A journey from atheism to faith: A conversation with the Christian Atheist - Podcast Episode 154

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Welcome to the Got Questions podcast. On occasion we like to bring on a special guest to talk about a topic or an issue or even like a worldview that's of particular interest to our audience or things that we get a lot of questions about.

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Joining me today is Dr. John Wise. He's the creator, producer, host of the

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Christian Atheist podcast. So John, welcome to the show today. Thanks for having me

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Shay, I really appreciate it. So both the Christian Atheist, that's a very thought -provoking title in itself and I've read a little bit of your testimony.

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So why don't you introduce yourself to our audience and tell them about the ministry, the calling that God has on your life.

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Okay, one of the common comments that I get about our podcast is, what kind of a moron are you?

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You're an oxymoron. So the idea of the Christian Atheist, I meant to be provocative in precisely that sense because it is paradox and I think that the thing that I open every podcast with is, welcome to the

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Christian Atheist where faith and reason fuse in the Incarnation. And the

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Incarnation is one of those things that we can't really understand. How does the infinite become finite and still maintain its infinitude?

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And so I tried to capture some of that in choosing that name, the Christian Atheist, but I spent 25 years as an

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Atheist. I had just begun my PhD work at the

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University of California, Irvine, and previous to that I had done four years of Bible College, planning to become a minister.

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I had studied philosophy with one of my professors at Bible College, and by the time

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I graduated from Bible College, I was well on my way to agnosticism. And so I didn't think my career choice of being a pastor was so good at that point, because most congregations would prefer their pastors to be more certain about the nature and belief in God.

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And so I started a program in philosophy at the University of California, Irvine, and one day

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I was walking across campus in my first year, and being an agnostic, I finally said to myself, no, there is no

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God. And from that point forward, for the next 25 years, I just considered myself an

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Atheist and taught as an Atheist as I got my degree. But as I say in the podcast, events were conspiring and God was working.

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As I look back now, it's very clear, it wasn't at the time, it was just, you know, me learning about philosophy then.

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But it became very clear in 2019, when one day

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I was sitting in church, that's a story all by itself, but I was sitting in church and the pastor was preaching on Joshua, and a lesson that I'd been teaching for years from Socrates popped into my head.

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And the lesson was this, if you want to know what someone truly believes, watch what they do.

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Don't listen to what they say. And I applied it to myself. And suddenly, and it wasn't a religious experience, and as far as I'm concerned,

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I've never had a religious experience at any time in my life that would qualify as some sort of, you know, religious experience.

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So I've never had that. But at that moment, it was a realization, I'm not an

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Atheist. I've never lived like an Atheist. Because an Atheist believes that there is no transcendence.

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And I've never lived like that at any point in my life. And I almost, at that point, stood up and stopped myself in church, stood up and thought to myself,

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I'm not an Atheist. And it struck me then, that something was sincerely wrong in my viewpoints.

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And the reason I had become an Atheist, why I made that switch back in the early years of my graduate work, was that I was familiar with C .S.

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Lewis's work, and in particular, The Magician's Nephew, in which he presents the woods between the worlds.

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And agnosticism seems to me to be a woods between the worlds. It's a place where it's kind of sleepy, and you make no decisions, because you don't have any reason to jump into one pool or another.

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And I thought to myself, here I am in agnosticism. I spent the first 25 years of my life as a

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Christian. I began to have serious doubts about Christianity, because it seemed to me I could never find the certainty

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I was looking for. And I felt as though, as a Christian, in Bible College in particular,

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I was trying to convince myself of the reality of God, rather than really believing it.

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At that day in my graduate studies, I said to myself, stop being a coward. There either is or is not a

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God. That's the nature of binary logic. Make a choice. And I said, okay,

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I choose. There is no God. And from that point forward, there was no looking back.

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Although there were times I had deep regrets about that, because my family was Christian, my wife was

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Christian, and I knew I was hurting them. And so I felt that deeply. But as I told

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Christians who have talked with me since then, there was something like a switch that had turned in my mind.

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And even though in later years, 2015, 2016, 2017, when

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I came to realize that the rational case for theism was actually stronger than the case for atheism,

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I still couldn't make the switch. But I just came to believe that there was no path back for me.

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In 2019, my wife, who had been diagnosed with Parkinson's in 2013 and put into a nursing home in 2015, died.

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I went to New York with my daughter, and I met up with my niece. Very salt -of -the - earth Christians.

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Loved them. Adored them. Always have. But I didn't share their faith. Talked to me again and said, wait a second, who in the world are you?

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Who have you been all of your life? What is it that you've done? Have you ever acted like an agnostic or an atheist?

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Or have you always held on to the truths? And I, of course, just said, well yeah, of course

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I did, because those are the things that I were brought up in. They seem to work well, and they seem to be the sort of structure of the world in which we live.

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And she said, that sounds an awful lot like something a Christian might say. Yeah. I said, there's no way back for me, though.

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That'll never happen. But during that week, God was working seriously on my heart and my head.

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And about a week after we returned from New York, I made the switch.

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And what stood before me was not two intellectual positions, because for me, the intellectual thing had already been settled long ago, having reviewed the evidence.

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What stood before me were two value decisions. One in which the world made sense, and in which value was eternal and real, and one in which value was merely epiphenomenon.

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And it became clear to me which one I should choose. And that was the turning point.

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Not immediately, but slowly. And first I came back to theism, obviously.

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The idea that there is a God is not only rational, but it's the rational position that I want to hold.

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And then, because my life had been Christian all before that, it collapsed back into Christianity.

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But there were even questions moving forward from there. So that's my testimony.

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Jenny and I married in August of 2019, and decided immediately that we wanted to dedicate the rest of our lives to proclaiming the message of Christ, in one way or another.

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And so we launched The Christian Atheist, our podcast, in 2019, the end of 2019. We have almost a hundred episodes of The Christian Atheist now.

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It comes out every week. And we're continuing to build the ministry. We just put out our first book, and if any of you are interested in my testimony, the real story behind all of this is well documented in here.

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So John, thank you for sharing that. I always love hearing the story of journeys like yours, where,

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I mean, being someone who's a, not on your level, but a fairly deep thinker myself, and have had to think through these things intellectually, and not that the intellectual part is the deciding factor, but for me it's a major factor.

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I could not be a Christian if I did not find it to be intellectually tenable, if I did not find it to be coherent, if I did not find the arguments for theism to be stronger than arguments for atheism, and the arguments for Christianity being the one true faith versus all the others.

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So intellectual arguments play a huge role for me, but at the same time, also fully cognizant of what the

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Bible says, that without faith it is impossible to please God, and we must even believe that God exists.

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Even the very first step is a step of faith, ultimately. You said something earlier, kind of hinted on it twice, that,

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I don't know, this could be an entire episode, or a series of episodes itself, but maybe just what is the one theistic argument that, as you were on your journey from atheism back to theism, that maybe was the most convincing for you, the one that really made you think, you know what,

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I'm finding that the arguments for theism are stronger than the arguments for atheism. Okay, so I actually have an episode on, like, the arguments for the existence of God, and I don't find any of the sort of traditional arguments for the existence of God to be,

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I mean, useful maybe, but not all that powerful, and certainly would never turn an atheist over.

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What convinced me was the nature of value in the world, because either value is real, and it's something objective, something that we can grasp, and something that carries on beyond the human psyche.

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It's not just something we create in the mind, whether as individuals or as a culture.

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It's something objective and real that we find in the universe. That seems to be self -evident to me, and if it is self -evident, where in the world does that come from?

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Because if we're living in a materialistic world, in which everything is that, just material reality, then all of this thing that we call love and value and beauty don't exist.

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They're simply epiphenomenons that evolved with consciousness, and that to me is utterly repulsive.

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I don't want to live in a world like that, and if I'm forced to choose between two visions, one that says that that's exactly the nature of value, and the other that says no value is real, it's actually bounded and founded in the nature of a transcendent

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God, I choose that one. And I think that human psychology, human life, and the human psyche are just grounded in that as a fundamental human reality.

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And that I actually took probably most powerfully from studying the work of Jean -Paul Sartre, who ended up as an atheist all his life.

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But I learned so much from studying being and nothingness about the nature of human consciousness, and the acknowledgments that even

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Sartre himself made that this points to a transcendent God. It's like, okay, and I put that together with all the other things, and I often get the question, you know, what was it that turned you around?

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It wasn't one thing, it's the whole picture. And I do think belief in God is the only way to put together a coherent, a truly coherent rational picture of human experience in this world.

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I love the ontological argument of the cosmos. I was looking like, what was it for you? And just the value principle that ultimately atheism, there's nothing of value in the world.

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If you follow that mindset to its logical conclusion. Now, having listened to a few of your episodes of your podcast,

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I haven't read your book yet. I definitely want to do that. We'll include links to both your podcast and where people can purchase your book in the show notes, in the description on YouTube, and also at podcast .gotquestions

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.org when this episode goes live. But one of the things you focus on is, maybe

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I'll phrase it as a question. So, John, what is wrong with the world? If you've listened,

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I mean, I'm not sure how far you got into it. But this is actually a question when we were going back and forth, you asked me, what should we talk about?

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And what came to mind was G .K. Chesterton was once, I think, by an editor, sent the question, what's wrong with this world?

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And Chesterton put into a letter that he sent immediately back to it, two words, I am.

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And I thought that's pretty clever. And I do love G .K. Chesterton. Well, I'm actually in the process of reading his

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Everlasting Man right now onto our note, not our compromise,

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Simple Gifts podcast. So if anybody's interested in listening, go to our

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Simple Gifts podcast and listen to it. It is an amazing piece, extremely influential on C .S.

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Lewis. So, for me, I agree with G .K.

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Chesterton, right? I am what's wrong with the world. We all are, because we are all sinful creatures.

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And yet, I mean, for me as a philosopher, this was actually one of the questions that drove me into the study of philosophy.

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And I think I actually found the answer in graduate school. And it's almost as simple as G .K.

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Chesterton's. What's wrong with the world is Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, a philosopher that nobody reads anymore, almost no one understands when they do read him, and has faded into the annals of history almost never to be heard from, other than by some of his most famous followers, the

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Marxists. But Hegel's fundamental contribution to the

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Western world was to take the transcendent, that is, that which is outside the world, the religious notion of a

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God who stands above and outside creation and brings the world into being, and to immanentize that, that is, to bring it all down to earth and say, no, everything is just the process of becoming.

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There's nothing outside of the process. And in fact, God is the process.

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His famous book, Phenomenology of Spirit, is exactly that.

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It's that attempt to reduce all things in our world to an explanation that is simply within the world.

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And so, the destruction of transcendence is, I think, what's wrong with the

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Western world. It has invaded our first, our academic institutions, and utterly destroyed them.

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And it's now invading the church, and we see it in our culture all around us, in wokeism, right?

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Because if indeed there is no transcendent boundary placed into the earth, placed into the world, into the universe, into the cosmos, by a transcendent

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God, then there are no real boundaries, and we can choose whatever we want. So if I want to be a woman tomorrow,

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I can choose to be a woman. And that is, of course, utterly ridiculous. But that's the logical outplay of the

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Hegelian philosophy that began, was promulgated, and slowly but surely has infiltrated our culture and our world from back in the 1830s when

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Hegel died. So that's a, you know, I told you, you'd have to rope me in when

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I start wandering off, so. Not at all. I mean, I enjoy conversations like this because they make me think as well.

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And again, we're not going to touch on so much, but really what I wanted to do in this podcast, introduce our listeners to you.

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So listeners, any of you who enjoy philosophy and enjoy a good philosophical conversation,

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I'd strongly encourage you to subscribe to the Christian Atheist Podcast. Dr. John Wise is an excellent communicator, a deep thinker, and also someone who's dedicated to pointing people towards Christ as the answer, and that's what

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I appreciate most about it. So John, you said something that's real brief, and maybe this can finish up our conversation.

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You said that the Hegelian mindset, the lack of transcendence, is infiltrating the

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Church. In your observation, what are some of the ways you see that happening? The way in which

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Hegel, I think, is infiltrating the Church. One of the things we saw in the

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Southern Baptist Convention is that it started moving towards accepting some of these woke ideologies.

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And also, another thing that seems to bother me, I'm still a university professor, and so I teach at the

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University of Arizona Global Campus. And inevitably, in every class,

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I have students who come in, proclaim that they are Christians, and no reason for me not to believe it.

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They seem to be perfectly decent people, and Christians, and believe in God, and they express that.

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And that's exciting for me, because I can now get on board with my students who are

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Christians, but almost all of them are following the woke ideology.

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They're on board with abortion.

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And so, these ideologies that have slowly crept in, and are undermining the

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Christian structure of the West, that has brought us to this point where we've actually almost defeated poverty in the world, all of that structure that we've built on the

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Christian understanding of the world, and is slowly being undermined, is also being undermined in the

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Church. And I ask myself, how are we failing to teach these students that it is

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God who gets to make the call as to what is right and what is wrong? It's not something that is relative.

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And if you disagree with it, it doesn't change God's position. And so, that worries me deeply, because,

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I mean, almost, Shay, almost every Christian student that I have is on board with all of this leftist agenda that is undermining our culture.

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And it's terrifying. I do my best in my classrooms to push back a little, but I've gotten in trouble with my administration.

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Don't turn our classroom into a Sunday school. And of course, I never try to do that. But I can't help but speak the truth as I see it in my classroom.

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And so, I fear for my job. But even more, I fear that we're losing the battle for the culture and for the values of the

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Christian world. And I don't know. I mean, I'm not deeply involved in trying to trace out how the end times unfold.

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But this certainly seems reminiscent of a lot of the things that are going on in the end times before things start to come to an end.

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And I don't know, but I think it's our job up to the very end to push back, to point people to Christ.

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And that is the only way that we come back from this, to turn back to transcendence, to the real

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God of the universe, who gets to make those calls, not human beings.

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Absolutely. I could not agree more. Even in, GodQuestions has been around for 21 years now, and even in that time,

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I have seen a massive shift in the questions. Not the questions themselves, but in the way people are asking them and in the way people will respond.

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Even just recently, someone asked a question for which the Bible has an absolute direct answer. I give them the answer, and they're like, oh, it's great that you hear what the

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Bible say, but what do you think about it? I think you're misunderstanding the purpose of our ministry here.

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It's not to give our opinions. And ultimately, my opinion on this issue is based on what the

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Bible teaches. Everyone's opinion is equally valid.

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How Christianity can have it your way. I love the stories about Jesus.

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I love the idea that He died for me to pay for my sins, but should that really impact the culture around me?

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How could it not? How could you want to compartmentalize your life so that Christianity has such a limited factor in how you live your life and how you respond to the world around you?

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It's shocking. It's distressing. Exactly what you were saying is that how can you possibly hold to what you just said and then hold all these beliefs?

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I wouldn't say it makes sense, but they don't even see why it doesn't make sense and even worse, why it can't possibly make sense.

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Right. Let me make one point on that one, because this points back to my claim about Hegel. One of the fundamental transformations that Hegel wrought was to undermine the logical structure of the

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Western world, the Aristotelian logic that has the law of excluded middle. That is, it's either true or it's false.

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And Hegel says, no, it can be both true and false. In other words, contradiction is not logically impossible on Hegelian logic.

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And this is the way of thinking that we see all around us, just like you just presented it.

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It's like, wait a second, I just told you what the Bible says. You understand that I believe that the

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Bible is telling the truth, the truth, the transcendent truth. And then you ask me, but what's my idea about it?

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Here's the truth. This is what I believe is the truth. There's your answer. And you don't get to choose what it is, and neither do

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I. We simply have to accept what God said, accept the reality of the world that He built for us.

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And part of that reality, I get in trouble for this all the time, is that there are men and there are women.

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And you can't blur the distinction between the two. It doesn't mean there aren't some weird things that sometimes happen in nature, but the distinction is there.

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And we don't get to decide what it is. It's not a matter of, oh, I can choose in the face of the evidence.

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No, the evidence is clear. The reality is clear. The truth is clear. All you have to do is conform yourself to it.

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So that worries me. Yeah, it worries me too. Believe me that. So, John, thank you for coming on the podcast today.

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And again, if you're looking for a podcast to listen to, including videos on YouTube to watch, that'll make you think, that will make you think about what you're observing in the world and maybe help you to understand better what you're observing in the world and why it's happening that way.

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Could not more strongly recommend the Christian Atheist with Dr. John Whyte. So, John, thank you again for joining me today.

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And we'll include links where you can learn more about his ministry, his podcast, his book, so you can find all that more.

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That will be available when this podcast goes live. Thank you, Shay. I really enjoyed it.

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It's been the Got Questions podcast with Dr. John Whyte of the Christian Atheist.