[00:00:00] Speaker A: The fascinating thing that I did not understand, that a lot of non believers don't know. The Bible, if approached correctly, withstands critical scrutiny. It doesn't resist questioning. No, it isn't opaque. It isn't transparent either, but it isn't opaque to your questions. It encourages your questions.
[00:00:27] Speaker B: Welcome to ekoskeptic, the podcast that explores the unexpected journeys of those who've moved from doubt to belief. I'm your host, Jana Harmon. And here we uncover the personal stories of former skeptics and atheists who found themselves embracing faith almost against everything they once thought possible. If you've ever wrestled with life's biggest questions about God, truth or meaning, or wondered how belief can emerge from deep skepticism, you're in the right place. Each episode, we step inside the minds and hearts of those who once dismissed faith. Follow their struggles, questions and turning points that led them to a new understanding of reality. Whether you're a skeptic searching for answers, a believer looking for deeper insight, or simply curious, these stories will challenge your thinking and open the door to new possibilities. In today's episode, we have the chance to see what happens when A lifelong skeptic, Dr. Larry Sanger, the co founder of Wikipedia, an analytic philosopher and champion of reason and intellectual rigor, begins to question his own skepticism of God. The very foundations of his non belief were shaken not by blind faith, but willingness to diligently pursue truth wherever it led. He had built a life on pursuit of knowledge, reason, and skepticism, leading him to become an atheist. Yet over time, the questions he once dismissed demanded deeper answers. His journey wasn't sudden. It was slow and deliberate and deeply personal. It involved philosophy, history, scripture, and unexpected moments of clarity. And today we step into that journey with him. If you've ever wrestled with doubt, if you've ever questioned the assumptions you've held about belief and non belief, then Larry's story might just surprise you. Let's get started.
Welcome to Ex Skeptic. Larry, it's great to have you with me today.
[00:02:22] Speaker A: It's good to be here.
[00:02:24] Speaker B: You come to the table with a lot of gravitas. Why don't you tell us a little bit about your background and education and experience, both in work and in academics.
[00:02:35] Speaker A: Okay. Well, I was born in the Seattle area and moved as a child up to Alaska, where I grew up, went to college at Reed College, and I was more of a libertarian than a liberal like most of the people who go there. And then I went to Ohio State and got my PhD in philosophy. So all three of my degrees are in philosophy. I was finishing the dissertation then and a friend of mine told me about wikis.
And so I got the idea of a wiki encyclopedia and pursued it for the first 14 months and then I named it, gave it a lot of its first policies.
And then basically I did teach a little bit after that for a few years and then I went back to, you know, a bunch of startups, mostly nonprofit educational stuff. I've worked on a lot of encyclopedia projects since then, you know, as a consultant, started a couple. Most recently I have been the president of the Knowledge Standards foundation, which as the name implies, it's technical standards, not epistemic standards for basically bringing together all of the free encyclopedias in the world in a single network, essentially making them all available according to a common standard. Something that would be bigger than Wikipedia and more useful than Wikipedia. But it's a big task.
[00:04:22] Speaker B: It sounds like a fantastic enterprise.
[00:04:25] Speaker A: Right. Well, we'd like more people to use it.
Yeah.
And now, to be quite honest, I've been looking into daily using, you know, AI chatbots, LLMs as they're called, even programming with them a little bit. And basically I think that encyclopedias are eventually going to take the role of essentially articulating what our knowledge is or is sort of like the benchmark that LLMs will use when it decides to declare what is generally believed. There's a lot of work to be done, a lot of very important stuff that just is really under supported.
[00:05:17] Speaker B: Well, I'm glad that people like you, with brilliant minds like you are out there doing that. So it's a gift, truly.
[00:05:23] Speaker A: Thank you.
[00:05:24] Speaker B: So your story, you published your story online, you've said about a year, writing your story, crafting your story after a period of time of belief. And I love your story. Yeah. And I'm so grateful that you're here to talk with me about it today.
[00:05:42] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:05:43] Speaker B: That when I, when I read through your story, there were a few things that stood out to me about you, just you as a person and the way that you pursue knowledge. And that is that and even your life is that you are a pursuer of truth, pursuer of goodness, and that you have a degree of integrity about you and honesty, that you're you, you're open to wherever the truth leads.
And that seemed to be true throughout your life.
Well, right, anyway, yes, truly, it's impressive.
And with someone of your brilliance, that intellectual integrity and honesty was a very important value to you. And so I hope that as we go through this story, everyone can get a grasp of really, I think that's a highly valued virtue today is to really be open and honest.
And you call yourself a truth seeker.
And so I. And it doesn't surprise me that to find you in the place where you are.
Introduce us to your story as a young person, as a child, the kind of home you grew up, whether God was in your home and how you reflected or thought of those things, the concepts of God, even as a child, was it something that you believed? Was it something you questioned? How did that look?
[00:07:22] Speaker A: I certainly believed in God when I was a child.
I was born and raised in the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, which is not that different from C.S. lewis's Anglicanism. You know, I was very thoughtful, but on the other hand, I didn't have very many people answering my questions in a very deep way. There weren't philosophers in my family, but I had a lot of philosophical questions. It didn't stop me from asking the questions that.
And I enjoyed just, you know, discussing things with family and friends and whatnot. I read the Bible quite a bit, but never all the way through.
I don't think I really understood what I was reading.
Not very well. I think we would have done some sorts of, you know, very rudimentary Bible studies of basic passages. But the. The unfolding of the entire Bible story, which is really necessary to understand Christ is.
That wasn't really made clear to me until 2020, 19 to 2020, when I first read the Bible all the way through for the first time. So at the time, when I was a kid, as I had a basic church and family understanding of Christianity and God, I talked to God, you know, so to speak. Imagine having conversations with him, even as a small child. I remember going to vacation Bible school, you know, and that sort of thing. So I received a sort of typical. What I imagine was a typical lcms childhood exposure to doctrine. So.
[00:09:23] Speaker B: And so it was something. It was obviously important to your family and you participated in these things and you prayed to God. You had some kind of semblance of belief.
[00:09:35] Speaker A: For a time in my young childhood, yes.
[00:09:38] Speaker B: In your early childhood, even until the time of your confirmation at 12, were you still believing when you went through that process?
[00:09:47] Speaker A: Yeah, I think so, definitely.
But it was just a few years after that when basically we stopped going to church because my mom and dad got divorced.
[00:09:59] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:09:59] Speaker A: And then.
Then I still remember the belief kind of slipping away.
I didn't think too hard about it. I don't think I cared that much a little bit.
And I stopped praying.
So.
Yeah. And, you know, as I started asking Questions even more, more pointedly, more perhaps intelligent questions. When I was a teenager, the fact that I couldn't get satisfactory answers really started mattering.
[00:10:39] Speaker B: You were asking questions about the truth of God or the Bible or Christianity, and to whom were you asking? And, and we're not getting satisfying answers.
[00:10:50] Speaker A: Oh well, I wasn't really asking people so much because remember, I had more questions than people would put up with.
It really came to a head when I took a class in philosophy as a, as a high school junior.
And we, we would have discussed any number of philosophical topics. One of them definitely would have been the arguments for the existence of God. And I really took that to heart at the following summer. You know, I imagined myself a writer and I remember just writing a lot about philosophical topics. And essentially I thought that in order to know anything I had to know precisely what I believed and why I was believing it and that the reasons are adequate to support and actually really excellent.
I was a little vague on just how much support the reasons should give to the, to my conclusions, but they definitely had to have some support.
And this ultimately meant that I was, I went through a process of, of doubting everything.
Philosophers will recognize this as being the process of Cartesian doubt. And, and the reason that, the reason I got so fascinated by philosophy, one of the main reasons is the, the following line of thought that just, I latched onto and, and couldn't shake, I guess, which is a lot of the people in my life like my divorced parents and, and you know, my siblings, druggie friends and, and other others around me, people that I knew at school had all kinds of problems and they even in some cases had totally ruined their young lives.
And it seemed to me that if they simply had one or two different beliefs that they wouldn't be caught up in these problems.
So I came to the conclusion that I really needed to know the truth myself about anything that matters or I myself might end up ruining my life in some way.
[00:13:36] Speaker B: Right.
[00:13:36] Speaker A: That just, that general thought struck me. So like knowing the truth about, about principles, like just, even, even practical principles, relatively low print, low level principles like drugs expand the mind.
So is it true or not?
It's pretty important because if you think they do, you'll be a lot more likely to take drugs if you think it's, if you don't think it's true, or if you're not convinced that it's true, then you'll have one less reason to take them. So I never got into drugs seriously, thank God.
And that's one of the reasons that, that's just an example.
So the idea was I was going to raise all of my beliefs to the ground. And of course, one of my beliefs, unlike Descartes, by the way, was the belief in God.
[00:14:42] Speaker B: Okay, so raising your beliefs to the ground and really looking for good reasons to believe what you do believe, justify true beliefs. When you were a junior in high school, thinking back to that philosophy class, those arguments for the existence of God that were presented to you, did they, did they qualify for you as substantive arguments that, that the reasons for belief in God were justified in any way, or did you find them uncompelling or unconvincing at that time?
[00:15:20] Speaker A: No. The teenage me would have said, I know there are these arguments. And I sort of went through them, rehearsed them, and tried to come up with new ones myself, but I, I didn't think that they supported the conclusion adequately. In other words, they, they weren't strong enough. And for many, many years after that, I continued to think that that basically okay, their arguments, they, in the sense that anything that gives some reason to believe something, I can acknowledge that they do give a reason to believe that God exists. But it's not a very strong reason. It's not enough of a reason to persuade a methodological skeptic, which is named for the position that I, the methodology that I outlined before, it's not an adequate reason for a methodological skeptic to give up his skepticism about God.
[00:16:25] Speaker B: So you went on to college and you studied philosophy. You had this really mode of analysis, methodological skepticism.
So at that time, I guess you would have left your whatever tacit beliefs in God behind because they weren't warranted in some way, I would imagine. Would you have considered yourself an agnostic, an atheist? How would you have positioned yourself?
[00:16:57] Speaker A: Very clear from the beginning that I was an agnostic and not an atheist. Okay, so philosophers, as opposed to, like the atheist activist community, draw a fairly clear distinction between atheism and agnosticism, where atheism is the positive assertion that God does not exist, whereas agnosticism is simply withholding the proposition. You neither assert that God exists nor that God does not exist.
And in a stronger version, the original sense, an agnostic is someone who thought it was impossible to know that God exists. But I never actually believed that either.
I just said I do not know, not that it's impossible to know. Maybe it is possible for all I knew.
[00:17:53] Speaker B: I'm just curious, during this time of skepticism, agnosticism, what was religion to you, a social construct? Was this because you had grown up in a culture reinforcing these ideas. What did you think those ideas were at the time where you moved completely away from all of that?
[00:18:15] Speaker A: My general notion was that it's all more or less irrational. I didn't really understand it, and I didn't really care about understanding it too much because none of it really struck me as being very likely. It's just, you know, people using their imagination about things that they don't understand.
They cannot understand that sort of thing.
The, the idea that revelation might be true, that there might be an actually existent God who would want to speak to us, is just something I couldn't take seriously at all. So that side of religion as a real force in the world, as opposed to just a human invention, that was not something I thought about or took seriously at all.
[00:19:07] Speaker B: I appreciate during that time that you, even though you didn't take religion seriously, that you didn't overtly demean it. Like some, some in the atheistic community seem to ridicule those who are people who believe in God and as ignorant or uneducated, or that their, their thinking or evidence isn't even worth considering. And I appreciate the fact that you, you maintained it, I guess, a cordiality in your view of Christians. Obviously it was part of your family.
[00:19:46] Speaker A: So, yeah, I'm the only one in my family who, who was a non believer, so. So like, if anything, it was due to loyalty to them, you know, I knew that they weren't stupid, you know.
[00:20:05] Speaker B: So anyway, yeah, so you were teaching philosophy and moving on in your life, getting your doctoral degree in philosophy and continuing on working and, and as a, again, a. Skeptical towards God. What was it, what was it in your life that caused you to start becoming skeptical of your own skepticism towards God?
[00:20:34] Speaker A: Right, A number of different things.
And I go over this intermediate period, basically between graduate school and 2020, so a period of about 20 years or so. And one thing that happened is I got married and, and had a child, now 2. And I reflected that I would die for these people, of course, if I had to. And that meant that I put their interests ahead of mine.
You might say, well, what difference does that make? Well, it so happens that in my youth, between the ages of about 16 and 26, I was interested in the philosophy of Ayn Rand. Her ethical theory is called ethical egoism, which basically says what we ought to do is determined by our own self interest, our enlightened, rational self interest, but our own interest.
But when I had a wife and a child, I discovered, yes, I would like sacrifice all of my interests dying for theirs. Well, that means that I'm not acting on my behalf, I'm acting on their behalf.
And so I guess I'm not an ethical egoist. And that gave me one less reason to believe in anything regarding Ayn Rand. I was never a dogmatic follower of Ayn Rand, quite the contrary in that community. I was kind of a gadfly because they tended to be very dogmatic themselves.
But nevertheless, she was an atheist. Because she was an atheist, that sort of confirmed me in my atheism.
Another reason that I had for agnosticism was what I called the no concept view of God. That basically I argued that we cannot really have a concept of God at all because what God is supposed to be is a creator out of nothing with a thought.
Whatever God is supposed to be, he's supposed to be a mind or a soul that creates things out of nothing with a thought. Well, we have no experience of that. We have no idea what that could possibly mean and therefore we don't know what God is.
There's actually something to that argument. I would say it's just that the conclusion that I can't have any concept of God doesn't follow. But I thought it did.
Later I came up with, I guess this is about 2017. I came up with the following argument. We can imagine a world in the not too distant future in which AI and is so advanced that it develops itself and becoming both self aware and improving itself with various robots and whatnot. You can imagine some sort of entity evolving out of this for a billion years, which has the capacity, I mean, just imagine how much difference there is between where we are today and where we were a thousand years ago. And then extrapolate that a billion years from now. Isn't it possible that some descendant race, species, entity would have the ability to create planets and you know, planets, then maybe stars and then, you know what I'm saying, I don't know if it's, if it's really true, might not be, but it's conceivable. And if it's conceivable, then what we're conceiving of is a creator. And then all you have to do in order to get the notion of a real creator is say, well, that sort of being which can has sort of hookups necessary to create a universe with a thought.
Well, that is all you have to do is say that sort of being already existed, has always existed, and there you have the notion of God.
So one by one, and I won't give any more examples unless you want me to. My reason is to disbelief that God existed. The reasons for resistance, so to speak, they just fell by the wayside.
[00:25:55] Speaker B: Wow. Again, as someone who's intellectually honest with integrity towards truth seeking, it sounds like again, you were willing to say the possibility of God is viable option on the table. When you consider these, these things that you were really working through intellectually. I'm curious, this is just a random question.
As someone who's obviously very brilliant and you rely a lot on your reason to draw conclusions and to really consider these larger questions that you were considering and that were actually moving you away perhaps from skepticism, did you ever question the rationality of your own mind in terms of its grounding? If you were. If we're born of blind, purposeless processes, how can we trust our own reason or rationality?
[00:26:50] Speaker A: So first of all, I would disagree that I'm particularly brilliant. I'm pretty, pretty average, sort of intellectual.
But you're humble. I would say that it's a very good question. Actually. My area of specialization when I was an academic was epistemology. And that is one of the questions that epistemology has considered. I like what Reid says about it. R E I D, the founder of the Scottish School of Common Sense.
And I don't know if I can remember the precise quote, but it's something like this.
He must be a fool or would want to make a fool of me. He would try to reason me out of my reason and senses that essentially if we do not have a rock bottom trust in the ability of human reason, then there's no point in talking at all or trying to reason at all.
So it's a methodological assumption. And that actually is something that I remember thinking about and deciding about when I was a teenager, like when I was 17 years old. I remember that I had forgotten, but I remember it now that, yes, one of the things, one of the things that is a rock bottom assumption that I can't dispense with is the notion that the truth is findable, at least to some limited degree, with human reason.
What else have we got?
[00:28:52] Speaker B: So as you were, your, your skepticism, you were beginning to say perhaps, well, God may be possible. Is there something there? You were, you were willing to move down that road to, to take a closer look or to scrutinize farther, further.
How did that work its way out? What did you do about this openness, not this potentiality, I guess you could say, in terms of the possibility of God, what did you do with that.
[00:29:32] Speaker A: Let'S put it this way. I was no less an agnostic in the sense that I didn't feel myself like drifting toward belief. I didn't even, like in November 2019 that had not changed.
[00:29:52] Speaker B: Right.
[00:29:54] Speaker A: All I'm saying is that a lot of the reasons that I had had earlier no longer were reasons for me to, to reject belief. So I was set up for a soft landing, so to speak.
[00:30:14] Speaker B: So then what happened? So the reasons for rejecting were falling, but then you were still in a place perhaps, I don't know, that I can imagine you being really ambivalent because you're a truth seeker.
[00:30:29] Speaker A: Yeah, well, I didn't care that much, to be perfectly frank. I mean, like I admitted intellectually that God might exist. Okay.
On the other hand, I didn't see any good reason, any rationally persuasive reason to think that he did.
And that was still my position. There wasn't anything, you know, the fact that I couldn't hold on to the reason for agnosticism or for the no concept view that I had before didn't change that state of affairs.
But so yes, it required some positive work essentially on my part or on the part of the Holy Spirit to change my mind and actually not just change it about the existence of God, but about methodological skepticism itself.
[00:31:40] Speaker B: So how did that happen?
[00:31:43] Speaker A: Well, all right, I'll start the story here in the summer of 2019. You probably remember the story of Jeffrey Epstein was breaking. Right?
[00:31:57] Speaker B: Right.
[00:31:59] Speaker A: Some people knew about him a long time before that. I didn't. That's like the first I'd heard of him. And a friend of mine told me about other high profile pedophiles and the people that they were surrounded by, you know, so Sir Jimmy Saville and some, some, some guy who peddled children to Belgian politicians, pedo wood in general, in other words, these directors and producers and whatnot who abused children in Hollywood. These sorts of cases are talked about, many, many such cases. Actually there's not just, not just the ones that I've mentioned, but I could go through a list of about 20 more at least that are high profile in the news. It's just we don't think about them altogether. And my friend was pointing out to me that if you actually look at the actual religious beliefs and the sort of symbology that these people routinely use, you can see that they are like these New Agers or they're Freemasons or they have some very wonky spiritual beliefs, let's put it that way.
And he was trying to get Me to see the symbology that just pervades pop culture.
I don't know how much that is still the case, but it's. It's a thing for sure. And a lot of people became aware of that at the time.
[00:33:50] Speaker B: Right.
[00:33:50] Speaker A: And I thought, well, is it possible that some of the most influential people in the world actually believe this stuff, you know, the occult, and they actually think that it has some effect on the world?
Why would they take such enormous personal risks committing these most horrific crimes? Right. Because they are truly crimes. They're criminals. If the thing that they're accused of doing is the case, why would they do that for a lie or something they didn't believe in? And then I always said, if there is a spirit world and there are like angels and demons, and I want to be on the side of the angels, I want to be on God's side, that's for sure.
Now, my friend was trying to, like, get me to talk more publicly about. About the elite pedophile rings, and I was on board with that to a certain extent. But I didn't want to start researching the occult more, as he was encouraging me to do, because I knew that even if I'm reading about the occult, I'm actually learning the occult mysteries, which the occultists themselves say open spiritual doors. So I don't want to do that.
But another thing that I learned, though, is that the occult is to a very great extent a reaction to and a perversion of biblical symbology and doctrine and things that can be found in the Bible.
So I said, you know, if I'm going to actually learn this stuff properly, then I should actually start with what they're reacting to, namely the Bible.
[00:35:53] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:35:55] Speaker A: And so I sort of left it at that for many months.
And it wasn't until the next December that I decided it's pretty important I should just finally sit down and read the Bible. It'll fill a hole in my education, which I didn't know the half of it. And it's like people who have not read the Bible, they just. You don't know what. What you're missing as far as. As a grounding in Western civilization. If you don't know the Bible, you will not understand so much of what happened in the west, basically in detail. It really helps to know it in detail. And so I decided to start reading it cover to cover, and I did. In a hundred days.
[00:36:53] Speaker B: In a hundred days, yes. That's a lot in a short period of time. You really soaked it in. What did you think when you read the Bible like that for the first time in an immersive way.
[00:37:06] Speaker A: I had read the Bible to my sons, parts of it, even the first couple of books of the Bible.
And at that time I thought that it was more or less nonsense, these quaint Bronze Age writings of shepherds, nothing terribly important except for educational purposes, which I thought was, was important.
But now I was actually trying to understand it and answering all the questions that I had about it. Because I thought that if I'm going to take the study seriously and actually learn what there is to learn about the Bible, then I have to understand it as the people who believe it understand it, not other people, not like skeptical scholars. Because I know academia pretty well and I know how they would approach the Bible.
And I was not wrong about that.
They'll like read their own speculative theories into it as opposed to just trying to understand it on its own terms.
And that's what I tried to do, to understand it on its own terms. And when I did that, I was amazed that all the questions that I had had over the years, and I had many, were not only anticipated and asked, they had been asked, you know, for thousands of years. In some cases they had been studied and written about endlessly by this field called theology. Of course I knew that there was a field called theology.
I knew it had something to do with the Bible and theorizing about God, but I couldn't really tell you very much about it.
What I had no inkling of was that it actually succeeds to a very great extent from anybody's point of view, making sense of what the Bible says. I'm not saying that anyone who thoroughly studies theology will become a Christian. I'm saying that it makes a coherent system, that the ideas contained in the Bible make a coherent system. And theology basically lays that system bare. That's what its job is. And I didn't know at all.
Yeah. And so I, by reading the Bible and answering my questions as I went through, basically acquainted myself with this 2000 year old history of theology.
And it was very persuasive, it was very interesting. But that was the only reason why I changed my mind.
[00:40:14] Speaker B: Yes, of course, in reading and picking up Scripture, of course it is coherent. Right. And it seems to be very comprehensive in its scope in terms of explanation, but it also seems to correspond with reality in many ways.
But I wondered, as you picked up this text, as a skeptic, skeptical by nature, did you ever question the reliability of the text, who the authors were, whether or not they, you know, the text was transmitted accurately over time. Those things that we seem to hear from those who push back against the Bible.
[00:40:52] Speaker A: Of course, yeah, of course. That'll be one of the first, first questions that I ask. And, and I, I ended up fairly early on. I don't know when it would have been, maybe February or March of 2020. So right around the time when I was changing my mind of the case for Christ.
And it is a really good book.
And it goes into some of those questions about the transmission of the Bible. It's very important. The answers are fairly straightforward. The Bible exists in more copies than any ancient manuscript by orders of magnitude.
And these manuscripts can be found in multiple traditions, multiple strands, and yet they show this enormous overlap. A great consistency, perfect consistency. There are a lot of variant readings, but that can be expected and explained by copyist errors.
And there's some other sorts of things to talk about, but that's all part of a field called textual criticism, and that's not hard to wrap one's mind around in terms of understanding what it is.
Even a non believer ought to be able to be rationally convinced that the Bible has not changed significantly in the Greek and the Hebrew from ancient times.
And certainly you can construct all the main doctrines of the Christian church based purely on the soundest readings of the Bible. Even if you cut away all the stuff that is even possibly a later addition, for example, what remains is more than enough to support, as I was saying, the whole project of theology.
[00:43:27] Speaker B: So as you were reading, you read the Bible and you came out of it, I guess, with more openness towards belief or as a truth seeker, did you believe the content as true?
[00:43:41] Speaker A: I didn't just believe it because it was written. No. There's another part that I haven't told.
[00:43:48] Speaker B: Yes, please do tell.
[00:43:50] Speaker A: Yeah.
So as I was reading even the first few books of the Bible, I was thinking through the classical arguments for the existence of God.
And as I went over them, even, even ones that I thought were the weakest, like the argument from contingency, the conclusion of which is essentially that there is a necessary being, and, and therefore it struck me as being like the weakest, the least help.
I, I was thinking of, of those arguments in new versions, or perhaps I had a greater appreciation. I taught those arguments, I taught philosophy of religion a couple of times as an agnostic back in like 2003-2005.
My view on the arguments developed in that same period a great deal.
And I had one insight that really brought them home in a way that I had never considered before, and that is one has to consider each argument as playing a role in the overall case for the existence of God. This is sometimes called the cumulative argument or the cumulative case.
And I think that's really true that, you know, it's important actually as a strategic point to say that the argument from contingency does not establish that God exists. All it establishes is that a necessary being which explains the contingent facts of the universe exists. Now, you might think that isn't very much. I agree it isn't the same as arguing that God exists. But the premises of that argument don't get you that far. But what it gets you is actually really important to the overall case. I mean, if you actually.
Either you give up the principle of sufficient reason or you think there is a necessary being that explains the universe, well, then you're starting from a very solid place. Even if it's a narrow ground, you can use it.
And the same goes with other arguments. So the argument from causality, it says that, well, if there's a necessary being that explains the universe, well, it's going to be a causal explanation first of all. And the things that are going to be caused are not just on my version, this is what I say.
They won't be just the passing events or the objects and the forces in the universe.
It will also be the laws that govern them and the scientific constants. You need to explain those things. Where did they come? What caused them to. To come into effect?
[00:47:17] Speaker B: Right.
[00:47:18] Speaker A: And, well, then that tells you a little more about the necessary causal being. And then the notion is you put a number of these arguments together in this way.
I could go on, but I won't know.
And you have a whole case for the existence of God.
And that never dawned on me before. I never really thought it through. At the same time that I was thinking of that, I was reading the Bible and I was also talking to God again. Now, I wasn't. I didn't call it at first praying. It was experimental. Right.
But eventually it became prayer.
It's very. It was very gradual. There was a time when I said, well, I guess what I'm doing really can be considered prayer.
And I guess I really have to admit to myself that I do believe that God exists. I don't know if I buy into all the rest of that stuff, that it sure seems like God exists and I'm praying to him.
But it was a very gradual process because it requires the replacement of an entire worldview.
[00:48:39] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:48:40] Speaker A: At the same time, I had to, like, write an essay.
Well, isn't quite that I felt compelled for, you know, cynical reasons to justify, rationalize a belief that I, that I was coming to as actually rethought the, the very idea of a soul. I wasn't that far away from soul talk already. As a philosopher. I, I bought into what is called property dualism. It isn't very far from, from believing in a, an immaterial soul. And I came to believe that also at least a soul that is not reducible to matter, let's put it that way, right.
Even now I feel like I didn't really reason myself into belief that God exists because it's so complex. It involves the change of a worldview.
One does not change a world, just decide up and decide to change a worldview. You don't do that.
I actually think I was guided by the Holy Spirit. I thought at the time that I was coming to believe for irrational reasons, like what am I doing?
Oh yes, but I mean, as you can see, I was at the same time reasoning through all of these things, justifying all the, the foundations of a Christian worldview.
Or at least I, I thought I was. I started writing a book which I'm still working on called God Exists. That's what it's called now.
But yeah, when I, when I started working on it, I didn't believe that God exists. I just, I, I, the very first, first drafts was just like me exploring the arguments.
So to that extent, I guess you could say I did sort of reason my way into it. But I would rather say that the Holy Spirit ultimately persuaded me and helped me to understand things that before I simply didn't understand. And at the very least that it's true that I learned a lot from the Bible and I can prove this by the way. I can prove that I learned a lot from the Bible. There's a whole chapter, two chapters in fact of my book in which I show in extremely fine grained detail just how close a match there is between the premises of the traditional arguments for the existence of God and things that the Bible says.
[00:51:41] Speaker B: You became a believer through time, through study, and through humble reflection. Yes, not only of your, the world and the arguments, but also of yourself. I think you allowed yourself. You know, you talk about the Holy Spirit coming and, and leading you really towards belief. And I believe that that's true, that God, he, he loves those who are seeking after him and he shows himself and he reveals himself through the world and the book of nature and through the book of Scripture and through his spirit. Right. He guides us and he leads us to himself there in, in your, in your story, in your 40 page, 40 plus page story, you do two things that I think that are very important to your story. One is that you, when you read the Bible, you were able to, especially in an immersive way, in a holistic way, you're able to see the story, the story of God through history.
[00:52:45] Speaker A: Right.
[00:52:46] Speaker B: And, and how he revealed himself over time, from creation, through the nation of Israel to the person of Christ and forward. But you also, and I think that's very important because it is a, speaking of a unified, I mean it's, it's, it's a grand story into which we find ourselves. But also you, you present the story of Christ and how he became man as God and how that he came for a purpose, to re, to call us to Himself. But there's a whole nother kind of step in which Jesus becomes a more personal belief for you.
Yes, that he is real and he revealed himself in the God, man, Jesus in the time, space, history and through Scripture. But it became very important for you, for sure. Can you talk about that?
[00:53:55] Speaker A: Sure.
I just want to say that what's important about understanding the overarching narrative of the Bible, the story, is not just that it's a grand story and it's beautiful or something, it's that you have to have a picture, at least I had to have a picture of what was going on. Like, that was like one of the main things that was stopping me from taking the Bible in particular seriously. It's like it's, it's one thing to say that it's an interesting piece of wisdom, of ancient wisdom literature that you know is conceivably true maybe somehow.
And it's quite another thing to say that it actually makes sense that it represents how you might antecedently expect God to speak to man, to reveal Himself to us. But your question was about how I came to believe in Jesus in particular. And. Well, one thing I, I want to say is a lot of people, including me, this is yet another thing that, that had to be cleared away for the longest time.
Certainly all the time that I, I was a child, I thought that by saving faith or belief, as in like John 3:16 people meant an actual intellectual ascent to a proposition.
And that is, if you keep talking that way, you're just going to drive off all kinds of people. That's not what the Bible meant. It's not correct, it's not biblical. What it meant is you have to have faith in God in the Person, which is to say you have to trust him.
And I think maybe the word that I keep coming back to is loyal. You have to be loyal to him. And that actually helped a lot when I, when I realized that, because it meant that, that I could separate the intellectual issues.
Right. Of the Case for Christ, which book, by the way, helped a lot in that regard. You know, just the apologetic there. I read it twice. The apologetic for, for the Resurrection is very important to understanding the message because the great hope of the Christians, the thing that we, that, that we are waiting for, is the resurrection of the body.
And, and Jesus demonstrated first that his, that resurrection was possible and that it would. And he said that it would happen to us all at the end of days, you know, when the whole game is played out, then we will all rise again and meet our maker for the last judgment. I think it was easier, quite a bit easier, in fact, for me to place my trust in God and in God the Son, in other words, the triune God. And I believe all that. But it's the thing that is necessary, the thing that saves us, the thing that inspires us, that allows God to send His Holy Spirit to indwell us, is trust in Him. That's it.
And then everything else will be made plain. And I think has been made plain since then.
[00:58:01] Speaker B: Yes. I love the distinction that you're making there and making it very clearly. There's a difference. I believe Greg Kokel says it this way. There's a difference between belief that.
[00:58:12] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:58:12] Speaker B: And belief in.
[00:58:14] Speaker A: Right.
[00:58:15] Speaker B: And so those things are very different. Right. Because one of them, belief that anyone can believe, but believing in placing your full weight or trust, like you say, a fiduciary trust in Jesus, giving Him your life like he has given you his, is a very different thing. It's a personal thing. And it sounds like, you know, you've done that in spades.
It's beautiful, really. And Larry, as we're, as we're kind of coming to an end, I'm one. I'm thinking about those who are listening, who are just skeptics by nature. I don't know that we can ever fully be lose our skepticism because especially someone like you, just a consummate question, ask and asker, just continuing to seek, continuing to seek after truth and asking questions. And that is, that's in the, in the most positive way. Right. And other people are looking at you going, wow, I wish I had that. How can I find that? Where should I look? How should I start? You've mentioned the case for Christ A few times from Lee Strobel, which is an excellent place. Reading the Bible, of course, was very instrumental in your journey, I think. I also hear from you you were open to seeking the truth led, which I think is huge.
So what advice would you give for someone who is actually curious and could be a truth seeker for themselves?
[00:59:45] Speaker A: Right.
Well, I've read several dozen books at this time in the last five years on theological topics.
Mere Christianity twice.
And I recommend that not everyone will be persuaded by mere Christianity in the same way that they wouldn't necessarily be persuaded by the case with Christ, but it persuades a lot of people.
And it is maybe more importantly, just from the point of view of, of coming to understand why people believe it does lay out the case fairly concisely and eloquently. It's very readable. You can listen to it because it was originally radio lectures. So let's see.
[01:00:45] Speaker B: And that is by C.S. lewis, who's also a former atheist, of course.
[01:00:50] Speaker A: Right, nice.
So I think that it's very important that you realize all of the questions that you are asking have been asked over and over and over again and answered so many times it's not even funny.
There's whole traditions of, you know, books, histories of the thought about your question. The answers will make sense.
They won't be the typical sort of non philosopher, non theologian dismissal of questions or just claims. Like, there's a lot of people who seem to think that you just have to have faith. You know, there's any number of pastors who have said that, you know, the most important thing for you to do is to just have faith. Well, that's true, but it doesn't mean the most important thing for you to do is to stop asking questions, because that's not what it means. That's not what true faith is.
True faith is greatly enhanced and supported, not just defended and not, not, just, you know, rationalized, but enhanced and supported by a robust seeking of, of answers to your questions.
And I, I say this about the hardest questions. Like, I went through, you know, in a period of like two and a half, three years, I went through the entire book of Genesis and wrote down all of the questions that I could think of. And I can think of a lot of questions, maybe not all of them, because I can think of a lot, but I. A lot. Right.
Five questions about some verses individually, at least 20 questions per chapter, often more, usually more.
And I answered all of them.
And here's the fascinating thing that I did not understand that a lot of non believers don't know.
And that is the Bible, if approached correctly, withstands critical scrutiny.
It doesn't just resist question. It doesn't resist questioning. No, it doesn't.
It isn't opaque. It isn't transparent either, but it isn't opaque to your questions. It encourages your questions methodologically. What you have to do is assume that there is an answer that makes sense and when you find it.
I could be wrong. Depends. People are different. But I found that, that, that the, the Bible is that really, really good answers to almost all of your critical questions are available if you hunt around hard enough for them. Right. And most of those answers have already been worked out for you.
[01:04:10] Speaker B: So it's just a matter of seeking and searching and asking those questions, being honest as you have to find the answers and diligent. And you continue to be incredibly diligent.
I'm thinking about your journey. It was definitely a process, process through your whole life, honestly, of moving through the questions.
[01:04:31] Speaker A: Yeah, it wasn't an immediate, you know, Road to Damascus thing.
[01:04:36] Speaker B: No, it was a process away and it was a process toward belief in God. And I'm thinking there were, at least in your, your written story too, there were, there were touch points of intelligent Christians, whether especially through writing or their writings or their thought. And they were good people. And I think goodness was a, and good ethics as a good, it was a value for you.
And you saw the Bible as promoting goodness and human flourishing and, and those kinds of things. How could we as Christians be good ambassadors for those who don't believe? I mean, you're sitting here as an incredible ambassador, being very thoughtful about your, your testimony, your life and, and a great witness in terms of someone again who has done due diligence. And you can, you can give the, a reason for the hope that you have because you, you've studied to, to show yourself approved, as the Word says. How can we as Christians best be an ambassador or engage with those who don't believe? Especially if those, if there are people who don't seem quite as open, maybe even as you have been all of your life to truth.
[01:06:04] Speaker A: I think we do need to prepare ourselves. I, I do think that we need to not just go to church and read the parts of the Bible we like. We need to study the Bible. We need to read it all the way through several times.
And now you don't. Not everybody, I suppose, has to, has to become a, an apologist. But we are told to be able to give an account of our faith.
That's what Paul said and to be able to contend for the reasons we adhere to the holy God. And besides, think of it this way. If either the Bible is the word of God or it is simply, you know, what some men have imagined God said, but if it's actually the word of God, that's extremely remarkable, isn't it? I mean, and again, I'm, I'm not, I'm using the word, the, the phrase word of God and it's general, ordinary English sense. If these are the literal words of God, then we should study them, shouldn't we? I mean, this is the creator of the universe, right? Doesn't that have like a deep existential pull on you? It should, I think.
Well, this, I think is actually really important for the parents out there.
You need to, if you don't know the answer to a question, at least realize that there are a lot of people out there. And we're blessed to live today in the age of the Internet in which there's so many different people you can ask. Frankly, I use Chat, GPT or GROK and ask, ask a chatbot and they've been trained on a lot, a lot of theology and they are able to explain pretty much anything in a fairly orthodox way. You might have to tell it that you want an orthodox answer, for example, and otherwise it might give you something else, but it will help. And if you don't want to talk to a robot, then you can talk to human beings. There's many resources out there, groups set up specifically to answer your hard questions. There's a Great website called gotquestions.org the answers are from a reformed perspective there that there's other similar resources, maybe not as compendious as questions. That's really good.
But yeah, look, just, just acquaint yourself with, with everything that's available and, and resolve to make use of it if, if you don't have the time to, to absorb all of the, of the knowledge that there is. But I think you have some obligation to do that if you're, if you're a Christian.
So.
[01:09:37] Speaker B: No, yes, I, I hear you. It's, it's important for us to again, give good reason for the, for the hope that we have and there are incredible resources out there now. We are blessed in a time where apologetics and has been developed over decades, actually centuries. Right. We just, we lost appreciation for it for a while, but, but it is, has come back and we have, we have an abundant abundance of riches available to us, whether it's AI or others or books or whatever.
Larry, you, you're truly amazing. I genuinely appreciate your witness. I know that your story is going to be a blessing to so many people. I appreciate the thoughtfulness with which you pursued your faith. Again, the humble reflection, the earnest study, the openness, the openness towards truth, truly. Because there's so many people who just, they don't want to see it or look for it or rebuff it without really seeing what's there, the riches that's there. And I love, too, that you emphasize the comprehensive nature not only of the evidences for the existence of God, but also the comprehensive nature of the story itself and how it answers all of our biggest and hardest questions.
[01:11:06] Speaker A: Yes.
[01:11:06] Speaker B: And that the Bible doesn't fear questioning and truth doesn't fear questioning, and that we should all be truth seekers like you. Really. So thank you so much. I truly appreciate your coming on today.
[01:11:21] Speaker A: You don't have to be a truth seeker like me.
I think it's pretty important to be a truth seeker.
[01:11:29] Speaker B: Yes.
I love that. Okay, well, thank you so much.
[01:11:34] Speaker A: Thank you. I really appreciate it. Excellent questions.
[01:11:37] Speaker B: Wonderful. Thanks for joining us at X Skeptic and for listening to Larry Sanger Story. If you'd like to explore more about his work or resources mentioned in today's episode, check out our show Notes. If this is your first time here, welcome. X Skeptic offers over 100 compelling stories of former skeptics who have found faith. Visit
[email protected] to explore more. And while you're there, sign up for our monthly newsletter to stay connected. Are you a curious skeptic? Do you have big questions and want to discuss them with one of our guests? We'd love to help make that happen. Just email us@info skeptic.org we'd love to hear from you. Your feedback is so valuable. Share your thoughts, suggestions, or ideas through comments on our platforms or via our email. Your input helps us shape our conversations and ensures we're addressing the questions that matter most to you. This podcast is part of the CSOS Institute Podcast Network. If today's episode resonated with you, we'd be so grateful if you would follow, rate, review, and share it with your friends and social network. Your support helps us bring these transformative stories to more listeners, and we hope you'll join us next time for another unlikely story of belief.
