Thread by @UnbelievableJB

We received this amazing story of how Premier Unbelievable? was involved in Nico’s conversion to Christianity (thread):

In late 2014, just after I'd graduated from law school, my wife and I decided we wanted to have a baby. Naturally, that raises some pretty big questions.

But given the fact that we were both typical "spiritual but not religious" agnostic Millennials, it also raised the biggest question of all for me: what do we teach this child about God?

Like so many kids growing up in the late 80s and early 90s in suburban coastal America, I was raised a "Christmas and Easter" Catholic; baptized and confirmed in a faith I knew absolutely nothing about.

I'd been catechized more by the paedophilia investigations in the city of Boston than I ever had by my church.
I couldn't tell you the first thing about what's in the Bible; we didn't even own one, as far as I knew. Growing up, I didn't know anyone who was actually religious.

The earliest conversation about faith I remember was at the second-grade cafeteria table around Christmas, when one of my peers told everyone that it was obvious that the Virgin Mary was a whore and covered it up by claiming God did knock her up - and they all agreed.

And even at the "Catholic" St. Joseph's College of Maine, I had no chance.

The professors there were quick to confirm, sometimes explicitly, what pop culture had already convinced me: religion was the opiate of the masses, a lie concocted by the patriarchy to justify their bigotries and control people.

I flirted with church a few times due to curiosity and seeking a sense of belonging, but this was around the time the discussion about gay marriage in the US was getting heated, so the sermon or two I heard just confirmed what I'd heard about Christians "hating" gay people, and…

…I didn't turn back. I remember working in a Boston bookstore and seeing the Bibles and religious books crammed into the "mythology" section, and that seemed about right to me. Christianity simply wasn't cool.

I didn't know of any celebrities publicly living their faith, including among the top scientists of the day like Neil De Grass Tysson or Stephen Hawking, and if God wasn't for them, then He surely wasn't for me.
But did I have the right to make that decision for my future child?

If I held anything sacred, it was children. I mean, that was why Christianity was so evil, wasn't it? Priests in my home state were abusing children en masse. So I had to do what was best for my future kid: educate him or her on the evidence and let that child decide.

Unfortunately, or rather, fortunately, I had more time to go on this journey than I'd anticipated: my wife and I were devastated to learn we were infertile.

So as time passed and no child came, and I began to research adoption and IVF, I did what any millennial would do: listen to podcasts.

There were several that quickly caught my interest: Cold Case Christianity with J. Werner Wallace, the BadChristian podcast, the Bible in a Year podcast...but none was quite so compelling as "Unbelievable?" with Justin Brierley.

As someone who'd practiced as an attorney, who believed the best way to find the truth between two conflicting claims is to pit them against each other and evaluate the evidence, this was everything I'd been looking for. I couldn't stop listening.

I'm fairly sure my performance at work suffered as a result.

Not only was I blown away by the fact that the Christians in these debates weren't the indoctrinated idiots I'd been lead to believe, or the fact that there were "proofs" and logical arguments for the existence of God, but I found myself siding with the Christians in these…

…debates, having expected the opposite to happen.

Intellectuals like Bart Ehrman, whom I'd heard so much about, tended to convince me of the opposite of their claims: for example, when pressed, I found Ehrman's defence of his work Misquoting Jesus proved that the words of Christ were preserved remarkably well through the ages.

Or in the legendary moments that Mr. Brierly himself got to ask Richard Dawkins himself some questions, we got to see Dawkins admitting to the horrific logical ends of an atheist moral worldview.
Using Unbelievable?

and supplemental research and reading, I was able to use deductive reasoning to narrow the religious field to Judaism and Christianity, having determined there just wasn't supporting evidence to justify the claims of faiths like Islam or Buddhism or Mormonism.

I found myself, prompted by "Atheist Prayer Experiments" promoted on the show, beginning to pray in my alone time. I asked God to reveal Himself to me. I asked Him to work a miracle in our lives and solve our infertility.

As atheist Matt Dillahunty often posits, if God is so powerful and wants me to believe in Him, surely, He'd give me something to go off of?
And He did. One night, my wife found a book called "Letters to an Atheist" by Dr Peter Kreeft in the bargain bin at the bookstore.

She knew I'd been researching this stuff and handed it to me. I recognized the name from Unbelievable? and gave it a read.
A few nights later, I was literally shaking her awake to tell her "I can't believe it. I do believe it."

After Dr Kreeft's incredible "cumulative evidential pie" arguments in which each slice of an apologetic pie is an argument for God, and brilliant extended framing of the Trilemma, I could no longer deny that I found the Resurrection more reasonable than any of the alternative…

…possibilities. But I wasn't there yet. Fortunately, Dr Kreeft left his e-mail address in that book, and I was surprised to find he took me up on a mild debate over e-mail.

What floored me was this: when I told Dr Kreeft I had objections and questions about Christianity still, he responded along the lines of: "if Christianity has questions you can't answer, then you shouldn't believe it."

And here I was believing it was something you had to take wholly on faith--that religion couldn't be reconciled with science or logic. But if you know Dr Kreeft, you know there was no hope for me to remain atheist at that point.

A few exchanges later and I told him I'd go to church.
After my last e-mail to Dr Kreeft, I remember surrendering fully to God in prayer, apologizing for the way I'd put Him to the test, and telling Him I'd only believe in Him if He worked a miracle in my life.

I asked for His pardon when He'd been there waiting for me to discover Him all along. The very next day was my wife and I's IVF appointment. We were scared and too poor to afford treatment, but if that didn't work out, we had an adoption conference the following weekend.

On that same day, my wife went to sleep crying, frustrated that she couldn't become pregnant.
I was awoken at 4 AM by my wife shaking me this time. She'd had a very strange dream. There was a pregnancy test in her hand. It was positive.

Seven years later, I am a father of four and a wannabe apologist myself. I still love Unbelievable? and recommend it to every atheist I know. The truth always wins out, because the truth loves us very dearly: Jesus Christ IS the Way, the Truth, and the Life, after all.

(I only found out the nature of this dream very, very recently. My wife, who was more of an atheist than I was, dreamed she was in church, quite bizarrely, and that a voice there told her she was going to be a mother.

I sometimes leave this out when talking to atheists because it is, quite frankly, "unbelievable" to them, not to abuse the term here.)
Hilariously, I walked into a Catholic bookstore many years later and saw that Dr Peter Kreeft had an entire bookshelf there.

I sent him another e-mail about my journey. He told me that sometimes it's easy to feel hopeless, that apologetics doesn't really convince anyone. They sure convinced me, thanks to apologists like him on the Unbelievable? podcast!

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