Section 47 — The Disciple Who Has Been Here: Testimonies of Former Atheists

The Source

The following brief accounts are drawn from documented conversion testimonies of well-known former atheists. They are included because the secular person often responds more readily to the testimony of someone who was exactly where they are than to any philosophical argument.

Source: C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (HarperOne, 1955). Alister McGrath, The Dawkins Delusion? (IVP, 2007). Francis Collins, The Language of God (Free Press, 2006). Anthony Flew, There Is a God (HarperOne, 2007). Lee Strobel, The Case for Christ (Zondervan, 1998).

C.S. Lewis — "The Most Reluctant Convert in All of England"

Lewis described himself as "the most reluctant convert in all of England." He came to theism not through emotional experience but through philosophical argument, specifically the argument from reason: if the human mind is simply the product of mindless natural selection, there is no reason to trust its conclusions about anything, including atheism. He came to Christianity through the persistent influence of friends like J.R.R. Tolkien, who helped him see that the Christian story was not myth competing with truth but the myth that was also fact — the story that all other stories were reaching toward.

C.S. Lewis (Surprised by Joy): You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.

Francis Collins — The Genome and the God

Collins led the Human Genome Project, which mapped the complete human genome. In the course of that work he found himself confronted by what he called "the language of God" written in DNA — a four-letter code of extraordinary complexity and elegance. The fine-tuning of the physical constants, the Moral Law (which he encountered through C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity on the recommendation of a patient), and the historical evidence for the resurrection combined to produce, in his words, "a scientist's faith."

Francis Collins (The Language of God): I had thought that faith required abandoning my scientific reasoning. I discovered instead that science, followed honestly, led me to the edge of a question it could not answer. And at that edge, I found not a gap in knowledge but a door. I walked through it. Not as an act of intellectual surrender. As the most rational choice available given the full evidence.

Anthony Flew — The World's Most Famous Atheist Changes His Mind

Anthony Flew was for fifty years the world's most prominent philosophical atheist. In 2004, at age 81, he announced that he had changed his mind. Not because of any religious experience or emotional conversion but because of the philosophical arguments — specifically the fine-tuning of the physical constants and the problem of the origin of life. He described his conversion as "following the argument wherever it leads" — the principle he had advocated his entire career, now applied to his own foundational commitment.

★ Disciple Tip: For the philosophically serious atheist, Flew's story is uniquely powerful. He was the one who had written the arguments against God most rigorously. He was the last person expected to change his mind. And he changed it specifically because he followed his own methodology honestly. This is the argument the disciple is making in every conversation: not "abandon your commitment to reason" but "apply it consistently."

Bryan Wachsmuth — The Bulldozer and the Door

Not every testimony that belongs in this section belongs to a public figure. This one belongs to a man who offered it in a live public conversation in 2026, unrehearsed, without preparation, in a thread on faith and the secular mind. It is included because it names what apologetics is for better than most professional apologists have said it.

Bryan Wachsmuth described himself, thirty-three years before that conversation, as a Roman Catholic pantheist who had given up on Scripture. He couldn't get reasonable answers to questions about Genesis — dinosaurs, Cain's wife, the flood. He reasoned that if the book was wrong at the beginning, there was no point reading to the end.

Several months later, his brother gave him a book: Science and the Bible by Henry Morris. He hesitated, then read it. Within the first few chapters he found reasonable answers to the questions that had stopped him — without, as he put it, "having to commit intellectual suicide."

Then something happened that he could only describe as transformation. Reading in his living room that Saturday night, he came to Romans 1:20. When his eyes hit the verse, he said in his heart, "I believe this." He looked around and confessed his blindness. He knew he was without excuse. He describes that night as a complete transformation: new man, new worldview, new heart for God, for truth, for righteousness, for His people. Six months later, through further study and the fellowship of a local church, he came to understand who Jesus was. He found out the Creator had a name and fell in love with Him. He was baptized three months after that. As of the 2026 conversation, thirty-three years later, he was still in awe.

Then he said this: "Apologetics did not save me — for salvation is of the Lord, and all glory always goes to His kind hand upon us. But I'm convinced God can use it as a bulldozer to clear a pathway for the door, who is Christ."

The bulldozer and the door. That is what this entire volume is for. The arguments in Parts Two through Seven are the bulldozer. They clear debris. They remove false confidences and comfortable evasions and open lines of sight. What stands when the debris is cleared is not a better argument. It is a door. And the door is a Person.

Bryan also said this, and it belongs alongside the bulldozer: "My brother who gave me the book was living out the Christian life before me several years, which also gave reason to at least consider his arguments. How we answer may be more powerful than the answers themselves."

The brother's life made the book worth reading. The witness was upstream of the argument. That is the full curriculum — and it is the same curriculum this volume has been building toward from Section 1.