Wikipedia Co-Founder Uncovers Occult Evil, Turns to Christ
Inside This Episode
Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia and a self-described skeptical agnostic for over three decades, recently stunned the world by announcing: “It is finally time for me to confess and explain, fully and publicly, that I am a Christian.”
Why would a philosopher with a PhD—a field often dominated by atheists and agnostics—abandon skepticism for faith? What rational evidence led him to Christ in his 50s?
In this interview, Eric Huffman sits down with Sanger to explore his remarkable transformation. Once deeply skeptical of religion, Sanger began questioning his worldview after uncovering the pervasive evil within Hollywood and elite circles, which led him to reexamine the Bible and Christian philosophy with fresh eyes.
More from Larry Sanger: https://larrysanger.org
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Transcript
Eric Huffman: Why would the co-founder of Wikipedia, who was a self-described skeptical agnostic for over three decades, publicly profess his faith in Christ in his 50s? What rational evidence led a man with a PhD in philosophy, a field that's dominated by atheists and agnostics, to convert to Christianity?
Larry Sanger recently shocked the world when he announced on his website for everyone to read, quote, "It is finally time for me to confess and explain, fully and publicly, that I am a Christian."
Larry Sanger is here with us today. Larry, welcome to Maybe God.
Larry Sanger: Hi, thanks for having me.
Eric Huffman: Thanks for taking the time. I'm sure you're very busy since this big announcement rolled out, and so I'm grateful that you would take the time to speak with us. Why don't we start kind of at the end of the story as we know it so far, which is just your decision to open up about your faith. Why now?
Larry Sanger: I didn't want to do it immediately because, well, at first, the very first, I wasn't even sure I was converting, you know? It took time. It was a process, I guess. And then by the time I was like really into it and had studied more, I realized, well, something that I guess I would have known before that too, that if I'm obligated to defend the faith, as I probably will be when I make an announcement, I'd better be able to explain myself coherently, you know?
It's a big mistake, it seems to me, for someone who doesn't have his head wrapped around the relevant arguments for a philosopher to come in and sort of be caught flat-footed about those very issues. It wouldn't be a good look for the gospel.
Eric Huffman: Right, to just wing it, go willy-nilly, see what happens.
Larry Sanger: Right, right.
Eric Huffman: I get it.
Larry Sanger: So, I thought that, you know, just waiting until I had, you know... I've read the Bible now almost five times. In fact, the week after next it will be finished with the fifth time through in the last five years. And I've read a stack of books about theology and apologetics, philosophy of religion, philosophical theology, etc. So, I guess I'm prepared now.
Eric Huffman: Yeah, interesting. Since you made that decision and obviously published the post that went around the world, what's the reaction been like? Has there been backlash, encouragement, some combination of both?
Larry Sanger: Very little backlash so far.
Eric Huffman: Really?
Larry Sanger: Yeah. I mean, I'm not sure why that is. I can only speculate. I think that a case like mine makes the atheists uncomfortable. Maybe there's something that they don't actually understand that I do now. At least, just speaking for myself, like 20 years ago, if such a thing were to happen, I would go, whoa, that's interesting. I wonder what happened to him. But I wouldn't presume to know.
If I was a rational person, which I hope 20 years ago I was reasonably, I wouldn't simply assume that a person in my present situation is simply irrational.
Eric Huffman: Yeah. I mean, especially given that the piece you wrote was so thorough. If you're watching online or listening to this, in the show notes, we'll put a link to that piece and you can read it.
I really appreciate it that there's a YouTube option of you reading that piece where you can listen to it. I listened and read simultaneously just to make sure I absorbed it. But it's so thorough. As your philosophical chops were on display, you really did your homework.
Larry Sanger: Well, thank you.
Eric Huffman: Yeah. And I would imagine that makes it more difficult to quickly refute. So, maybe the backlash is still incoming.
Larry Sanger: Right. No, I think that that's actually probably right. But on the other hand, there's been an enormous amount of feedback. I don't know how many replies I've written. I have not been able to write a reply to all of the responses on my blog. There were over 500 comments, and I think over 400 of those would have been from other people. And for a medium that is not as popular as it used to be, blogging, that's actually a lot.
Then there have been any number of interviews just like this one you can find on YouTube, and they've got quite a few views. There's been a lot of feedback on all of those and other places. I couldn't possibly respond to it all if I wanted to. It would be like a full-time job and then some, I think.
Eric Huffman: Yeah. I mean, I was amazed when I scoured the comments how many you had responded to, even as recently as yesterday or today. I mean, you're trying your best to keep up with those questions that people are asking. That's most of the comments, other than the, wow, thank God for this. This is amazing. There were comments from some Christians and some non-Christians, Well, what do you do with this? What do you think about this? And I really admire your careful attention to those as well.
Part of this, I think the reason for such an amazing response has been the fact that you're a public figure. You are known for Wikipedia, among other things. Do you think that contributed in some way to what you're seeing?
Larry Sanger: I guess so. Yeah, that's probably most of it.
Eric Huffman: Yeah. I don't think most people in the world, if they're familiar with Wikipedia, would expect a co-founder of it to come out in such a full-throated way in favor of Christianity.
Larry Sanger: Yeah. Well, I mean, I was hired to start Wikipedia, which it was basically my job to do that because I was about to finish my PhD in philosophy. So, that was sort of the Jimmy Wales requirement for the job, essentially.
Eric Huffman: What was interesting to me reading your story was, and reading about you elsewhere, was seeing that early on, in the early days of Wikipedia, I think it was even after you'd left the company, you voiced criticism of the platform having an anti-religious bias. Like, you were already seeing a tilt or bias in the material being published on Wikipedia. You were almost defending Christianity before you were defending Christianity.
Larry Sanger: Yeah. I was disappointed with my allies, let's put it that way. I sort of wished that my fellow unbelievers would have used stronger arguments, more, you know, meatier arguments. There's such a rich field of things to say, and yet, well, most of the people are not at all philosophically trained, so they're not able to actually mount a philosophical argument.
I can tell you now that as much as atheists like to say they know the Bible better than the Christians do, well, that's just false. There are a few who do and who know it very well, but not very many. So most of the discourse online from atheists directed at Christians is just abuse.
That is sort of reflected because they sort of emerged out of and reflect that whole, you know, culture. The new atheists, they are just a reflection of that, I think.
Eric Huffman: Interesting. We'll talk more about that in just a moment. Let's go back in time first, though, just for a minute, and talk about your upbringing, because I find this fascinating. You were raised Christian, at least nominally, but I think a little more than nominally Christian.
Larry Sanger: More than nominally. Yeah.
Eric Huffman: Later in your childhood, I think your family stopped going to church, I think you said in the piece. But early in life, you were a Sunday morning Christian. You were there at Missouri Synod Lutheran, which is a... I know that to be very rigid, let's say, pretty intense denomination. I don't mean that pejoratively. I mean that they take it seriously. And yet, when you were a child, you were known for asking questions. In fact, you said you were known for asking too many questions. That struck me as interesting. What kinds of questions were you asking as a child?
Larry Sanger: I remember driving to church, I think, a couple of different times, and I would ask... because the conversation would talk about the soul sometimes, then the spirit, and then in explaining this, they would bring up the mind. So, what exactly is the difference between the soul and the spirit and the mind? I wanted to know because it's like trying to... you know, I was simply trying to understand what I was being told, which is actually the origin of a lot of the very best philosophy, actually. All you're trying to do is understand what people say in a basic way, and well, they couldn't explain it.
Eric Huffman: Really? Something as simple as that. But I think sometimes they're thrown around as though they're synonymous.
Larry Sanger: Not simple at all. It's very hard. I mean, that's deep philosophy, actually, and theology, you know? There's different theories about it. Some theologians actually think there are three separate things. Some think there are only two.
Eric Huffman: Interesting, yeah. But the fact that your questions were not received signaled to you early in life that maybe questions weren't welcome in church, is that correct?
Larry Sanger: Well, that was with my parents and older siblings. In church, I don't remember asking that many questions in church.
Eric Huffman: You mentioned later in life, maybe you were still a teenager, I think, taking questions to a pastor, and that didn't go well.
Larry Sanger: Right. What happened in that case, I had recently shifted my... you could just say shifted my outlook on life. I had taken a class in philosophy. And without getting into the details right now, let's just say that I found myself without a belief in God anymore. I couldn't justify the belief in a way that I thought I needed to be able to in order to hold on to it rationally. And I thought that any beliefs that I held, I should understand very well, and I should have excellent reasons that I could explain, at least to myself, for believing them. I couldn't.
I had a number of different reasons for thinking that I at least didn't know that God existed, and objections to the traditional arguments for the existence of God. And then the problem of evil was one that I would have been aware of back then.
I went to a pastor, or rather, I actually called him on the phone. I don't think it was my church's pastor. I think it was a different one because I didn't want to put the old pastor... We had stopped going to church, by the way, by this time.
So, anyway, I called up some pastor who didn't know me. You know, I was just some snot-nosed kid trying to understand some things about ultimately what I would call philosophy of religion. That's what it's called. A lot of pastors back then, and even today, are not really trained in philosophy of religion. And the questions, they're hard.
And of course, every pastor is familiar with the traditional arguments for the existence of God. That's true. But being able to whip them out and really make them shine in the mind of a 17-year-old is hard. It's a big ask, actually. I didn't realize that at the time. I just thought that, well, of course, he's going to be smarter than me about this stuff, you know? But he sort of gave me the brush off. So he didn't want to discuss it in any sort of great depth. It's possible that he gave me a book recommendation, but I'm not sure. But let's just say he wasn't very exemplary in his pastorality.
That didn't cause me to lose my faith. It's just he lost an opportunity to keep somebody who was in the process of falling away from, you know, going over the brink.
Eric Huffman: So, let's say he didn't have the answers, and maybe that's why he brushed you off. What do you think a better alternative outcome would have been? Probably people watching right now have people they care about asking questions they don't have answers to, but they still want to engage in meaningful conversation. What would a better response have been?
Larry Sanger: That's a good question, actually. I hadn't really thought too hard about that.
Eric Huffman: I think about it all the time.
Larry Sanger: I'm not a pastor. I don't have any designs on becoming a pastor. I would say that there's a lot of free, high-quality online resources. Yeah. You could just type a question. This is what I did, actually, when I started reading the Bible all the way through for the first time, you know, for good understanding. I had a lot of questions, and I really wanted to understand it the way that Christians understand it.
And sometimes the most efficient way to learn what the traditional answers to a certain question were was simply to type the question into Google or search engine of your choice and look at the first few results, and it's amazing. It's like, of course, all the things that you're thinking about have been asked before.
Eric Huffman: That's right.
Larry Sanger: All of your questions have been asked before.
Eric Huffman: Time and time again.
Larry Sanger: At least a pastor needs to know that, of course, and I'm sure most of them do. You know? That's what theology actually is all about. It's not just that. Theology is not the same as apologetics. But basically, apologetics are drawing on theology, which is a 2,000-year-old tradition so that the grounds for the answers, to a very great extent, are there and public and not that hard to find.
If I had time, I might invite such a person to sit down and say, you know what, a lot of the questions that you're asking actually require the services of a theologian or a philosophy professor or something like that. And there aren't very many pastors that... just be honest with them about that.
Eric Huffman: That's right.
Larry Sanger: You know, I think. And then I say, but that doesn't mean that there are no answers. The thing is, I myself have asked these questions over the years, and I've always had resources available to me, you know, professors and books and whatever, and I know where to find the answers. I look them up, I read the answers, and I say, Wow, this actually makes a lot of sense. And then I stop thinking about those questions.
Eric Huffman: Right?
Larry Sanger: But there's some people who just keep thinking about those questions over and over and over again, so they've got the stuff down pat.
Eric Huffman: Right. And the resources are out there. What a time to be alive. I mean, it's an amazing time to be a Christian right now because so many resources are out there on these different topics and questions. If you're watching and listening and you have ever felt yourself out of your depth, as I do almost every day in my line of work as a pastor, there are questions people ask that I haven't thought about much or don't have answers to at the ready.
The main thing is when that door opens and you make that call to that pastor, that was really, whether you saw it that way or not, kind of an invitation into a relationship or something. Like there was an opening there that was immediately shut by him sort of dismissing you. And I think the relationship is almost as important as the answers themselves.
The fact is we miss opportunities when we just shift someone aside whenever we don't have the answers right away. Just go get coffee. Just at least communicate to someone who's asking questions that you care about their questions and you care about them. I think that's a good start. And then you can explore the answers together, maybe. Read a book together instead of sending someone away with a book recommendation. Let's get coffee and read a chapter at a time. Good stuff. That's great. Thank you.
Let's fast forward a little bit to college, actually to grad school, because you've talked about your experience at Ohio State and your graduate professors there. Most of them were unbelievers, outspoken, I guess, about their unbelief in God, agnostic in many cases.
Larry Sanger: At that point, it wasn't really necessary to be terribly outspoken. I mean, it's just an assumption that most people have. You could go and talk about that. Well, you know, if I were to believe in God, then blah, blah, blah, and they talk about it as if it's not, obviously, it's not really the case. It's not even worth talking about for the most part. But there were some of my fellow grad students, even a couple of the professors believed in God.
Eric Huffman: Interesting. It was during that time, though, that you sort of staked out your position philosophically about what you believe, what you don't believe. I guess, you came out as an agnostic in that period of your life.
Larry Sanger: I would have said I was agnostic. I think I even learned the term when I was 17.
Eric Huffman: Yeah.
Larry Sanger: Yeah, yeah. But I confirmed it, I guess, that is a good way to put it. For example, one thing that I would have said back then is that I don't even have a concept of God, not really, because, you know, the notion of God is supposed to be a mind or soul that created the world with a thought or something like a thought anyway, the word. And do I have any experience of my own mind creating things with just a thought? No. So, the very core notion of the creator is not something that I can relate to at all, have no concept of it.
Of course, I can respond to that now. I mean, basically, what I would say now is that there are a lot of our concepts that are what might be called placeholder concepts. In other words, we don't have a notion, a very clear notion of what an atom is really in itself. We have things that we can observe, we can describe things that are supposed to be true of it, but we cannot experience firsthand the atom.
This is true of a lot, in fact, maybe even most scientific concepts. We don't have a direct experience of these things, we just have ways of measuring them. [Selling? 00:19:47] the same way. We can have a notion of God that is built up of all the attributes of God. And that's actually quite enough of a peg to hang further statements about God on. So, that's perfectly fine.
Eric Huffman: Sure.
Larry Sanger: But I didn't have that response in mind. I wouldn't have been impressed by that response at the time.
Eric Huffman: Yeah, yeah. You describe the idea of God as being literal nonsense during your graduate school days. It sounds like it wasn't until you were, I guess, confronted with the fine-tuning argument for God's existence that you felt any kind of challenge at all from theism. What was it about the fine-tuning argument that sort of got your attention?
Larry Sanger: A student came into the graduate student room one day to engage me in just conversation, and he presented the fine-tuning argument to me. I had heard it before, but he explained it in more detail, actually, than I would have been able to give myself.
I was probably a first- or second-year graduate student at the time, and philosophy of religion wasn't my area. And I thought that it was fascinating that there was something about the universe that really did seem to suggest an intelligence behind, you know, entirely inorganic features of the universe, like the numbers, the constants that are required in order for the cosmos to have the structure that it has, essentially, that supports ultimately life. And why should those numbers be as they are if they weren't essentially designed to result in the eventual appearance of life?
That's the argument, and I didn't have any response to it. That was kind of unusual to me, just the fact that I didn't have a response.
Eric Huffman: What kept you from just following that trail at that point in your life and sort of seeing where it leads? Was there something about it that you found lacking in and of itself as an argument for God that maybe...?
Larry Sanger: Well, yeah. I mean, what I always fell back on is the fact that it might even be true that there is something independent of the created universe, independent of space and time and matter, that explains, in some sort of designing way, why things are as they are. But you can't infer from that bare proposition that the God of Christianity exists or even that God under any ordinary conception exists.
It's not like I was totally ignorant of these things either. I had some exposure to this sort of thing. No one had really sat down and written out a complete case, integrated case, that presented the arguments not as each arguing for the existence of God, but each supplying a different piece of the puzzle that ultimately it can be explained as pointing to God. It's called the argument from the best explanation or to the best explanation.
Eric Huffman: It's my favorite part of the piece you wrote. I hope people will go and read it. It's from me.
Larry Sanger: And it's very important. I didn't understand. I just wonder what would have happened if somebody had sat me down and explained that in great depth, which somebody could have done at the time. I mean, who knows? I might have actually rethought my agnosticism.
Eric Huffman: Sometimes I think in our desire to evangelize the unbelievers, we lean on one or two favorite arguments. To us as Christians, they seem so compelling and convincing, but on their own to honest skeptic, they are lacking on their own, whether it's fine-tuning or in first cause, whatever argument is your favorite.
I think that's important for people that do Christian apologetics to hear. And you talk a lot about apologetics in the piece, actually, and not always in glowing terms. I mean, you're not insulting toward any particular apologist, but you name a couple names. And yeah, you just say, you know, you just found their arguments well thought out to be lacking something, lacking in some way. And maybe it was that the unified theory of bringing them all together for a best explanation that was missing at the time.
Larry Sanger: Here's how I like to put it. Now, I should have written this down in the piece, perhaps. A lot of apologists, and frankly, this is true of philosophers generally, they like to think of arguments as being something that compels assent. It's like you have to believe the conclusion. It's like, what's going to happen? Are you going to arrest me if I don't?
I actually think having had my mind changed by a reconceptualization of philosophical arguments, I actually think about arguments in a different way, which I... well, I now understand some things that some philosophers have said that I used to read. Anyway.
And it's the following. That the function of an argument is not to compel assent. It is to explain to people a point of view. An argument is a window into a point of view. And especially if a whole point of view requires a battery of arguments, then you shouldn't... you do your own cause a disservice if you treat individual arguments as clinching the case, because they don't. It's really important that you understand the entire worldview.
The only way that I was able to come to a Christian worldview was by actually working through all the different little parts that are in a Christian worldview.
Eric Huffman: Sure. You're a philosopher, and you were on a search for truth, and you had to be reached in a way that spoke to the way your brain works. And I think it's fascinating as a Christian to see how all the different ways that God reaches different kinds of people through the heart, through the head, through whatever. And the way that He reached you is no less fascinating.
At that point in your life, you were on a path, you were committed to pursuing truth. You know, that was your goal, your stated mission, and you just didn't think God was a part of it for that part of your life. But there were a couple of instances, a couple of events, big life events that sort of began to change you. One of them was your marriage, and another was the birth of your first child. Could you just talk to us about that and why those experiences opened you to new possibilities?
Larry Sanger: People like to ask about this, but I thought that that was a little bit idiosyncratic. Maybe not, though. From basically the time I started getting interested in philosophy in the next 10 years or so, I was really into the philosophy of Ayn Rand. And that was probably because Ayn Rand likes to idolize reason, you know, that we should always have rational, logical reasons for all of our beliefs. And so, I agreed with her on that. That was very important to me.
I didn't necessarily agree with all of her conclusions, but one of the interesting things was that she was an atheist. I wasn't agnostic but at any rate. And another, though, was that Ayn Rand was an egoist, an ethical egoist, not an egotist.
An egoist in the philosophical context generally means somebody who believes that the reasons we can give for what we ought to do or ought not to do, are ultimately explained in terms of what is in our own enlightened self-interest. Okay. So, like, if I ought to do something, then ultimately it is because it's good for me.
Now, this can be sort of made more enlightened sounding. So, there's something called enlightened ethical egoism. But I rejected even that after my marriage and then the birth of my first child, because I reflected, this is actually very, very simple and straightforward, this argument, this sort of argument.
I would be willing to die for these people. Now, would I be willing to die because it would be in my own best self-interest? Well, no, I wouldn't even exist anymore. So, that can't be the reason why.
And then being a philosopher, I asked, well, then why would I be willing to do this? Why would I actually think that that is a thing I ought to do? And I said, well, it's whatever the reason is, it has reference to their interest, not mine. That means that I had to actually put somebody else's interest ahead of mine. And therefore, ethical egoism was out the window. And then that made me think, Well, maybe Ayn Rand was wrong about a lot of other things because that was sort of like the essential feature of Ayn Rand's philosophy.
Eric Huffman: I think about, you know, soldiers with their bands of brothers that would fall on a grenade. I mean, it's not just blood relatives that we do that kind of seemingly irrational act of love for. You know, we willingly die for others. That act is clearly not in our self-interest.
And it's not even just dying for others. Like, you'd also spend the rest of your life in prison for them, you know? So I think the dying for others could be dismissed in a religious sense if you had a belief that you were going to go to heaven for dying for others. But you would also suffer for them. You would do anything for them, which is fundamentally contrary to the Randian point of view.
So those events changed you or started the transformation toward conversion. But there were other things that got your attention as well that started there, continued the transformation process. Things that you saw in the headlines. Sinister things. Hard to understand evil things, like the Epstein Island controversy. Why was it in particular that something like that would further your process toward conversion?
Larry Sanger: It was pretty indirect, actually. A friend of mine told me about not just the Epstein case and, you know, the pedo island or whatever they call it in the Virgin Islands, but also Sir Jimmy Savile. He was knighted. And they had to know that he was a pedophile when he was knighted, which is very indicative. A lot of people would deny that, but I think it's true.
There have been all kinds of high-level political scandals, you know, former Speakers of the House, right? Or at least one. And pedo-gate and pedo-wood. Just look these things up.
Eric Huffman: Yeah, I'd rather not, but I know you're right.
Larry Sanger: And a lot of the people who are into this stuff, at least my friend was convinced, and he... well, I think he is probably right about some of it anyway, they're into the occult. They're not like traditional Christians, of course.
He seemed to think, and was trying to get me to believe, that their weird religious ideas actually had something to do with their systematic collective child abuse. He said, well, if you really want to understand this, then you have to understand ancient sex rights and how they have continued to the present. And then for that you need to read these books about the occult.
So, I said, Well, I'm not going to read the books themselves. I'm not going to, like, pick up Aleister Crowley or anything. But I thought, well, maybe I'd read some books that are about the occult written from people who aren't into it.
Eric Huffman: Seems a little less dangerous.
Larry Sanger: I started doing that. I said, "No, this is dangerous." If I'm learning about the mysteries, then I'm learning the mysteries. And if the mysteries themselves are somehow a... and I wasn't thinking that this is a real possibility, but I was kind of weirded out enough to think that, well, maybe I shouldn't be touching this.
Eric Huffman: How did you process all that with your rational sort of framework? How did that sit with you?
Larry Sanger: Well, it was pretty upsetting, actually, to be honest. Because it is definitely a bit of sand in the works of a rationalistic point of view to be told that some of the leaders of the world, not all of them or anything necessarily, but some of them have gotten away with, as parts of groups of child molesters. That's the most horrific crime that I can possibly think of. How is that even possible? What kind of world do we live in? And why would they even think of that it was possible for them to get away with it?
They're putting a lot on the line by doing that, aren't they? Well, maybe they believe these things, really. That was the conclusion I was coming to. And then I thought, well, you know, I like to investigate other people's points of view. That's what I've always done. That's what G.E. Moore, the philosopher, said. His inspiration for doing philosophy is trying to understand what other people think. So, I was trying to understand what these people think, right?
And then I knew this about the occult. I knew that their ideas, to a very great extent, are a perversion of a reaction to a twisting of the Bible and biblical symbols. This is especially evident in Freemasonry, but in a lot of others as well.
Eric Huffman: Nazism as well. The high levels of Nazism were deeply into the occult, and a lot of people don't know that.
Larry Sanger: Right. No, it's absolutely true. It's factual. It's not a conspiracy theory. That was the thing that kind of weirded me out. A lot of these things are not disputed at all by serious researchers. It's just that people don't know them.
So, the point is, I thought, I ought to read the Bible if I really want to understand their point of view. And then if I'm going to read the Bible seriously, then I would actually try to understand it the way the Christians understand it, which I had never really tried to do before.
I didn't really feel like I needed to, because it was obviously just this work of ancient Bronze Age shepherds and not really particularly profound, certainly not more profound than like Plato and Aristotle or anything like that, and not worth really spending a lot of time on. But I was motivated to start.
Eric Huffman: Yeah. Is it fair to say that — this is such a funny story to me — that your belief in what became your belief in Christianity began sort of in a backward way. It started with your realization that there was something efficacious to the occult and those who practice it.
And that realization led you to study the inverse of the occult, which, as you're saying, was your exploration of the Bible.
Larry Sanger: I was still, and I still am to a very great extent, a methodological skeptic. So, I didn't believe that. And I don't know how much of it I still believe, because we're talking about things that are necessarily hidden from me, and which I have no grounds on which to understand. Nevertheless, I thought it's possible. I couldn't rule it out. And that was interesting to me. That was enough, just the possibility.
Eric Huffman: Yeah. And when you decided to explore the Bible on your own, thinking that it was just this Bronze Age, you know, written by Bronze Age shepherds, what did you actually find, and what surprised you?
Larry Sanger: I was expecting it to be the way that it had been when I would like read it sort of casually to my sons who are homeschooled. I thought this is the most important influential book in the history of the world. I would have said that forever. I always believe that. It's obvious.
But even five years before that when I had read it to my sons, parts of it, it was really not anything worth writing home about. It was just a lot of myths. That's how it struck me.
Eric Huffman: Talk tales, yeah.
Larry Sanger: But I wasn't trying to understand it. That's the problem. I wasn't actually giving the things it contains my serious attention. You know, actually ask the questions and get answers. The thing is, when I started doing that, I discovered to my shock, my consternation how is this making sense? But it was making sense.
The example that I like to give is from the story of Abraham and Sarah. When Sarah was younger, she had been added to Pharaoh's harem and Pharaoh was going to have relations with her and God stopped that. And then just after, just after Sarah was told that she was going to bear Isaac, she was 90 years old and past the age of bearing. She was postmenopausal. She probably was not much to look at. Why was Abimelech sexually interested in her? This is another, Abimelech. Why? There are two different ones, whatever. Anyway, why was he interested?
Well, they had received a prophecy or rather a promise from God that she would bear Isaac within a year. He would be back this time next year and she would have a son. And in the intervening time, a miracle would have had to take place, right?
Well, what was the nature of the miracle? There's two different ways that could happen. Either a new, young, healthy womb was put in the body of an old woman, or maybe the entire woman was rejuvenated. And that makes sense. That explains everything, doesn't it?
Eric Huffman: Wow.
Larry Sanger: The entire woman was rejuvenated. Then that would explain why she was sexually attracted, even at the age of 90. The thing is, okay, it still sounded like a folktale and so forth, but the amazing thing was the more I asked these sorts of questions, the more I realized that there were actually answers for all of them. And I thought, well, maybe they're just like rationalizations. But the more I looked into it, the more I realized, no, it's actually in the text itself, right?
There's a way of reading into a text, stuff that is taken from outside of the text in order to make it more plausible. That's not what's going on here. It's the text itself provides the materials necessary for making it just supremely rational, coherent.
Theologians who really study this stuff know that. That's why they're theologians. That's why they don't just like give up even after decades of study of the Bible. Because it all makes sense. And they're not irrational people. These are some of the most rational people in the world, I think.
Eric Huffman: Right. I remember reading that you wrote it was the coherence of scripture that really surprised you as you read through it. I would say all the questions that people ask today and get hung up on and sometimes walk away from the Bible about, they've already been asked and they've already been explored and the answers are really out there and within reach if you do the research, you do the investigating, as you did. And thank God for that, because that's why we're sitting here today. Let me pause.
Larry Sanger: I'd say one more than that, I actually think the Bible in a certain sense demands that you ask questions in the following sense. You cannot understand certain things that are being said unless you ask hard questions, the answers to which are not obvious, but they're there. They can be found in other chapters or whatever. And that's the thing.
You can't understand why a certain prophet uses certain language in a poem unless you understand the intertextuality. In other words, it's a reference back to some other thing. The default explanation is given earlier in the text. The prophets understand these things and it actually makes sense. You will not understand what the Bible is saying unless you understand those connections.
Eric Huffman: He who has ears, let him hear. So, you're reading the Bible, your eyes are opening to some things you didn't expect to find there, its coherence, etc. And then your next step in the journey was to start at least pretending to pray, as I understand it. What was that like and why did you decide to start talking to God?
Larry Sanger: Fortuitously, or maybe it was designed that way. I actually started these sorts of, you know, dialogues with God when I was a child. I remember walking to school when I was, I would have been eight years old and just sort of imagining what God would say to me in response to things. I didn't think even at that time that it actually was God. I understood that I was imagining, right?
And then later on, when I was doing philosophy, you know, a lot of philosophy takes the form of dialogues, right? You know, Plato's dialogues, for example, or Hume in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. I would sometimes write those down. Sometimes I just think them through and then it would just like come back to me like riding a bicycle. Sometimes I would have these sorts of internal dialogues with a supremely wise being as a sort of methodological tool to understand whatever I was thinking about.
Okay. So, I started doing the same thing just sort of naturally, again, in the context of, you know, reading the Bible and thinking again about the traditional arguments for the existence of God, which actually the Bible sort of caused me to do. Just thinking about the possibility of reading the Bible started making me think about those old arguments. And I would like start, you know, dialoguing again with this supremely wise person.
At a certain point, something sort of switched and I realized, you know what, it seems like someone is there. I don't know. I don't want to put this flippantly. I want to try to remember how it actually happened, but I'm not sure I can because it was so gradual.
When I first started having these sorts of dialogues, I didn't believe that God exists. Now, even now, I'll go and take a walk and imagine a dialogue with God. And I think maybe God is kind of inspiring the answers. I think they're drawn from the Bible, of course, because I've read the Bible five times. That makes it a lot easier to imagine what God would say.
And so reading the Bible actually made it a lot easier. The first time I read it, I read it in 100 days. I was kind of obsessed. I had a whole lot of biblical language, you know, washing over me every day and it made it easy to, as I say, imagine what God would say. And I recommend that to everybody. I think it's a perfectly orthodox sort of practice. Just imagine what God would say to you. Now, don't get confused and start thinking that God actually did say that to you. I think that's probably wrong, unless you're quoting the Bible.
Eric Huffman: Yeah, if you're in the Word, I think that can be a safe assumption sometimes, but I agree, we should tread carefully.
Larry Sanger: Yeah, I think that I'm still confused, actually, to be perfectly honest, about how to distinguish ideas that pop in your head that are supposed to be from God from ones that you generate yourself. I actually think there's not a big difference, actually. If you are marinated in the Word of God, then the things that are likely to pop into your head are likely to be the Word of God.
Eric Huffman: Yeah, certainly more likely. I think I would add a third category of is it from God or is it my own thoughts? And there seems to be an indication in Scripture that some thoughts must be taken captive because they may be influenced by some dark demonic force in the world that we should not ignore or explain away.
The reason I thought your story about the occult leading you to explore the Bible was so interesting is because I think without a belief in the darkness, the evil of this world, it's really hard to explain or really stake your life on a belief in God and vice versa. I think sometimes it's really a both-and deal. And so, Christians should be very, especially when you're coming to faith in Christ and new to faith in Christ, you should be very wary that you're over the target, so to speak. And so you are getting the attention of some force in the universe that does not have your best interest at heart.
Larry Sanger: Right.
Eric Huffman: Does that make sense?
Larry Sanger: It absolutely does. In fact, one of the things that disturbed me the most over the years, and disturbs a lot of philosophers actually, not in an occultic way, but it might have relevance, is the problem of weakness of will, akrasia. So, you know that you should do a certain thing, but you don't do it. You know that you should be following your diet, for example, and yet you end up indulging. Why is this the case?
I knew, due to my broad reading, that religious people in particular, maybe Christians especially, but not just Christians, they seem to be able to solve this problem in a certain way. They're able to commit to their moral law, if you want to call it that, in a more significant way than I was able to.
I actually think I have been able to keep my moral commitments much more consistently since coming to believe in God. I chalk that up to the Holy Spirit. I think that it is His help.
Eric Huffman: I found it interesting that even before your conversion, or even getting close to conversion, when you were writing in a post before, I saw this quote, and I wrote it down by hand because I think it was so interesting. It was a clue of where your life was headed, I think, but it was also just a really profound observation. You were talking about the downfall and decline of religion in the West, and sort of grieving that as a secular philosopher at that time.
And you wrote, "So I say, as a serious cultural force, inspiring us to live well, religion is a pale shadow of its former self. Even as a nonbeliever, this strikes me as a truly profound loss." So, you were already observing the benefits of what you're describing long before you ever got close to it yourself.
Larry Sanger: For sure, yeah. Yeah. There's the whole phenomenon of cultural Christians you might have heard of. I suppose I was one, you know, even before they were called that. I never disliked Christians. I thought they were a little naive, perhaps, until I'd stopped holding even that belief that they were really on to something.
Eric Huffman: At this point in your life that we're describing now, you had kind of come full circle, but you hadn't quite taken the leap of faith, let's say, to become a Christian, but you were praying in a way, you were reading the Bible more than most Christians do. Was there a moment when the light shone from heaven and Damascus Road knock you off your feet kind of moment? What happened to lead to your conversion?
Larry Sanger: Nope, there was not. It was very gradual. But I will say, you can't actually be, especially a reasonably self-aware and self-honest person and not know when you actually believe something as important as that God exists.
At a certain point, I did say, well, I guess I have to admit to myself, as much as I don't maybe want to, I had to admit to myself that I was actually believing in God. I think perhaps a few more days passed after that. And then I said, well, if I actually believe in God, I'd better start actually explicitly praying to God.
I do recall that one night, just lying in bed before going to sleep, uttering a silent prayer, so to speak, in my own mind. That was something like the sinner's prayer. I can't really remember what I would have thought. But it was also gradual. I didn't like there immediately accept Jesus as my Lord and Savior even. At that point, I guess what I would have said was, "I believe that God exists so I believe that Jesus is His Son." And I...
Eric Huffman: The Bible's true.
Larry Sanger: Yeah. Something like that. I didn't even know what it really meant, even though I had thought about it and done a little research about it. I didn't know what it really meant to say that Jesus saves me from my sins or something like that. I didn't even know how to put it, you know. And yet this is supposed to be the central tenet of Christian religion. That was kind of disturbing to me.
Here I am believing something. I couldn't really articulate what it was that I was believing. But I can explain why that would be the case now. It's because it is very experiential. I mean, that's the most important thing. It was not a confession that saved the robber on the cross, although that was enough for Jesus to look into His heart and see that He was really sincere. The robber on the cross did confess that Jesus was who He said He was and that, you know, expressed loyalty.
Eric Huffman: But the experience led to the confession.
Larry Sanger: The experience was not a confession, more to the point, the loyalty is not a confession. I actually felt loyal to God and to His Son, to the Son of God before I accepted all of the doctrine. It required another process to actually really understand the doctrine properly.
Eric Huffman: I hope everybody watching that has any sort of hang-ups or you're sort of just have a toe in the water with Christianity because for a lot of people, it's because Christianity to you is a concept or theory of life or philosophy of life rather than experience with God. I can't say it's this way for every single person. I just think what you're saying, Larry, is right, that it's an experiential and relational God that we lift up in Christianity. And He wants to be experienced. He wants to be in relationship with us. And that's really where the magic happens, so to speak. That's where lives change. It's not just in the ideas behind the Christian philosophy or worldview. It's in opening yourself up to experiencing Him on a personal level.
Larry Sanger: All right. I like to put it this way. I looked back over all of the traditional arguments for the existence of God, and maybe the individually strongest argument, the one that's like hardest for people to argue with is the argument from contingency.
But that's like the weakest in terms of actually bringing you to the final argument, the final belief that God exists. Meanwhile, the weakest argument from other people's point of view is the argument from religious experience where I seem to have an experience of God, and yet that is easily the most powerful argument that most people have, anyway, when it comes to describing their own reasons for believing that God exists.
If you ask people, what do you think is the strongest argument for the existence of God, they will, give some of the more abstract sorts of arguments. But then when you ask them a slightly different question, you ask them, what is your reason for believing that God exists? Then they start talking about their experience of the Holy Spirit.
Eric Huffman: That's exactly right. And there's nothing more powerful than that. No argument, no set of theses, or whatever has ever been more persuasive than a sincere testimony.
What was the difference between your sort of intellectual ascent to believing in the God of the Bible and your experiential, sort of the process that led you to recognize your sin? Because that seemed to be a hang-up for you, for it was just I believed in God and Jesus, His Son and all in the Holy Spirit, but I hadn't really come to terms with my sin and Him saving me from that. What set that experience apart? How was it different?
Larry Sanger: Well, it's not like I thought it was without sin. That isn't my point. I mean, I had always been sort of what... my word for it was morally ambitious. So, like, I wanted to be a good person. That never went away. And there's a lot of atheists, actually, who are morally ambitious. I fully believe that.
Nevertheless, the thing that I didn't understand, I guess, was what Jesus' death on the cross had to do with that. And it's, frankly, a very bad idea, with all due respect to everybody, I think it's kind of a bad idea to say that what is necessary in order to come to a saving faith is to believe that Jesus died for your sins on the cross. I know that's how the Bible puts it, but the reason that the Bible puts it that way is that it came with a lot of baggage that the Jews who heard that understood. We don't have that baggage. We don't have the notion of a suffering Messiah. They did. They understood the upshot of that.
That's why you actually can tell Jews that and they will get it, right, people who are early familiar with the Old Testament. That's why it's really important for Christians to read the Old Testament, ultimately, because you're learning about your Savior.
Eric Huffman: And the framework that gave rise to Him. Not just about the suffering Messiah, it's about the whole sacrificial system and what that whole process of life for sin meant.
Larry Sanger: I mean, I still have trouble wrapping my head around it. It's a hard subject. It's one of the hardest parts of theology. The requisite thing, I think, is declaring your loyalty to Jesus. That is the true faith. There's not a particular proposition that is required for you to believe in order to be saved. In other words, the belief that saves is the belief in a person, not in a proposition or set of propositions. Although I will say, if you don't believe certain propositions, you cannot have a genuine adherence, loyalty to trust in belief in the person of Jesus.
Eric Huffman: Sure.
Larry Sanger: But I did some writing. I even still have a blog post up about that from like February of 2020, which is like a theory of the atonement, why Jesus had to die on the cross for our sins, why that might save us. But it wasn't just that. It wasn't just a failure to understand that. What I didn't really understand is my need for a Savior. I think the reason, and I think my dialogues with God and reading the Bible sort of backed me into a proper understanding of this, and it took many months.
But eventually, I did come to understand that when I was sinning, I wasn't just doing wrong, which is like some abstract violation of human nature or something like that. I was actually sinning against God. Had to understand that He was my Creator, and that actually matters. I need His forgiveness.
And it's only after you have lived for a while in the notion that you are the child of a Creator who loves you, who is your Father, and that He actually takes... look, when you're sinning, you're either hurting yourself or you're hurting other people, but the point is you're hurting something that God loves. And God loves... most essentially, He loves life, especially human life and everything that that entails. And He gets angry when the ones that He loves are hurt. I had to wrap my mind around a lot of these sorts of issues before I understood it.
Eric Huffman: It's humbling. There's no small measure of submission and surrender that come with that. To some of us, it's very hard to submit and surrender to some idea like that after we've spent our whole lives being proud, successful academics or business people or whatever, and then suddenly we have to submit to this very simple idea that we're not very good guys after all. Not when compared to God. I've identified as a pretty good guy my whole life, and suddenly I've realized that I shouldn't be comparing myself to people, I should be comparing myself to my Creator and honoring Him. It's not about shame either. It's not about beating yourself up. It's recognizing sin and then quickly recognizing how quick He is to forgive it and what amazing grace that is.
So two more questions. First is, how has this experience changed the way you see your life and the world around you? Just the lens through which you see the world. What's changed since you gave your life to Christ? If I met you, the 10 years ago version of you, what would I see different?
Larry Sanger: Well, I have different habits, have a fairly different personality, have a different relationship with my wife and my boys and other family members.
Eric Huffman: Different how?
Larry Sanger: Well, okay. So I found it a lot easier to lose weight.
Eric Huffman: There's a selling point for Christianity.
Larry Sanger: I'm much less interested in... not that I was ever terribly interested in money. That's probably as much because of my academic background as my Christian upbringing. But I became even less, I guess. Like, damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead, I'm going to do the things that are really necessary to do, even if it means losing a job or whatever.
Then I was certainly a lot more forgiving and easy to get along with my wife and my sons. Not like we had a terrible relationship before that, but it was better for sure after that. Like getting into unnecessary arguments is just un-Christian, let's put it that. And that ended to a great extent. Not completely, I'm not perfect.
Eric Huffman: Sure. No one is. In the piece at the end, you said despite your conversion and public profession of faith, you hadn't found a church to call home. I don't know if that situation's changed since that piece went live, but assuming it hasn't, why not? What has kept you from sort of digging your heels in at a church?
Larry Sanger: Well, at first, I thought maybe I would start going to church, and I tried it out. I went to a couple of Bible churches. I went to a Lutheran Free Church once. I ultimately discovered that I would want to be asking a lot of questions of the pastor. I kind of know from my academic and other background my impact on other people. So, I knew that as a PhD philosopher, you know, I-
Eric Huffman: You still have too many questions.
Larry Sanger: And that makes a lot of people uncomfortable. And it's not just that, because, you know, there's a lot of PhD philosophers who go to church. I would actually have no trouble, you know, just like being quiet for the most part. I think that's true. I could do that.
The problem is that I will continue to write about philosophical theology and just plain theology on my blog, make videos the way I have. Well, you saw what happened. I didn't expect it at all, but you saw what happened when I let my conversion story out. So, do I really want to join like a Lutheran church and then discover I disagree with them radically about the sacraments?
Eric Huffman: And you've gone public, and then they have to excommunicate you or whatever.
Larry Sanger: No, I don't want that. That's bad for them. People who are sort of on the edge of faith, too, you know. I wouldn't want anyone accusing me of stealing people from one denomination to whatever, I end up going to next or something like that. Not that I'm saying that would happen, but, you know, it's just something... I didn't want to cause trouble by being the bull in the China shop, so to speak.
So, I want to have worked through a set of about 20 hard questions that can be used to put you into a denominational pigeonhole, essentially. As somebody who actually speaks publicly about theological matters, I better make sure I have a reasonably, reasonably well-worked-out view before I publicly associate myself with a denomination.
Eric Huffman: Sure. I respect that, and I trust there will be a time for that. And when it comes, I pray you find a good community of folks. I just think the church needs more people who ask questions. I think we need more artists and more skeptics in the church. I think the churches get too boring because we tend to marginalize such folks out of fear or being threatened or not knowing what to say, and I just think y'all tend to make church life more interesting. I think that makes the whole church more attractive to people that are asking questions like you have asked your whole life.
Larry Sanger: I think the only way to get to a deeper understanding of a lot of theological and biblical issues is by asking questions. You simply will not get certain insights unless you ask the questions.
Eric Huffman: Amen. That's right. Okay, one final word for anybody watching or listening that is maybe just hung up on some theoretical proposition or some, for whatever rational reasons they have, they just still identify more with their skepticism than with belief in the Lord. What would you say to somebody who sees themselves as smart and sophisticated and reasonable and they're not quite getting over the edge of faith?
Larry Sanger: Well, I would invite them to read the Bible all the way through for good understanding, asking all of their hard questions and then trying to find answers to the hard questions. You don't have to believe the answers, but get the answers on the table mentally, so to speak, and acquaint yourself with them. That's what I did.
The idea is if you actually go all the way through the Bible... you don't have to do it in 100 days the way I did. It could be a year. Don't make it less than that or longer than that because then you'll just lose motivation to keep up with it. But a year or less, go through the Bible, get some good advice about how to study the Bible properly, and actually do that.
Actually, try to study the Bible and ask every hard question that you can think of or as many as you have time to go through. You don't have to believe the answers right away. Just try to understand them. And try to understand not how skeptical academics would answer the questions because they're worthless when it comes to actually understanding what the Christians believe.
If you want to understand what the Christians actually believe, then you have to seek out orthodox, small o orthodox answers.
Eric Huffman: Sure. Just go on a sincere pursuit of truth. That's what you're saying, essentially.
Larry Sanger: Or just a research project. Don't bias them against it by calling it a search for truth. We think it's truth, but they don't yet.
Eric Huffman: Well, sure. I mean, even if the truth is "this stuff's not true", you just be sincere, be honest, and open-minded as you get into it and do the work. I think that's great advice.
Larry Sanger: Exactly. I think there's a pretty good chance you'll be very impressed by everything that you learn.
Eric Huffman: I agree. Well, Larry Sanger, you are a gift. I've really enjoyed talking to you. I thank God for you, and I'm glad everybody got to hear your story. If you're watching online or listening, I hope you'll check out the links in the show notes and the rest of Larry's work. Thank you so much for your time, Larry.
Larry Sanger: All right. Thank you. I appreciate it.
Eric Huffman: God bless you.