A Skeptical Philosopher Becomes a Christian Part One

KEVIN HARRIS: Larry Sanger is the founder of Wikipedia and also has a Ph.D. in philosophy. After decades of being an agnostic, he has published the story of how he became a follower of Christ.^[1] We're going to look at some of the highlights of his conversion story. It's quite long and detailed. He's very thorough. I like the fact that he waited before he published his testimony because it shows that this is no flash in the pan conversion. He's been in a process of solidifying his faith since 2020. The Christian community is sometimes guilty of rushing a celebrity or a prominent person onto the platform when he becomes a Christian without giving him time to grow. Do you know what I mean?

DR. CRAIG: I do, and I think you're absolutely right. We shouldn't out of enthusiasm over someone's coming to Christ push him out into public speaking or things of that sort too soon before he's had a chance to really sink his roots down into Christ and to develop some Christian maturity. It really is potentially harmful to that early convert.

KEVIN HARRIS: Larry writes in this conversion story,

Throughout my adult life, I have been a devotee of rationality, methodological skepticism, and a somewhat hard-nosed and no-nonsense (but always open-minded) rigor. I have a Ph.D. in philosophy, my training being in analytic philosophy, a field dominated by atheists and agnostics.

Continuing about methodological skepticism, he writes,

It does not mean someone who believes knowledge is impossible; it means someone who withholds belief as a key methodological or truth-seeking strategy, in order to arrive at firmer knowledge at some later date.

So he defines the methodological skepticism. What does it mean to add the term methodological to a discipline? Doesn't everything involve some kind of method?

DR. CRAIG: I think what he's trying to say here is that he doesn't adopt the skeptics’ stance of denying all truth or saying that knowledge is impossible – that we have no knowledge of anything. Rather, he thinks of it as a sort of method for approaching questions; that you approach them being skeptical and not making a commitment until you have good arguments and evidence for it. Now, although that is a sort of common sense view, it really does lead to a kind of Cartesian skepticism. This is really the method that Descartes adopted. And I think that contemporary epistemologists would say that this is a bad methodology. There are many things that we know, even though we may not know how we know them. We know that I exist. We know that the external world exists. We know that the past has actually occurred. We know that there are other minds like our own. And it would be foolish to deny such knowledge and to be skeptical about it unless and until we have some sort of proof of those things. I think in many cases it's better to stay with our beliefs that we hold firmly unless and until we have some defeater of those beliefs – some reason to think that those beliefs are mistaken. That will be a method that will prize the attainment of truth and be much more effective in capturing large numbers of truths. The methodological skeptic seems to want to have as his goal to believe as few falsehoods as possible. But I think a better goal is to believe as many truths as possible, and methodological skepticism is not a good way to do that

KEVIN HARRIS: Next he writes,

Once, I slummed about the fringes of the Ayn Rand community, which is also heavily atheist.

We haven't talked very much about Ayn Rand in our podcasts, but Larry says in his testimony that he was influenced by her objectivism. Maybe you have a few things on her?

DR. CRAIG: She was a kind of pop philosopher that had considerable cultural influence in certain circles. She wrote some novels and movies were actually made out of these. I remember one starring Gary Cooper, I think it was The Fountainhead. Basically she promoted the values of selfishness – that self-interest ought to be our guide in moral matters and in decision making. It was a very bold and deeply anti-Christian perspective.

KEVIN HARRIS: Larry is very detailed. He has really analyzed his life to figure all of this whole thing out. He traces his journey with God back to his childhood. He said he was confirmed in the Lutheran Church when he was 12 but then shortly thereafter his family quit going to church. His father began to explore New Age religions which he said made the Bible less central in the family. And he realized he no longer believed in God when he was 14 or 15. It's rather obvious that our parents have a real impact on our spiritual life.

DR. CRAIG: That's a good reminder to all of us who are parents to set an example for our children both in teaching them from a young age the truth of Christian doctrine, and also in providing them good reasons for what we believe. This is especially true for those of our listeners who are fathers. As a father, you really set the tone for the faith of your children as they grow up.

KEVIN HARRIS: Larry next says that he got a reputation as a kid who asked too many questions. He said a philosophy class in high school changed his life, and he began thinking of God strictly philosophically. He writes,

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.

We've heard this way too many times. I don't know what the pastor was thinking or why he responded that way to Larry, but it looks like the pastor really missed an opportunity.

DR. CRAIG: Yes. This reminds me of Tim Stratton's testimony of how he as a youth pastor had a kid come into his office one day and started asking questions about Steven Hawking and the origin of the universe and God. Tim said, “I couldn't answer his questions. I didn't even know what he was talking about.” He said the boy finally got up and walked out of his office in tears because he was so frustrated in disappointment, and Tim said he never came back. That was a revolutionary moment for Tim Stratton. He thereafter purposed that he would intellectually equip himself to deal with the sorts of questions that people in our culture are asking today. That is a great lesson especially for our youth pastors in our churches today.

KEVIN HARRIS: Absolutely. One more thing that Larry writes on this. He says,

As I continued to think about philosophy, I decided more firmly that I would remain 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.

At this point he developed what he calls a chain of reasoning that are rehearsed over and over. I want to briefly synopsize the five points he developed because they're interesting. This is what he lived by.

1. I am familiar with people who have either ruined their lives or are well on their way. Moreover, practically everyone I know has some bad habits or has made serious, costly mistakes.

2. In all cases, the problems seem to be explainable by their believing certain falsehoods. . . .

3. But such awful outcomes are avoidable, if I avoid believing dangerous falsehoods.

4. It seems to me that I can know that something is the case only under three conditions: (a) I know precisely what I believe; (b) I know why I believe it; and (c) I know that the reasons for belief are excellent. (In what way? I had different theories on this last part, which led me to pursue epistemology.)

5. Therefore, to avoid similar disasters, I should withhold (i.e., avoid holding) any belief that I do not know, with certainty, to be true. . . .

You know, that's not too bad for a teenager, but what do you make of his five point method?

DR. CRAIG: That isn't bad for a teenager, is it? I think, unfortunately, when he gets to number five – “that I should avoid holding any belief that I don't know with certainty to be true” – goes way too far. This is that methodological skepticism again which demands certainty before you will accord belief to a proposition. As I say, that will lead you into the pit of Cartesian skepticism where you begin to doubt virtually everything. The other thing that I would point out here that I think as a teenager he overemphasized the importance of intellectual components in making bad decisions and ruining one's life. The fact is that a person can hold the right intellectual beliefs but through weakness of will he makes bad decisions and succumbs to temptation. Merely trying to regulate your beliefs to make sure that they're true doesn't say anything about this problem of weakness of will. One of the great things about Christianity is that it not only gives you the truth about the world but through the renewing and regenerating power of the Holy Spirit one is given the inner strength to make those moral decisions that you know you should make to withstand temptation and to choose to do the hard thing. That's something that's really missing from his teenage method.

KEVIN HARRIS: Fast-forwarding to college, he went to Reed College in Portland to continue studying philosophy. Larry said that Reed's unofficial motto is “Communism, Atheism, Free Love.” He became friends there with a thoughtful Christian who conversed with him, but the friend caught him in a sin and thoroughly chastised him and ended the friendship. Larry mentions this as another roadblock to him becoming a Christian. I don't know what the sin was but Larry said he didn't have any guilt over it. I don't get the impression that Larry is blaming the pastor and his friend, but both were apparently factors in his remaining agnostic. I bring this up just because this should cause us to be sensitive when dealing with others when calling somebody out. Maybe they need to be, but some sensitivity is always required. Don't you think?

DR. CRAIG: Yes. I think a true friend is willing to correct you when he sees you making a morally bad choice and misstep. This is related to what I was just talking about before with weakness of will and not being able to do what you know you ought to do. But why the friend would cut off Larry is peculiar. It's hard to understand what would lead him to break their friendship rather to simply admonish his friend and try to get him back on the right track.

KEVIN HARRIS: Larry developed his five points when he began graduate work at Ohio State. He adopted an argument for agnosticism, and here it is.

We are told that God, if God exists, is a spirit that, among other things, created the world with a thought (or “word”) from nothing (ex nihilo). But our only notion of “spirit” is understood by analogy with our own minds. As far as our own minds go, we have no experience whatever of thoughts bringing matter into existence from nothing. Therefore, we have no grounds on which to say we know what God even is. Therefore, any arguments that make use of the concept of God are literal nonsense.

He says his view of God was a no-concept view that can be distinguished from both atheism and agnosticism, both of which employ a concept of God, he says. Nevertheless, he generally referred to himself as agnostic.

DR. CRAIG: I don't think this is a good argument at all. I think he's right in saying that God would be analogous to a human mind. He would be however an unembodied mind that created the universe, whereas we are finite minds that are embodied. The difference between God and us would not lie in our nature. We would both be minds. But it would lie in our finitude as opposed to God's infinitude. I don't think our inability to create things out of nothing with our minds is any reason to think that there cannot be an unembodied mind of infinite power who is omnipotent and who created the universe out of nothing. It is interesting that if we have minds as substance dualists claim, our minds do influence our bodies so that you do have immaterial entities that have physical effects. When we will to do things in our bodies, our minds influence the physical. So it's not true that the physical cannot be caused by the work of the mind. The question would be whether or not the physical could actually be brought into existence by the mind, and there's no reason to impose our finite capacities upon the creator of the universe. One other thing one might add is that those who think that abstract objects like fictional characters, the equator, the center of mass of the universe, literary works like novels, musical compositions, many people think that these are created by their human composers and writers. In that case they would, in fact, bring them into being out of nothing. The authors and composers create these things from nothing. Now the difference would be these aren't physical things. As I say, they're abstract objects. But nevertheless it would be an example of the mind bringing something into being out of nothing. So the only question would be whether or not we have any good reason to so limit the cause of the universe that it cannot be invested with the property of being able to create physical things out of nothing.

KEVIN HARRIS: That's somewhat of a cliffhanger, and we'll pick it up next time on Reasonable Faith with Dr. William Lane Craig.^[2]