When atheists asked me why I converted from atheism to Christianity, I told them that being an investigative reporter was a big help. Their next question was usually, “What does being an investigative reporter have to do with your leaving atheism?” I’ll explain.
Investigating ‘God’
I would have written that heading differently 54 years ago. It would have read ‘Investigating ‘god.’ Little ‘g’ because I was an atheist. So, why the big ‘G’ now? Because I put aside my biases against theism and used investigative techniques to discover the truth.
I will admit that my first thoughts were to prove that God didn’t exist but knew I had to abandon that thinking or I could never call my investigation ‘accurate and objective.’ This was an important subject, and so I wanted to get it right. Here’s a little background about investigative journalism.
Investigative ‘Feelings’
Investigative reporting begins with having a feeling about a possible story. By ‘feeling’ I mean a sense of whether a story might ‘have legs,’ a story worthy of investing time and resources into discovering whether claims are true or false.
Revealing what others are hiding is a big part of investigative journalism. I worked on hundreds of stories and learned that powerful people hide important information from less powerful people (e.g. citizens, employees). That’s where curiosity and skepticism play an essential role in choosing which stories to investigate.
Curiosity and Skepticism are essential ingredients in investigative journalism, but how did they play a role in my becoming a theist?
My Story
I grew up in a Christian family but never became a real Christian (saved). I responded emotionally (disgust) to hypocrisy in our church at a young age and stopped going to church during high school. I became an atheist in college. However, what I had not done was investigate the truth claims of Christianity. I was skeptical about Christianity, but not curious enough to look at the evidence for Christianity.
I became a broadcast reporter after college and was drawn toward the investigative side of journalism. I learned the basic skills and spent time with investigative reporters and police detectives learning the craft. I was a strong atheist and shared my views as a radio talk show host but didn’t let my atheism affect the way I covered news stories. Journalists are supposed to be able to do that.
I interviewed a college professor who was a Christian about a story at a local church and he said some things that stuck with me. By that I mean he said some things that ‘bothered’ me. I had a feeling about what he said. It wasn’t an emotional feeling. It was a sense that something was hidden that needed to be uncovered.
I began what became a five-month investigation into the claims of theism and Christianity. I was emotionally invested in being an atheist. I admit to having ‘confirmation bias’ as an atheist. I didn’t want to change my beliefs or the way I lived my life. However, I sensed there might be something to the story and had to follow the evidence wherever it took me. That investigation led me to become a theist in 1971.
Just The Facts
Facts are vital to an investigative reporter. Facts right, story right. Facts wrong, story wrong. It’s really pretty simple. Facts are part of the trail of evidence that reporters are supposed to follow to get to the truth of any story. Once an investigative reporter decides that a story idea is worth researching, they start looking for facts.
You’ve probably heard the term “fact-checking” used in media reports. I can tell you from experience that just because someone says they are checking facts doesn’t mean they are telling you the truth. Many fact-checkers are not good at their jobs and get things wrong. Some are lazy and will tell you anything so you just go away. Some have bad motives and use their position as fact-checkers to mislead reporters and cover for powerful people. They purposely don’t want you to uncover the truth. The term ‘fact-checker’ does not necessarily equal ‘truth-teller.’ The term is thrown out in the news media every day, but I am not impressed because of my experience as an investigative journalist. Once you learn the ‘craft,’ it’s fairly easy to see when a fact-checker has done their job correctly or poorly.
Questions That Needed Answers
The ‘investigative process’ begins by making careful ‘observations.’ Those observations lead to asking questions that need answers before you can move toward making interpretations and reaching conclusions — and the eventual writing and reporting of a story.
One of the reasons I didn’t believe in God at that time was because I couldn’t see Him, hear Him, talk with Him or touch Him. I didn’t believe I had a way to ‘observe’ God’s existence. If I couldn’t test something with my physical senses, I seriously questioned whether it existed.
What I came across in my investigative research brought me to an even more pointed question: “Why is there something rather than nothing or something else?” Why is the universe the way it is? Why is it not ‘something else’ or ‘nothing else?’
The Cosmological Argument
That’s where the Cosmological Argument was helpful to me. It was one of the pieces of evidence the Christian professor had presented to me, so I needed to do some investigative ‘fact-checking.’
I could see and hear things in the cosmos. The earth, sea and sky were things I could experience with my physical senses. I ‘got’ the universe. It was big, it was there, and I was part of it. I could see light waves and hear radio waves. I lived on one of the small objects in the universe – the earth. I knew the earth existed because I could see it, hear it, touch it, smell it, and taste it. I could jump up and down on it. I could run around on it. I could run my hands through the dirt and swim in the ocean.
We know meteors, asteroids and comets exist because we can see them in the sky. We can touch pieces of them that fall to the earth. I remember as a child standing on a large meteor that had landed in a farm field. We know the moon exists. We can see it from the earth. We know the planet Mars exists because we can see it. We’ve launched space probes that have sent back pictures and other data to scientists on earth. We know stars exist because we can see them with our eyes and even better with telescopes. Space exploration has opened our understanding of many things about the existence of the universe and our solar system.
Questions I asked decades ago led to answers and some understanding of arguments for the existence of God. As I understood it — the Cosmological Argument was basically that ‘everything that had a beginning had a cause.’ The universe had a beginning, therefore the universe had a cause.
Other ways I’ve heard it explained are -
“First, whatever begins to exist has a cause.”
“Everything begun must have an adequate cause. The universe was begun; therefore, the universe must have an adequate cause for its production.”
“Everything which has had a beginning was produced by a sufficient cause. The Universe has had a beginning, and therefore must have had a cause sufficient to bring it into existence.”
The Cosmological Argument deals with both “cause” and “effect.” The cosmos exists, so it makes sense that there is an explanation for its existence. The argument continues that given the immense size and complexity of the cosmos, the “cause” of the cosmos would have to be greater than the cosmos itself.
What was my reaction as an atheist to this particular piece of evidence? More on that in the next part of From Atheist to Theist.
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