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MIT graduate Chris Lee was raised to reject religious superstition and embrace science alone. His search beyond a purely naturalistic worldview led him to believe in God and Christianity. To read Chris’ written story, you can read his article “My Christian Story” here To read and listen to more stories of skeptics and atheists’ conversions to Christianity, visit www.sidebstories.com Episode Transcript Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to the Side B Stories Podcast, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist who surprisingly became a Christian. Why do atheists become atheists? There are as many answers to that question as there are atheists. Every skeptic has a reason, or more likely, every skeptic has several reasons for rejecting God. Sometimes, it’s on the back of bad experiences with Christians, Christianity, and faith. People or institutions who are supposed to represent truth and grace, lives of integrity and generosity, genuine love for God and others, well, they don’t. They’re supposed to demonstrate lives that have been transformed into something other, something more, something different, something better than what is normally expected by those who don’t claim God as authority and guide, but they don’t. If they reflect God, then they are poor ambassadors for the one they supposedly represent, or so it goes. Once someone starts to distrust Christians, they can begin to doubt the whole endeavor of Christianity and God. Belief is no longer attractive or plausible. It is no longer an option. Today’s episode taps into this reality, the reality of human failure to embody God well. It can be very disorienting. It can lead to disbelief, and unfortunately, it often does. But the question in today’s episode is whether or not someone can find their way to belief in God despite all of this human failure. Let’s listen to Chris Lee’s story to find out. Welcome to the Side B Stories podcast, Chris. It’s so great to have you with me today! Thank you, Jana, for having me. Wonderful. Before we get into your story, why don’t you tell me a little bit about who you are, where you live, maybe a little bit about your education, what you do? Sure, absolutely. I live in the Boston area, in a little town called Braintree, about 10 miles south of the downtown. By day, I consider myself a software engineer in financial services, so fin tech, and by night, I jokingly say that I’m a cult fighter. I graduated from MIT in 1997, and also did my master’s degree in divinity at Gordon-Conwell Theological seminary. Oh, okay. So you’re pretty highly educated, and of course, in the Boston area, academics is prevalent there, so I’m sure we’ll find out more about what you mean by cult fighter? Something like that, yes. Something like that. I forgot the exact term. But anyway, so that sounds very intriguing. I’m sure we’ll get to that later in the podcast. So you’re in Boston now. Let’s go back to your childhood and where you were born and grew up. Tell me a little bit about your family, whether they had any belief in God or not, or how they directed you. Sure. I grew up in western Canada, in a city called Vancouver, a beautiful, amazing place to grow up. Very multicultural. And my parents, my dad was very much an atheist, a humanist, so did not have any beliefs, and in fact, had been very hurt by a number of Christians in his life, so he had very much turned against Christianity and was, as you might expect, anti Christian. My mother was very nominal. She might have gone to church a few times now and then in college, as well as afterwards, and certainly she had a belief in a higher power. She believed in God. She prayed, but it was not very evident in her life, and certainly if she mentioned that she was Christian, it was only in name. As I mentioned, the very nominal side. So that’s the background. So Vancouver. Is that—tell me, culturally speaking, is that much of a religious community? No! Not at all. Okay. I would say probably less than 20% even identify as Christians. Certainly, it’s very small. It’s maybe more than New England where I am, which is something like 5% or less evangelical and something like very nominally Roman Catholic, but certainly religion in western Canada was not a public thing and was not even a major factor in people’s lives. So did you have any exposure to what you would consider a more robust form of Christianity growing up? Any people that you knew? Or was that in your world at all? Sure. So there’s kind of two major influences. My grandmother was very devout, but we didn’t have a lot of exposure to her. And then my best friend in high school was able to answer a lot of my questions, and he was and continues to be a very devout Christian today. And so whenever I had weird questions, like, “I don’t understand the Bible,” or, “I don’t understand this Trinity thing. This is weird,” I would go to my best friend in high school, Vern, and we’d talk about it. And he very cogently explained to me these doctrines. Okay. So you did have some influences. So as you were growing up, you had a father, you said, who was a secular humanist. He was an atheist. You had a mother who had a nominal expression of faith. So when you were growing up, did you have any belief in God? Were you following in the footsteps of your father or your mother? Or was it an issue or something—did you go to church? Talk with me about that. Sure. So my younger brother and I were taken to church for a while, maybe off and on. Whenever we went on vacations or whenever it was convenient, so maybe a couple of times a month, and mostly to go to the Sunday school programs and socializing. And I really didn’t get much of the faith, and a lot of it seems like rituals, so I really didn’t understand why people did what they did, and then, when I was 12, my dad came up to me and said, “Well, Chris, you’re twelve. You’re old enough to make your own decisions. If this is what you want to do, then you have my,” whatever, equivalent of blessing, I guess. “You can do that, but if you don’t want to do it, then stop doing it.” And I said to him at that time, “Yeah, I don’t understand this. It makes no sense. I’m going to stop doing it.” And, also around the same point in time, we were talking about college applications already, at age twelve, and preparing for higher education, and also I had become very enamored of science. Kind of like Carl Sagan puts it, that the cosmos is all that is and all there ever was and all there ever would be. And really believed that science could or would be able to explain everything. And so I said, “Well, this all seems like superstitious hogwash. Every kind of religion, especially going to church and things like that.” So I, at that point in time, decided, “I’m going to be an atheist.” And it was a distinct moment in my life that I remember. It was over two years where I said, “I don’t believe any religion is true. I reject it all.” “All this stuff seems like either fantasy or hogwash, your choice.” So when you rejected God and that metaphysical reality, any kind of supernatural reality, by default, in a sense, you embraced a naturalistic view of the world. Correct. I know you said you really honored or revered science in a way as being an ultimate explainer, in a sense, of the world and that there was not anything more than that. Would you say that you looked at the naturalistic worldview with any kind of critical eye at all, in terms of the logical implications of that naturalistic worldview? Or were you looking more at just the positive aspects of “intellectual people believe in science, not in hogwash.” What was your line of thinking around that time? That’s a great question. So yes, absolutely, I actually carried through a number of the logical conclusions, so, in fact, we were being taught, not only evolution and all that it entails, but you can apply that also, you know the Darwinian evolution, to the survival of the fittest. And certainly in terms of implications, if I’m smarter than somebody else, I deserve to live longer or… deserve to have my opinions heard more rightly than other people. I became very elitist in a way. I’m kind of ashamed now to admit it, but I certainly had this air of superiority because I thought that my thinking was correct, more correct than others, and certainly that those who were more correct deserved to have their voices heard, and the less correct voices did not deserve to have their voices heard. So certainly I did carry through in some of those implications of what I believed. I didn’t fully see that certainly naturalism and humanism have certain assumptions, like, as you alluded to, if you basically eliminated all possibility of the supernatural, that it’s almost like, “Okay, everything has to be explained by science,” or it’s kind of like you’re almost using science in a way of being like god in the gaps instead of using God as the God of the gaps, things like that kind of argument. Yeah. That tells me a little bit about you, that you are, obviously, a critical thinker. That you are willing to look a little bit more closely at what you were embracing, not just what you were rejecting. So you were obviously a student, a teenager. You had embraced this atheistic identity. You were moving towards university and developing an elitist, intellectualist way of thinking, I guess to pursue your goals of academia and achievement. So I wonder, were most of your friends thinking in the same kind of way? Did you have a lot of friends who called themselves or identified as atheists as well? I had some friends who were atheists, maybe one or two, and then the rest of them were largely agnostics, true agnostics, meaning they didn’t know, so in my mind there’s a major difference. Atheists are—within reason, you determine that there are no supernatural… there is no existence other than what we know. There is no possibility of any God or gods. And agnostics can range from, “Well, I’m not sure, and I’m not 100% certain that my position is correct,” or it doesn’t have to be 100% certainty that there are no gods, but maybe even 99%, 97% sure. That would be an atheist position, and then some agnostics were like, “Well, I haven’t thought through it enough, so I don’t know what to believe.” It strikes me, as you were talking about the embracing of your naturalistic worldview, that there was somewhat of a Darwinian perspective on who was perhaps the stronger or the more fit. And I think that oftentimes there is a dismissal of the religious in that kind of scenario and almost a contemptuousness. Did you ever have a sense of that? As just a part of your atheistic worldview? I didn’t get to that point where I saw all, whether it was Christianity or other religions, as having zero credibility and zero value. I think I was much more a pragmatist about it and very utilitarian. It’s like, “Okay, well, I guess some Christians do function as counselors, and they give free counseling and help out the homeless. Okay, yeah, that’s somewhat useful,” and I definitely heard a number of my brother’s sentiments, whether that’s expressing that Christianity is just a crutch for those who are mentally weak or other sentiments that are similar. So you lived with this perspective for a little while, while you were in high school. So take us on your journey from there. How long were in this atheistic perspective? What, if anything, kind of starting making you question, perhaps, your own perspective and becoming open towards another? Sure. So I would say it was just over two years, maybe somewhere between two and two and a half years, that I very much would self-identify as an atheist and would tell you, “I’m an atheist. I don’t believe in anything. I believe science can explain everything or will explain everything.” And I think even I had an atheist high school teacher who questioned that a little bit, and he said, “Well, wait a second. Are you sure that science will be able to explain everything?” I was like, “Wait. You’re an atheist. Aren’t you supposed to accept that science will or can explain everything?” But it was really a set of three circumstances that really made me think that maybe atheism is not correct or maybe that there is an existence outside of what we know, outside of a naturalistic environment. So the first thing was I was walking home—this was in, I think, the end of seventh grade or eighth grade or something like that, and I was walking home from my school, and on the way home, there’s one side of the road that has a sidewalk, and the other side has no sidewalk, and the other side that doesn’t have a sidewalk is actually further, and for whatever reason, I decided I’m going to cross the sidewalk. And a car came over, kind of barreling out of control, on the side of the sidewalk, where I was standing, and I thought to myself, “Well, that’s really strange. It’s completely illogical and irrational to cross the street where it would be a further path and it’s not got a sidewalk, and crossing the street, I could’ve been hit by a car. Does this make sense?” And it’s like, “I wouldn’t have seen the car coming from behind me, either, but it did eventually run over that piece of sidewalk. So hmm.” That was a little puzzling, and I didn’t think anything much more when that happened. Like it was a near miss? Yeah. It was a near miss. Well, that was an unusual piece of intuition, that I crossed the street and should have been dead, and I’m alive. And there’s no rational reason for this. So, okay, whatever. And then, the second time, my mother was driving my brother and I back from whatever it was, I think from the high school, and she had just finished the night shift, so she was overly tired, and she forgot to stop at a stop sign, and a car kind of came over the hill and broadsided us. And it was on my side of the car, but five seconds before the accident happened, I’d actually unbuckled myself and moved over to the center of the car. Not seeing the car. I just unbuckled myself and moved. And again, I was like, “My goodness! I survived another crash and could have been seriously hurt.” My mother actually did have whiplash and concussion, and she had to wear a neck brace for many months afterwards, whereas I didn’t have any injuries whatsoever. And it was very remarkable. So again, it was kind of like, “What?” I should have been fully seat belted and not taken it off at any point in time, but for whatever reason, I moved. And then a third time we were passing in between two warehouse buildings, and there was a railway crossing, and there was actually a train coming our way, but the gate had not dropped and there was no signal, and we barely missed it. It was—I don’t know—six feet? Ten feet? It couldn’t have been more than that. And so there was a series of situations that I realized, like, “Probabilistically, I should be dead. And if I had followed everything rationally, done everything rationally, stayed on the same side of the sidewalk where eventually the car would’ve run over, kept my seat belt on, that I should be dead. And yet here I am alive, and all these things not very rational.” Right. “So is there perhaps something more than what I see, maybe more than rationality, maybe more than naturalism,” and so that led me to thinking, “Okay, maybe I should think there is the possibility of a supernatural,” and then at that point I kind of went from atheist to agnostic. And I definitely would not say I was a Christian, did not want to explore Christianity at that point in time, but at least at that point in time, I would have put it this way, “I’m open to some existence beyond the natural, whether that’s God, gods, goddesses, whatever. I’m open to it. And maybe I should go look into these things.” So this was at the age of fourteen. Okay. So then you started looking, I presume, and tell me about t…
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