Peter (host):
As a teenager, Michael Shermer decided to become a follower of Jesus. But later on in life when he was in graduate school, he changed his mind and rejected his previous decision. During an interview, he explained how he went from believer-
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To what?
Peter (host):
...to unbeliever.
Interviewer:
The first thing I asked you about is Christianity because I know I've read a little bit of your biography. I knew that you were a Christian at one point. So the first question is, what led you to become a Christian when you decided to become one?
Michael Shermer:
Right? Yeah, I've written quite a bit about this in several of my books. It was not a parental influence thing. I wasn't raised religious, my parents were not religious at all. It was more of a peer group influence of my friends in high school, but I took it pretty seriously. And I went to Pepperdine University, which is a Church of Christ school in Malibu, and was a member of the first four-year graduating class from that campus. And it was all in all a good experience. But I discovered once I left that not being in the Christian bubble, where you're surrounded by everybody else who believes the same as you, it becomes more difficult to believe in the sense that the beliefs were never founded on good evidence in the first place. There really are faith-based arguments, you just believe or you don't believe and there may be good arguments you can use for why you believe but in the end, they only work if you already believe and you're looking for justification for your beliefs.
Peter (host):
Lots of people see religion, including Christianity as irrational. However, despite what Shermer claims, there are many other people who have studied the evidence, applied their intellect, and then went in the opposite direction. They've gone from unbelief to faith in Jesus.
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Oh yeah? Prove it!
Peter (host):
All right. Well, in a moment, we'll talk about one person who did exactly that.
Peter (host):
But first, let me explain what the series is all about. People often regard faith in Jesus as simply a matter of blind faith. However, there's a whole field of research that seeks to provide rational, credible reasons for believing. This whole discipline is called apologetics.
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Sorry for what?
Peter (host):
No, apologetics is not about apologizing. Although the words sound similar and are frequently confused with each other. Apologetics comes from the Greek word 'apologia', which refers to giving a defense or providing reasons. Apologetics is about giving reasons or making a defense of the Christian faith.
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Don't get defensive.
Peter (host):
No, you're still not getting it. It's not about getting emotional, angry, or defensive. It's just about providing logical, rational reasons to believe.
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Logic, logic. I'm sick to death of logic.
Peter (host):
Well, I don't quite know why you don't like logic, but I assure you that when it's done well, apologetics can be really interesting. And it's something that God has used to change people's lives. This whole series is going to help explain what apologetics is all about, and why it makes sense to follow after Jesus.
Peter (host):
The life of Jordan Monge is one example of a life that stands in contrast to Michael Shermer's claims. At the tender age of just four, Jordan was already a skeptic. Her mother actually found her at a party challenging another child about the authority of the Bible.
Jordan Monge:
The first kind of story my parents told me about when I was little was when I was four, my mom was at a party once and she walked into a room to check on me. And all she caught was me telling this other little six-year-old girl, "But how do you know what the Bible says is true?"
Peter (host):
Later on, when Jordan was in middle school, her atheism was so well-known that one of the kids in school threatened to go to her house and quote, "Shoot all the atheists."
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That's not good.
Peter (host):
In high school, Jordan's Christian friends were scared to talk with her because they knew she could easily tear apart all of their poorly constructed arguments. She even challenged them by bringing a Bible to school with sticky tabs in it, which marked all the apparent contradictions and problems in that book.
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She's tough. And smart.
Peter (host):
Yeah, Jordan was definitely a tough, smart, young skeptic. So smart, in fact, that after high school, she was accepted into Harvard University.
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Harvard? Really?
Peter (host):
Yes, Harvard. The Harvard. And it was while she was at Harvard that she met another student named John Porter. He challenged her on a number of issues pertaining to her atheistic worldview. He was able to address her concerns about contradictions in the Bible and on issues related to the coherence of God. He also challenged her to explain the origin of the universe. What caused the universe to come into existence.
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But where did the universe come from?
Peter (host):
There was also another issue that had plagued her for some time. And it concerns morality, where did morality come from? And what was it grounded in? What makes human rights apply to all people in all places at all times. Over time, as she discuss these issues with John and consider the matter in greater depth, she saw that Christianity made a lot more sense than what she had previously thought.
Jordan Monge:
And it wasn't until I came to Harvard, that I realized there are Christians who do have answers to these questions. I thought that I had thought about it a lot. And really what I had done was just talk to other people who are as dumb in these variants as me. And of course, they didn't have any better answers than I did. And it wasn't until I really started investigating that I discovered these arguments that I thought were really good against God, were actually quite weak and that people had rebuttals to them for centuries, if not 1000s of years.
Jordan Monge:
Basically, I got into a series of arguments with one of my friends who worked for the Harvard Ichthus. Yeah, so if this is a journal of Christian thought and expression at Harvard. One of my friends was writing for it. And he wrote this kind of apologetic in it and we kept discussing back and forth and arguing, basically about, can you be good without God? Yeah, just ethics function is there's no real grounding for it.
Interviewer:
Intellectual grounding, right?
Jordan Monge:
Yeah. Metaphysical Grounding. And so that was part of the argument. And then we started arguing about, "Well, what are good arguments for God's existence? And what are good arguments for the Bible being true or for the resurrection of Jesus Christ." And so, basically, we argued back and forth for about six months, and he just kept winning the argument. It was like, "Okay, maybe, maybe you're right. "
Peter (host):
One day, Jordan decided to read the Bible again. But this time, her goal was not to disprove it, but rather to understand it and contemplate it. After reading for a while she got to the passage that described Jesus' crucifixion on the cross.
Jordan Monge:
I had finally made it to the Crucifixion scene. And as I was reading it, I had this moment where I just said, "No, Aslan No. "
Peter (host):
As a youngster, Jordan had read the beloved children's book called The Chronicles of Narnia, written by C.S. Lewis. The second book in that series called The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe featured a lion named Aslan, who died to rescue the life of a young boy named Edmund. When she read that book, she hadn't realized that the death of Aslan was written as an analogy for what Jesus had done when He died on the cross.
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The great Cat is dead!
Peter (host):
When Jordan read the story of Jesus in the Bible, she realized that she was like the young boy in Narnia. She was Edmund, and Jesus had died to rescue her.
Jordan Monge:
It immediately clicked like, I am Edmund, Jesus is Aslan, and He is dying for my sake. Seeing it now with me in the story, was a totally radically new way of looking at it. Realizing kind of my own sinfulness at that moment, and my own need for healing from that sin, made all the difference in how I read it. And so I started just crying, thinking about really thinking about Aslan, but thinking about Jesus through that process.
Peter (host):
That moment was a powerful one for Jordan. But at the same time, she wasn't yet convinced that Christianity was actually true. So she plunged into further study, research, and searching. She looked at other religions, at science, and the writings of atheists such as Richard Dawkins.
Richard Dawkins:
I'm Richard Dawkins. I've been an atheist since I was a child.
Peter (host):
Along the way, Jordan discovered the rich intellectual tradition that Christianity offered with all the great thinkers through many centuries. Thinkers and scholars such as Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Pascal, and Lewis. God was reaching Jordan through her intellect and opening her heart to what really mattered. She realized what love was and what Jesus had done for her.
Jordan Monge:
As I thought about what love really was, I could see how Jesus' death on the cross was the perfect embodiment of that.
Peter (host):
Jordan eventually came to realize that even though her high school friends had not been able to provide a robust case for Christianity. There were certainly others who could provide good answers, and who could develop a strong defense. These other people could do it because they had taken the time to study the issues in-depth. Jordan realize that Christianity was not simply a matter of blind faith, it actually made sense. So Jordan decided to become a follower of Jesus, and on an Easter Sunday morning in 2009, she was baptized.
Peter (host):
At the beginning of this episode, we heard about Michael Shermer and his rejection of faith in Jesus. In contrast to Shermer is the story of Jordan Monge. She went from unbelief to faith in Jesus while studying at Harvard University. And Jordan Monge is certainly not the only person who's had their lives transformed after studying apologetics.
Peter (host):
In our next episode, we'll learn about someone who spent his life studying philosophy as a committed atheist. Then towards the end of his life, he changed his mind.
Female Narrator:
You're listening to Lit by Worldview Summit with Peter Kupisz.