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Former atheist Dr. Dan Mizell left Christianity and embraced science as the most rational way to understand and live in the world. Over time, he began to question whether the natural world was sufficient to explain reality. His search for answers led him to a more solid foundation for knowledge, ethics, and life in God. Episode Transcript Hello and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to Side B Stories, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist or skeptic but who became a Christian against all odds. You can hear more of these stories at our Side B Stories website at www.sidebstories.com and see more of these amazing stories on our YouTube channel. We always welcome your comments via our Facebook page or YouTube channel and on our email at info@sidebstories.com. We love hearing from you! Many people grow up with a notion that belief in God and belief in science don’t go together, that you either need to choose one or the other. That you’re either rational, reasonable, and scientific or deluded, superstitious, and religious. After all, science brings knowledge, objective knowledge about reality, rather than just merely the comforts of a subjective, human-constructed religious story. Leaving religion behind for a more robust, sober-minded science is a common tale. But what happens when the pristine perception of science begins to break down? When it doesn’t meet someone’s elevated expectations for knowledge, for life, within. In our story today, former atheist and mechanical engineer Dr. Dan Mizell once fully embraced science and the natural world as the most rational basis for understanding reality. That is until his pristine worldview began to crack under the weight of closer examination, of practical living. He began to question whether or not the natural world was sufficient to explain reality and answer his growing questions. I hope you’ll come along to hear Dan tell his thoughtful story of moving from disbelief to belief in God, of finding a comprehensive, integrated worldview where science and faith comfortably fit. Welcome to Side B Stories, Dan. It’s great to have you with me today. Thanks for having me on. I’d love for the listeners to know a bit about you. Who you are, where you live, perhaps your family, your education. Love to hear all about that before we get into your story. Okay. Yeah. So I’m currently a mechanical engineer working in the hydraulics field. We live in northern Michigan, I have a wife and now four kids, one who recently arrived. That sounds good to me! Is that it? Yeah. So northern Michigan. I know…. I’m just going to say it anyway, because I know this is going to air probably not during the winter, but it has been very bitter cold up there, I imagine, in northern Michigan, hasn’t it? Yeah. It does get pretty cold. We get a lot of snow. We’re right by Lake Michigan, so we get some moderation of temperature from that but a little bit of extra snow. Actually, just last night I was out teaching my three-year-old daughter to ski, so that’s always an adventure. Oh wow! What fun! And I love that you’re teaching her so young. It’s amazing to see those little ones just zooming down the slopes, and they’ve been on slopes. Almost as early as they can walk, they can ski, and they’re such naturals, so good for you. Well, let’s get into your story. And let’s start at the beginning. Tell me, have you always been from Michigan? Where is your family of origin from? And what did your home look like in terms of just your family life and was religion or God any part of that? Yeah. So I was born and raised in southeast Michigan, so almost to Ohio, but on the Michigan side of the border. And great family growing up. We lived a mile away from my grandparents and a bunch of cousins. I was an only child myself, but I had a lot of family around, so it was a really great environment. In terms of religion, we sort of viewed religion as this impersonal god, but we felt a very strong cultural obligation that you should go to church. You should be a good person. If you’re a good enough person, you’ll go to heaven, that sort of mentality. It wasn’t really this personal relationship. But very devout in my family’s own way, that there was this emphasis that we would always go to church, even if we’re on vacation, so it was…. I’m getting out in the weeds. No. You’re fine. I guess there was a hesitance to get into the big questions of religion. It was just sort of, “This is what we do. This is what our family has always done. Let’s not think about it too hard.” And that sort of informed my view on religion that, “Oh, well, maybe we’re not supposed to ask the big questions.” My dad, he was a truck driver for his whole career, but he was very interested, very inquisitive about a lot of subjects, and so I could always come to him with questions about, “Hey, how does a radio work?” or “How does a light work?” or whatever it was, and he would usually have a good answer for me. And so, kind of in the very early days, it started to set up this dichotomy of, if I’m interested in a scientific and a technological question, those answers are available, and we can ask those, and we can be interested in those. But if there’s a question about God or a question about religion, it’s almost taboo, where we don’t like to ask too many questions about that. So now I realize that’s not a…. I got the wrong impression. But that’s definitely what I had growing up. And as well, going to church, the church we went to, a lot of the preaching kind of had the message that science and religion are not compatible. The old trope. I don’t think this was ever mentioned, but it was sort of the theme of a lot of it is, “Science says your grandpa was a monkey, and your grandpa’s not a monkey, right?” That sort of thing, and at the same time, I was reading science magazines and reading about Darwinian evolution, and well, it kind of made sense internally, at least. And so, again, it kind of felt like, “Okay. There’s people talking about these things that have good answers and good reasoning behind their position, and then there’s these other people in the church that, they also talk about the same subjects, but maybe not with as much intellectual rigor.” That was the impression that I got. There are people, of course, on both sides with intellectual rigor and on both sides without it. And I was, I think, hearing one group from one side and the other group from the other. But again it sets up this picture of the world where, if I want intellectual rigor, if I want answers, if I want things to fit together in a cohesive worldview, I should go to science and technology and learn about those things. And religion is kind of this thing over here that helps you deal with fears and maybe belonging. But that’s not where you ask questions. That’s not where you should be inquisitive. Interesting. So it sounds like religion was a bit compartmentalized. It was important enough for your family to participate. It was even on vacation that you would go to church. So, in some ways, it was very important, but in other ways…. Yeah. Some things were off limits. Like you say, you got the impression that, if you’re intellectual, if you’re scientific, maybe it doesn’t provide that kind of rigor. So as you were getting older, it sounds like you were obviously in school, learning about Darwinian evolution and reading science magazines. How old were you when you were starting to wonder…. I mean. Let me just say this: Were you able to compartmentalize church, set it aside, still participate, and still kind of believing science and technology on the one hand and church on the other hand, kind of on parallel tracks? Or were you starting to reject the religious aspect of whatever that was and move more firmly or fully towards science and technology and leave religion behind? I think that definitely through high school it was very much compartmentalized. It was, “There’s this religion thing we do on Sundays, and there’s this science and technology thing we do other times.” And I was getting the message, subliminally really, from both sides that there’s a barrier in the middle, and information—thoughts don’t cross that barrier. And so that was probably right up until going to college. I hadn’t thought that really deeply about religion. It was just, again, a cultural almost obligation that I felt, that, “This is what my family does. We go to church.” And so growing up in southeast Michigan, I ended up going to college in the very western end of the northern peninsula of Michigan, at Michigan Tech University. So it was about a twelve-hour drive all the way through Michigan to get there. So about as far as you can go and still be in Michigan. And I actually ended up meeting my now wife up there, and that really started to make me ask questions, because she was also raised in a religious family and was less hesitant to ask the heavy questions about religion, and so, when I started dating her, we started having these conversations that made me pretty uncomfortable, because I didn’t know—I hadn’t thought about these questions in as much depth as I was starting to. And she was also raised in a bit of a different tradition than I was within Christianity, and so we had some differing opinions, and there was a lot of—I wouldn’t even say conflict, but a lot of interesting discussions. And I would say over the course of about the first two years of my undergraduate studies, we had basically talked each other out of our belief. We had… I don’t even want to say discovered discrepancies. We had maybe imagined that there were these inconsistencies in Christianity, but really a lot of that came from us. I’ve heard the analogy of we came over scripture. We were almost judging the contents of scripture through our own lenses, and those lenses were, of course, very heavily influenced by the current prevailing scientific viewpoint. And so whenever something in scripture seemed to conflict with that, we would have to go around and around in circles, and ultimately we’d say, “Well. I don’t know. Maybe that’s wrong.” Never having the humility to say, “Well, maybe we misunderstand that,” or, “Maybe we should let this scripture help us understand what science is trying to tell us.” No. We were too proud for that. So we ended up bit by bit chipping away at what faith we had. And really- Yeah. I was going to say. Go ahead. I was going to ask you a little bit about that, in terms of the faith that you had. Did you ever actually believe that God existed? Or was it just more of a cultural routine or ritual that you participated in, like you say, for belonging, for community, for to go where your parents went or whatever? Or was there any real felt belief even in the proposition that God exists? And there’s something or someone real at the end of all of these rituals? Or was it just again just something you did? I would say, probably the whole time I would have agreed that there is a God, just that there was no personal relationship, at least for me, with that God. And so I had this conception of a very, not uncaring, but a remote God. That you could pray, but you shouldn’t really expect an answer sort of thing. And so—did you have another? As you were starting to question and you’re looking at scripture, you and your girlfriend. And you’re looking at perhaps how it doesn’t match up with a scientific worldview. Things like miracles or perhaps other things that might have been giving you trouble. I know you were having discussions between the both of you. Did you ever seek counsel or find an intelligent Christian or anyone? Was there anyone in your world with whom you would even talk about: Do science and belief God go together or not? Or were you just making these judgments on your own? Yeah. Not really at this stage. It was really kind of this echo chamber between the two of us, and, “Why should we ask anyone else? We’re the smartest people,” kind of mentality, and, “We can figure this out. We’re smart undergraduate college students. We’re going to get to the bottom of this.” Yes. And for the first few years, we did attend to church on campus, but it was just this kind of slow, slow falling away. And really, the concept of worldviews has been really helpful in understanding not only what led us away but also what ended up bringing us back. And so I think what really drove me to reject Christianity was the kind of the two competing worldviews. There’s science, and then there’s religion, and I kind of viewed both of them as a model for understanding the world. And in one model, there’s this supernatural being that, does all these things and interacts, but on the other model, there’s… it doesn’t seem to need that. There’s just these natural laws, and we’re not going to ask where those natural laws came from. We’re just going to accept that they exist and they have explanative power. They can use these laws to predict what’s going to happen in the future. You can use them to build useful things. And that seemed more interesting, more useful. It had, in my mind at the time, better explanations for what was going on. And meanwhile, the Christian worldview, in my mind, it answered the same types of questions but involved this kind of wishy-washy supernatural being that I didn’t feel was necessary to explain at least the questions that I was interested in asking, which was a subset of all the questions that could be asked. And it’s interesting. When you presuppose that there is no God—you mentioned miracles. Miracles can’t happen in a purely naturalistic worldview. They’re not allowed because there’s no supernatural. And so if something does happen that somebody might call a miracle, well, there must be a natural explanation for that. And maybe science just hasn’t understood the phenomenon that’s going on. That was the sort of explanation that I would come up with when presented with something that might appear to be outside of scientific understanding. So by presupposing that there was no God, I could define away anything that might point me to God. So it became a comfortable, I guess, rational, reasonable place to live for you intellectually, I presume. Yeah. That’s a good way to put it. It was comfortable. I didn’t have to ask uncomfortable questions. And it really wasn’t, “I’m rejecting God.” It’s a, “I don’t believe that there is a God.” It’s a, “What you see is what you get.” There’s the natural world, and we can study it, and learn things about it, use it for our purposes, but ultimately there’s no before, there’s no after. This is all it is. And it’s simultaneously a very empty way to view the world, in terms of fulfillment and purpose and all of those things, but it’s also, in a way, a comfort that nothing really matters. You go into this nihilistic…. There’s no greater purpose, so I don’t have to worry about what the greater purpose is. I can just do do my thing, be a good person, whatever that means, and live happily ever after, right? It’s what I thought. Well, how did that work for you? Was that existential emptiness, or the emptiness that is a part of the naturalistic worldview, did that affect you personally? Or were you able to, like, “Hey, I’m good. I’m fine with all of that. There is nothing more than the natural world.” Like you say, “There’s nothing to worry about. Things just are. I’m sober-minded. I’m rational. I don’t need….” You characterized Christianity as maybe perhaps for those who needed something like that, for belonging or whatever, but that you didn’t necessarily need that, I guess, as a rational being who can make sense of the world through a scientific lens. Did that work well for you? Was that able to answer—I mean, like you said, you weren’t asking certain kinds of questions. You were accepting certain types of realities that came with that worldview. So yeah. How did…
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