00:00:16.440What led to him finally accepting that Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life?
00:00:22.280He has a really, really interesting story.
00:00:24.420And it's amazing to look at how God used so many moments throughout his life to lead him to the cross.
00:00:42.400Larry, thanks so much for taking the time to join me.
00:00:45.740If you could tell everyone who you are and what you do.
00:00:47.600um well right now i am president of the knowledge standards foundation and we collect all of the
00:00:57.680free world all free encyclopedias in the world um we do a number of other things all right my claim
00:01:05.200to fame is um i was co-founder of wikipedia now i'm ex-founder i like to call myself because you
00:01:12.420know how it is. And this is another thing that the Knowledge Standards Foundation is doing. This
00:01:18.380is 70,000 books on a 128 gigabyte hard drive. Basically, the classics of Western civilization
00:01:26.340backed up in the palm of your hand. And that's just something that I've been trying to get out
00:01:33.880there. There needs to be many, many, many copies of all the public domain books, not just one or
00:01:41.660two on archive.org. This is one of my hobby horses. Yeah, amazing. Okay, before we even
00:01:50.380get into your Christian testimony, I want to go all the way back. I want to hear your life story
00:01:54.520and how you got to the point of helping found Wikipedia and how your interest was sparked in
00:02:01.240all of this. So can you take me all the way back to your childhood and tell me what your upbringing
00:02:05.460was like? Sure. Well, I mean, I was born and raised in the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod.
00:02:17.960That's my earliest church memories come from that. My dad was an elder.
00:02:25.520But I asked a lot of questions sort of constitutionally. That's just how I am.
00:02:30.460And I, for example, I would ask, you know, well, if God has created everything, then what caused God and that kind of thing, you know, those sort of basic questions that thoughtful kids will ask.
00:02:49.100Um, and, uh, I was confirmed at age 12 and, um, but around age 16, um, I had a class in
00:03:01.880philosophy at, in high school, they had such a thing.
00:03:05.620Um, and, um, it was very interesting to me.
00:03:09.580And I started thinking the following summer, uh, about the basic questions of philosophy.
00:03:17.940And I decided because I knew all these people who had messed up their lives.
00:03:24.140In fact, it seemed to me that practically everybody I knew had messed up their life in one way or another.
00:03:44.900I knew certain things that they thought, and I thought they'd made mistakes.
00:03:49.080You know, they were wrong about things.
00:03:53.360So I developed a very deep conviction, totally independent of religion, that it was very important to have the truth.
00:04:03.880And so, ever since then, I have thought of myself as a philosopher.
00:04:16.160Even before I went to college, I knew I wanted to be a philosophy professor, although I changed my mind about that.
00:04:24.880So, I became a non-believer in my teen years, an agnostic.
00:04:32.920I wasn't an atheist. I was a skeptic. But there's a difference, I think. I won't go into that.
00:04:40.520But the point is that I basically stopped caring very much about the possibility that God might exist.
00:04:49.920And then what happened? Well, while I was finishing my dissertation, Jimmy Wales gave me the job of starting an encyclopedia for bombist.com, which was his website.
00:05:10.880And that became Newpedia, which became Wikipedia.
00:05:18.320I set many of the original policies, or at least articulated them, and sort of led the community and got it started on a lot of its habits.
00:05:32.920Not all of its bad habits, hopefully, but a lot of its good habits anyway.
00:05:39.440in the first 14 months of that. First couple of years, if you include Newpedia. And so I'll just
00:05:49.820pause there. Yeah, sure. Sure. Yeah, that's all super fascinating that you were interested
00:05:55.760in philosophy. You describe yourself as kind of like a naturally inquisitive kid, and you brought
00:06:03.160your philosophical questions to a pastor when you were a teenager, correct?
00:06:35.940And I might have sounded like a disrespectful, snot-nosed kid.
00:06:42.160I'm not really sure, to be quite honest.
00:06:47.140But I had sincere questions for sure, and he could have engaged me in conversation about them.
00:06:54.220And it's clear to me that he didn't want to talk.
00:06:59.760The conversation was over within, I don't know, five or ten minutes.
00:07:05.940And what kind of questions were you asking him? Do you remember?
00:07:12.740They were typical skeptical objections. I can't remember exactly which ones, but, you know, like the very one that I mentioned before, right?
00:07:25.340So if an explanation is needed for the universe, why isn't an explanation needed for God?
00:11:00.620It didn't seem like a sin to me at the time.
00:11:03.200so yeah he challenged you with a fine-tuning argument and that's the laws of the universe
00:11:08.740are so precise that any small change would prevent it from supporting life and so yeah that's the
00:11:14.320argument that there must be uh an intentional creator and that really left an impression on you
00:11:21.860Yes. So in this little story, basically, what happened was a graduate student who was, sorry, no, it wasn't a graduate student. He was a student in my class, actually. He was just a very smart undergraduate.
00:11:43.020way, he came into the student assistant room and basically wanted to engage me in discussion
00:11:56.260about arguments for the existence of God, because that would be what we were studying
00:12:01.580And it was very interesting the way that he expressed the fine-tuning argument, right?
00:12:11.820So the universe has got a certain constants, scientific constants, such that if you change them in minute ways, then weird things happen or fail to happen.
00:12:30.100Like, you know, atoms don't form or, you know, yes, the universe is left in a soup of inert material or whatever.
00:12:40.020Um, and, uh, so everything is fine-tuned for, uh, the existence of, of life.
00:12:51.380And, um, it doesn't that suggest a designer.
00:12:56.480Um, and I didn't have an answer to him except to say, well, you know, it might have some
00:13:05.460other sort of explanation, which just seems kind of lame.
00:13:11.940And I was, although I was stymied a little, I didn't feel like terribly embarrassed, but it left me emotional, though.
00:13:28.320And I don't think it was because I was unable to answer.
00:13:31.760I mean, I'm unable to answer all sorts of problems in philosophy, right?
00:13:37.460So it's not that. I think it had to do with my awareness that I had just closed the door on something that might be more valuable than I was then willing to admit.
00:13:56.680And you write that your marriage and the subsequent birth of your first child really changed how you saw the world.
00:14:08.820It kind of disrupted a lot of the beliefs that you have. Is that correct?
00:14:14.420Yeah, well, because I had the relatively idiosyncratic, you know, commitment to Ayn Rand's ethics, sort of.
00:14:23.220I wasn't totally committed to it, but according to Ayn Rand, the author of The Fountainhead, our moral obligations all stem from our self-interest.
00:14:36.640So if we ought to do something, if it is right for us to do something, you can explain that in terms of what is good for you in your enlightened, as it's called, your enlightened self-interest.
00:14:47.920All right. And I thought that that was probably right. I remember defending that throughout graduate school. And then, you know, I got married in 2001 after I got my PhD and had my first child in 2006.
00:15:07.800And I just occasionally thought, isn't it interesting that I would die for these people?
00:15:17.320I mean, of course I would die for these people, but father wouldn't.
00:15:21.000He's not a good father if he wouldn't.
00:15:42.440But at the time, because I myself had sort of accepted an error, the same sort of thing that I was wanting to avoid earlier, it was hard for me to come to that realization.
00:15:58.220You also talk about watching the atheistic movement, if you want to call it a movement, become increasingly bombastic and radicalized.
00:16:12.700I would say these are kind of like my words, becoming like their own kind of dogmatic religion.0.61
00:16:19.420And you contrasted that to how you saw the behavior of Christians, even Christians on social media.0.82
00:24:21.060But the point is that the bare idea of a thought bringing creation into existence
00:24:30.780I thought of a way to talk about that coherently
00:24:39.560Yeah. And that was enough to, you know, I didn't conclude that the universe is therefore a simulation, which is Elon Musk's conclusion, which he drew after that, actually. No, I think that that is merely evidence that it's possible that a creator exists.
00:25:06.220You also dealt with the issue of why be moral and the problem of evil, which, of course,
00:25:14.140these are things that have been debated for a long time. And there are always questions that
00:25:17.820I have for my atheist friends that I haven't ever gotten a good answer on. That's not to say that
00:25:22.680no atheist has an answer for it. But those that I've talked to of, you know, even the one that
00:25:29.460you articulated. Why sacrifice yourself for a child? He can give you nothing in return.
00:25:37.680Why sacrifice yourself for a loved one? Why do things that are not in your direct self-interest
00:25:43.800just because they are the right thing to do? Most atheists I know would say that being kind or being
00:25:52.980charitable with expecting nothing in return is a good thing, that that is a sign of virtue.
00:25:59.460but they can't tell me why or why beauty exists, why there are these like intangible realities
00:26:07.340that have nothing to do with the perpetuation of the species or survival of the fittest.
00:26:15.680And so tell me how you articulated that before you were a Christian.
00:26:21.020What conclusion did you come to about why it's important to be good or be moral?
00:26:26.440Yeah. Well, I'll tell you, the line that you just outlined there is not the one that I took in this essay that I wrote. I think it's called Why Be Moral on LarrySanger.org, if you want to look at it. It's a pretty long essay.
00:26:51.780Um, and, and, but it was important to, to my, uh, to my conversion in a certain way.
00:27:02.100Um, I actually disagree with the notion that in order to make sense of our moral obligations,
00:27:10.520we have to depend on, um, an existent God.
00:27:14.860I think that we naturally have certain desires.
00:27:22.920They are built-in desires all organisms do.
00:27:26.800And what we ought to do, what is meant by normative language, evaluative and prescriptive language, in other words, saying what is good or what we ought to do, is ultimately explainable in terms of life.
00:27:44.860So, basically, without going into the details, we ought to do, and in fact, if we're well-functioning, we want to do things that are good for our lives and for the lives of people and animals and living things around us.
00:28:09.580I thought that this was a naturalistic theory of ethics, and I explained it in detail.
00:28:19.860But philosophers who hear this will recognize that it's a version of natural law ethics.
00:28:27.620And when I started thinking again about the arguments for the existence of God, the way it worked in was this.
00:28:41.960But if God is, or if there is a creator who designed the universe and designed our human nature, and if basically we are made happy by following certain moral rules or making more likely to be happy when we do, let's put it that way,
00:29:06.920that actually is evidence of the goodness of God.
00:29:14.840So I don't say that God is necessary in order to explain morality.
00:29:24.840I say that the fact that human nature pushes us in the direction of goodness
00:29:32.620and that the designer seems to require that of us if there is a designer.
00:29:39.220So, given that assumption, right, that would imply that the designer is good.
00:29:46.080So, the conclusion of the argument from morality in my hands is not that God exists,
00:29:54.780it's that if there is a God, then God is purely good.
00:30:02.620And so coming to that conclusion and writing that essay, you write in your most recent essay that you started to move from this kind of, you know, coolness towards Christianity to a warmness towards Christianity as you realized, okay, connecting these ideas about morality to Christianity and what the Bible says actually makes sense.
00:30:27.300Can you talk about how the Jeffrey Epstein scandal plays into your testimony?
00:31:42.140He said, that's why they use all of these symbols, you know, like the old one eye, which people were obsessing about five years ago, remember?
00:32:07.680And at the very least, I said, due to this, you know, the fact that these people are able to get away with horrific crimes, just look at how Epstein has been dealt with.
00:32:22.240It cannot be denied that justice has not been done.
00:32:26.840There's a lot of guilty people walking around free right now.
00:32:35.180I said, well, our society must be governed like judges, for example, must be beholden somehow or other.
00:32:44.440I don't know how exactly. I have ideas, of course, by powerful people, right?
00:32:52.840And are such powerful people occultists? And this is what my friend was saying.
00:32:57.500So he was pushing these books about the occult on me, not the actual, you know, Aleister Crowley or whatever on me, but he was, you know, things that were written about the occult.
00:33:10.820And I, even that kind of weirded me out because I said, look, if I actually thought there was a reason to investigate this stuff because they, I don't know, it's like an important part of a culture because our culture is like ruled by people who believe this.
00:34:03.860whatever that they could appeal to ascended masters and whatever um well then um doesn't
00:34:12.600that mean that uh it's possible that god exists um that's one thought that i had but another is i
00:34:21.460didn't want to read those books that my friend was was pushing at me i looked at a few of them
00:34:25.880a little bit and looked at a few videos and it's like i just kept getting creeped out essentially
00:34:31.900There's a little more to it than that.
00:34:33.360But, yeah, I didn't want to get into it.
00:34:35.760I didn't want to open any portals, you know, so to speak.
00:34:39.620But one thing I learned is that, you know, like if you look at Masonic symbology, it's based on a lot of Old Testament, like temple symbology.
00:34:58.260um it and and the notion is what what occultists like to do is to invert biblical symbol uh symbols
00:35:10.640so um in other words pervert them twist them um and so that led me to think maybe i should read
00:35:20.440the bible if i want to understand them at least it'd be safe to read that and actually try to
00:35:25.240understand it. And then maybe I would be, I don't know, in the clear to read some of the occult
00:35:33.080stuff if I wanted to. Never wanted to after that, though. Yeah. So you started reading the Bible,
00:35:39.300really digging into the Bible, December of 2019. You said that you used a 90-day study plan on the
00:35:46.620YouVersion app, and you really liked the ESV Study Bible. We have that in common. I started
00:35:52.100reading the ESV study Bible when someone gave it to me as a gift when I was in college. And
00:35:56.020I've tried several other study Bibles since then, and that is my go-to. But tell me about that
00:36:02.440experience. So, yes. Well, it wasn't the only Bible commentary that I used, but I used it quite
00:36:13.360a bit. And in fact, my current two-year plan, I'm just finishing up reading the entire thing.
00:36:19.340um uh so i at first i thought i was just going to read it a little bit at bedtime and then
00:36:31.820it became sort of an obsession for a hundred days um i was uh reading everything carefully
00:36:41.520sometimes twice i was looking up answers to all my questions to you know understand what it meant
00:36:48.560I actually was trying to understand what the things on the page meant.
00:36:53.140And I'm, you know, I'm trained in reading old texts.
00:37:00.400One of my areas of concentration is early modern philosophy.
00:37:07.560So I knew, of course, to like when to look up concepts in an encyclopedia,
00:37:13.540wanted to look up definitions in like a Bible dictionary, wanted to look at maps,
00:37:22.740went to just look at a general commentary, because something, even though the words are
00:37:28.140good English, I just understand why would they say that. And in the process of doing this,
00:37:36.360I actually acquainted myself with theology, because you can't understand the philosophy if you don't understand the concepts that it contains, and you can't understand biblical concepts unless you understand theology, or at least you acquaint yourself with theology as you come to understand them.
00:37:59.900So somebody who knows the Bible very, very, very well knows a lot of theology, for sure.
00:38:05.740And the thing is, despite having a Ph.D. in philosophy, which is sort of an adjacent field, I had no idea that people who did theology and analyzed biblical concepts, etc.,
00:38:30.740did anything that was worth doing, that it was interesting, that it was coherent.
00:39:47.320One thing that I did, though, even in, I think, the months before I started reading the Bible,
00:39:52.500I started rethinking some of the traditional arguments for the existence of God a little bit, which might have been one of the reasons why I picked up the Bible.
00:40:01.280But the two processes went hand in hand.
00:40:04.020And so, in other words, I actually had to persuade myself that there were better versions of the arguments for the existence of God and that they work together in a certain way, which I simply hadn't understood before, which I'm writing about in a book now.
00:40:25.000I had to sort of like teach myself these things or be led to them one way or another.
00:40:32.340and before I could really take what the Bible said seriously.
00:40:40.100But I will say this, the Bible, one of the things, a good example of this,
00:40:48.860of how the Bible sheds light on philosophical arguments,
00:40:54.900like in a way that I hadn't really appreciated before.
00:40:58.040So, in Exodus chapter 3, God, he introduces his name.
00:41:24.160Not that I knew Hebrew, but, you know, there's interlinear tools, which are pretty easy to use, and everything is explained.
00:41:32.620It's very nicely laid out on BibleHub.org.
00:41:37.260And I looked at commentaries, and, well, it turns out that there are very good reasons why he would introduce himself that way.
00:41:46.760He was saying, as theologians generally say, that he is that which exists.
00:41:58.580Existence is part of his essence, as philosophers would say.
00:42:04.040He is, in fact, that which must exist unlike everything else.
00:42:10.020The existence of everything else in the universe is conditioned upon his existence.
00:42:15.520That actually is all contained within his saying that this is his identity, because the notion of a name in Hebrew, and I think the ancient world to a great extent, was it said what you were, right?
00:42:32.420And this is why kings renamed their vassals, right?
00:42:36.920Gave them new names to say, this is what you're going to be to me, right?
00:42:40.700This is why Abram was renamed the father of a nation, Abraham, right?
00:42:48.140God named himself saying, I am that which exists necessarily, essentially.
00:42:55.340And the experience of like coming to grips with that exegetical question just made the whole argument from contingency much more alive.
00:43:08.020And I said, OK, well, I don't believe that it follows from the fact that there are the assertion that there is a necessarily existent being that that's God.
00:43:26.200You have to say a lot of other things.
00:43:27.600But isn't it interesting, right, that the Bible says, God says that he is the necessary being, and that that's the conclusion of, like, the most bedrock argument that natural theology offers, natural theology being the philosophy of religion and the study of the arguments for the existence of God.
00:43:47.820and can you tell me how you got to because after you read through the bible you continue
00:43:54.500still to this day to continue to read through the bible um you concluded at some point after this
00:44:01.240that god does exist you believed that jesus is the son of god according to what you read in
00:44:08.920scripture but you didn't yet believe that jesus died for your sins so can you take us from your
00:44:17.520philosophical journey from understanding that God exists to understanding the Christian claim
00:44:24.700that Jesus is God and that he died for our sins and is our way of salvation.
00:44:32.460So it's interesting. It is a very long and gradual process. And I mean, in the spring of 2020,
00:44:47.520Um, I, I would have said I have a provisional Christian belief.
00:44:53.420It's like, I'm inclined to believe it seems probably right, um, that, that sort of thing.
00:44:59.200Um, and I, I was able to articulate right around the time when I started, you know,
00:45:08.500when I was willing to admit to myself that God exists,
00:45:13.920that I was more inclined to believe that than not.
00:45:20.740The first time I prayed, taking myself to be sincerely,
00:45:24.920really praying to God was like the end of February.
00:45:28.800And right about the same time, I wrote an essay,
00:46:29.280And it's quite another to actually believe what it's saying.
00:46:35.920But I don't know when it was, but at some point, I, well, I guess you could just say I increasingly felt convicted, as the word is, of my sins by God, by the Holy Spirit.
00:46:52.100And I increasingly felt the need of a Savior.
00:47:00.320See, this bothered me because I thought, isn't this kind of back—isn't it reversed?
00:48:07.940I can say the moment when I started believing in God and trusting in God, but to say that I am a Christian and entailed all kinds of other things that I had to sort of work through.
00:48:29.640And most of it had to do with, you know, problems associated with my being a skeptic, a methodological skeptic is the word.
00:48:39.760And so, you know, like I was saying, when I was young, I thought it was really important to have the truth.
00:48:45.340And therefore, it was necessary to have really good reasons to believe whatever you believe.
00:48:51.040And you have to understand your beliefs.
00:48:52.460And, well, Christianity involves all kinds of things I didn't understand.
00:48:57.480and all kinds of things I couldn't justify.
00:49:03.260And you might say, well, you have to take a leap of faith.
00:50:07.720Yeah. And have you been able to find a church, because you write about this,
00:50:14.720still having a lot of questions and trying to find a place that can take your questions?
00:50:22.480Well, yeah. So I've read a lot of books about theology, basically, several dozen in the last
00:50:32.620five years. And so it isn't a lack of knowledge. It is the lack of certainty
00:50:42.520that I don't want. There are certain things that I know I'm not going to be praying to Mary.
00:50:51.560Got pretty good reasons not to do that, pretty sure. And there's a number of other things
00:50:56.460of that sort that would point me down one path versus another denominationally.
00:51:06.540But I feel like I need to make up my mind about more of the basic principles. And it takes a long
00:51:14.700time for me to make up my mind about things. Because like I say, I still have this sort of
00:51:21.260methodological skepticism. It's really not just a principle I accepted and can easily discard.
00:51:30.740It's sort of like part of who I am. And I know that for the same reason, you know, if I were to
00:51:38.640go to, like I've thought of, you know, Independent Baptist Church or maybe the Anglican Church of
00:51:47.700North America, maybe the orthodoxy, if I can put aside my, you know, my, well, resistance to
00:51:57.540praying to saints, and so forth. I know that I would, like, ask questions, and I know myself,
00:52:08.220I'm very persistent, not necessarily that I would, like, annoy people with my questions,
00:52:15.600But if they're trying to engage me, I'm not going to be able to go along.
00:52:19.760So it's kind of hard, you know, one thing that some people, not everybody, by the way,
00:52:26.280but one thing that some people insist on is that if you're going to join a church,
00:52:32.900then you have to submit yourself to an authority.
00:52:36.440Well, the only authority at this point that I really want to submit myself to is that of Scripture.
00:52:43.880got and i think i'm getting closer to the point where i can i can submit myself to to people
00:52:52.760without disrupting see that's what i don't want to do i don't want to disrupt the proceedings
00:52:58.260i don't want to be a bad influence um you know um because i easily could be so but i'm prioritizing
00:53:09.260you know, study of the distinctives of the issues on which Christians divide.
00:53:20.760Well, I'm confident that God is going to use you to be one of those people that can answer
00:53:26.980people's questions. And I just love hearing people's testimonies and all of the different
00:53:33.480parts of the constellation of someone's story that in retrospect they can see, but in the
00:53:39.080moment. It's hard to see how God is piecing things together, but I believe that he's going
00:53:44.060to use this testimony for his glory, which is always what he does. But also there are a lot
00:53:49.880of very smart questioning young people who want a place to go to ask good questions. And you are
00:53:56.140someone who has asked questions over and over and over again. And rather than just like sit in your
00:54:02.600questions, you have sought the answer to them. And I really believe that that discipline and
00:54:10.260that curiosity that you've had your entire life is going to affect the lives of other skeptics
00:54:17.280and questioners and new believers. And so I'm just very grateful for that.
00:54:24.240Well, I hope God uses me that way, I guess, if that's what I'm good for.
00:54:30.460Yeah, me too. Me too. Where can people find you and support you, follow you, all that good stuff?
00:54:39.360Well, my blog is larrysanger.org. That's where the essay that we've been talking about, we've been asking questions based off of. It's the latest thing. A skeptic, what is it called? A skeptic returns to Christianity.
00:54:58.460Yes. Anyway, something like that. And there's also I'm on X.com, but I don't actually do much there except share my stuff. I'm one of the advisors of BitChute now. And so I'm putting my videos there. My latest video is a is a video version of the same testimony.
00:55:22.260um and uh yeah uh there's a oh there's a bible study that has started a lot of uh a lot of bible
00:55:33.860geeks um are are uh gathering and we i mean it's gone from like 30 people to like 120 in the last
00:55:42.400couple of days um so you're welcome to join us if you're into like brainy bible study um awesome