G1 Conference Session 1: Dan Biddle and Andy Hidalgo "Ex-Atheist Testimony"

So Andy, we have known each other now for five plus years. I'll never forget meeting you at one of the conferences that we did.

I think it was at a hotel, it was like a three week series that we did. And I remember meeting you out in the parking lot and you gave me some really unique background and incredible testimony.

And ever since I heard it, I thought we need to have more people hear this because your journey was really from not only being, from not being neutral, from not being agnostic.

I understand that you were an atheist. And then by God's work and through his word and in time, you made a huge jump across the chasm.

You went from atheism to person of faith now. So I was just hoping you could fill us some in that big picture and tell us what that journey looked like.

Yeah. So I grew up as kind of like a Christmas Easter Catholic where you go

Christmas and Easter and that's pretty much it. I'd never really had a demonstration of the gospel.

And by, as you're probably not surprised, by junior high, high school, I would say

I was about an atheist. Although I wouldn't say I would wear the badge of atheism because it wasn't really something that you belonged to at the time.

It's not like today where you can go on Google and Twitter and find atheists everywhere.

It was a little bit more spread out back then. So around after high school,

I met my wife and we started dating. And she had told me that if I wanted to date her,

I would have to come to church. And at the time I had done the whole church thing. So I was okay with it.

And in the back of my head, I'm thinking, okay, well we can just deconvert her slowly and then we'll move on.

So fast forward, we're married. I'm an atheist and I'm going to church.

So our pastor at the church had either knew someone or was aware of somebody who acquired some

Dead Sea Scroll fragments. And they had brought them to the church to put them on display. And during that time, they presented on how the

Bible came to be. How did this library get leather bound and show up here as one giant book?

This was all brand new to me. I'd never seen any of this information before. And I had learned from school, from movies, from TV, that the

Bible was a book of fairy tales. It wasn't actual history. And so now to see that, wow, Paul was actually a person and he was actually writing to the

Corinthians, which were real Christians in a place and time in history. This was enough to just tear the rug out from under me.

Later on, as the church is continuing to do a little bit of apologetics, the pastor challenged the church to say, hey, you need to know what you believe and why you believe it.

And I had to admit to myself that I didn't know what I believed and I didn't know why I believed it. So I did something

I had never done before. I prayed and I said, okay, I'm gonna go to the atheist side and I'm gonna look for everything that they have against you, against the

Bible, you being God, and against Christians in general.

And I still feel a little embarrassed about it because I'm sitting here telling the creator of the universe what

I want him to do. But anyway, so that was his half. And then I said, okay, what

I was going to do was I wasn't going to accept that there was no answer as an answer.

And I didn't realize at the time, but in the future, that argument would come at me again and again and again, because they would present an argument and then it would say that Christians have no answer to this.

And I had to rest on that promise of, okay, I'm not gonna accept that. I'm gonna go and dig, I'm gonna listen to the other side and I'm gonna weigh these things and really flesh it out.

And if you think of my journey, if you think of a map of the world, think of that map completely blacked out.

You can't see anything on the map. And then think of wherever you are in the world is lit up. Imagine you went to another country and then that part of that country would light up.

And then anywhere else you go, they start to light up and you start to see more of the map. That was what my journey was like.

And it started off really, really was really looking back, it's really simple things. But at the time it was earth shattering to me.

And those were just simple claims of Bible contradictions. The main claim to the type of argument was that the

Bible is internally inconsistent. And so why would you believe something that's clearly written by a bunch of different people?

It has no overarching author whatsoever. And so as I'm going through those, it's interesting looking back because I had to read more of the

Bible as I'm dealing with these kinds of arguments. Good lead in. So it's very interesting how

I feel very led through this whole thing because as I'm looking now at the map of this journey, there's a lot of lights lit up all over the place.

And I'm looking at where I started and where I started, they were really easy.

And I'm looking at all the other things. I'm like, that would have totally destroyed me. That would have totally destroyed me, but I never got those.

It was as if I was kind of being led through the easy stuff first to kind of build me up so that way I can deal with the other ones later when

I had a little bit more strength in me. And so that was an interesting thing there.

But one argument came later, and I'm gonna try to quote this as best as I can.

It was a debate between an atheist who I can't remember his name, between him and William Lane Crank a really long time ago.

And he said, if there was no Adam and Eve, then there was no fall.

There was no original sin. If there was no original sin, then there's no need for a savior. And if there's no need for a savior, then

I submit to you that that puts Jesus historical or otherwise into the ranks of the unemployed. And I think absolutely that evolution is the death knell of Christianity.

And this was hitting so hard for me because everything prior to then was something that was over there on the table.

I didn't have a personal stake in whether the Bible was internally consistent or not, but I already believed in evolution.

So to say that evolution was the thing that makes the Bible wrong, all of a sudden I'm like, I have to now either be inconsistent with what

I just said that I was gonna investigate, or I'm gonna have to put something I believe on the table.

And it was very, very, very stressful at that time. You got skin in the game at that point. I had skin at the game at that point.

And so that sparked the journey of just going through the whole creation evolution debate.

And I found that at a certain point, I could no longer hold on to evolution as a story of the history of the world.

And I remember there was this period of time where kind of in my mind, I saw myself, and then it was as if the camera was backing out to where you can see the world, and then you can see the galaxy, and then all of a sudden the whole universe.

And I'm like, this is a God -created universe. And that became my worldview.

And it was at that point that I could really give myself over, and I could surrender to God because now it was true enough to me that I could give myself over to it.

Wow, that is fantastic. So take me from there, from the point where you realize there is a

God or a divine creator, what was your journey like going from there through different Christian camps on perspectives on origins to becoming a biblical creationist?

What was that journey like? So the interesting thing is that the atheist community drove me straight to a reading, me reading

Genesis by myself, and then them arguing against the young earth creationists.

The argumentation that they used was that the Bible is inconsistent with the world around us.

And so that put them in stark contrast between evolution and stark contrast between the age of the earth being 4 .6

billion years old. So I had jumped straight into the young earth creation camp and seeing like, okay, you two defend each other, or debate each other on this and see which side is better.

And I fell into the young earth camp. Only later when I started to try to share my faith, did

I suddenly realize that Christians, like even in my own church, didn't believe that the earth was young.

And I started asking questions about people, anyone that would answer, hey, so what do you believe about Genesis?

What do you believe about this? And I was horrified. I'm like, you guys are accepting the atheist origin story.

And the apologists who are pushing evolution, the apologists who are pushing old earth, even if you don't believe in evolution, you just believe in old earth.

They were asking me to accept something I had already rejected. They were asking me to accept the origin story of atheism, that the world essentially made itself and reject what the

Bible, in my mind, clearly taught. Okay, so it sounds like you were then at that point able to take the biblical narrative on top of the origins account and evidence and overlay the two and they seem to match tightly.

Yes. Whereas you saw some of the other camps were like, no, what is the story of the evolutionary mindset and worldview and how can we now wrap that or curve that around the

Bible? And you saw an inconsistency there. Yeah, all throughout the Bible, you have a problem because let's say you take

Genesis one and you say, okay, well, a day doesn't have to mean a day. Okay, fine. Well, in Exodus, it does say that in six days, he created the earth or the world and it rested on the seventh day.

So in Exodus, we know what a day means. And if you're gonna say, well, the structure of Genesis is not actual historical narrative, it's something else.

Well, okay, we have the same structure in Exodus at the dedication of the tabernacle. When you have each tribe coming forward and bringing their gifts, it's structured in the same way that Genesis one is.

So is that not real history? And then you have the problem of, well, Jesus is talking about marriage.

He's challenged and he's asked about marriage and he says, well, haven't you read from the beginning, he made them male and female.

And this is one of the ones that I haven't really seen a good argument on the other side, where they say, well,

Jesus said from the beginning, he made them male and female. Well, if evolution is true or if long ages is true, it's not the beginning of creation.

It is well towards the end. And there are all these little inconsistencies all over the place where you start to break the

Bible. And though the individual person might be fine with those inconsistencies, it's their children that the atheists come after, whether it be through the schooling or whether it be through the evangelist atheist who go out and talk to people, they're talking to the kids of the people who are holding these beliefs and they're seeing the inconsistencies.

That's very good. Let's talk about family for a minute. As you become a

Christian and you align yourself with holding to the creation account, how has it impacted you as a dad and as a family man now?

So, yeah, my worldview is interesting because coming from atheism,

I didn't get rid of all my atheist beliefs all at once because they didn't just didn't come up.

So as they come up, as you, I have four kids now, as they've come up little at a time,

I've slowly had to dust them off and say, well, is this really something I should be hanging on to? No, how should I think about this biblically?

And that's been an interesting journey. And I feel very passionate about learning as much as I can because I know that my kids are going to have to deal with these things.

And if I don't know how to defend these things, they're not gonna know how to defend these things. And so training them up and teaching them from an early age, what the arguments are gonna be, slowly bringing them kind of like same through the same journey that I went through.

I'll challenge my oldest sometimes and I'll just put the atheist hat on and I'll argue from the point of view of an atheist and I'll let him fester for a little bit and then help him work through those things later.

And I think that's so important because as they go grow up and they go off into the world, they're gonna experience these things.

And if they're not prepared, they'll be swept off. So as a dad, you're intentionally creating some tension between their worldview and what the world is teaching to say, hey, dwell on this place of uncomfortableness for a while in this tension.

And then you come back with the biblical creation perspective and pull them back into it.

So I think that's very, very important. We see a lot of parents that just teach creation, creation, creation, it's all they get.

But by the time they're 18 or 19, they don't know enough of the atheists and the evolutionary worldviews and arguments to be able to stand strong.

They go off to college and it's usually after the first year that they get their faith erased. They come back and the self -pronounced atheists,

I don't know how many times I've heard parents say that in their journey while I raised my kid, they went to Wednesday night youth group and we went to Sunday church together and everything.

And then I send them off to whatever secular institution. And after the first semester, they came back

Christmas and they no longer believe it. It was a philosophy teacher, geology, whatever it was. An informed atheist knows the

Bible better than your kids do. And they can turn it against you very easily if you don't know, if you've never dealt with these things before.

And so, yeah, getting this stuff at them early so they have time to deal with it in a safer environment is very important, absolutely.

That's great. Yeah. All right, well, thank you for coming on today. We appreciate this and we'll see you next year too.