[00:00:02] Speaker A: It's whether there's good evidence to place our faith in the thing that we have, because we put our faith in all kinds of things in this world. Can it bear the weight that you place on it? You know, Jesus says he's conquered death, and those that follow him, the same will be true for them. Now, that's either true for all of us or it's true for none of us. And it's worth finding out, because if it's true, it changes everything. And really, it changed everything for me.
[00:00:34] Speaker B: Hello and thanks for joining in. I'm Janna Harmon, and you're listening to the ecsceptic podcast where we hear unlikely stories of belief. Each podcast we listen to someone who has once been an atheist or skeptic, but who became a christian against all odds. We were formerly known as side b stories, but we've changed to ex skeptic. We still have the same great content, but now with a different name. And we hope you like it. You can find more of these stories on our ex skeptic
[email protected]. dot that's exkeptic.org and see more of these amazing stories on our YouTube channel. If you'd like to be part of our new ex skeptic community and receive our emails, provide feedback, or ask questions, you can sign up on our website. Again, that's exsceptic.org.
oftentimes we are immersed in a world where we absorb the prevailing narratives around us, at our home, among our friends, in our classroom, and in our culture. We tend to believe what those who are in authority, especially intellectual authorities, teach us and tell us. And many times those narratives dismiss God, particularly when it comes to the sciences. As the story goes, science and faith do not belong together. In fact, there's no need for faith at all to understand the world and to understand ourselves.
In our story today, neuroscientist doctor Sharon Dierks was raised in a secular world where religion played a minimal role. Intellectual authorities led her to believe that science and belief in God were incompatible until she began investigating the verifiable claims of Christianity. She came to see that a robust, integrated belief in God and science was possible. Not only that, but that God informed all of reality, including her own life. I hope you come to listen in.
Welcome to the ex skeptic podcast. Sharon, it's so great to have you with me today.
[00:02:41] Speaker A: Thanks so much. It's brilliant to be here.
[00:02:44] Speaker B: I love that you use the word brilliant. It's so british, so very british. As we're getting started.
[00:02:53] Speaker C: I'm sure that the listeners have already picked that up a bit from you, that you're from the UK. Why don't you introduce yourself, tell us a bit about you?
[00:03:03] Speaker A: Yeah, sure. So.
Well, I live in Oxford now.
My journey, my story is that I have a background in brain imaging and functional MRI. I did a PhD in that at the University of Cambridge and spent ten years in the field of neuroscience, studying everything from human cocaine addiction to some of the methodologies undergirding what functional MRI is measuring and so on. So prior to that, I did biochemistry undergrad, so I'm very much kind of steeped in the sciences.
Yeah. So. And for the last 1520 years, I've been speaking, communicating, writing around questions of faith that people have and trying to communicate some of the reasons why belief in God is credible and worth considering.
[00:04:06] Speaker C: What a privilege it is to have you on with me today, someone who has obviously done the hard intellectual work of understanding the reasonability, the grounding for the christian worldview. And I love that you like to use your giftedness and your intellect and your education in such a powerful way around the globe to let others know that God is worthy and incredible belief. So, thanks so much for coming on with me today, and let's get started back in your story, because you're here on this part, podcast, as a former skeptic. And so I want to know where that skepticism was grounded, where it began. Where did you grow up? What was that culture like? And your family?
Was God or religion or religious education or any of that part of your upbringing?
[00:05:07] Speaker A: So, yeah, I grew up in the northeast of England, which is about 250 miles north of Oxford on the east coast, not too far from the scottish border.
And I would say that my background was kind of religiously neutral. I had a very loving, very kind of stable, secure childhood home.
But spiritual things just weren't really talked about either way. And what that meant was there weren't any. I didn't really know anything about the christian faith, literally didn't know anything.
But equally, there weren't any bad experiences or associations with Christianity that later had to be kind of undone.
So I describe it as kind of just not really having a religious component to it at all.
I mean, I remember going to Sunday school maybe a handful of times, but I always remember feeling a bit uncomfortable because I just wasn't familiar with it. I didn't have a Bible, so when they got bibles out, that was a bit alien to me.
Yeah.
So it. It was just kind of neutral. I do remember as a child. And it's something that I talk about in my work on human consciousness that I. Because I didn't mention in my introduction, but I've also written three books on the kinds of questions that people ask. And one of them is, am I just my brain?
And in there, I describe sitting by a window as a bored child on a weekend one day, watching the rain splash against the window. And there are many days like that in the UK because it rains a lot here.
And suddenly a series of questions came into my head.
Why can I think, why do I exist? Why am I a conscious being?
It seemed like I had an awareness of my own existence, of my own consciousness. And what's interesting is I wasn't one of those kids that was asking loads of deep questions and having conversations at home. These questions just seemed to come from nowhere. And yet they were powerful and significant to the extent that I still remember them today as part of my journey.
So that happened around, I don't know, between ten and 13. I can't really place it precisely.
And then the next important thing to know about me was that even though I didn't really know what I believed, I knew what I loved at school and I loved the sciences. I decided as a teenager that I wanted to be a scientist and I loved that. And I probably worked a little bit too hard.
And I really looked up to my.
I really looked up to my a level biology teacher because I went on to study biology, chemistry and maths at a level which in the UK are the exams that you take to get you into university or college.
And my a level biology teacher gave me a book by someone called Richard Dawkins and it was called the selfish gene. And this was just a few years after it had come out and it was obviously doing very well at that point. And I read this book and somehow just absorbed the view that we are just gene machines, that there's just the material and that's all that it means to be a human being, and that the purpose for our existence is really in passing on our genetic material to the next generation. And the important thing is that our genes survive and make it on and on in life. And I just. I just absorbed this view. And that's something that's interesting to me, that I didn't wake up one day and decide, I'm going to get myself a worldview or a religious belief or a perspective on the world.
I just absorbed it from people around me, from books that I was given, from magazines that I read, from tv and radio and so on. There wasn't any social media then, so I didn't have that and I didn't critique this view. I just assumed that it was the way that it was.
And I arrived at university to study biochemistry, assuming that we were material beings and that science and God were not compatible. I didn't really know precisely what I believed. I probably would have described myself more as an agnostic than maybe sort of a very vocal kind of skeptic or ardent atheist. I just didn't really think about it that much. But when I did, it was to say that, well, you clearly can't believe in God and be a scientist, so you have to choose between those two things. So that's how I arrived at university.
[00:10:40] Speaker C: Even through all of that, you were absorbing information from authorities that you respected. Intellectually, you were entering into the scientific worldview. It seemed to make sense to you, especially as someone who, I guess, was driven towards the sciences. Now, you said that you went to Sunday school occasionally, so it was somewhere dotted in your world, religion. And I know in the british system, oftentimes you're given some forms of religious education, but it seems oftentimes a little bit removed from any kind of practical sensibility. But I wonder through this whole time, and I know UK is fairly secularized, generally speaking, were there any christians in your world at all that were showing you a different kind of way to think about?
Not only that we might be more than our brains and that we are more than matter in motion or whatever this kind of reductionistic view was, were they showing you something different, or were they even giving you an alternative explanation that perhaps belief in God and science can coexist or even be integrated?
Were there any alternate views or people in your life that were pushing against this narrative that you were buying into?
[00:12:18] Speaker A: So. And before I arrived at university, not at all. And that's something to really note, that there are parts of the UK and there are people that, you know, there was no christian union in my school. There was no kind of arena to even know that these sorts of conversations were possible. So, I mean, it wasn't until I arrived at university that they used to put catchy titles, the Christian Union, on the stairs going up to the dining hall. And I would see these, and I'd literally never seen these before. I'm like, who are these people that ask questions about life? Because it just hadn't been a feature of my. My schooling, my upbringing, certainly not the philosophical questions that, that you raised. I did have christians in my life. I was part of a youth group in my high school years that I largely went to because of friendships and romantic interests. And so, you know, I was just, you know, happy to be part of this group. And for me, it was ticking a box. And maybe, you know, in a funny way, I thought, well, maybe this makes me a more rounded person because I'm. I'm checking the religious box here, and I've got all these other things that I'm doing as well now. I think there were. There were people in that group that would have called themselves committed christians, and I did have some deep conversations with them, and actually, I know that one of them had been, you know, praying for me for a long time, and.
But it wasn't about science and God, and it wasn't about whether we are just our brains or matter in motion. That kind of came later. They were kind of astonished when I called them up a few years later and said that I'd become a Christian.
[00:14:18] Speaker C: Yes, no doubt.
So you're at university, and I guess the christian union was a novel idea to you, perhaps, or that you hadn't noticed it before, but you take us from there. You were about to turn the corner.
[00:14:39] Speaker A: Yeah. So in my very first week at Bristol University, they hosted an event called Guerrilla Christian, which was basically four christians sitting on chairs in a row and a room full of people who were asking them whatever they wanted.
And this was an important part of the beginning of my journey, that asking questions is okay. And kind of christians that are worth their salt want to try and give responses to people's questions, because if something is true, it is worth, you know, it's worth asking questions to find out whether it's true or nothing. So I put up my hand halfway through this evening, grilling Christian, and asked, surely you can't believe in God and be a scientist at the same time.
And I was given the answer that actually, yes, you can. And saying that science is in conflict with belief in God is a bit like saying that the software program and processes that undergird Instagram is in conflict with the existence of Kevin Systrom, its founder and CEO.
And of course, those two things are not in conflict. In fact, together they give a more complete understanding of Instagram. And if you try and understand it just with reference to the software and the processes, you end up with a diminished understanding. And it's the same with God and science. The study of the mechanisms in the natural world is not in conflict with belief in the one who set it all in motion and continues to uphold it today.
And I'd never heard anything like this before, and it really opened up a whole horizon for me of asking more questions and grilling more christians, which I did. Over the subsequent 18 months. I spent spent a lot of time chatting to my then friends and flatmates and roommates about the christian faith, and we would have conversations on our staircase late into the night. And I also went to a course where I could ask questions, and I probably gave them quite a hard time actually just asking. But again, it was a key part of my journey that there were places for me to do that and there were people that were willing to listen, sit with me and help me.
[00:17:32] Speaker B: I'd like to take a break from our story to share some amazing feedback. We've been hearing about our podcast at Xsceptic. We love hearing from you, our listeners, on how this podcast is impacting you. Like someone from Pittsburgh in the US who says, this is such a helpful and encouraging podcast, it is helping me engage more with my skeptical family and friends in a meaningful way. Thank you for sharing these stories.
We also recently heard from another listener who said, thank you so much for this podcast. Three out of my four children are atheists or agnostics, and your podcast has helped to lift me out of despair and given me hope to pray again. They've also given me insight and more wisdom on how to interact with my children and others.
We hope our stories and advice from former skeptics have been as meaningful for you as they have been for these two listeners. If so, we would love hearing from you through our
[email protected] or through our website. We would also greatly appreciate your taking the time to rate, review, and share our podcast on your podcast platform so even more people can benefit from these compelling stories and wise advice from former skeptics. Now back to our story.
[00:18:46] Speaker C: I think your inquisitive mind, your desire to know what is true, served you very well. Because I'm sitting back here thinking there are so many people who just believe a paradigm or science and God.
They are foes. They are not friends.
They do not go together. Either you're scientific or you're religious. Either you're reasonable and rational, or you're deluded and you know that kind of thing. And they don't take time like you did to really start asking those kinds of questions. How do they go together? How can one make sense of an integrated view? What kinds of questions were you trying to get answered in terms of how to understand the integration of a faith centered view or a God centered view which is also grounded in evidence and rationality, but also this agency mechanism paradigm where there are actually two kinds of sources of knowledge in a sense, that can go together in a beautiful way.
How were you kind of moving through this journey? Do you remember any specifics that you were wrestling with?
[00:20:17] Speaker A: Yeah. So, I mean, a really important one for me at that point was the creation evolution question, because I was studying biochemistry where kind of, you know, certainly molecular evolution was part of our bread and butter, you know, that this was a process that was taken as fairly kind of standard and just happening, and let's study it. And so, you know, and again, I think I kind of heard somewhere that, you know, that christians believe certain things about the Bible or.
And how to kind of reconcile that with belief in God. And, of course, recognize that christians hold lots of different views on how they make sense of the opening verses of Genesis. But first and foremost, it's not a scientific textbook.
It's not giving a scientific account. It is giving an account of things that actually happened, but not in a literal, scientific way, and in parallel with kind of creation stories that were happening and being written by other nations of other beliefs at the same time. And so it was also very helpful to me that one of my lecturers was somebody that held a view that actually evolution is something that can be thought about and wrestled with and is not necessarily incompatible with Genesis, the opening verses of the Bible. At that point in my journey, that was really helpful to me because it released me from this hinge point of feeling like, is it God or is it evolution?
Is it my subject of study, or is it the existence of God? And here we are back to this sense of there being. It being binary and there being this need to choose between these two things.
I think, looking back, that God wanted to kind of free me from that. That's not a decision that I was being expected to make.
And of course, you know, there are today, yes, there are young earth creationists, there are old earth creationists, and there are evolutionary creationists that would take those verses, those opening days of Genesis, to be evolutionarily long periods of time. And so that was helpful for me to know that there are options there. There are different ways of thinking about this. So I did have to wrestle with that.
And, of course, there were questions about kind of, you know, lifestyle and what it means to be a Christian. And I. Yeah, I mean, all kinds of things.
[00:23:19] Speaker C: So were you wrestling? It sounds like you were accepting the possible reality of God and looking at how it might interact with your scientific beliefs. But were you even wrestling with questions, say, with regard to the existence of God to begin with?
[00:23:41] Speaker A: Although I would, yes, I was. And I, in these courses that I was involved in, we were looking at, you know, the accounts of Jesus life and the kinds of things that he said and did, and, of course, whether or not we could trust those documents.
And I remember reading another book that I can't even remember its title now, but showing me how I could actually trust the documents of the New Testament, of the Gospels. And if you want to throw them away as unreliable, you actually have to do that with most other, if not every other historical document that there is about any other historical event, such is their reliability and trustworthiness. And I remember reading that and thinking, why hasn't someone told me this earlier? It seems like it's the world's best kept secret.
And so after coming to a realization that these documents, that the New Testament could be trusted, that it hadn't been changed over time, I then began to read its contents and discover this person, Jesus, that said these extraordinary things and said that he was going to die for people, for their wrongdoing and rise again and defeat death and evil and sin.
[00:25:14] Speaker C: I was thinking, as someone who had bought into Richard Dawkins narrative, that we are our genes, are we just, our brains are only our physical selves. And you, prior to college, had bought into that sense. It sounds like that we are natural beings in a natural world with natural causes and effects.
And you're telling me that when you read the Bible that it was a grounded historical document, that.
But in the Bible there are things that are more than natural in nature. You know, there are things that are supernatural. There are claims as if you. You know, you just mentioned that Jesus Christ died and rose again. That's a very strong claim of a supernatural being coming into a natural world, you know, defeating death, rising again through a supernatural power. So, you know, there's also that paradigm shift that had to be made, moving from a reductionistic view. It was, I guess, too, yeah, I.
[00:26:35] Speaker A: Think I would describe myself prior to arriving at university, not as a. I wouldn't even know what the word materialist was. I don't think it was articulated that clearly in my head. I think it was just that I didn't really know what I believed, which meant that probably it's. Although I held this view about science and God, it wasn't deeply researched or necessarily strongly held, but it was my thought, my loosely held belief. But I think I probably would describe myself a bit more as a bit of a blank slate, rather than someone that needed to switch positions from a to b. I was more like, I don't know if anyone is truly neutral, but as I try and think about. I mean, I just. I wasn't negative. That needed to go positive. I was more like zero, if you see what I mean.
[00:27:35] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:27:37] Speaker A: Which probably meant. And because as I think back on it, some people, when they looked at my journey to faith, they said it seemed to happen in a quite straightforward way.
Of course, they only saw, really, the last couple of years of it. They didn't see the, you know, the years building up. But maybe part of that is that there wasn't anything to undo. There wasn't this kind of virulent kind of opposition that I had intellectually committed myself to.
[00:28:10] Speaker C: Oh, yeah. Yeah.
I love, again, that you were open to the possibility you. It sounded like you were making the best decisions you could based upon the information that you had, and.
But yet when you encountered that, there was more to think about, that you were open and willing to investigate that.
[00:28:34] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:28:35] Speaker C: Yeah. And again, that is so admirable in a day that sometimes people aren't as open to say, let me take a closer look, and then it doesn't feel threatening. It sounds like it didn't feel threatening to you. It actually felt inviting to you to figure this out. Is there more, you know, can I make sense of this? Can I make sense of a God infused world where science exists within it? You know, that it fits actually pretty nicely. So as you were going along and you were having these wonderful conversations and just exploring, what were you finding or what were you deciding or what?
[00:29:19] Speaker A: I was discovering more about the kinds of things Jesus said.
I was seeing more of the lives of the Christians around me and how they were living and the difference that it made to them. Because one of the things that happened very early on was that in my hall of residence, the person living next door to me very quickly kind of owned her childhood christian faith, if you like, and decided this was something she was gonna. It was gonna be part of her life, not just something that she walked away from. And then another friend became a Christian in the first year, and then I moved in with them both and another girl who was Catholic in our second year. So I was the only person who wouldn't describe themselves as a Christian in the house.
And one of the things that happened for me was that Sunday evenings were really boring because they all went off to church, and I stayed in the house myself.
And so, funnily enough, that that sort of thing played a part.
It's very interesting, as I reflect back on it, because some of the other things that really impacted me were experiential.
So I remember going to a carol service. So we love carol services in the UK, something that we do around Christmas time. We have whole evenings dedicated to singing carols, which seem to have a different tune, same words, different tune to in the US. I'm not really sure what happened there. But anyway, my friends invited me to a carol service, and I had done a lot of music growing up. I played the violin, I played in orchestras, I'd sung in choirs, I'd sung Handel's Messiah as an agnostic.
[00:31:39] Speaker C: Okay.
[00:31:40] Speaker A: And that's probably part, you know, I wonder if that's part of it as well. Some of these words just kind of just mulling in the background in my consciousness.
And so I was in this carol service and I appreciated the music, which was extremely high quality, but I was just aware that there was more going on than just music.
I could see that there's like, there's something else happening here. What is that?
And of course, what I didn't realize that it's what christians refer to as the Holy spirit, the way in which God is present with his people today. And so that's what I was experiencing at this carol service. And so that was really significant for me to kind of encounter God, which is another way of thinking about him. And it's another form of argument, if you like, and there are philosophers and talk about the argument from religious experience, that if God is real, he can be known, and he can be known in a real and experiential way.
[00:32:53] Speaker C: Absolutely.
[00:32:54] Speaker A: I guess that happened to me as part of my journey.
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[00:33:50] Speaker C: You were having the conversations that made it seem as if it might be worthy of belief as true, but also, experientially that God was showing himself as palpably real and worthy. And even probably, it sounds like, attractive to you in some way. I mean, when you experience the presence of goddess, that can be almost an overwhelming thing that draws you closer towards belief. So walk us on from there, then.
[00:34:33] Speaker A: A key moment again, another key moment for me was that my friends, my flatmates, had invited me to join them at church for their service.
And I said to them, I'm not going to come to the service because I've got an essay to write. So I'm going to stay home and write the essay, but I will come and join you for your student group that meets after the service, because I knew that that's what they did.
And so they went off to church. I stayed home and wrote a biochemistry essay, and then I jumped on my bike and I cycled to their church to join their student group.
And it's kind of bizarre looking back on it, because who does that?
And there was a sense when I was getting on that I think that might be the moment that I made my decision. I mean, I think there were a series of moments, but this was a significant one. And I had a sense that I wasn't just cycling from a to b. I was actually going home.
There was something about what I was doing. I was actually going home to my heavenly father into a relationship with him, a friendship with him. And so it was kind of this momentous thing. And it was also not that, just that I was choosing, but that I was being drawn, drawn in. Both were happening. It wasn't one or the other, but I was choosing and I was being drawn in. And so.
And then I began to. So that was that moment on that day. And after that, I began to begin to read the Bible with someone from this church.
And they helped me walk through some early stages of what it meant to be a Christian and what exactly Jesus had done on the cross by dying and rising again.
A key verse for me. I mean, I was really a workaholic. I really got very stressed. But psalm 27 carried me through. The Lord is my light and my salvation. Whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life. Of whom shall I be afraid? The sense that I didn't need to be afraid of the things that I was afraid of before that. There was a peace available to me and a strength available to me because Jesus had carried all of the mess and all of the kind of sin, what christians call sin on the cross so that I could live free of the hold of that over my life.
And that had all kinds of outworkings at the level of relationship breakups, how I handled those outworkings, how I handled my work and handled work stress. And, yeah, there were just so many different practical ways in which that became reality in my life and made a difference.
[00:38:09] Speaker C: Yeah, that's wonderful.
I can even. There's something about you. There's something about your presence that you do exude both, I think, the peace and the strength of Christ.
I don't know, it's almost palpable. But your beautiful ambassador, an example of what I think, what it can look like to be in Christ and to have that. I mean, I love the way that you talked about you felt like you were going home to your heavenly Father, that it feels as if you are at home with him, you know?
And I love the mutual choosing.
It's such a beautiful story, Sharon, and it sounds as if you have not only found this really full and abundant life in Christ and living that out, and praise be to God, to the young women that he brought into your life, to kind of guide you in that direction especially. I'm just finding that so ironic.
You tell us of, really, the secularized nature and the vacuousness of God in your life growing up, but yet there you were with three roommates, or flatmates, as you call them, who actually, we're drawing you also towards God. That's just incredible. I think that he does see us individually, and he does orchestrate things in our lives to help us see who he is. And he obviously, for that with you, I'm just thinking of the skeptic there, like, okay, she's really bright and intelligent. She's credentialed and agreed to. She's elite. You know, in terms of, you know, Cambridge, you live in Oxford, you're. You know how.
I know we kind of touched on it before, but if somebody came to you today and said, I just don't know how science and faith can go together, you know, I'm.
I just don't. I just don't get it.
I don't see how you can believe in both. And how would you. I know we kind of touched on it before, but. But how would you answer that to, say, a skeptical person who's pushing against you?
[00:40:35] Speaker A: Yeah.
Yeah. Well, in addition to what I've already talked about in terms of Instagram and Kevin Systrom and the processes. I would also, in regard to faith, I would say that actually everyone has faith in something.
If we take faith to be that which we trust in, or place our trust in, everyone has faith in something and they exercise that faith not blindly, but on the very basis of evidence.
And so we might have a high level of faith in a family member or a friend because of their track record, you know, of being trustworthy, or we might have a low level of faith if they've let us down repeatedly. Either way, the level of faith is proportional to the evidence to support it.
And it's no different with religious belief, with belief in a divine being, and in particular the Christian God. Actually, when people put their faith in Jesus, it wasn't a blind thing. It was actually on the basis of the evidence that they saw for his life, the way he treated people, the way he was as a person, and then the way that he seemed to have authority over the forces of nature by healing people and raising them from the dead, and then went on to die and rise himself.
And so when people put their faith in him, and that's nothing to say that faith in the christian framework is in a person, not in a proposition or a set of exercises, but in a person for whom there is good evidence, that's on the basis of evidence. It's the thinking thing that you do.
And so the question is not whether faith in and of itself is irrational, because actually everyone has faith in something, but whether there is good evidence to warrant the level of faith that we've placed in that thing. And I came to realize that there is good, there are very, very strong grounds for placing our full weight, for leaning completely on the person of Jesus Christ. And that's something that I didn't throw my brain out of the window to do. I exercised it in order to reach that conclusion by looking at the evidence for the resurrection, looking at the trustworthiness of the gospels, looking at whether, you know, the existence of God makes more sense of the world than if he doesn't exist. The reason why we seem to have moral sentience, or the reason why the universe exists despite its extremely unlikely beginnings, or the reason why we have minds that can even make sense of the world, scientific and religious thinking and so on. So I used my mind to draw conclusions about who I was going to put my faith in. And of course, that was Jesus. And so I guess I would say to the person asking that question that it's not faith itself is the thing in the dock. It's whether there's good evidence to place our faith in the thing that we have, because we put our faith in all kinds of things in this world, can it bear the weight that you place on it? You know, Jesus says he's conquered death, and those that follow him, the same will be true for them. Now, that's either true for all of us or it's true for none of us. And it's worth finding out, because if it's true, it changes everything. And really, it changed everything for me. It did change my whole life. It was probably little by little, but it did filter through to every. Every area of life. For me.
[00:44:36] Speaker C: That's just beautiful.
Wow.
So if there are, Sharon, if there are curious skeptics who are listening, who are open and willing, like you were, to ask more questions, to look at the evidence that may be there to see if there's something solid to stand on, how would you encourage them? Or what advice would you give to someone to take a step forward in seeking after truth after God?
[00:45:15] Speaker A: Well, I would firstly say that there may be christians in your life that have been kind of walking alongside you as just a friend or whatever. I would probably go to them first and I ask them if they have, you know, particular recommendations. There's a ton of things online. There are all kinds of really helpful materials online. There's OC at the Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics with lots of different material. I know there's the CS Lewis Institute where you're based, Jana. And there are things like Sean McDowell's podcast.
There's also unbelievable, premier, unbelievable in the UK.
I mean, there are so many different ministries who have content online that can be easily accessed. There are books as well. I'm sure that there are lots that you recommend.
Somebody that I probably would recommend is Simon Edwards has a book called the Sanity of Belief, and that's actually a book that he wrote to his 14 year old self when he was more skeptical about the world as well. So I don't know if that would be a good starting point. I have a book called am I just my brain? If that's something that is a question for you.
And there are. John Lennox has got all kinds of helpful books. Can science explain everything?
And many others.
Yeah. So there are lots of resources, and I'm sure they could get in touch with you or me. I have a website, dirichs.org, dash.org.
and there's a way to contact me through that. And I'm sure, Jana, you have ways of doing that as well.
[00:47:15] Speaker C: Yes. Yes, absolutely. Thank you for making yourself available. And for those excellent resources that you've already mentioned, I think, like you say too, just talking with or finding a Christian near nearby, someone who is actually solid and authentic in their faith and understands why they believe what they believe, a good place to start. So for those of us as christians who really do want to make a difference in the lives of those who do want to walk alongside those who are asking questions or whatever, or you had mentioned too, earlier in your story that you encountered some christians that seem to be living out their faith in an authentic way, that was winsome and attractive. I wondered how you could commend us as christians to live, to be, to engage with those who are questioning perhaps, or just don't believe.
[00:48:17] Speaker A: Yeah, I think that. I would say that it's really important to be aware of the kinds of questions that our friends are asking and to equip ourselves. There are resources that we can go to that give us a bit of a grounding in terms of how we might respond to those and being mindful that, and you mentioned already, the UK is really quite secular, and I think possibly some parts of the US are heading in that direction as well. And so we need to have ways of responding that don't require someone to start with the Bible. We need to have actually questions that we can ask our friends and thoughts that we can conversational topics that start elsewhere in kind of philosophy and kind of what is it that makes us human, you know, and why do we exist, where do the most persuasive explanations lie and actually be comfortable with a level of conversation in that arena before we may even get to the person of Jesus, although that is ultimately where we do want to get to.
And so a little bit of equipping of ourselves and also learning to ask good questions, I think we've tended to give monologues, but actually we need to learn to have dialogue, and that requires asking good questions and learning about the person and having a conversation. And Jesus was brilliant at this. He asked a lot of questions.
Even when he was given an open door to give a standard kind of answer, he didn't necessarily give that. He asked a question. And that in doing so, that opened up a whole part of someone's heart in terms of where they're at. So learn to ask good questions and then finally pray. Prayer changes lives. Prayer changes the world. I believe I became a Christian partly because people were praying for me. And I don't quite quite understand how prayer works, but I believe it is powerful and effective and so be faithful.
[00:50:53] Speaker C: In prayer as well, yeah, that's wonderful. Again, so solid and so real, I think just listening, being there, being ready, you know, to know the kind of questions to ask when you've heard from the other, you know, to know how to guide them in the right way. But prayer, yes, it's, I mean, this, this is ultimately the Lord's work. And you've done a beautiful job of showing how he drew you to himself through prayer, through so many experiences and conversations. When I think of your story, you know, I think of that ten to 13 year old girl who was sitting by the window looking outside and reflecting in such a serious way for a young girl, asking those big questions and just thinking about the way that he led you even on this path, intellectually, to answer those questions. But ultimately, he brought you to himself to answer those really big questions, to give you more than the reductionistic view that you had been given to a more full and beautiful view of humanity, who you are in Christ. And that it's, it's just so satisfying, both intellectually and, you know, for your whole life. Again, you're sitting here as this beautiful woman of God that it's so clear to me that God has done just this holistic work in your life over time, you know, through this process. And now you are sitting here as, again, just an appointed ambassador to demonstrate his grace and his truth for all to know and that you've invited everyone to know. So thank you so much, Sharon, for coming, for telling your story in such a beautiful way. You're so articulate and it's, it's just such a joy to hear your story and I know so many will be blessed through it. So thank you for coming on.
[00:53:15] Speaker A: Oh, pleasure. Thank you for having me.
[00:53:17] Speaker C: You're so welcome.
[00:53:19] Speaker B: Thanks for tuning in to x skeptics to hear Doctor Sheeran Dierigss story. You can find out more about her website, books and recommended resources in the episode notes for questions and feedback about this episode, you can contact me through our
[email protected], dot. Also, if you are a skeptic or atheist who would like to connect with one of our guests with questions, please contact us through our website and we will get you connected. This podcast is produced through the CS Lewis Institute and the help of our wonderful producer Ashley Decker, audio engineer Mark Rosiera, and Ministry assistant Lori Burleson. You can also see these podcasts in video form on our YouTube channel through the excellent work of our video editor, Kyle Polk. Jordan Harmon is our amazing graphic designer. If you enjoyed it, I hope you'll follow a 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 will hear another unlikely story of belief.
