My Note:

Larry Sanger, a co-founder of Wikipedia, has publicly shared his journey from atheism to faith in Jesus Christ, becoming a Christian. 

This is a two-part story told by Larry Sanger himself. I am sharing part 1 because it is a long read but, all the same, a fascinating one. For the full article, you can read it on his blog with this link (https://larrysanger.org/2025/02/how-a-skeptical-philosopher-becomes-a-christian/)

How a Skeptical Philosopher Becomes a Christian

“It is finally time for me to confess and explain, fully and publicly, that I am a Christian. Followers of this blog have probably guessed this, but it is past time to share my testimony properly. I am called to “Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature.”¹ One of the most effective ways to do so is to tell your conversion story. So, here is mine.

If you did not know this change, and if you knew me before 2020, this might be a surprise. Throughout my adult life, I have been a devotee of rationality, methodological skepticism, and a somewhat hard-nosed and no-nonsense (but always open-minded) rigor. I have a Ph.D. in philosophy, my training being in analytic philosophy, a field dominated by atheists and agnostics. Once, I slummed about the fringes of the Ayn Rand community, which is also heavily atheist. So, old friends and colleagues who lost touch might be surprised.

For one thing, though I spent over 35 years as a nonbeliever, I will not try to portray myself as a converted “enemy of the faith.” I never was; I was merely a skeptic. I especially hope to reach those who are as I once was: rational thinkers who are perhaps open to the idea, but simply not convinced.

I pray that this exercise in autobiography is not too vain. So I will try to state the unvarnished truth, on the theory that a story with “warts and all” will ring truer and persuade better. But if I am going to tell this story properly, I must start at the beginning, because my experience with God goes back to my childhood, and many waypoints in my journey since then have been relevant to more recent developments.

Part 1: I lose my faith

I “ask too many questions”

My parents met and married in the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod, the more conservative of the two largest Lutheran denominations in the United States. One of my great-grandparents was a professor of musicology and church organist; we still have his books. My father was an elder in our church when I was a small child. I remember a few Bible commentaries on the bookshelves, which I found forbiddingly difficult.

Throughout my later childhood in Anchorage, Alaska, I was much given to asking “too many” questions. For example, I heard, as a child, much talk about “mind,” “spirit,” and “soul,” and I asked my parents—on the way to church, when I was perhaps eight—to explain the difference between these, or whether they were not perhaps the same. I repeatedly debated with friends about the origin of the universe, and discussed the question, “If we say we need God to explain where everything came from, then why don’t we need something to explain the existence of God?” I was confirmed at age 12 in the Lutheran Church, but soon after, my family stopped going to church.

As so many have, I lost my faith in my teen years. Dad started looking into New Age religions (he is now a more orthodox Christian again); this alone made the Bible less of a unique reference point for me. I remember a long ride, at age 13, south of Anchorage on the “Ski Train,” which still exists. I fell into a long discussion of various philosophical questions, mostly about God, with a colleague of my Dad’s. That made a big impression. Without realizing it, I probably stopped believing in God when I was 14 or 15: even today, I do seem to remember the belief slipping away, as I occasionally mused that I no longer prayed or went to church.

When I was a high school junior, I took Mr. Crawford’s one-semester introduction to philosophy. It changed me forever. After that course, I started spending a great deal of time thinking and writing about various philosophical questions, but especially about the existence of God, the problem of free will and determinism, and the possibility of knowledge. I never stopped.

I was 17 and four or five years had passed since my confirmation. In the intervening time, I had only rarely thought about God. But I started again, now in a philosophical mode, and it came as something of a discovery that I did not seem to believe in God anymore. At some point in my late teens, I remember calling up a pastor—I forget which—to ask skeptical questions. It felt bold for a teenager to do, but I was not merely being rebellious. I really needed help thinking these things through. But the pastor had no clear or strong answers. He seemed to be brushing me off and even to treat me with contempt. It seemed to me he did not care, and if anything, I had the impression that he felt threatened by me. This was a surprise. The damage was quickly done: being met with hostile unconcern by a person I expected to be, well, pastoral confirmed me in my disbelief.

As I continued to think about philosophy, I decided more firmly that I would remain in my disbelief. In retrospect, I believe it hurt my belief very much to have been told that I should not ask so many questions. This is a terrible thing to say to a child, because he will infer (as I did) that only dogmatic people, who lack curiosity and are unable to answer hard questions, believe in God. Therefore, such a belief must be irrational. That is what I thought. How wrong I was, and how long it took me to discover my mistake. Apparently, it made no impression on me that many of the deepest thinkers in the history of Western civilization have been Bible believers.

I am converted to methodological skepticism

In my late teens, I—now a cerebral, geeky youth—came to be driven by a skeptical chain of reasoning, which I remember well, because I rehearsed it so often:

1. I am familiar with people who have either ruined their lives or are well on their way. Moreover, practically everyone I know has some bad habits or has made serious, costly mistakes.
2. In all cases, the problems seem to be explainable by their believing certain falsehoods. (I was able to rehearse many sad cases and had various hypotheses about the “falsehoods” on which their personal failings were based. For example, the drug addicts falsely believed that drugs were a key to enlightenment.)
3. But such awful outcomes are avoidable, if I avoid believing dangerous falsehoods.
4. It seems to me that I can know that something is the case only under three conditions: (a) I know precisely what I believe; (b) I know why I believe it; and (c) I know that the reasons for belief are excellent. (In what way? I had different theories on this last part, which led me to pursue epistemology.)
5. Therefore, to avoid similar disasters, I should withhold (i.e., avoid holding) any belief that I do not know, with certainty, to be true. Moreover, I should make it my purpose in life to “seek the truth” (so I put it, to myself).

So that is how, at age 17, I became a philosopher and a so-called methodological skeptic. I discovered the latter term later, when I studied philosophy at college. It does not mean someone who believes knowledge is impossible; it means someone who withholds belief as a key methodological or truth-seeking strategy, in order to arrive at firmer knowledge at some later date.² Within a few years, I adopted a kind of foundationalism, the view that knowledge is ultimately justified by rational beliefs that are themselves not justified by other beliefs. In my version, certain beliefs of perception and of common sense formed the foundation of the rest of my knowledge.

I arrived at college in 1986 knowing I was going to major in philosophy, and unlike most of my fellow students (even later, in graduate school), I was driven by a personal truth-seeking mission, a mission both moral and epistemological. I honestly did not understand why most people were uninterested in the questions I was asking. However abnormal, I thought I would try to build a system of philosophy of my own; it would have a firm rational basis but draw practical implications. To my disappointment, I learned that such a task had been declared naive and outdated at least fifty years before. Nevertheless, I thought I would eventually give it a try; so I aimed to become a college professor.

In those early years, I was dismayed by the irrationalism and nihilism I saw in the field. For all their attention to logic, it seemed to me few philosophers still adhered to a method of rationalistic truth-seeking. In lieu of anything better, I wound up reading works by a fellow unbeliever, Ayn Rand, who also thought there was an objective truth and that it could be discovered through rational methods. I ended up hanging out with Objectivists (as Ayn Rand devotees call themselves), but never quite fit in, mostly because they were dogmatists about many derivative matters, and I, with my methodological skepticism, was not.

Because of its devotion to free-thinking, I attended Reed College, which was full of liberal unbelievers (their unofficial motto: “Communism, Atheism, Free Love”). But I do remember discussing religion at some length with an earnest Christian, a few years older than me, who took a few courses there; his name was Phil Rees. Phil made a lasting impression; I still wonder what happened to him. We got to be friends, but one day, he caught me, well, let’s just say “in a sin.” He thoroughly criticized me, to my puzzlement—I really didn’t see what was wrong—and just like that, our friendship was over. That made a big impression on me, too, despite the fact that I did not feel guilty at the time. Yet I also did not feel quite comfortable; I suppose I received it as an interesting datum.

I started graduate school at Ohio State in 1992, where all my classes were in philosophy; the vast majority of the professors and my fellow grad students were nonbelievers. In those years, I felt no pull toward God. I considered myself agnostic, i.e., I neither believed nor disbelieved in the existence of God; I “withheld the proposition.” At some point in graduate school, I adopted an argument for my agnostic position. It went like this:

We are told that God, if God exists, is a spirit that, among other things, created the world with a thought (or “word”) from nothing (ex nihilo). But our only notion of “spirit” is understood by analogy with our own minds. As far as our own minds go, we have no experience whatever of thoughts bringing matter into existence from nothing. Therefore, we have no grounds on which to say we know what God even is. Therefore, any arguments that make use of the concept of God are literal nonsense.

More specifically, then, I said I had a “no concept” view of God, which one might distinguish from both atheism and agnosticism, both of which seem happy to employ the concept of “God.” When I got serious about matters, I would say, “I do not even know what ‘God’ means.”³ But generally I called myself an agnostic.

So I had no inclination to study or investigate religion per se, though philosophy of religion was a professional interest. As a student, I was exposed to plenty of arguments for the existence of God, and indeed I had known several since childhood. I often taught about them as part of introductory philosophy classes. Though I earnestly tried to understand why anyone might find them persuasive, I found them entirely unconvincing.

Once, however, one of my students came to the graduate assistant room and engaged me in conversation; this would have been, perhaps, 1994. He presented a version of the Argument from Design called the “Fine Tuning” Argument. (I will discuss it some more below.) Again, this made an impression on me; as I found I had no response, there were tears in my eyes, to my consternation. To this day I am not quite sure why. The student left quickly, no doubt tactfully leaving me to my thoughts. Perhaps I was only ashamed that I was unable to respond. But ever after that, as a nonbeliever, I always thought the Fine Tuning Argument was perhaps the strongest argument in the theist’s arsenal.

I remember attending a debate between Ohio State philosophy professor Neil Tennant and some Catholic thinker at Pontifical College Josephinum, the Catholic seminary in Columbus. I remember cheering, quietly, “Neil, Neil, he’s our man! If he can’t refute ’em, nobody can!” I was rightly rebuked for being disrespectful by one of my fellow Ohio State grad students, and I felt duly shamed.

I decided in the mid-1990s not to pursue a career in academia after all. It is not quite relevant to discuss this in depth, so suffice to say that I rarely saw any sincere concern for truth, of the sort I had made my life’s mission. Contemporary academia appeared to me (and still does) largely a sterile game, with a methodology on some points incompatible with my own. This frankly ruined my appreciation for the search for philosophical truth in a modern (or postmodern) academic context. Still, I decided to go ahead and finish my dissertation, mostly out of my interest in the subject, and because I had spent so much time on it anyway.

After I defended my dissertation in 2000, and after I returned from California, having started Wikipedia in 2001, I taught philosophy for a few more years at Ohio State and local colleges. In that period I taught philosophy of religion twice (around 2003-5). It was fun to teach, and I set myself the goal of obscuring my own views to students. I remember asking at the end of one term, “How many of you think I am a theist?” A third of the hands went up. “An agnostic?” Another third. “An atheist?” Another third. I concluded the class, saying, “Excellent! That is exactly the outcome I wanted!” I wanted them, too, to seek the truth for themselves.

I am a confirmed agnostic

I never aligned myself with the so-called New Atheists of the Dawkins and Dennett stripe. I found them crass and obnoxious. I partook, a bit, in discussions of atheism and agnosticism online, but, to my surprise, I found myself arguing more about methodology with the atheists than about God with the theists. Now, don’t get me wrong. Even in the last few years leading up to my conversion, the arguments made in debates by theists like William Lane Craig still struck me as glib; he seemed to sidestep obvious problems that the non-philosopher atheists were usually not philosophically acute enough to pick up on. The approach that Craig and others took struck me as earnest, but ultimately intellectually dishonest.⁴ But the atheists were—to my disappointment, because I really wanted allies—actually worse. To me, they came across as clownish, often merely mocking, and apparently incapable of addressing anything but the most simplistic versions of the arguments. They insisted strongly that anyone who merely failed to believe in the existence of any god was properly called an “atheist.” Under such a definition, I was an atheist. Yet I was not like them: I was always willing to consider seriously the possibility that God exists. They were not. Nor was I very hostile to religion. I thought it obviously had some salutary effects. The atheists typically, by contrast, said that they simply lacked a belief that God exists, but their mocking attitude screamed that God did not exist. In my experience, the people who call themselves “atheists,” regardless of how they define this term, rarely take the possibility of God’s existence seriously.

My experience studying and teaching the classic arguments had given me a modicum of respect for them. It seemed trivial, to me, to poke holes in such arguments, holes sufficiently large enough to justify my stance of withholding the conclusion. Perhaps the biggest complaint I had about the arguments was that none of them came even close to establishing that God, especially the God of the Bible, exists. They made partial headway, perhaps. For example, the First Cause Argument at best established that there was a first cause of the universe. The Argument from Contingency concluded that a necessary being exists. But what is that? Who knows? The Argument from Design supported the notion of a cosmic designer. But what sort of designer? In every case, most of the work still needed to be done: “Go ahead then,” I would say, “now show me that the first cause, the necessary being, or the designer is God, with all the rich meaning of that term. And even if you do that, you have not established that the God of the Bible exists.” Because nobody ever seemed to do that with any seriousness, I assumed that they could not.

There was one thing that I did frequently say, about the arguments for the existence of God, and that is that, perhaps, I did not understand them perfectly. I had studied enough of philosophy, as a methodological skeptic, to have developed this sort of reluctance or uncertainty. For example, William Alston had written a book with the puzzling title Perceiving God,⁵ which for my dissertation I dipped into. This book develops a version of the so-called Argument from Religious Experience. That argument, in Alston’s hands anyway, seemed beyond my ability to grasp: I mean, I was not having any religious experiences. I concluded that, perhaps in the future, I might have a religious experience and thus “perceive God,” as Alston said is possible. I could not rule that out. (I was right not to.)

My attitude toward the rationality of belief in God was informed by my great respect for Alston as well as for Alvin Plantinga and Richard Swinburne—hard-headed philosophers of the analytic tradition, but also Christians, whose work I had come across in subdisciplines outside of philosophy of religion.⁶ So I always held that it was at least rational to believe in the existence of God, in some sense.

My attitude toward the Bible was also mixed at that time. Again, I knew that many brilliant minds had studied and loved it, finding it to be full of great wisdom. Still, based on the limited reading I had done, it struck me as being not much more than primitive Bronze Age myth and wisdom literature, with the miraculous bits probably based on rich imagination, misunderstood emotions, and other natural psychological experiences. It seemed to me that people who were most strongly committed to the search for truth, at least as sought through rational, methodological skepticism, could not take it seriously.

I should add at this point that two life events changed my understanding of ethics, and this mattered later for my conversion. The first was my marriage, in 2001, and the second was my first child, in 2006. After these events I certainly could no longer endorse Ayn Rand’s (in retrospect) ridiculous notion that we can somehow justify our moral obligations toward other people in terms of our own self-interest, no matter how “enlightened.”⁷ Indeed, if I am willing to die for my wife and children, would I be acting in my own self-interest at all? I had always believed that morality had something to do with caring for other people. But, in caring for them, is it my interest that I care for, or theirs? I say this because, again, Rand made an impression on me between the ages of 16 and 26, or so, and her unbelief in God confirmed me in mine. But I was now firmly rejecting her ethics, which struck me as a clear lapse of judgment. Awareness of that lapse later made it easier to reject her atheism as well.

My reasons for disbelief fall away, one by one

I stopped teaching philosophy in 2005 and started working full-time again on Internet projects. I went through many years without giving much thought to God, Jesus, or the Bible, except as cultural phenomena and as an ongoing philosophical interest. I continued to dream from time to time about writing a grand system of philosophy, but I knew that would take a lot of time and focused effort that I would probably never have. The New Atheism became, if anything, even more obnoxious, to the point where I was asking myself if I had ever been like that. I rarely was, anyway; I had too much respect for Christian family and friends. Similarly, I observed Christians on social media often (though not always) behaving with maturity and grace, while their critics often acted like obnoxious trolls. Some of my favorite people were Christian, too. And some of them were extremely intelligent. Strange.

The obnoxiousness of the growing anti-Christian sentiment actually made me defend them even on this blog. In 2011, I came across an article by atheist Peter Boghossian (before he had become so well known), titled, “Should We Challenge Student Beliefs?” His answer was “yes”; I accused him of bullying Christian students into trying to change their beliefs.⁸ I also engaged a lot with atheists on Quora, mostly on the question of the very definitions of “atheism” and “agnosticism,” before I quit and removed all my answers. The Quora atheists (like their Reddit and Wikipedia counterparts) were beyond obnoxious and yet rarely articulated anything remotely approaching an intelligent critique of theism. I knew that, because unlike them, I thought I was able to mount an intelligent critique, and I knew what one looked like.⁹ I scanned books produced by New Atheists such as Dawkins and Harris and could never bring myself to actually buy one: they were just so transparently mediocre. Criticism of theism and Christianity presented such a rich field of strong argument, and I found virtually none in these books. In fairness, this is not so much the case with the philosopher atheists, whose work is more serious.¹⁰ They were acting like indoctrinated adepts of a religious cult themselves, which I found to be just weird.

After enough years of dealing with these “adepts,” the thought slowly dawned on me: maybe, just maybe, I too had been indoctrinated, in a way. Perhaps I had misunderstood things I only thought I had understood. Perhaps I had not been exposed to the best representatives of the faith. In short, perhaps, I had not given Christianity a fair shake. And yes, I couched this in terms of “Christianity” to myself: I never found any interest in other religions. This thought sat uncomfortably in the back of my mind for many years.

From around 2010 until the present, I exposed my two sons to the Bible, because this library between two covers is, after all, the most influential book in the history of the world, bar none. One cannot call oneself well educated in the West if one has not read it. Sometimes I read parts to my sons; this, however, did not make much of an impression on me. It was interesting literature, to be sure. I know now that I simply did not understand what I was reading very well. I merely assumed there wasn’t anything terribly deep to understand.

While all this was happening, my thinking about morality evolved. In 2014-15, I wrote a couple of essays, “How to end Western Civilization” and “Our Moral Abyss,” in which I bemoaned the worsening moral culture of the West, which I associated in part with the decline of religion. In the former, I wrote:

Critics of the religious right often seem to forget that Christianity as a moral culture, beyond its religious and political tenets, instructed people to work hard, to hope for a better life, to treat others kindly and donate to charity, to practice the graces of humility and self-respect, to rein in our passions and practice moderation, to take responsibility for ourselves and our dependents, and much more. It wasn’t all good, but much of it was. It taught the very idea of obligation, which has grown much weaker for many of us. It was an organizing, all-encompassing, core part of the Western civic culture. But really no more. Many don’t go to church; many of those who do go to church don’t believe; even those who do believe don’t take religious moral strictures very seriously; even if they do, they probably don’t understand them well; and finally, those who understand them aren’t supported by most others, who are both ignorant and deculturated, and all too willing to “tolerate” all manner of sins. So, as I say, as a serious cultural force, inspiring us to live well, religion is a pale shadow of its former self. Even as a nonbeliever, this strikes me as a truly profound loss.

Even as I wrote this, I felt no closer to being a believer myself. Things began to change in 2017, I suppose, when I wrote a short blog post with the cheeky title, “Could God have evolved?” The argument was something to this effect: our technology today would look like magic to people of 1,000 years ago. But what if we are staring down the barrel of an AI-boosted technological boom (sometimes called the Singularity)? Imagine another million years of societal evolution, supercharged by AI:

But what if there is some alien race that has evolved past where we are now for millions of years. Imagine that there is a billion-year-old superbeing. Is such a being possible? Consider the invention, computational power, genetic engineering, and other technological marvels we’re witnessing today. Many sober heads think the advent of AI may usher in the Singularity within a few decades. What happens a millions years after that? Could the being or beings that evolve create moons? Planets? Suns? Galaxies? Universes?

The conclusion of the post is not that this is what has happened. The conclusion is that if it is conceivable that a billion-year-old superbeing could bring about the existence of a universe indistinguishable from this one, then it ought to be conceivable that God exists. I was struck by this as a response to my “no concept” agnosticism (discussed above).

I then went through a couple of years with the uncomfortable thought that one of the central supports for my agnosticism had been knocked out from under me. This was unsettling, but not alarming. I never jealously guarded my unbelief. I never feared becoming religious. I was just unable to, because it struck me as entirely unjustifiable.

There was one last waypoint in the intellectual part of my journey back to God. In 2019, I wrote two more philosophical essays, a 7,000-word essay on ethical theory titled “Why Be Moral,” and a companion piece, “A Theory of Evil.” These are accounts of good and evil that root it in the natural value of life. I concluded the latter essay this way:

What makes humanity loveable, and what inspires the most devotion toward heroes and leaders, is the capacity for creation, the ability to invent, build, preserve, and restore whatever is good, i.e., that which supports and delights flourishing, well-ordered life. What makes evil individuals worthy of our righteous anger is their capacity for destruction of the good, due to their contempt for human life as such.

If so, then the love for God may be understood as a perfectly natural love of the supremely creative force in the universe. For what could be greater than the creator of the universe, and what could be more loveable? And then it certainly makes sense that they would regard Satan as a force most worthy of our hatred and condemnation, since Satan is held to be an essentially destructive entity, the one most contemptuous of human life as such.

In both essays, I positively mention Christian connections to ideas I was merely exploring. When I wrote this, I was not signaling a new belief in God—I was still quite agnostic. I was merely appealing to whatever Christian sentiments the reader might have in support of the theory of evil (and good, on which it was based) that I had developed. Sometimes nonbelievers do this. Nevertheless, it’s true that this showed a change in attitude that had come over me. Whereas before I had been merely skeptical and cool toward Christianity, I now felt warm toward it. I had come to morally approve of it—it was not just tolerable, but positively likable.

The essay about evil was written in the summer of 2019, reflecting what had become a temporarily obsessive interest of mine: the horrors of the Jeffrey Epstein case were coming to light, and I had discovered that there have been groups of powerful, wealthy, and famous people who systematically raped children.¹¹ Before 2019, while I had railed against Internet pedophiles, I had never heard of the notion that rich and influential pedophiles might be organized in criminal conspiracies to commit this most horrific of crimes. Like many at the time, the very idea filled me with a kind of existential horror. “What kind of world must we be living in,” I asked myself, “if our institutions allow this to happen with impunity?”

At the same time, I came to wonder if some such people took a keen interest in the occult, a topic that had never held the slightest interest for me. A friend of mine spent much time persuading me on this point, recommending any number of books about the occult that would make, for example, certain fashionable Hollywood religious movements clearer. I started reading those books and watching some videos, but I couldn’t get very far into them. I am not entirely sure what restrained me, but the following line of thought had much to do with it: These people actually believe this weird stuff, obsessed with symbols, ritual, secrets, secret societies, and supposedly-ancient stories of gods. Yet it involves belief in actually-existent spiritual beings that can cause real-world effects. There were references to “sex magic,” an ancient and apparently ongoing practice. But this, some evil people apparently believe, becomes more potent when it involves sex with minors. That might explain some of the organized pedophilia. Historically, some of the people who pursued such occult ideas were brilliant and powerful.

What followed?

I drew two conclusions. First, if the occultists had spent all this time and taken such risks on such weird and reprehensible practices, then perhaps there is something to the very idea of a spirit world, which undergirds these practices. What if they engage in such hellish practices because there is actually something to the idea? I did not say so (nor do I now). Just ten years earlier I would have scoffed. But I had become disturbed enough that I stopped reading those books, even critical books about the occult—because to learn about the occult just is to be inducted into the occult “mysteries.” After all, one of the things that one learns about the occult and its various secret societies is that they believe the knowledge itself is potent, that it opens doorways to the spiritual realm. If there was one thing that was clear to me, it was that I wanted such doors, if any there be, to remain firmly shut.

The second conclusion I drew is that, as my friend said and as was evident to me based on what I already knew, many of the occult ideas were perversions of ideas and themes in the Bible, the practices themselves dating back to Biblical times. This was a very weighty consideration. I thought that if I were going to learn anything about the occult, then, it stood to reason that I should first read the Bible cover-to-cover, this time for reasonably good understanding. I wanted merely to understand it on its own terms, that is, as its believers understand it. That would, I thought, help me to understand what the occultists were reacting to. I did not, of course, set out to convert myself. But one thing I told myself (and my friend) is that, if I started believing a spirit world actually existed, I would immediately believe in God, and I would certainly want to be on his side.

I begin to read the Bible

Such thoughts were percolating in August and September of 2019. But it was not until the following December that I was looking for some bedtime reading, when it occurred to me, “I did want to read the Bible eventually. Why not that?” So I decided to go ahead and start.

I am not sure why I began to read the Bible so obsessively and carefully, as I did. Being trained as a close reader of difficult texts—the history of philosophy—I knew when I was not understanding properly, and now, finally, I did want to understand. Soon I was considering various Bible reading apps, including one that made it especially easy to find notes on particular verses as one read.¹² I made heavy use of this, looking up unfamiliar names, poring over maps, reading definitions of archaic words. I adopted one of the YouVersion Bible app’s easy-to-use 90-day study plans.¹³ I immediately made Bible study a serious hobby, so that a month later I could write “How I’m Reading the Bible in 90 Days.” I found a number of different study Bibles and commentaries, especially the ESV Study Bible and the notes by Jamieson, Fausset, and Brown.

When I really sought to understand it, I found the Bible far more interesting and—to my shock and consternation—coherent than I was expecting. I looked up answers to all my critical questions, thinking that perhaps others had not thought of issues I saw. I was wrong. Not only had they thought of all the issues, and more that I had not thought of, they had well-worked-out positions about them. I did not believe their answers, which sometimes struck me as contrived or unlikely. But often, they were shockingly plausible. The Bible could sustain interrogation; who knew? It slowly dawned on me that I was acquainting myself with the two-thousand-year-old tradition of theology. I found myself positively ashamed to realize that, despite having a Ph.D. in philosophy, I had never really understood what theology even is. Theology is, I found, an attempt to systematize, harmonize, explicate, and to a certain extent justify the many, many ideas contained in the Bible. It is what rational people do when they try to come to grips with the Bible in all its richness. The notion that the Bible might actually be able to interestingly and plausibly sustain such treatment is a proposition that had never entered my head.

I also, fairly soon, started “talking to God.” This was experimental. After I had lost my faith as a child, I nevertheless continued occasionally pretending to dialogue with a supremely wise being about various issues in my life. It was a kind of therapy, a kind of play pretend with an imaginary friend (that is more or less how I put it to myself). So, I did that more explicitly now, but with God, being of course aware that this is suspiciously like prayer. I never once thought that the thoughts that appeared in my head were any but the products of my own imagination. (I still do not: I am not a prophet.)

What I would say now is that I had already begun to believe in God, but I was not ready to admit it to myself, nor could I easily reconcile it with my own philosophical commitments—especially not with my methodological skepticism. As a result, I wrote several documents, trying to explain various things to myself. If you will bear with me, I will next try to summarize some of the main thoughts I had then, which were instrumental in my coming to believe in the God of the Bible. Perhaps others, situated as I was then, will find this interesting.