s like, “Okay, everything that I believe, and I must be able to understand it, that's what I'm going to be responsible for.” And at first you might think it's like, “Well, that gives me lots of control.” And it's like, “It might, but have you ever thought about how finite you are? Have you ever thought about how much you know? How much information do you have about the entire universe, or let's just say just our galaxy?” And I think if you stop and think about it, it's a very small amount of information. We as human beings understand very little as a whole.

So I think you need to try and find the one true God and put your faith and trust in Him. Because I think that revelation is greater than wisdom. Wisdom is only as good as the presuppositions and the foundations upon which it’s built. But when God reveals truth to us, then you should grab hold of it.

Yes. Thank you for that. Adam, you have taken us on your journey through skepticism and back. Thankfully, you didn't go over the edge of the cliff, but it sounds like you've made it back to a very solid place where you’re placing your trust in the One Who actually knows and is truth and can reveal it. Is there anything else you'd like to add to your story before we kind of turn the page?

Yeah. I think that honestly one of the major things that I think is the most important is for anybody to have a personal relationship with God. A personal relationship with God completely supersedes all of the arguments, all of the evidences, and it's the most immediate way that people actually do know God. If you're a skeptic and you're interested in evidence, you need to take that as a serious consideration, that the primary way you need to encounter God is go to Him directly. So I think that that can supersede so many things. Somebody can give me evidence points for why something is true, but if I experience it for myself, you can blow right past everything else.

If a skeptic is listening right now and said, “Okay. All right, Adam. How do I experience God? What would that look like, even? How do I take steps in that direction?”

To me, the first thing is treat God like a person, just treat Him like a person and talk with Him, like ask him, “Hey, Lord, you know what? I don't know if You exist,” and be willing to just be open and honest. One of the things that I think is so beautiful about the book of Psalms is David's honesty. He's complaining at God, he’s yelling at God, he’s frustrated with God, and he's like, “Are you even up there?,” like David himself is asking all these things, and I feel like, for any skeptic, it's to be as honest as possible. And I'll tell you this as well: So when I was going throughout my own journey, I also felt and noticed I wanted objectivity as much as possible, but I personally remember feeling resistance that there were all these different voices inside of my head, and it became difficult to even discern what is objective, what is true. And so you do, you have to fight against other voices to try and get at the truth, because the other voices, yourself, your own voices in your own head, will lie to you. And so you have to counteract that and do your best to be as objective as possible and make honest, heartfelt pleas to God to try and connect with Him.

And then the second part that I think is super, super important: You have to be willing to sit down and listen, to receive from Him, to actually hear and know the truth that He does speak to you. Because the other thing that I've seen that's truly amazing is how many other people have walked away from God who can remember their encounters with God and they reject it now. They're turning away from their own experiences with God, because they're like, “No. Now these other evidences are so much better.” And so they’ve even said, “I felt God once, but that wasn't really.” So, I'd be skeptical of your own skepticism.

Yes, yes. And I know that there are so many stories. It’s a common tale these days of Christians deconstructing. It sounds like you deconstructed without deconverting.

Yeah. I actually have been called a deconstructionist. I don't think it was a compliment at the time.

No, no. I think it’s…. I know that there have been people who've been trying to really clarify what that means. Deconstruction doesn't necessarily mean leaving faith. It’s just, I guess, opening the box, taking a look inside, seeing if it's worth belief. But oftentimes, the path is towards deconversion, over the cliff, if they can't find solid answers.

the problem is when you've built a pot incorrectly, and it hardens, there isn’t really a way to make little adjustments, so you do. You have to destroy it but then build it back up. And if you do well with God, that's what He does sometimes with us. Because the problem is we've built up our own religion as we want it, and it's all messed up, and then there can be a need for us to deconstruct our faith, because we built it on poor foundations. We didn't actually have good Godly foundations. And you know what? Sometimes it's because of our parents or pastors, and they're all doing the best they can. But deconstructing your faith can be a good thing, when you built it in the wrong way. And that was my problem. My foundation for my faith was built on rationalism. I built it on rationalism. And it got pretty tall. And it was. It was necessary to crumble that down. But now my foundation is Christ in a way that is so much greater than what it used to be.

Yeah, it was reconstructed in a more solid way. Yeah. And so you obviously have been on the edge of skepticism. You talk with skeptics. How can we, as Christians, engage with those who don't believe, who are skeptical of our beliefs? You've hinted out a few things. It sounds like you have very good and open and honest conversations with others. How can we benefit from your wisdom in this area?

I have two major things to say on this: And I'm passionate about this issue, one just because of my own stories and of course how many people that I've seen that have all deconverted, deconstructed. And part of the reason is I totally get it, and I feel like I had been treated the way that they were treated, I would have left, too. Let me get into this part: Okay, so number one, how you treat a person is you need to look at them very individualistically. People are very different. And I was shocked and amazed to realize, as I was studying apologetics and everyone wants to know in Christianity what's the best argument for God's existence? And that completely depends. That depends on the individual. Some people are focused on science. Some people are history people. Some people are philosophy people. Some people are pragmatic. And some people are experiential. And so, depending on the person, the arguments look entirely different.

But the one thing that I want to add in here that I feel like I haven't seen enough is for people to understand how to love intellectuals. So there are honest skeptics, and there are kind of dishonest skeptics, where they're not really looking for a serious conversation. They’re just poking questions to make fun of you or mock you. But then there are those who are honest skeptics, where the answers really, really matter to them.

And I want you to picture this: Imagine that somebody comes into your church and you're the first one to greet them. And you can see that they are noticeably distraught and upset and everything like that, and you ask them, “Hey, what's the matter?” And they tell you, “My dad just died yesterday, and I'm really, really having a hard time with it. It's really, really bothering me. And I'm even struggling with my faith and how to respond to God.” And the first words are out of your mouth are, “Well, you shouldn't struggle with that. You just need to have more faith.” Almost everybody realizes how unbelievably absurd that is, to give a response like that. How can you be so cold? How can you be so callous? That is exactly how it feels for an intellectual to come into a church and ask you, “Where did Cain get his wife?” And you just say, “You just need to have more faith.” Because the question for them is personal. The question itself is personal. And so just sitting there and listening to their questions, saying, “That’s a really good question. Let me help you find an answer for that,” is caring for them. But to give them dismissive answers, you are indirectly telling them, “I don't care what you think. I don't think your question is important, and I don't care that you think about it.” That's what you're telling them. You're being uncompassionate. So for those that are honest skeptics, be patient with them, listen for their questions, seek to answer them.

Yeah. It’s amazing how a little bit of a valuing the other goes such a long way. You know, when you listen towards understanding, and you're really paying attention to the things that are really on someone's mind and on their heart, it’s incredible how that will produce an openness in them. When you care to listen. Like you say, it seems like a very simple little thing, like that really wouldn’t matter with them, but it matters a great, great deal whether or not someone even will consider Christianity based upon how we respond to others, whether we put them off or we actually sit down, as you did, and spend time with someone.

What a beautiful story that is, and Adam, you have brought so much today. You’re not the classic, “I was an atheist. Now I’m a Christian,” but I love the struggle, because I think that, practically speaking, is where we find a lot of people are right now, just kind of looking at Christianity all-or-nothing thinking, and leave it behind, but they don’t really know… they may know what they’re rejecting, but they may not know exactly what they’re embracing in a worldview without God.

And I think you brought such a beautiful wholeness to your story, not only that you ended up reconstructing your faith, but that it wasn't onerous upon you. You really found the source of truth and the One Who reveals truth to you. And it's obviously changed your life, and you're helping other people to find Jesus as well.

So thank you so much for coming on and being so honest through your doubts and through your skeptical journey. I think it will be so helpful to many people out there listening today.

Well, I hope so. Thanks so much for having me, Jana. It was a great pleasure being here.

Thanks for tuning in to Side B Stories to hear Adam Terry's story. You can find out more about Adam's YouTube channel, Curious Christianity, his social media links, as well as his new book entitled, It Was Never About Adam, in the episode notes. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can contact me through our email, again that’s [email protected]. Also, if you are a skeptic or atheist who would like to connect with any of our former guests with questions, please contact us through our email, and we'll get you connected.

This podcast is produced through the C.S. Lewis Institute through the help of our wonderful producer, Ashley Decker, audio engineer, Mark Rosera, and video editor, Kyle Polk. I hope you'll enjoy it, that you’ll follow, rate, review, and share this podcast with your friends and social network. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll see how another skeptic flips the record of their life.