[00:00:00] Speaker A: It's just the most incredible adventure of a lifetime to know that you're following someone good who knows where he's going, who knows where he's leading you, and who's leading you with benevolence there. And I don't think any of us can say that if we don't have a personal God who we trust in his character and we trust in his purposes and his ends.
[00:00:26] Speaker B: Hello and thanks for joining in. I'm Dana Harmon and you're listening to Ex Skeptic, where we hear unlikely stories of belief. Each episode we listen to someone who has once been an atheist or a skeptic, but who became a Christian against all odds. If you're interested in more stories like these, visit us at our
[email protected] or check out our YouTube channel. We'd love to hear from you, whether through comments on our Facebook page or YouTube channel, or via email at infoxkeptic.org your thoughts and feedback are always welcome.
Many people don't have time or interest in God or even thinking about the big questions of life they're busy pursuing, achieving, reaching goals, accomplishing high levels of performance in academics or work, not even considering the larger, more foundational questions of life, like who we are, why we're here, where we're going, and what it all means.
This is particularly true at elite levels of education, science and technology. The goal before many is progress and achievement for its own sake, to keep moving forward at an elevated pace and not taking time to consider the deeper presumptions that lay at the very foundation of our thinking, of our making sense of what it is that we are doing.
Dr. Kathleen Knoller was once like that, pursuing achievement at elite institutions without time for thinking about the reasons for it all. An exceptionally intelligent scientist and atheist, she had long ruled out God as a possibility, much less an explanation for all she valued. But today she is here to tell a story as someone who is not only believing in the reality of God and the truth of Christianity, but has looked deeply and found life that is truly life in the person of Jesus Christ. I hope you'll come along to hear her story.
[00:02:18] Speaker C: Welcome to the X Skeptic podcast, Kathleen. It's great to have you with me today.
[00:02:23] Speaker A: Thank you for having me.
[00:02:24] Speaker C: As we're getting started. You have quite an impressive credentialing and educational background and even your job. I'd love for the listeners to know a bit about who you are as we're getting started.
[00:02:37] Speaker A: Yeah, sure. So for my professional background, I'm a Scientist by trade. So I've been in school mostly my entire life. I went to Columbia University for my undergrad, studied biomedical engineering. I actually converted to Christianity during gap years that I took between undergrad and my MD PhD program. So I studied for two years at the NIH. That's where I became a Christian. And then I moved on to an MD PhD program, first at Duke and then transferred to Hopkins to be with my husband. And now I work as a computational biologist in cancer research. And I'm also married to my wonderful husband and I have one beautiful daughter who's one years old.
[00:03:15] Speaker C: Oh, wow. Fantastic. You have a lot on your plate, for sure, but I would love to hear your backstory a little bit. You mentioned there that you became a Christian during a gap year, and that was obviously when you were a little bit older. So you, it sounds like you had a history without Christianity in your life. So let's, let's go way back to your childhood and let's start with your home.
[00:03:42] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. So my home was very loving. I had an idyllic childhood in many ways, but there was no religion in my household.
None of my parents were religious. None of my family was religious. I wouldn't say anyone was spiritual either.
My mother actually, she had immigrated from Iran and she was very against religion because she had witnessed the Iranian revolution and seen what, you know, religious fundamentalism can do to a society and can do to the rights of women as well. So I would say she definitely communicated that distrust of religion and that opinion that religion was more of an institution or a man made structure that was often very bigoted and oppressive and political to me. And so I very much believed that and carried that through my childhood.
But both of my parents were very well educated and they communicated that value or preference to me. So I was very focused on getting an elite education.
They very much highly valued science and engineering and math. So that's why I tended to focus on, in addition to some classical music and art training.
But throughout my childhood and my education, they very much instilled this appreciation of beauty in me, which later on linked me to Christianity. And I later on saw, you know, the reflection of God through a lot of the things that I was studying or doing. And they also led me to be a bit more of an intellectual person and to appreciate theory, whether or not that was in math. But later on that would be connected to theology and apologetics and philosophy.
But there were also things about my upbringing that drove me to Christianity because I felt like they were a missing piece of my education or of my upbringing. The main one of those is that my parents were very good about teaching me to, quote, be a good person, but without any sort of religious or spiritual beliefs underlying that and without any, you know, deep roots and even the culture that we were living in in America, it was sort of a nebulous statement. And so I had no underlying worldview to back it up, and neither did they. It was really this umbrella that referred to this amalgam of rules of politeness and societal norms combined with, I believe, some moral values that were sort of subconsciously or unconsciously taken from other religions. Without my parents really knowing it.
[00:06:25] Speaker C: I was going to say that yes, there is, there's a lot there in terms of just you're growing up, it sounds like you had a good, loving, stable family that valued education and that you directed your efforts towards there. And they also had instilled in you some good moral values, perhaps not knowing exactly how to ground those. They just knew that they were good and societally good and culturally good and they were good for you. As you were pursuing just growing up, it sounds like you were a very busy young lady, not only in education, but in the arts and just really developing a very well rounded life. It sounded, at least in your growing up years, you had not much to long for or to miss because you were, you had a very full life, it sounds like.
Were, were there any questions, I mean, in terms of, I guess, very deep questions in you in terms of what ground science or what makes a good person. I mean, you were so busy pursuing achievement, there were no questions.
[00:07:34] Speaker A: And this is what I find is a huge hole in the way that a lot of us are educated, not just me.
I have actually taught a class at Johns Hopkins before for undergradu and I've taught a little bit of medical ethics. And I find that I see the same issues that I saw with my education and their education in that we're not even taught to ask the questions. We're not even taught that worldview is something that we should be cultivating. We're not taught that worldview is even a thing.
So I was just sort of busying myself with work that I thought was good and productive and meaningful. But I never bothered to ask the deeper layer of questions beyond that to ask why I was pursuing science. A lot of other students are very similar.
They will sacrifice fun, they will sacrifice relaxation. Oftentimes I also sacrificed my health. A lot of students nowadays are very anxious, are dealing with certain health issues and will work themselves to the bone. Despite that. And for me it ended up, you know, sort of revealing a bunch of health issues because I was just so stressed. So a lot of secular people like myself will sacrifice a great deal to pursue science or to pursue excellence, but there's no consciousness or underlying reason for why we're making those sacrifices or why it's even good to make a sacrifice in the first place. There's no really understanding of why we're ordering certain virtues above another. And so for me, that was the main hole in my upbringing and in my entire education was that I didn't even ask the questions I was content to do and to be intellectually superior and to be a high achiever and to be complimented by everybody because from the outside I just looked hard working and kind and virtuous. But those virtues distracted from the very deep pride and other sins that were underneath and from the ignorance also that I didn't, I didn't even know why I believed the things I believed what I was aiming for and what the purpose of it all was.
[00:09:57] Speaker C: Yes. You know, that's so interesting. I think a lot of people are like you say, just caught in that trap of just achievement as an end of itself unto itself.
But it's interesting to me you made the statement that you, you weren't taught to even really think about what those big worldview questions were. But were you aware of the underlying naturalism and scientism that that was underlying your educational experience, or am I presuming there?
[00:10:27] Speaker A: I think I was aware of it on some level. I don't think I could have articulated it. And I think a lot of what I articulated. So I declared myself to be an atheist and then I switched to an agnostic. Then I think I went back to atheist before I became a Christian. And I think a lot of what I articulated was just my desire to declare myself firmly somewhere. I think the fact that I wasn't, I didn't have a coherent worldview and I wasn't asking any of these questions, let alone asking the right questions. And so I wasn't, I wasn't intellectually there, but I emotionally felt that vacuum, I felt that void. And so I wanted to fill it with something. So I filled it with the label atheism for a long time.
[00:11:11] Speaker C: How old were you when you kind of identified as an atheist?
[00:11:17] Speaker A: I was probably in my mid teens and I thought I was very cool. And I just never investigated anything behind atheism. I just had these impressions that religion was antiquated, it was man made, it was Made to control people. Religious people were simple minded. They only believed because their family believed. And so that's the other trap that I was in. I thought, you know, my family, family doesn't believe in anything. They don't have a particular worldview. So I'm free, I'm free from tethers, just like they are. And that was absolutely not true. We all serve something, we all believe in something. Some of us can just declare it or recognize our beliefs better than others. And I just wasn't, I wasn't as self aware to do that. But I, there was also this aspect of bravery to it. I declared myself a nihilist in my late teens as well. I thought it was just so brave to acknowledge the nothingness in the world. And I think a lot of, a lot of my friends who were nihilists or atheists do correctly recognize the darkness in the world. They do correctly recognize the brokenness and they perceive that. But they blow it up into this overarching hypothesis of the way that the world is run. Rather than putting it in its proper context within Christianity, it just becomes this overarching theory.
And then it just seems like for me, it just seemed so brave to acknowledge that hard truth, which was again a way for me to puff myself up in pride. But that's mostly what went into my atheism diagnosis in my early teens.
[00:13:01] Speaker C: There's a difference between intellectually believing nihilism, you know, that the nothingness of it, and actually living as if you know nothing is important, including yourself, as essentially no ultimate meaning, value, purpose, freedom to choose. Or are those kinds of things that come alongside the belief in nihilism? Did any of those intersect with your life at all? Did that belief intersect with your life other than, you know, like you, you mentioned this prideful, kind of courageous stance that you were taking. Like I'm one of those who know and I'm bold and brave enough and courageous enough to admit it, you know, that there is nothing.
[00:13:49] Speaker A: I think my story is in that way is a little bit banal. And then I'm just like, I didn't think about it and it didn't affect me emotionally, but I think it's banal yet very common. And I still have friends to this day. So I'm about 30 years old and I have a lot of friends who are my age and who are married, who have lived a good amount of life, have kids and they have the same beliefs that I had back then and the same approach to it, that they're very busy, they're Very professionally successful. They have a lot going on in life and there's just never the time to take a breath and ask the question. And there's also a fear of taking a breath and asking a question that you don't want an answer to or emotionally sitting with something that you don't want to have to acknowledge or feel.
And so I think that was very real for me as well was that there just wasn't, there wasn't any sort of value placed on anything past science and achievement and myself. And so all these other things went in the bin of arts and crafts is what I used to call humanities. And it just didn't even deserve an answer. And that is a very privileged place to be in, but I see a lot of kids in that place as well is that we're, you know, our parents were immigrants, but they built a great life for us and now we get to profit off of that great life. We're at elite institutions, we're getting educated, you know, in the finest supposedly places in the world. Right.
And so we can afford to have nihilistic beliefs or be hedonists or be, you know, whatever it might be. And that really doesn't impact our day to day life. We don't have to face suffering, we don't have to face those consequences. And it's a very privileged place to be. And I don't think a lot of students nowadays fully acknowledge that privilege. I think it's quite the opposite.
[00:15:40] Speaker C: Were you ever challenged to believe through all of your education, particularly as an atheist or agnostic, in terms of the grounds underlying the scientific enterprise itself, like the rationality or intelligibility or predictability, order of apparent design of the universe, the ethics underlying the scientific method, any of those kind of presumed things that must actually occur even before you began the scientific, you know, methodology itself?
[00:16:20] Speaker A: Yes, those were all things that I came to think about once I became a Christian. You know, even my high school was ranked number one in the nation. And you know, I've been to these fine schools and nobody talked about that. None of the science professors talked about that. It was right down to the details. And so I think my education, like many people in STEM and in secular universities or secular schools is very technical. It's not personal, it's not holistic, it's, you're just getting a technical degree and you're focusing on materialistic details. But, but yeah, later as a Christian, you know, just realizing that not only are, you know, science is science sort of have these underlying philosophical or religious beliefs or rather scientists do.
Science can't answer all the questions. And that's the one thing that I did know. And I remember I was reading.
We were reading Origin of Species in my undergrad, and we were. I was reading a bunch of works from Darwin. And, you know, as. As a atheist and as somebody who thought that evolution was pitted against Christianity like mortal enemies, I, you know, I really clung to Darwin.
And I remember reading something about how he was talking about some of the naturalists that were protesting against his sort of utilitarian doctrine that every part of a. Every unit of an animal or of a creature is produced or has evolved for the good of the creature that possesses it.
And so his opponents had said that actually some of these structures or these units were made for beauty or made to delight man or delight a creator. And I remember Darwin wrote something like, well, that's beyond the scope of science, scientific discussion.
And I remember reading that and thinking, huh, well, Darwin says that there are some things that are beyond science. You know, there's got to be something more than the material world.
But those questions just didn't interest me at the time, so I didn't investigate them further. But now it's. It's so. It's so easy to look at. Even, you know, even my work I do, I'm doing right now something very uninteresting, probably for a lot of people, but I'm doing something called matrix factorization, and I'm trying to find patterns that are generalizable across multiple patients that explain some biological phenomenon that's happening in the tumor. And so I assume that I can find these patterns that will repeat themselves in the future that are generalizable. I assume that I have a rational mind. I assume that I'm a logical thinker, that if I write this down and I write my experiment, I design it well, that if somebody repeats it, that they'll get similar results.
Like you said, there are so many assumptions underlying not only my rational abilities and my ability to think and reason our senses as human beings, that I can interpret something and get the same visual feedback.
My brain can interpret the same image that it's seeing the same way that somebody else's brain will.
You know, I'm going to see the same, you know, pattern in. From a scientific theory. It's going to manifest itself the same way tomorrow as it does today as it did yesterday.
All of those things I completely took for granted. And I didn't recognize that until I started to read a little bit more as a Christian. And John Lennox was actually his books were the first things that made me.
[00:19:56] Speaker C: Realize that you mentioned that you moved from atheism to agnosticism. Now you were, it seems like you were fairly entrenched in this atheistic worldview and bent towards, you know, doing your scientific study and finding patterns and doing those things. But what made you step back and question? Because it sounded like you weren't in really questioning something larger or deeper and you know, in terms of grounding or presumptions. So what made you say, maybe I'm not sure about this?
[00:20:36] Speaker A: Yeah. So I, this is a theme for me as a friend questioned me.
So a friend questioning me led me to agnosticism, from atheism. And then a friend quest, a different friend questioning me later led me ultimately, ultimately to Christianity.
So I had a friend who essentially asked me to prove my atheism. He said that that's not, it's, it's not this automatic assumption that you have as a ground truth assumption of the world that there is no God. You have to prove that to me. And how are you going to prove that? And so I was uninterested and intellectually lazy. And so I copped out with agnosticism. I said, well, it's impossible to prove and I can't do that knowing full well that I, I had secretly gone and tried to. I read Nietzsche and I went back to my philosophers and I looked at history and I, I particularly hated Christianity, despite my, despite my sort of emotional agnosticism towards a lot of these bigger worldview questions. I had this animosity towards Christianity.
[00:21:39] Speaker C: Yes. Can I pause? Let's pause on that for a moment. Why the animosity towards Christianity?
[00:21:46] Speaker A: Yes. So I think it was because Christianity was the predominant religion in the area that I was living. So I grew up in the east coast of the US And I, I remember actually wrote this op ed when I was in Columbia comparing the, the Westboro Baptist Church's approach to homosexual sin to the, quote, regular Christian Protestant approach to it. And I was so angry that the Protestants seemed to have the same beliefs as the Westboro Baptist Church. And for anybody who doesn't know, the Westboro Baptist Church will picket the funerals of gay people. They will hold up very, you know, hateful signs saying God hates the F word. Just things that I don't want to repeat. And they communicate in very, very extreme and hateful ways.
And so my thesis of my op ed was that Protestants were just the same. They just voiced things a little bit differently and they had this fake facade that covered a core of judgment and hate and bigotry, but they were just covered by this facade of friendliness and smiles and Western culture and that at the core it was just the same dark hatefulness shared between the two of them. So I just, I think it was a combination of me disliking the, the fake exterior that I thought that Christians had combined with just the Christians that I knew, I all knew through news outlets. I didn't know any Christians personally. I actually only knew one or they didn't reveal themselves to me is probably the more likely story because I was so hateful towards Christianity. If it ever came up in conversation. I just thought it was, it was antiquated and hateful and I just, I couldn't understand why it had a place at the table anymore now that we were thousands of years past when that book had been written.
[00:23:53] Speaker C: I'd like to take a break from.
[00:23:55] Speaker B: Our story to invite you this Advent season to consider the true meaning of Christmas. The C.S. lewis Institute offers a daily devotional with reflections on profound biblical prophecies that surrounded the coming Messiah. Each day you'll consider key passages from both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament that prophesied the birth of Jesus. There will also be insights from archaeology and biblical history enriching your understanding of the events surrounding Jesus birth.
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[00:24:59] Speaker C: So how long were you in this, let's say, period of atheism? For how long? And then how long were you in this period of a knock? Agnosticism, I guess it was probably through a lot of your education.
[00:25:12] Speaker A: It was, yeah. So it was. I converted to Christianity in my early 20s, so I was an atheist, I would say, for the majority of that time, and then an agnostic for the latter years.
[00:25:22] Speaker C: Okay, so you had another friend come along while you, while you were an agnostic and ask you another pivotal question. Tell me about that.
[00:25:31] Speaker A: Yes. So yes, I was in my gap years. I was at the NIH and I was really just focused on again, research and trying to cue myself up for an MDPHG program admissions cycle.
And I had somebody who wasn't even really A close friend, I'm just using the word friend for ease, was more of somebody who was just also on the same floor and worked in a similar lab.
And he said, why don't we exchange our favorite books? I don't know if he saw that he was a Christian, of course, I don't know if he saw that I was a very sorry soul or I looked like I needed something where he was just really passionate about evangelism, I'll never know. But I gave him one of my favorite novels, which was the Unbearable Lightness of Being, which I still love to this day, but pulls from a lot of Nietzsche. And he gave me the Reason for God by Timothy Keller.
And of course I immediately distrusted a book that was from a pastor. I thought that was the most biased source possible to talk about Christianity. I didn't really view it as okay, a pastor is going to be an expert on Christianity. I thought, he's just so self interested and I can't trust what he's saying. But Timothy Keller is, for those who don't know, is a pastor from New York. And he wrote Reason for God essentially distilling his wisdom from many, many years of being a pastor and talking to largely to young professionals in New York who had a very similar demographic to me who were either battling with doubts about Christianity or were battling non belief. And so he distilled all of their objections over the years into these major objections that he covers in each chapter. But his discussion of absolute morality was the most pivotal for me. I was a relativist who didn't know enough to declare herself a moral relativist.
But I very quickly realized, you know, like C.S. lewis says, I think in Mere Christianity he says, everybody's a relativist until you know, somebody does something to you and you're like, wait a second, that's not fair.
And that was me. You know, I'd always tried to be a good person and I would get very morally self righteous if I felt that somebody had crossed me or one of my friends. But I had no grounds for that. I had no declaration for my, my moral righteousness. I had no foundation to declare it by. So that chapter is the most pivotal for me and essentially converting me into at least somebody who believed in a lawmaker or a lawgiver. And so that connected to science for me as well.
And that chapter was, was very pivotal in that I not only realized that I, I was incorrect in my moral relativism, but I also held a lot of scientific beliefs and learned about a lot of scientific laws and theories and laws and physics that presumably required some sort of lawgiver.
And so that chapter sort of led me down that pathway into later identifying that law giver as the God of the Bible. But there was another chapter that also really impacted me and that was on how can a good God allow suffering?
So those two, those two chapters were very, very impactful. But yes, that one Christian really I admired very much because he put himself out on a limb. And I think that's something I try to encourage a lot of Christians to do, is you're really not going to be witnessing to somebody if you're just nice to them. I've had so many people throughout my life be very, very kind to me, be self sacrificial, be giving, generous, and none of them are Christians.
And so a lot of Christians nowadays that I meet, they, they feel uncomfortable overtly saying that they're a Christian, especially in a workplace, especially at school, because they feel like we're in an environment of persecution relative to church history. We are certainly not, but I completely understand where they're coming from. It's not a completely friendly environment either. And it takes a lot of courage to say something and a lot of tact. But if you don't at least identify yourself as a Christian and specifically identify Christianity as the reason for why you do what you do, why you were kind, why you were generous, so on and so forth, the non believer is not going to connect the two. And so finally, this person who gave me the book, you know, that boldness is very inspiring and you know, his ability to pursue truth at the price of great discomfort and awkwardness was something that he verbally told me is because of his love of Jesus.
And I would have never put those together otherwise. And so that was a great witness for me.
[00:30:24] Speaker C: A biased pastor, are you?
I guess in a sense you were willing to hold your nose and open the book and read it for what it was. I presume that you were surprised by what you found. And for those who, who don't understand the word or term, relativism. Can you, can you talk about what moral relativism is and why that was important for you to really recognize there had to be something more than just your feeling or preference about what is good or not.
[00:31:03] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. So I like to give this example to people when I'm talking about moral relativism to sort of bring it to light. So essentially moral relativism is when people say something like, well, you know, there's, there's no, there's nothing that's really objectively good or bad. It's just good or bad within a certain context or within a certain culture, it can be acceptable or unacceptable. But if you, if you transcend time or you transcend culture, there's no moral principle that you're going to pull out from that that applies to all time periods or all cultures. So it's this, it's this relative morality that your moral laws depend on your relative situation and are very contextual.
And so I like to give this example that, you know, back in the Aztec times, there was a lot of child sacrifice. And in particular, there was one rain God that they sacrificed children to. And if you ask moral relativists, you know, is that wrong?
A true moral relativist will say, well, no, for that time period in that culture, you know, that was acceptable for the Aztecs. And then you ask them, is that okay today? Like, what if you plucked a group of Aztecs and put them in modern day New York City and they wanted to do child sacrifice there? Could you punish them using the laws of New York? Could you? You know, who would be right if the New Yorker said, you can't do it. And they said, I must for my, you know, for the sake of worshiping my gods. How do you decide who's right? And then the person who gets to decide who's right is, is either the, the majority or likely the person who's the most physically powerful and can overwhelm the others. So if you're a moral relativist, you can't really, you can't make ultimate judgments about right and wrong. And the, the end determiner of right versus wrong often ends up being the government or whoever's in power.
And then they just determine some rule that's going to change tomorrow. So it's a very, it's a very unstable way to live as a moral relativist. And then you also can't assert your moral high ground when you're having conversations with other people, which was very important for me as a prideful person, to be able to do that.
[00:33:22] Speaker C: So then how does that relate to pointing towards the need for a God or a transcendent source of morality? How did it shift your thinking?
[00:33:34] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. So if there was an absolute morality, if there was something that I was going to appeal to, it would have to be some sort of transcendent law. I really liked natural law, but I appreciated it in a secular context, in a sort of legal ethics context at the time.
But looking back, you know, it, it fits Very well, obviously in the context of Christianity and you know, looking back and for anybody who's interested in it, can read, you know, St. Thomas Aquinas and essentially, you know, if, if you have any sort of moral law that transcends time, transcends culture, transcends individuals, it's a transcendent law. And so it's not, it's not a man made particular law. It has to come from somewhere. And so where can it come from? If it's been around since the beginning of time, if it's independent of humans, if it's independent of the structures that we create on earth that, that are created and then die off, it has to come from something. And so that doesn't necessarily point to the Christian God, but that did point me to a God and that also pointed me to a personal God, because an impersonal sort of naturalistic force wouldn't have created a moral law that could be communicated and instilled in human beings as sort of this natural law.
And you know, that also pointed me to a God who was also a creator because I felt like natural law was very entwined with sort of teleology that everything is created with this final purpose or objective. And we're all supposed to, you know, God would want us to behave in ways that are compatible with his design and compatible with that objective. And to do so would be, Would be good and would be. Right.
[00:35:31] Speaker C: Yes. So you were reading this book and you were finding, hmm, this makes sense, that there has to be a transcendent moral law giver in order for there to be an objective right and wrong or good and evil. And you mentioned also that there were scientific or laws that also made you step back and think in terms of what is the sourcing of those laws. Can you explain what you meant by that?
[00:36:00] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. So just any scientific law, any scientific principle, like Newton's law of gravity, there had to be a lawmaker or there had to be some place where the law came from.
It just was counterintuitive to me that I had been taught that the world that we live in was created by random processes, random and unguided processes, yet we had all of these laws that were governing everything.
And so that didn't quite make sense to me. And so that fit very well into this. It's not absolute morality because it's a scientific law, but it's this sort of, it's more fitting with, I suppose, like the natural law philosophy, that God is this lawmaker and he's made not only moral laws for us. But he's made laws to govern the universe, to govern the workings of everything. And, you know, as his creatures, we can actually study those now. And that's just such a blessing to study all of those laws and to figure out, you know, how he's governing the universe, how his hand is in everything.
[00:37:08] Speaker C: So you were. You were becoming open towards the possibility of God at this point, I guess. And you mentioned that there was another chapter that was very significant for you with regard to, I guess, pain and suffering. Talk to us about how that was impactful in terms of, again, continuing to open your mind towards the possibility of God.
[00:37:29] Speaker A: Yeah, so I think that's something that a lot of people struggle with. And the funny thing was, is that I hadn't suffered at that point.
I have since suffered.
And yet that was such a big objection to me. And I had a very strong kind of compassion for other people, even in my medical schooling. And I was a Christian in medical school. But I would do just fine with very bloody surgeries where the patient was anesthetized, but the clinic procedures where the patient was suffering and would express pain, I would almost faint. We know that something's wrong about humans that suffer. We don't like it. We want to stop it. That's just a human instinct, and that's a good thing to want to stop that. I was very much concerned with the problem of suffering and of evil. And how could a good God permit his supposed sons and daughters to suffer in the world today without intervening?
And so that got me onto this whole theme of studying predestination and free will. And that is still a theological topic that is very interesting and very complex to me today. I find that for anybody who struggles with that, William Lane Craig's molinism is a very effective way to make sense of that for me.
But essentially, I just couldn't make sense of, okay, I presuppose that God's character is good. And I presuppose that he loves his creation and the humans that he created, yet he's letting us fall into sin. He's letting us suffer. And so understanding that that came ultimately as a consequence of free will and that I couldn't. I couldn't love a God who was just and who was perfect, but also expect him to be okay with imperfection and to not demand consequences for evil, all of those ideas were just incompatible. And I was asking God to be less than who he was.
[00:39:26] Speaker B: As you were coursing through this, were.
[00:39:28] Speaker C: You talking with your friend about what you were Reading and discussing, you know, the questions that it was raising. Was it, you know, what was going on in your mind in terms of shifting towards the possibility of belief?
[00:39:46] Speaker A: I did talk to my friend a little bit. I actually talked to a lot of my other friends as well who were all non believers. And there was a great deal of mockery at the time. I had very strong emotions in response to this book and I would encourage anybody who was like me and who hates or hated Christianity to really lean into those emotions and investigate why they're there. Because that was one of the strongest drivers for me to lean into Christianity and learn about it a little bit more is that I was reading this book by a pastor that I had scoffed at and yet it was triggering immense amount of anger in me, which I'd never felt before. And I was, I was channeling that into mockery with my other non believer friends. I was going to turn the book into origami and put the little origamis on the front on the other guy's desk. That gave me the book as a sort of passive aggressive, I don't know what I wanted to do right, but I was just really angry that I had been confronted and found to be intellectually wanting. I had found to be wrong. And I had found that a lot of the very self righteous impressions and strawman arguments that I made about Christianity could be so easily knocked down by just a few pages of this book.
But yes, I was, I followed up with questions and I actually switched to follow up with a, with a female mentor. He connected me with a female mentor and she was older and very spiritually mature and she was somebody that I could go to with, you know, in an intimate way as well, which is what I needed.
So I ended up talking about all of my objections with her and she provided that, you know, that safety and that a very non judgmental attitude towards me, but also provided that wisdom and that anchor of certainty of somebody who has known God for very, very many years and her faith is not going to be shaken by some silly objections or, you know, arguments that I've made that she's heard a million times and reasoned with people through. So that was very important for me to have and something that I hope, you know, Christians can be to non believers once they convert or they mature as well.
[00:42:06] Speaker C: So your time spent with this older woman, I guess again those discussions led you to perhaps soften your animosity, become more, you know, some of those walls were, I presume, breaking down and you were becoming more open and more and more open and to the place of seeing plausibility of the Christian worldview, of the grounding of these moral laws, these scientific laws. There was an answer to brokenness in the world and the reasons for suffering.
And as you were walking along, I guess it. I presume at some point it intersected with the person of Christ. Did it lead you there?
[00:42:50] Speaker A: Yeah. So actually, at the end of the Reason for God, Timothy Keller gives a distilled description of Christ's sacrifice on the cross. And so before I talked to anybody else, I read the Gospel, and I realized I'd never heard the Gospel, despite the fact that in every English literature class in most of these universities, including mine, you will read excerpts of the Bible. But it's always in a very academic way. It's as if you're reading a scientific article and you're typically not reading from the gospel. You're reading small excerpts or you're reading from, you know, scattered books, and so you don't get a cohesive picture. So I never really heard the full story of Christ's sacrifice on the cross, and I heard it from Tim Keller by the end of the book, and it really touched my heart. And so there was the intellectual component, and there was the heart component that God just blessed me with that moment.
And so I didn't declare myself to be a Christian at that point. I declared myself to be a theist.
But it was a lot of investigation, I think, to. To turn to Christianity took a lot of investigation into the historical aspects of Christianity. And so I just found. I found the most historical support for Christianity than for, let's say, Islam. And I found that it made the most sense with the world as I understood it. But I. I dove into a lot of, you know, Roman history and sources that discussed the person of Jesus and his role as, you know, the starter of this new religion and this Messiah, this martyr.
And I dived into church history, and that helped a lot.
I learned a lot about. I was very concerned with biblical translations and oral traditions and how the Bible was passed down from generation to generation. So I did a lot of study on that and found that oftentimes, you know, when they were translating or copying over the Bible, even when they were copying, they would count, you know, make sure the same first letter was on every single line, and they would count the number of letters between every incidence of the letter A, for example. They were just immensely careful. There were scholars that were, you know, translating it and copying it. And so all of those little studies, I would say, contributed Bit by bit to me becoming a Christian. But it was a combination of the intellectual side and the emotional reaction that I had to the gospel and to Christ's sacrifice.
[00:45:19] Speaker C: So you reached a point to where you believed it was true.
And true enough to surrender your life, I suppose, to the person of Christ.
Yeah, that's beautiful. And I think that's honest too, especially as a critical thinker, as you are an intellectual, that you don't want to believe something that you don't believe is true. Even so, I appreciate about that, about you, is that you did some rigorous study in order to ground again the reality of your belief in Christ and what he did on the cross for you. So I imagine that now that you are, from the time of becoming a Christian onward, you were able to see life and even your work, I would imagine, in a more holistic view in that, you know that. That Christianity actually provides beautiful explanatory power for what you do, who you are, the grounding underneath your worldview and what actually you do as a scientist. How has your perspective changed in your life and in your work since becoming a Christian?
[00:46:42] Speaker A: Yes, like you said, I mean, it's given a foundation to everything. It's given a philosophical foundation, it's given a scientific foundation, a moral foundation, everything. In terms of the science specifically, like I mentioned before, you know, it. It makes sense of humans capacity for rational thought. It makes sense of our consciousness. It makes sense of the laws that I'm able to discover and the repetitive patterns that I find through my scientific inquiry. It helps me to give credence to the medical ethics principles that I would follow as a practicing physician.
It underlies a lot of my work in that way. But yeah, so essentially, you know, as a scientist now, I can. I can expect laws governing the world that I can discover. I can. I think it was Abraham Kuyper that said that, you know, Christians who are scientists, we know that we're building something, we're creating something according to some blueprint that God has some sort of blueprint or some sort of final end that we're working towards. And that's very powerful for, you know, anybody, no matter what your job is, science or anything that, you know, if you're a Christian, you believe that you have the Holy Spirit indwelling in you. You believe that you can be directed by the Holy Spirit, that presumably through prayer and through sanctification, that you would be able to discern, you know, where the Holy Spirit is leading you in your life and you'd be able to contribute to that grand purpose that is, you know, written by God and determined by God.
And it's just the most, you know, beyond science, beyond philosophy, anything. It's just the most fantastical adventure as well, I think. You know, it's just. It's just this incredible heroic task that God himself, Jesus himself, asked you to pick up your cross and follow him and leave behind, you know, what you were doing before. Leave behind your old idols, these, you know, these gods that are man made of wood and stone, and these, you know, animal gods or these, you know, idols that you have in your life of particular humans or particular achievements or particular things. You get to just leave that all behind and put in its proper place and follow the one true God. And it's just the most incredible adventure of a lifetime to know that you're following someone good who knows where he's going, who knows where he's leading you, and who's leading you with benevolence there. And I don't think any of us can say that if we don't have a personal God who we. We trust in his character and we trust in his purposes and his ends. I don't think, you know, even if you believe in a God and you're spiritual, but your God is not personal or you don't know anything about his character, he hasn't communicated it to you, you can't move through the world with that kind of confidence.
So, yes, so it just led me on just the most incredible adventure of a lifetime that I'm still on with the difficulties and still doubts from time to time, but with great certainty compared to where I was before and great purpose and great meaning.
[00:49:50] Speaker C: That's really beautiful.
And as we're.
I'm just thinking about those who are listening who. You know, there are so many skeptics who are out there who mock or deride Christianity without having given it much thought.
You know, I think in the same way there are a lot of people who are just, especially in this kind of elite scientific world or intellectual world, that they're just achieving and bent on, you know, accomplishment, but really not looking underneath the surface or not taking time to do that.
But. But yet there, you know, there are those who. Who know that are questioned that there's some. There's got to be something more. You know, there's got to be a better explanation. There's got to be something more for my life. But I wonder what you would say to those who are skeptical out there, who may be the slightest bit curious. Maybe they should. Maybe you should Virtually hand them, you know, the reasons for God and say, open this up and start reading it for yourself. What would you say to someone who was the slightest bit curious or even not that you would challenge them?
[00:51:10] Speaker A: Yeah, I would say that if, if you're even a little bit curious or if you don't have a well formed worldview, which I suspect most people don't.
I think first of all, it's your intellectual duty. It's just your duty as a human being to figure out why you're here, what's going to make your life good? How are you going to live a good life?
Ask yourself these very basic questions, why am I doing what I do every day? And start with those very basic philosophical questions and then that'll drill you down into some answers. And if Christianity specifically is of interest and you're curious about that, I would say just read.
I think it's, you know, it can be good to find a Christian and ask them questions as well. I didn't really have the opportunity, I didn't know any and I didn't feel comfortable with anybody until I met that, that one person.
So a lot of people may be in a bit of a secular bubble there. But I would say don't be afraid to, you know, pick up C.S. lewis, Tim Keller, any number of authors, John Lennox, if you're interested in science and just start reading with an open mind. And I would say if you have a strong emotional reaction, there's a reason why. And I would strongly encourage people to be very honest with themselves and self reflective in why they reject a particular worldview. Is that truly because you've investigated all aspects of it and you found it to be illogical or wanting? Or is that because you haven't really investigated but you think on the surface it sounds ridiculous, or you're just, you know, you're sort of a victim of your modern times and you think that to be enlightened means to be separated from antiquated religion. Sort of be honest with yourself about what presuppositions you hold and what emotional reasons you may have as well. I think a lot of people who come to me and who say that they would never be a Christian and I asked them a little bit about their personal history, you'll find something in the past that's leading them there, some negative experience. And you know, Christians are sinners too.
And so you know that negative experience is to be expected if you interact with enough Christians.
But yes, I would just say that people should be intellectually curious and honest with Themselves and self reflective and to dig into their emotional responses.
[00:53:45] Speaker C: Yeah, I think that's really wonderful. And for us as Christians, there are so many directions here, but not only from your own wisdom, but also what happened in your own life. You had friends, right, who led you and who challenged you to look a little bit deeper, went beyond their own apprehension and fear, challenged you with boldness to really take a closer look at what Christianity is.
But I love what you were saying there just a minute ago, how even in your own interactions with those who don't believe that you're asking their back story, you know, as to why they don't believe and trying to see, is it, you know, what the source of the objection is?
Why don't you talk with us as Christians in terms of really good ways to engage with those who are skeptical of belief?
[00:54:45] Speaker A: Yeah, I would say, first of all, a lot of Christians that I know are in Christian bubbles. They don't really have a friend who's not a Christian. I think a lot of people are afraid of that nowadays.
They're afraid that somebody may influence them poorly in a spiritual way towards sin, or they're afraid of engaging with someone who might be hateful towards them. And while I understand that, I think that's, you know, you have to have faith in the Lord and the Holy Spirit and, you know, the strength of your convictions.
And I would say, you know, the first step is to find a friend who thinks very differently than you and to not treat them as a project. I think that was, that was a challenge for me when I was first becoming a Christian was that I, you know, the female mentor that I had, she treated me with so much love and she treated me like a granddaughter. But there were other people on my journey that I felt like, am I an evangelical fun project for them? Am I an intellectual challenge? Do they just like to debate and they're bored or do they actually care about me as a person and they want me to find truth? And so I think I would say, you know, the first step is make a friend who's not a Christian and then to engage with people, I think, you know, you have to have a sort of level of intimacy and a sort of friendship there first.
And I would say, try not to be offended. And that can be really difficult. But I remember I went to church for the first time and I actually sat at a round table pastor's class and I asked, you know, well, were these miracles really real that Jesus did or is this just a metaphor? And I really wanted to know I really thought, I was like, there's no way that these could be real. That's ridiculous. I, you know, I said something like that, this must be allegory or this, this must be myth. How do you interpret this? Is this poetic language in the Greek? And, you know, how do I. How do I make sense of that? And it was such a genuine question. I didn't ask with any sort of animosity either. And the silence at the table and the looks on everyone's faces, I can still remember to this day were just complete shock. And I felt so judged and so uncomfortable. And my now husband just calmly picked up and said, yeah, yes, we, you know, we do believe that they're miracles. That's the purpose of them being included in the Bible. If they weren't miracles, they wouldn't be outstanding and they wouldn't be proof that Jesus was the Son of God. And so, you know, and then he took me down, you know, sort of descriptions of, of language in the Bible and so on and so forth and helped instruct me from there. But I think that can be very helpful to be.
To be loving towards the people that we're evangelizing towards and be very careful that we're not interacting with them in a prideful way that is sort of holier than thou or presumes that.
That they're always asking questions from. From a place of darkness or animosity. Sometimes it's just genuine curiosity.
But even if it is from animosity, to just be patient with that, because being confronted with the truth of Christ can. Can bring up a lot of strong objections and strong emotions.
And then finally, I would say that I would really encourage them to study and to, you know, invite them to a book club or just invite them to read a book with you or with you and one other friend who, you know, is a strong Christian. That's been a really good format for me, and that's something that I got from the CS Lewis Institute was these discipleship groups of three to four people where you meet once a week and you discuss. You know, it could be anything, the Bible, a book, but it's very focused on, you know, maturing together spiritually. And in this relational context, it's focused on building intimacy and friendship and sharing prayer requests and not just being this big Bible study, but being just really an intimate group. And so I've done that with non believers and Christians, and that's worked beautifully in that, you know, even if someone doesn't convert at the end, they got a chance to ask a lot of really hard questions to a group that they feel like is not going to run away. If they ask some uncomfortable things, they're going to keep seeing them, and we're going to keep having those discussions. So I think having, you know, using. Using gifts of hospitality or using the context of discipleship or other relational contexts to let people ask these questions has been very helpful for me.
[00:59:20] Speaker C: Yeah, that's really beautiful. And I. And I love to the word that you gave a little bit earlier when you mentioned that it's good to be hospitable and friendly and create a great relationship, but it's also very, very important to use our words. Right? To identify who we are and that we are followers of Christ and to speak truth. Right. With boldness, but with gentleness and respect. And it sounds like you really embody all of those things.
Your story has been extraordinary, Kathleen.
I admire you and your accomplishments, but I think I respect you even more for the beautiful woman of God that you've become and the way that you're able to not only use the intellect that God has given you in a very deep and profound way, not only with regard to your work, your vocation, but also as applied to your belief, your faith, the way that you engage with others in such a meaningful way, the way that you even tell your story.
And it's obvious to me that he has gifted you not only intellectually, but is, but in your beautiful spirit and the way that you can and your vision and the way that you're able to see things holistically. And now all of life has become not only a witness to you in terms of the glory of God, but also your life in Christ has become this beautiful witness to the world. That an intelligent, beautiful young woman can embrace reality in such a meaningful way, but yet also be such a really brave and bold and beautiful witness to the world, to the watching world, that there is something more worth taking a look at. You know, that there is meaning and purpose to be found, that those big questions can be answered in a very profound way through Christianity, through God, through the person of Christ.
And I just want to thank you for coming on today and telling me your story. I know so many people are going to be blessed.
[01:01:32] Speaker A: Thank you so much for having me. That's very sweet of you. And yes, I just. I hope this is a witness for Christ. And I hope, yes, I hope the listeners will listen to this and at least be prompted to read something. If you're not a believer, just be prompted to think about Christianity and just consider. Just keep a bit of an open mind.
[01:01:57] Speaker B: Thanks for tuning in to Ex skeptic to hear Dr. Kathleen Noller's inspiring story. For more about Kathleen and her recommendations, be sure to check out our show notes. If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to reach out at our
[email protected] we love hearing from you. Exkeptic is part of the C.S. lewis Institute podcast Network. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider giving us a good rating and sharing it on your social media. Your support helps us bring the these powerful stories of transformation to more and more listeners. In the meantime, I'll be looking forward to seeing you next time where we'll hear another unlikely story of belief.
