[00:00:00] Speaker A: So I had some friends. I asked him, can I come to your home and can I pray for the first time, you know, in 10 years?
And that was a very important moment because I hadn't prayed to God 10 years. I didn't think God existed.
And in that moment I realized I missed. I missed God.
I was very thankful that God was patient with me and I experienced God again. It was 10 years. It's like 10 years without somebody in your life.
[00:00:44] Speaker B: Hi, I'm Jana Harmon from the Ex Skeptic podcast. Do you have intellectual doubts about God and Christianity?
This kind of skepticism can come after years of belief or prevent you from ever believing at all. We've Talked with over 120 former skeptics and atheists who've shared similar doubts.
That's why we've created playlists on our YouTube channel organized by themes like Is it rational to believe in God? Can you believe in science and God?
There you can hear from many others who've wrestled with similar questions. Questions find us on YouTube @x Skeptic and explore these playlists and others. Subscribe and share it because someone else might need to know that they're not.
[00:01:29] Speaker C: The only ones with questions.
[00:01:33] Speaker B: When welcome to X Skeptic. I'm your host Jana Harmon. And here we listen to unlikely stories and belief. Each episode brings you into the life of someone who once seriously questioned or outright rejected Christianity, only to find themselves drawn to it in ways they never imagined. For many, the rejection of God is rooted in reason. Especially for critical thinkers, belief can seem intellectually dishonest, something for those willing to trade logic for wishful thinking. After all, truth we must ground in what is observable, provable, repeatable and logical. Anything less is speculation.
Perhaps that's where you find yourself.
Jeff Guibel did as a math teacher. Trained in logic, steeped in proofs and driven by precision, he came to believe God no longer made sense for him. Though he once pursued faith as a teenager, he lived as an atheist for nearly a decade, convinced that skepticism and belief simply couldn't coexist.
But then, in a graduate level math class, Jeff encountered something that shook his confidence in pure reason.
The realization that even logic relies on unprovable assumptions, axioms, postulates, inescapable leaps of faith. That discovery launched a six year journey, one that would eventually lead him back to the very God he had left behind.
If you're ever torn between reason and faith, or assumed you had to choose one over the other, Jeff's story might challenge your assumptions and open the door to something more.
I hope you'll listen in.
Welcome to Ex Skeptic. Jeff, it's so great to have you with me today.
[00:03:16] Speaker A: Thank you for having me.
[00:03:17] Speaker B: Terrific. As we're getting started, would you please introduce yourself to our listeners, tell us a little bit about who you are, where you live, perhaps what you do for a living, maybe a little bit about your family.
[00:03:29] Speaker A: My name is Jeffrey Guibel. I go by Jeff. I'm a high school math teacher, public. This is my 20th year teaching.
I live in the city of Pomona in the Los Angeles county area.
I have nine living children. I'm happily married with my wife and currently I've come back to God and very, very happy to be back with God.
[00:03:56] Speaker B: Wonderful, wonderful. Do you want, if anybody's listening and they hear some noises in the background, do you want to explain what that is?
[00:04:02] Speaker A: So in our neighborhood we have peacocks, a lot of them, and this is their mating season and they are making lots of noise. So if you hear those noises in the background, it's peacocks with the big feathers doing their displays.
[00:04:16] Speaker B: So let's get started with your story. You said you just recently came back to God. Let's go back to your beginnings and talk about where your early days, your childhood and your family life and whether or not religion or God played a part in your family's life or even in your own.
[00:04:33] Speaker A: So going all the way back to when I was born to about the age of five, it's my understanding my family was going to a Baptist church near our house.
I don't really remember much. I do remember going to the nursery school and I have a vague memory of the pews.
But there was some trouble in my family. My parents ultimately got a divorce and by the age of five, I don't remember us going to church.
By the time I was 8, they got the divorce and there was no longer church that I can remember.
I've heard the term creasters. Christors is a term for Christmas, Easter Christians.
So at my mom's house, because my parents were divorced, she would pretty much go to church on Christmas and Easter. My dad no longer went to church, but they did send me to a Christian elementary school. So I had that Christian core from the elementary school that I went to even though it was more like cultural Christianity. At my house and my dad's house, he was a very stable, providing father, but he didn't go to church. He had a sequence of girlfriends over time, long term relationships and things. And I did not experience real Christianity from my dad's House and my mom's house was very chaotic. She had married an abusive non functioning alcoholic and that brought a lot of turmoil. The police, restraining orders, thefts, lots of turmoil in my life as well as my mom was.
She owned a decorating and entertainment business.
She did children's parties, which means from 14 years old I would dress up as characters and go to parties. As I got older, I became a clown and I would do Aladdin, you know, characters, I mean not me as Aladdin, but we would bring those characters and all these different characters to parties. But she also did adult parties.
And this means that strippers was part of my life.
Partying was kind of part of my life from a young age. I cannot forget when I was about 11 years old, for my 14 year old sister's birthday party, she had a male stripper. And remember we went to a Christian school that was in elementary school. And so that was quite the scandal. And I didn't understand scandal at the time. Looking back, I understand scandal, but I didn't understand at the time. I didn't understand why people's parents wouldn't want their children to, their friends to be around me or for me or for them to come over to my house. But that continued. My brother at his 18 year old birthday had a couple strippers. I would have been about 14 at that time. From when I was 16, that was part of the celebration. Sixteen forward, I would always have an exotic dancer or whatever. I didn't think anything of it. I thought it was entertainment because that was the way I was raised.
Partying and having fun.
I didn't think much of it. So I would not call it a Christian household.
More of a happy, go lucky, good times kind of home, but with abuse and alcoholism.
And so I had enough life experiences up into my teens to know kind of like what sin was and to know how bad it can get.
But I also had a little bit of Christianity kind of floating around.
[00:07:47] Speaker B: So through any of that, even on your own personally, did you ever believe in God as a child or even through adolescence? Was that any even remotely. I know you were only Christmas, Easter and there was some kind of vague reference there and, and even through sixth grade. But even through those years you're, you're old enough, I guess to develop an idea of, okay, they're telling me about God. Is this true?
[00:08:14] Speaker A: Yeah, I definitely accepted God existed. I didn't even think about it. I just assumed God existed. I started with the default assumption God existed. It was kind of a vague idea of God. This kind of cultural Christianity, type of God.
Not a very close concept of God, but God existed. And I didn't think a lot about it. That's the part that's kind of interesting for me is I. I just sort of took it for granted, but I didn't really pursue it very much.
[00:08:42] Speaker B: And it's interesting, too, that you. You mentioned that you had some kind of a concept of sin. I presume there was that in the background that I. It's, it's. It's interesting that you had entertainment in your home, but you viewed it as entertainment and nothing more than that. But there was no guilt or anything associated with it.
[00:09:04] Speaker C: Right.
[00:09:04] Speaker B: Because it was just something that your mother brought into your home. It was just a normal, natural rhythm of your celebrations.
So there was nothing really wrong with that. I guess in your mind there wasn't.
[00:09:16] Speaker A: But it's so interesting you should say that, because I didn't. I actually had a girlfriend at the time, and she would complain to me about the strippers around my birthday. And I thought she was being ridiculous. Said, it's just fun, it's just entertainment.
Now I look back, I think I'm a horrible person. But. But back then, it was the way I was raised. This was. This was part of our life.
She would audition strippers during shop meetings, and it was just something I grew up with. I thought it was normal.
[00:09:48] Speaker B: Okay, wow, that's interesting.
[00:09:50] Speaker C: And so.
[00:09:53] Speaker B: Obviously you.
[00:09:53] Speaker C: You moved in.
[00:09:55] Speaker B: This way of thinking, this, this, this was your world. It was your. Your worldview, I guess, was developing in terms of just living and what did you. Or just walk me through your story in terms of what. What came next? Did you go to college?
What. How else was your world and your worldview shaped beyond your family?
[00:10:17] Speaker A: Yeah, so when I got my license on my own, I drove down to a church just up the street from my mom's house.
My brother's friend had introduced us to the church before. My brother went to the military, and that was around 14 for me. But when I got my license, I went on my own.
When I look back, I don't know why I went to this church on my own. I don't know why I continued to go, but I know I enjoyed it back then. I don't think I really thought much about it. I just kept going on my own without any family involvement or anything.
But when I think about where I was at, there was turmoil at my house, there was police at my house, there was chaos at my house. And I think when I look back, I wonder if I Just liked that almost warm place. It was a nice place to be. It was a positive environment, even though I had a lot of chaos at my house. But I really don't know what caused me to go and why I kept going.
And I was very unchurched. That's a term I've heard before, unchurched. Even though I had that elementary school background.
But I started to go and I started to listen, I started to learn. And by the time I was in my late teens, around 18 or 19, I actually started to listen to the teachers were teaching and try to put those things into practice.
I refused the strippers at my 19th birthday, told my mom, please don't have those.
And that was a controversy in my family.
And I ended a relationship I had with a non believer because I had heard I was not supposed to be unequally yoked. And I started to follow God. And as I started to follow God, I began to experience real really neat and positive things in my life. And so I didn't know very much.
The pastor taught us that the Bible was like a love letter. And you wouldn't put a love letter on the shelf.
And I was kind of an am, kind of a romantic person in some ways. Some people would be surprised to hear me say that, but my wife would know this is true.
And that struck me as, oh, I have this book that I don't even read. So I began to read my Bible and as time went on, I began to learn about apologetics and I would go out evangelizing and for about five years, bringing me to about 25, I had gotten married, I was happy. Things seemed to be going really good. And I used to call it my escalator to God. It was just kind of a growing relationship with God. It was going really well. That gets me into my like 25.
[00:13:00] Speaker B: Okay, okay. So that was. I. I can see why you would be drawn to a church environment where there's something.
There's not disorder, there's order, and there's order out of chaos. Right. And a piece probably that you found there, I'm curious, during that time of professed Christianity, obviously you took it seriously. You were evangelizing, you were learning the reasons for why you believed what you believed.
It sounds like it was a pretty personal faith that you believed what you were reading in the Bible.
[00:13:31] Speaker C: Right.
[00:13:32] Speaker B: That Jesus was real, that God existed, that Christianity. I imagine that you thought it was true. It was obviously producing good things in your life. And so what happened then?
[00:13:45] Speaker C: Something happened.
[00:13:46] Speaker A: Something did happen.
And before I share that you've talked about knowing about sin.
I had experienced the really negative side of sinful life. And this new life I was experiencing was a joyous good alternative.
I came to enjoy no police at my house, no fighting, no drugs, no alcohol, none of these things. So I did begin to actually like the Christian life as opposed to the life I had been living.
But things were going great. But as I learned more, here's where things kind of took a turn.
I began to believe that what the church was teaching that I was at, was teaching was not actually scriptural. I started to notice the more I read the Bible, the more there was things out of alignment.
I began to pursue Greek a little bit and I learned about textual criticism and I learned that some of the things that people said about the Bible weren't exactly true, which caused me to question my leadership. I was able to accept the things I was learning. But what really bothered me was how come the people that are teaching me don't tell me these things? Why am I learning these things on my own? And why do they seem to contradict what they're teaching from the pulpit?
And these questions begin to deeply trouble me as to why is it that the leadership seems out of sync with, with scriptures?
And it was a deep question, how can these godly teachers in my life be so wrong in certain areas? And I don't want to get into the details of what I was observing, but I began to see clear scriptures that were teaching things different than my non denominational little mini megachurch I was going to.
And that didn't feel good at all. I was very concerned. How can these leaders be teaching things that aren't true in my opinion at the time.
And this led to me pray, praying on a Saturday, just deeply concerned, asking God, how can these teachers that I trust be so wrong in so many areas?
And then something happened.
It's very hard to explain, but I felt I was in the presence of God for approximately an hour in which I felt little taste of the glory of God.
And I was in tears and for about an hour and I just sort of sat there in the presence of God.
And this experience gave me a renewed hope that God was really real.
And, and despite these teachings being off here and there, there was a real and living God and, and I just needed to rely on that God and pursue that God.
Does that make sense?
[00:16:43] Speaker C: Yes, absolutely. Especially after you have a profound encounter like that that you can dismiss perhaps some failings of men and their interpretation or your teaching, but you can't dismiss the reality of God when you've sat in his glory for an hour.
[00:16:58] Speaker A: Yes, I haven't experienced anything like that since.
But it was a hugely transformative experience which I can't explain other than I felt I was in the presence of God for approximately an hour.
I was in my right mind because when my friend came over and he knocked on the door, I got up and said, hey, come here and pray with me.
He won't believe what's happening.
And nothing really happened after that, but I was completely in my right mind. I could hear my children playing in the yard. It was very real, but yet very cognizant. I was completely aware the whole time. So it was a powerful experience. It transformed my life.
[00:17:36] Speaker C: Yeah, I was going to say. So what did you do with this seeming discrepancy between the reality and beauty and presence and glory of God and that, with what you were hearing, did you stay in that church? Did you confront the leadership?
How did you wrestle with that issue?
[00:17:53] Speaker A: I did some small confronting of leadership didn't go very well.
And I was still struggling with what do I do with all that? That was still a struggle. But I really felt God was real.
And so this is where the story takes a dramatic turn. Surprising to me, probably surprising to anyone listening. About a year after that, I decided to go to my grandparents cabin up in Big Bear, which is the mountain city near us.
They have a cabin there, a vacant cabin. And I asked to go there and I went by myself to pray. And I thought, you know, Jesus would go into the mountains and pray. Right.
And I was really seeking that experience I had with God. I was, I wanted to be in God's presence again.
And I went out there alone and I prayed on a Friday night. And I. When I got tired I went to sleep and I woke up and I. And I just began praying. And after hours of praying I began to basically experientially hallucinate. I didn't see anything, but I'll explain. I was just praying on the bed and my eyes were closed and I was kneeling and I felt like my grandfather who had died was standing in the room next to me.
But I knew he wasn't there. So, so I kept praying, but then I had to check and I looked to my left and my grandpa was not there. It was just an empty room.
So then I went to try to pray again.
And after a period of time I believe there was an alien standing in the room, just like out of the movies, next to the bed.
And I thought this is ridiculous. I'm going to keep praying, keep my head down and keep praying. But I couldn't shake the idea that there was an alien next to me, as real as could be.
So much so I had to stop and look. So I looked and there was no alien.
Continued to pray.
And then I felt there was light beams shooting up from the ground surrounding the bed. Not like godly light beams, but just like light.
And again, I couldn't shake this feeling it was very real. And I had to stop what I was doing, open my eyes and look around to see if there was lights.
And then it hit me.
Whatever I could conjure up in my mind, I could experience.
And then I realized experience couldn't be trusted.
And all these experience I had at Church from 16, these positive experiences and all these, that experience I had the year before, I suddenly realized it was all manufactured in my mind. That was what I concluded.
And then I thought about all the doctrinal issues and things and I suddenly realized, you know what?
This is all fake.
The reason people are disagreeing and making differences in scripture and understanding and all that stuff is because it's just fake. It's just a made up religion.
These experiences I have are fake. This whole thing is fake. And that suddenly made sense to me, why there's all these differences in confusion.
The whole thing was fake. It was like an epiphany.
And I walked out of the bedroom, I fell down on the floor in the hall there and I wept because I didn't think God existed anymore. It was really surprising. I, I went to the mountains to meet God and here I am on the floor weeping because God doesn't exist.
[00:21:29] Speaker C: I'm sure in some sense it felt like the rug being pulled out from underneath you could be because you had found a somewhat solid foundation for life, for living. It had given you a good life.
And now that realization that it's not true. Yeah, that would have been incredibly disheartening. I can't even imagine.
[00:21:52] Speaker A: Oh yeah, and it's not funny, but it is kind of funny. I, as an atheist I had, remember I said as a child, I, I kind of took God for granted.
I, I always assumed God existed. And so this was like the first time in my life that I realized God didn't exist as well as even had that conceptual idea. And so I sat there and I, I began to look at the whole world differently, like, okay, wait a minute, there's no God. And I begin to ask questions like, well, where did everything come from then?
And you know, where did life Begin and there's a lot of questions, right?
And I, and I realized immediately I didn't have a lot of answers.
So I decided that even though I didn't think God existed, I would be an agnostic.
I settled in my mind in that moment. I really got uphold agnosticism because I don't have any answers to lots of questions.
And so I had to drive down that mountain knowing I was going to tell my wife that I was an atheist now and I didn't think God exists, but I was going to be living as an agnostic. It was a very sad day for my wife.
It was terrible.
I mean first it just seems random, right? If you think about the whole thing. I was on this positive experience towards God and then to come home an atheist so dramatically and you know, without any warning.
So it was very hard for her. It was hard for the few people that I told. I didn't tell anybody really only her and a few people.
But I, I did like, I do like my wife. I did like my wife at the time and I wanted to maintain my marriage and I wanted to, to be happy.
So. And I wasn't against God, I just didn't think God existed.
So I agreed to go to church with her on Sundays and to live the Christian principles. Besides, I had experienced the positive side of Christianity so I thought that the principles were good. So I thought, you know, these principles are good, I like them. I liked what they've done in my life.
God doesn't exist, but it'll make my wife happy if I go to church.
I wouldn't pray or anything as anything God existed, but I would go through the motions. The Christian, you know, morality.
And in truth I felt that if people were happy with their fake God, I sure was happy when I had my fake God.
I'm not going to bother them. I didn't want them to experience what I had experienced. Just let them be. So I was not a militant atheist.
I kind of kept to myself.
My family didn't know. I never told them. I just let people be. I actually didn't, wasn't excited about where I had ended up. And I thought maybe I was happier.
[00:24:37] Speaker C: Before, like you were saying, even just for pragmatic reasons, it's good to maintain this Christian way of living in order to maintain your family and your marriage and even just the fruit of living in those Christian principles.
[00:24:54] Speaker A: But I was new to atheism and I needed to test out my own beliefs.
I am a math guy. I'm a little bit of an analytical Thinker.
And I wanted to explore whether I really had this, this atheism. And I wanted to make sure it was good.
So at the time, there was a thing called Skype cast. You could open up a room and you could title it and you could bring people into it and discuss things.
And I recall I titled it how do you know?
And I maintained at that point in my life like an extreme skepticism.
So anybody who came into the room with any belief, even if it was atheism, I'd say, well, how do you know that?
If it was a Christian, how do you know that? Hindu, how do you know that? Spiritual people, how do you know that?
I was very antagonistic towards anyone's belief in the sense of questioning. How do you know? Because I actually wanted to know if anyone could know anything, because I certainly didn't know anything.
And as I listened to people's responses, in my opinion, I felt they couldn't justify anything really. And I started to settle into this place where I realized, oh, nobody knows anything. Everyone's just guessing.
We're all just in the place of making best guesses. And I was kind of getting comfortable with that. I called friends to meetings at my house and we discussed the most convincing arguments for God.
And I asked them to discuss it. And I discussed these and I listened.
And I found that everyone was ultimately just making statements. In the end, there was nothing grounded in my assessment.
And through all these different pursuits, I concluded that nobody could really know anything.
I reached a place of extreme skepticism. You know, do I exist? Am I brain in a vat? Is this a video game simulation? You know, you've heard all these things, right?
How could I know? I really settled into this place. How could I know anything? And I settled into my atheism that God didn't exist. And I settled into my agnosticism that people can't figure anything out. And that, that, that was for about four years.
[00:27:06] Speaker C: So, yeah, that's interesting that you, I appreciate that you were being intellectually honest with yourself and what you do know and what you don't.
I think that it's not an easy place to be, honestly. And I also appreciate that you were, you were opening yourself to anybody to convince you essentially of the grounding of their own beliefs. And I, and I also presume at this point, I know you had mentioned earlier that you had read some apologetics and any of those apologetics argument, it seems like at this point would have been ineffective for you or were ineffective seemed kind of moot. What was your view of if Someone would have presented I know because I know God exists. Because would any of those reasons resonated with you at all or had you reached a point, like you say, of extreme skepticism where really no one knows anything and we just need to accept that you know, that you can't know.
Like a Cartesian, you know, I know I exist, but beyond that it's hard to really ground anything with any substantive or certain knowledge.
[00:28:19] Speaker A: It's funny you should say that. I would have said I don't even know that I exist.
So the answer to your question is if you were to present something to me not in maybe I shouldn't have said antagonistic earlier, but if I said that, but, but if you were to say something, I would just ask you how do you know that? Whatever line would come out of your mouth, I would say well, how do you know that? And I discovered that nobody was able to get very deep. It's like the child that says why?
Why, why?
I discovered that if I just ask people how do you know that a few questions in most people would reach the ground, so to say, and there'd be nothing under it.
And I was, that's where I was at.
And I got comfortable with that. That was a couple years in and by the fourth year of this I had come to accept that was reality.
So what changed me was around that fourth year I decided to go back to school. I had a degree in math already, but I was going to get a master's in mathematics.
And there's a class called Math, 581 Studies in Geometry.
And in that class in the first chapter, because they're going to discuss the foundations of geometry. In the class they laid out how prep proof works. Now this is a 500 level class. This is the fifth year of math.
And I had gone through four years of math education without encountering what I'm about to share with you and this high level math class. This book said something very simple, but I think profound.
And I know when I talk about math, people's brains turn off. So if anyone's listening to this, I already know from experience as a math teacher, I said the word math brains shut down sometimes. So just anyone who hears this, just try to listen to this because it's not complicated, it's pretty simple and cool.
So in this book it said for a valid proof to exist, every statement that is made has to have a supporting reason.
I'll just pause there. That seems pretty reasonable, right? Statement, reason. If you've seen a two column proof in math that's the idea. Statement, reason. So the book said, well, the minute you give a reason, that's a statement, and it requires a reason.
And so it said, if you provide a statement and you give a reason, that's actually statement two.
And statement two needs a reason, which is statement three.
And statement three would need a reason, which is statement four. And it's an infinite regress problem in the book, laid out in this little paragraph. It's not possible to prove anything, because if every statement requires a reason, you have an infinite regress problem and no proof is possible.
So for every valid proof in mathematics, you must have some absolute axiom or axioms.
And you have to accept logic exists, which I hadn't even really thought about. I'm like, okay, I got to accept logic exists. I didn't even think about that. So you got to accept logic exists, and you have to have some axioms. What's an axiom?
If you go to my textbook in my school at the time, it said an axiom is a statement accepted without proof. I'll never forget that definition.
An axiom is a statement accepted without proof.
So to get the reasoning going, we have to start with what are called axioms. And axioms, by their nature are things. They're base assumptions that we just make at some level, we accept them and then we can reason forward from them, but without them, we can't reason. To reason, you have to have assumptions.
And it occurred to me that the reason no one could ever prove anything is, is because I didn't understand that.
I would. See, I would keep saying, how do you know that when the reality is, at some level, you have to have statements you accept, and then you reason forward from them.
So for the last four years of my life, I had been pursuing. Pursuing a fool's errand, as they say, right?
There was no way to answer Jeff Geibel's questions.
You have to have assumptions and you have to reason forward from assumptions for reasoning to occur. Is that making sense?
[00:32:36] Speaker C: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. There's certain, what I guess you would call brute facts about reality, like that you have a mind or the. The laws of logic, right, that you're using to reason from in terms of what they are. And.
But yeah, where they come from is a whole different ball game.
[00:32:58] Speaker A: That's right.
[00:32:59] Speaker C: They are certain axioms on their face that you have to. You have to have. Right. In order to reason.
[00:33:06] Speaker A: And that. That what you just said there was. My quest for the next six years was like, what axioms do? I choose because I Had realized once you choose a set of axioms, you can apply reason to it and you can go anywhere you want.
But how do you select those axioms? Ultimately, they're choices. At some level, they're choices, and the choices you make dictate what follows. And so I realized we have to have axioms for the reasoning process to work.
But these reasons, the axioms themselves are accepted statements. They're not proven statements. They're things you just accept.
Like, it's just wild that my textbook at the time, I think it had 29 axioms. So here at the back of the book had 29 axioms. And if you read them, those are all the statements that that book bases every single proof upon.
And it's almost like a religion of sorts, or almost like a monopoly game. You know, you set up the rules of monopoly and then you can play the game.
So you set up the 29 rules in the back of my book. Then you could do every proof that's in the book, but you could take some of those axioms out and get a different set of proofs.
It was very interesting. And that's what we did in that class.
And so I got on this quest of mine. Well, what are my axioms? What. What starting points should I begin with in this thing called life?
And remember, I'm coming from sort of radical skepticism, right? To a place where I'm realizing I got to accept some things. So now what do I accept? What are my choices? What do I start with?
And that was, keep in mind, I didn't come to act to Christ for about six years.
So that's a long six years of me shuffling axioms and wondering, what should I start with to begin this reasoning process?
[00:34:47] Speaker C: Even on some level, though, you had to accept that there were axioms, right?
That there, there even in your math class, in order to presume even to reason from those axioms, you. You had to agree, in and of yourself at least, that it was. It was a rational thing to do. That, I don't know, I guess it's like you say, there's this infinite regress that you can get back to a place where it's almost paralyzing unless you accept those facts about reality in order, like you say, to move forward.
[00:35:20] Speaker A: It was paralyzing and exactly what you just said. So now it was just a question of what axioms to choose. And for example, it became easy for me, rather than trying to prove what. This is very important, rather than proving whether God existed or didn't exist, I would simply Assume God didn't exist, and then kind of reason forward from what world would look like.
And then I would say, okay, let me try on another assumption. Let's assume God doesn't exist and just play with the reason that follows. And I came to the conclusion, and other people disagree with me. But for me personally, if I assume God doesn't exist as my axiom, I personally have no way of concluding that there's any meaning or value or purpose ultimately, and that we just make things up.
That's the place I always landed on as I reasoned that way. And then if I assumed that God did exist as an axiom, I could see how the possibility at least existed that the creator of the universe created this place with meaning and value and purpose.
So I could see how if I chose God existed. I could see how meaning, value and purpose followed as a possibility.
And if I chose God didn't exist, that I could see how there was no meaning, value and purpose. Now it's very important to keep in mind. It's like a game.
I didn't think God existed, but I realized I needed to make some axioms. And I actually didn't like the axiom that God didn't exist because I had to look at my family and my children and the life around me and my job as a teacher and all these things I'm doing all day long as ultimately meaningless. I actually enjoyed the idea that these things had meaning, that I wasn't just making up the meaning. So I decided in a strange move, I said, how about I just act like God existed?
And I'm one of those strange people who was an atheist who, who, who lived as though God existed. If you've heard of those kind of people.
I was an atheist who lived as though God existed because it allowed me to act like there was meaning in the world.
So I, I was actually, I was. I was content with my fake God.
I. I had accepted that, that this God just existed in my mind so that I could play like there was real meaning, value and purpose. And did that for probably five years.
And during that time I was actually, you know, attending church with my wife. And they asked me to teach the Sunday school for the little children from like five to seven. And I was happily teaching them things that I didn't think were actually true.
I would never pray, of course, because I didn't think God actually existed. But I certainly enjoyed acting like God existed.
It was kind of like having your cake and eating it too, right? I knew God didn't exist, but I could play along like he did and kind of live this little fairy tale. And then I went on this trip to visit a friend in Sacramento, about five hours north of us.
And he's an atheist friend of mine who'd also lost his faith. And he basically told me I was being ridiculous.
He told me in very straight terms that this is like a joke, that I'm actually living this out. He said, I'm an atheist and I accept there's no meaning, value and purpose.
And then I proceed to make it up.
You're an atheist, but you assume God exists and then you just make up your own meaning, value and purpose. And he's like, what's the point? Why add in that extra step?
Why don't you just bite the bullet and accept there's no meaning and value and purpose? Just make it up and live that way.
And for the five hour drive home, I thought a lot about this. I thought he was right, I was being ridiculous.
But I really liked living as though meaning, value and purpose existed.
And I, and I didn't want to accept the reality that there was no meaning or value or purpose to this life because I was experiencing the truth that there is meaning and there is value and there's purpose. He was kind of stealing away what I had in a silly little way created.
And so after years of living as though there was meaning, value and purpose, I had real trouble denying that there actually was and accepting the atheism that I, that I wanted, not wanted, that I really believed was true. And I had an epiphany.
Maybe it's all real.
Maybe these daily experiences of meaning and value and purpose that are happening all around me are valid ways to conclude what the axioms should be.
Maybe the day in and day out love I have for my family and my wife and my students and others, those experiences are valid ways to formulate axioms.
And I had got to the place where I realized I had to choose some axioms and, and you sort of just choose them, right?
I was like, why aren't I choosing to accept what's obvious, which is there is meaning and value and purpose? I, I started to realize I was denying my experience, that my atheism was denying my daily moment by moment experience.
And I sort of put it all together and I said, of course it's real.
And if I, I came up with an axiom around that time, which was something like this, if so, what I'm experiencing right now has some connection to what's real.
May seem like a baby axiom to You. But for me it was a big deal.
What I'm experiencing right now has some connection to what's real.
And if that's true, then the love I have for my wife is real and the love I have for my children is real.
And these day in a day encounters of meaning and value and purpose, that's all real. And I begin to settle into like wait a minute, this is all real. Now if meaning and value and purpose are real, I see no other way to get there unless there's a God somewhere in the mix.
So I, I, I, I accepted God exists because this world is so meaningful and I could no longer deny the meaningful novice. For those 10 years, I, I, I was trying to really believe there was no meaning, value and purpose. But I just, I, I knew it wasn't true.
And having experienced that it wasn't, it wasn't true.
[00:41:59] Speaker C: Let me just say that there's something to be said for our experience and, and our existential sensibilities of desires for, for love, for meaning, purpose, value.
But also the things like you say that we are experiencing in daily life, like I'm freely choosing in know my freedom of choice, that, that I think that humans are valuable, that they are that, that we have human rights, that there is such that the good thing is good and evil. These things, these, whether you call them intuitions or they feel like brute facts inside of us, you know that we just know that you know that these things exist.
But like you say, when you're looking at the best explanation or grounding for foundation for what those things are, they best are explained through a transcendent source. Who is the grounding for those things. A personal, transcendent, powerful mind that creates us in his image and imbues us with a mind that can reason that even your own rationality has no ground grounding apart from a transcendent mind. You know that you can trust your own mind to make decisions or even you know those laws of logic or the beauty of math, or the its elegance and all of these things and you're looking and you're going okay, that you know, I believe those things are real or true, but where do you ground them? And for you, I believe, as you seem to discover, that in terms of a base axiom, it goes to the foundation of reality itself, which is God, who is the transcendent source for all of those things, who gives us the ability to give an adequate explanation for the things that we intuitively know are true, like meaning, purpose and value. Those things that we deeply long for and crave.
Because like you say, in the atheistic worldview, if someone is intellectually honest like you, it doesn't end in a good place. It ends in nihilism, where everything is meaningless, purposeless, valueless.
You're not even choosing your own morality. You're just determined to believe in certain ways to respond and react. And there's no inherent person head. You know, there's, there's so many things you lose.
And I think there's an irony here that, that there's a sensibility that atheists seem to think that Christians live with illusions as some fairy tale understanding or wishful thinking about the world, when in reality they admittedly live with useful fictions in order to justify themselves. And the things that they, they know in their heart are true or are meaningful are the things that their heart craves and they have no grounding for. So I love your really brute honesty here that you were willing to come to a place where you know, where you're choosing the axiom, which I guess, and I don't know if you would say the base axiom here is God himself.
[00:45:26] Speaker A: Everything you said, it was well, well stated. You really captured the whole realm of what I experienced. I mean, I went into that nihilism, I wouldn't have called it nihilism, but that's what I knew where the ultimate place landed and I lived in that place for about 10 years.
But like I said, I created useful fiction. All these things you just said are very good and I experienced it all. And I also know like for some atheists who are like, oh, this is just dumb and like they, they kind of dismiss these things, but it's not, we're actually experiencing these things moment by moment. And I would actually go further than, not that we crave meaning, value and purpose, but we actually experience it. That's the thing that really got me.
It's actually before eyes. So as I sat and denied those things were true at their core for approximately 10 years, I felt like I was denying reality. I might be a little different. I don't know if I was pursuing meaning, value, purpose.
As a matter of fact, it's almost like it was pursuing me, if that makes sense.
I tried to live as though it didn't exist and played games to play along like it did exist, just to kind of live my day in and day out life.
But I actually did content myself with the idea that these things are not actually real and I'm just playing a game. But meaning, value, purpose sort of pursued me. I couldn't deny it. It was an experience that I denied long enough and it overcame me as I'm being ridiculous.
And I feel like I can't communicate that to somebody who's still in their atheism, but I can communicate it as something I've accepted. I mean, there's so much meaning. There's some things in life that are so terrible.
And just to embrace that, to embrace that's terrible, to embrace that's good, is so natural.
We know it's here in our hearts, but to embrace it. I finally came back and I was like, oh, these things are all real. Just like I know I've been denying it for so long.
So meaning, value, purpose, in a sense, pursuing me. And I couldn't get away from it, if that makes sense.
[00:47:46] Speaker C: No, it makes perfect sense because it really is at the heart of who we are.
I think if you lose God, you actually lose your own humanity.
Eric Metaxas says it this way. If you're only matter, then nothing matters.
I had a former atheist that I spoke to and he said I reached the point where I realized that I am not. I, my person am not thinking, I'm not acting, I'm just not making choices. I'm just a Coke can fizzing, you know, you're just responding and reacting.
And we know, we know that we're more than that.
We're made for more than that, that there is this valuable person inside who's made in the image of God, you know, invaluable, special, exceptional, that we know in some ways we're different than the dirt or the rock, you know, and the ground. There's something qualitatively different and that our choices are meaningful. I mean, that's why I think we built things in society to help us guide, you know. Well, no, you don't. You don't hurt another, you don't harm another. Even the atheists will say, you know, that's their ethic. You don't harm another. Well, based on what?
Based on what? What axiom? You know, how do you know?
To go back to your question, there's no grounding there for it. And it goes against everything we in our humanity recognize intuitively, deeply. So I love what you're bringing forward in your story.
So I imagine coming to this place of recognition and acceptance, was it over a period of time? Was it kind of a sudden, like aha moment or how did that happen?
[00:49:43] Speaker A: It was a. It was somewhat of a slow, maybe year of transitioning from that conversation with my friend. Maybe it was less than a year.
I'll tell you. I hadn't prayed for those 10 years in any real way. And I want to share something that's kind of personal. I was actually scared to pray because the last time I prayed, I basically started to hallucinate.
And I felt that my mind is where I'm at. So wherever. Whatever is going on up here, if I lose this, I lose everything.
And so I thought, you know, praying is kind of a dangerous thing.
So I had some friends. I asked him, can I come to your home and can I pray for the first time, you know, in 10 years?
And that was a very important moment for me because I hadn't prayed to God for 10 years. I didn't think God existed.
And in that moment, I realized I missed God.
I was very thankful that God was patient with me and I experienced God again. It was 10 years. It's like 10 years without somebody in your life.
And I was. I was very.
I was very thankful that God worked with me. He's very, very good to me and that I denied and left him for 10 years.
And then he just seemed to accept me right back.
[00:51:16] Speaker C: Oh, yeah. It just. It makes me think of that beautiful, beautiful picture of the father and his son who had left. He decided to go home, and the father ran towards him and embraced him and kissed him and was so excited to see him return home.
Yeah, I can see where you would have been apprehensive, but, boy, I'm just so happy for you that you found your home again and you found a place of belief. Truth is the person of God, that embodiment of meaning, purpose, and value, who was calling you home.
The embodiment of love, essentially, that was calling you home. So I'm wondering how.
How you would, as a formerly extreme skeptic, but someone who obviously is still very thoughtful, analytical, yet very personal. Right. You're a person.
How would you describe knowing or being known or knowing what you're believing is real or true?
I know you describe it kind of as a choice, but in a way that there's. It also explains everything you know, that you know or feel intuitively to be true.
So for someone who's wrestling with these.
Not only these concepts, but just feeling like, could that be, you know, I want these things to be true.
I sense that they're real. I just can't get there.
I'm curious, how would you describe being grounded in this reality now and how has it changed your life?
[00:53:13] Speaker A: It's kind of a tough question to answer because it has lots of parts to it. But one thing I'd like to say, it's like reaching out and touching a flame and you know it's hot.
You don't have to reason that out. I started to realize there's a lot of things that are happening moment by moment that are very real, that are hard to explain. It's very hard to mathematically, scientifically explain exactly why that flame is hot or to even prove that it's hot.
I don't know if you've heard these conversations, but even asking the question, is it actually hot? You know, in truth, it's just nerve endings, right?
It's just a sensation.
You know, you could get to the place where you say hot doesn't actually exist, but it's kind of a stupid place because if you reach out and touch the flames, you can feel the heat.
And the same thing kind of happened to me. I did all this reasoning and thinking to get back to God, but in the end I just reached out my hand and touched the flame and I could feel the heat.
And so while I still think all that I did was valid and it was important for me, and God was very kind and gracious in using how I think to reach me.
Once I came back to God, it was very experiential. I just knew it was true.
And I felt kind of dumb, actually.
I felt like I had been denying reality for so long when it was so clear that things do have meaning.
So. So I repented. Like said, I repented of my extreme skepticism.
I expected, if you recall, that reasoning requires faith and that I could, I could make faith statements. And I embraced the, the, the meaning that was happening all around me.
No longer just in this place of extreme skepticism, but just really embracing my moment by moment life. And I felt that God really blessed that, just moving forward with his truths, his teachings and things like this, and just looking at sunset and truly saying, that's beautiful. That's truly beautiful. Not just because I'm experiencing it, but it's actually really beautiful. God is really good.
[00:55:36] Speaker C: Yeah. I think what you're bringing forward here is that something we all know, but it's sometimes lost, especially in the world of apologetics or trying to know things. We have a tendency, and Iain McGilchrist talks about this really beautifully, that we have this reductionistic view of knowledge that has to be left brain and rational and that has to be provable through the scientific method or whatever it is, scientism, whatever. But the reality is there's all kinds of knowledge, there's all kinds of Knowing most of the things that we know are not through a scientific experiment. You know, you know your name, you know what you ate this morning, you know, your intuitions, your thoughts, your, you know, you know how to drive a car because you've done it a million times. Not through, you know, those kinds of things where we live through intuitive and experiential knowledge, tacit knowledge, all of these different things. And I think so, so many times, they're so dismissed. But I love, again, what you're bringing forward is there are things that, you know, like touching a flame is hot, you know, you know that you know certain things. And, and it sounds again that you have come into a place where your things really come together. They coalesce. They coalesce. They make sense that all, all of these natural human things make sense within. If a God exists and a God who loves you and a God who created you for a purpose and has gifted you with all of these things like dignity and beauty and purpose and value, and like you say, we can look at a sunset and know that that's beautiful, we don't have to create an experiment and talk about light waves and color and, you know, those kinds of things that are really reductionistic to the grandness of what we know, and they are a reflection of our Creator and what he has created for us. And so I love that you've come to this place, but it's a very expansive view of knowledge. It's an expansive view, but yet very simple, very basic at the same time.
Things that we all know. I love that.
[00:58:01] Speaker A: Yeah. And it's not the best apologetic that I can write down as an argumentation form, but I at the same time know it's true.
So while I may not be able to, like I said, write an argument exactly about this, that's why I said I felt kind of stupid in the end. I had done all this arguing and all this discussion and all these things.
There's something that's just sitting right before me if I just open my eyes to it.
[00:58:28] Speaker C: How would you encourage someone to move forward, perhaps from some of their own skepticism towards giving God a chance as the basic grounding of all reality? Is that basic axiom.
[00:58:44] Speaker A: Yeah.
So part of the reason I hope to be here was I know there must be other people who are like me. They use those ones who ask the whys, why, why?
Who get stuck. Like, I got stuck. And. And I just want to share this because I know I benefited from realizing that, at least in mathematics, you had to have some axioms to get even something like math started.
And so if there's anyone out there like me who's always asking why understanding that infinite regress problem is a real thing is such an important idea to get yourself out of that hole.
And it's okay to make assumptions.
I would have never thought that was the case. But not just okay though, you have to make assumptions to reason forward.
You have to have some choices you make, and that's a whole process in and of itself. But it is required to reason. You have to have some sort of assumptions or faith to reason forward. And then you got to choose those things. But that's important for someone who is like me asking why, why, why? To understand that you have to have some sort of assumption to reason for it was super important. I hope someone's who's struggling with those same things will hear this and just be encouraged to get their sort of thought process worked out so that they can understand how the reasoning process works. What I'm saying is that you have to have axioms to reason and it's just about choosing them. And then once you start exploring that, it can help you to do this reasoning process. I hope I didn't confuse anybody. I know there's somebody out there who needs to hear that.
And like I said, that was a six year quest for me just to try to figure out what my axioms are.
So I really wanted to share that because I hope it helps somebody.
As for believers working with people like me, I can just encourage them not to give up.
My wife was always praying for me.
Just think about this. It took 10 years for me to come back to God. And my wife was always faithful and prayerful and loving to me the whole way.
Sometimes I, I wonder if it was really just my wife's prayers that brought me back to God.
And so I would encourage anyone who has someone like me in their life to pray for them, to love on them.
It's okay to discuss things with them too. A lot of my coming back to God was having long conversations with people.
But you might be in it for the long haul. And just because someone's an atheist for 5 years, 6 years, 7 years, 10 years, they can still turn back to God.
[01:01:30] Speaker C: For those who may be listening, and perhaps they do have a spouse, which I think is a particularly difficult place to have someone who believed and then left the faith. And your wife, like you say, she was loving, she was patient, she was prayerful.
If your wife were here and she could tell us what she was thinking or feeling during this Period. And how she was making you feel.
Was there anything that she was doing or not doing that helped you along the process? Was it just giving you space?
Was it, you know, being quiet?
Was it being obviously prayerful? But did you have conversations or did, did she just kind of pull back and let you go at your own pace? How did that look practically for someone who's listening?
[01:02:19] Speaker A: For my own wife, she wasn't pushy.
She seemed to talk to me when I talked to her about it.
And she's just, she was just a loving wife. There's a verse about this.
I can't believe it's escaping my mind, but there's a verse about this with the non believing spouse. And so. So she really did just live out the Christian wife loving, you know, like 1 Corinthians 13, love. Love is patient, kind, not self seeking. Go down the list. I think my wife just exhibited being obedient Christian to God. And that certainly made things really easy for me to have that space to think about and process these things. I did not get angry with her. I did not, you know, I didn't have anything to be angry at.
So I can't answer that question for everybody. But I know my wife was just a very loving follower of Christ and certainly that helps me to be open to the things I shared with you today, the goodness of God.
[01:03:29] Speaker C: And I'm sure she appreciated from you that you continued to go with your family to church and to go through the rhythm of that, even though you didn't believe at the time.
So I can see where she created a space for you to do what you needed to do, but yet still continue to love you. That's a beautiful, beautiful testimony and what a wonderful wife you have.
So, Jeff, what a wonderful, transformative story. Very honest, a little bit heady, but I'm sure that people will be able to follow.
I think it definitely will speak to people that they have to really come to a place of recognizing there is a choice involved here and that all axioms require some degree of faith.
But at the end of the day, you found the source of truth itself, himself.
That helped you make sense of your life and all of reality and gave you everything that really your heart desired and then some.
So thank you again, Jeff, for coming on. I'd so appreciate you and your story and I know that so many people will relate to it and actually, Lord willing, will find a way forward through listening to your struggles and seeing how you were able to move forward beyond your extreme skepticism to now to the place where you're willing to tell your story for the whole world to hear that you believe in God.
So thanks so much.
[01:05:17] Speaker A: Thank you for having me. I'm very thankful. God's been very kind to me.
[01:05:22] Speaker B: Thanks for joining us for this episode of Ex Skeptic. If Jeff's story resonated with you, perhaps it's because you too have wrestled with big questions about truth, reason, and belief.
Jeff discovered that even in the world of mathematics, arguably the most precise and logical of disciplines, there's no getting around the need for unprovable assumptions.
Faith, it turns out, isn't the opposite of reason. It's built into the very foundation of how we think, how we live, and what we choose to trust.
Maybe, like Jeff, you've built your life around intellectual honesty and a deep desire to follow what's true no matter where it leads. His story reminds us that sometimes the most rational thing we can do is reconsider.
If you're an extreme skeptic, or even just curious, I hope this conversation challenged and encouraged you to to keep asking questions. You never know where the search for truth might lead.
If you'd like to explore those questions in conversation with one of our guests, we'd love to help. Just email
[email protected] and we'd love to get you connected.
X Skeptic is part of the C.S. lewis Institute podcast Network. If you've enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and review and share it with with your friends and social network.
In the meantime, we'll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we'll hear another unlikely story of belief.
