“When I really sought to understand it, I found the Bible far more interesting and—to my shock and consternation—coherent than I was expecting. I looked up answers to all my critical questions, thinking that perhaps others had not thought of issues I saw. I was wrong. Not only had they thought of all the issues, and more that I had not thought of, they had well-worked-out positions about them…The Bible could sustain interrogation; who knew?”

Last week, Larry Sanger, the man who started Wikipedia in 2001, published a lengthy essay laying out his journey from skepticism to Christianity. For most of his adult life, Sanger was a committed skeptic, trained in analytic philosophy—a field dominated by atheists and agnostics. Though he spent 35 years as a nonbeliever, he never saw himself as hostile to faith, only unconvinced, and his testimony is geared toward those who share that rational, open-minded skepticism.

Reading through Sanger’s story, I was struck by a few features.

1. Failure To Engage Well With Good-Faith Questions Can Be a Catalyst for Disbelief

Sanger grew up in the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod, but by his mid-teens, his belief in God was dissipating, and his departure from the faith was clinched by the unfortunate response of a pastor to his questions:

At some point in my late teens, I remember calling up a pastor—I forget which—to ask skeptical questions. It felt bold for a teenager to do, but I was not merely being rebellious. I really needed help thinking these things through. But the pastor had no clear or strong answers. He seemed to be brushing me off and even to treat me with contempt. It seemed to me he did not care, and if anything, I had the impression that he felt threatened by me. This was a surprise. The damage was quickly done: being met with hostile unconcern by a person I expected to be, well, pastoral confirmed me in my disbelief . . .

In retrospect, I believe it hurt my belief very much to have been told that I should not ask so many questions. This is a terrible thing to say to a child, because he will infer (as I did) that only dogmatic people, who lack curiosity and are unable to answer hard questions, believe in God. Therefore, such a belief must be irrational. That is what I thought. How wrong I was, and how long it took me to discover my mistake.

This story should rekindle a passion in every minister’s heart to be familiar enough with the field of apologetics to know where to seek out and find answers to questions and objections people may have to Christianity. It should also encourage a spirit of compassion and pastoral care, not annoyance or contempt, toward people with questions.

2. The Cumulative Force of Multiple Arguments for God’s Existence Can Be More Persuasive Than Any Single One

Although Sanger found the Fine-Tuning Argument, a version of the Argument from Design, emotionally moving as the most compelling case for God’s existence, he found neither it nor the other traditional arguments fully convincing.

My experience studying and teaching the classic arguments had given me a modicum of respect for them. It seemed trivial, to me, to poke holes in such arguments, holes sufficiently large enough to justify my stance of withholding the conclusion. Perhaps the biggest complaint I had about the arguments was that none of them came even close to establishing that God, especially the God of the Bible, exists. They made partial headway, perhaps.

That partial headway had more influence the more he studied, as the cumulative effect of the arguments’ force became stronger than he realized at first.

What I dwelled upon more than anything is the fact that the arguments taken together are far more persuasive than I had understood.

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