July 22, 2025 • 44 mins
Dr. Guillaume Bignon was a French atheist . . . and he was perfectly happy. He was very successful as a software engineer in finance, a musician, and a volleyball player. Yet a chance encounter with a beautiful woman would change the way he thought about his life and beliefs forever. He joins us today to share his unusual story—the story of a man who didn’t need God but who grew to believe in God after he thought through the nature of morality, the relationship between science and faith, the supernatural, and the reliability of the Bible. With rigorous reasoning, remarkable authenticity, and a sense of humor, Dr. Bignon will take us on a journey of his innermost questions and surprising discoveries.
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S1 (00:00):
Hi friend, thank you so much for downloading this podcast
and I truly hope you hear something that encourages edifies, equips, enlightens,
and gently but consistently pushes you out there into the
marketplace of ideas. But before you start to listen and
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you about this month's truth tool. And it is a
perfect fit for both the marketplace and getting out there.
It's Ray Comfort's book. Why? Jesus? If you listen to
(00:22):
the broadcast with any regularity, you know we love Ray.
He is bold, unashamed of the gospel. And yet in
such a winsome way, he delivers a truth narrative to
the man in the street, so to speak. He's written
the book Why Jesus? To Teach You How to Walk Through,
by examples and through real conversations he's had on how
to share the gospel in exactly the same way. Listen,
(00:43):
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opt out clause. That's where we're supposed to go. And
in truth, how can we keep this good news to ourselves?
So I want you to have Why Jesus as this
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(01:45):
with Janet Parshall. Now please enjoy the broadcast.
S2 (01:50):
Here are some of the news headlines we're watching.
S3 (01:51):
The conference was over. The president won a pledge.
S4 (01:54):
Americans worshiping government over God.
S3 (01:56):
Extremely rare safety move by a major.
S4 (01:59):
17 years the Palestinians and Israelis negotiated.
S3 (02:04):
Between the parties.
S1 (02:17):
Hi, friends. Welcome to In the Market with Janet Parshall.
You heard the chaos in the marketplace of ideas as
we started all kinds of booze, all kinds of merchants
selling and buying all kinds of goods, some counterfeit, some shabby,
some hollow and some bedrock faith and fact and truth.
And that's why you and I must show up in
the marketplace of ideas. So this program is designed to
(02:39):
get you to think critically and biblically. Newsflash they're not
mutually exclusive ideas. You come to faith in Christ. Not
only is your heart transformed, but your mind is renewed.
And one of my favorite kinds of conversations. Because you
know what my goal here is? My goal is to
lovingly get you out there now. It wasn't my idea.
It was Jesus's idea. And if you don't believe me,
(02:59):
listen to the conversation he has with his daddy on
his way to Calvary. John 17. My prayer is not
that you take them out of the world, but that
you protect them from the evil one. Sanctify them with
thy word. Thy word is truth. Sorry, no going to bed,
pulling the covers over your head and just waiting until
it's all over. You are to influence and occupy until
(03:19):
he comes. And it's getting well. I was going to
say difficult, but it's not. Let me rephrase it. I
think it's now requiring some muscular Christians. I really do
bumper sticker Christianity has come and gone. It doesn't cut
it anymore. If the Oxford Dictionary word of the year
was post-truth, it means we've juxtaposed this whole idea that
truth is knowable and it is applies to all people,
(03:41):
in all times and in all places. Rather, our feelings supersede.
And when that happens, you have chaos, cultural chaos, moral chaos,
chaos of the first degree. And that's what we're living
in right now, days of chaos and lawlessness. Because man
is doing basically what's right in his own eyes. So
along come you and me, living epistles. Ooh, there's a
weighty idea. Someone literally reading your life to see whether
(04:03):
or not you are living with the eloquence of the gospel.
Not easy stuff, by the way. Particularly because more and
more the culture is rising up against us. No surprise
if you're in the word, you understand this is the timeline,
I get it, but I want to be able to contend,
as it says in the book of Jude, for our faith.
I want to be able to give a reason for
the hope that resides within me, and that isn't done
by flicking through a computer screen for five seconds. It
(04:24):
isn't done by spending five seconds in the word. It's
done by rolling up your sleeves and studying to show
yourself approved unto God. It's going to take some sweat equity.
It's going to take some commitment. It's going to take
some work. So the kinds of conversations I love are
people are going to say, this is who I was now,
this is who I am. And they are able with
power to articulate why they believe in the historicity and
(04:48):
the authenticity and the reliability of the Scriptures of Jesus Christ.
Such is our guest today. He's written a new book
called confessions of a French Atheist. Although watching him for years,
I'm surprised it took so long for the book to
come out, because I've gone back years and he's been
telling this story of how he came to faith in
Jesus Christ, who he was versus who he is now.
(05:10):
And so we're going to spend the hour with a
man who's going to show us, through his testimony what
it means to think critically and biblically as well. Doctor
Guillaume Bignon is with us. He was born and raised
in France. He studied math, physics, engineering, science. Notice the
doctor in front of his name. He currently works as
a software engineering manager, but he's a whole lot more
than that. He has a wonderful story of how he
(05:33):
came to faith in Christ. You're going to hear that
this hour, but I will tell you that now, as
though just studying math, physics, and engineering science wasn't enough,
he decided that he would also dig in to the
Word of God. And so now he has a master's
in biblical literature, with an emphasis on the New Testament
and a PhD in philosophical theology. I bet you're wondering
what in the world is that? We'll answer that question
(05:54):
during the course of the hour. By the way, you
want to know his areas of interest? Get a little
closer to the radio. I love this stuff. Skeptics, cynics, seekers.
You get front row seats. Get a little closer. So
as areas of interest include the metaphysics of free will,
just chew on that for a minute. Natural theology and soteriology.
And I am so thrilled that Doctor Guillaume Benoit is
(06:15):
with us. Binion fillet. Mignon Binion I'm going to get
this right. My Spanish better than my French. So welcome.
I'm so glad that you're with me. Thank you for
the gift of your time. Thank you for finally putting
your story in a book. It took a while. That's
my first question. Why so long to finally get confessions
of a French Atheist out in printed form? So we
can read your story, not just hear it.
S5 (06:35):
Hey Janet, thank you so much for having me and
thank you for your kind words. So why it took
me so long? Well, that's because I have so many
lives lived at the same time. So, you know, I have, uh.
I am a father of five young children. I am
working full time as a software engineering manager for a
tech company in California, but for the last 15 years,
I was on Wall Street as a software engineer working
(06:57):
on the trading floors of banks. And all of this
activity of researching, writing, speaking at conferences, all of that
is happening in my secret life with my secret identity
as a Christian philosopher. So one thing at a time,
but with a bit of perseverance, we finally got to
this writing, and I'm doing also a bit of a
publication on different topics. So this is the this was
(07:18):
the right time in God's providence, and I'm happy that
the book is out now.
S1 (07:21):
Oh, I'm thrilled. And I've been waiting quite some time
for the book, and I'm absolutely thrilled and have so
been looking forward to this. So I have a million
questions and I know the hour is going to go
too fast, but let me just start here. I want
to know first about the spiritual lay of the land
in France. It's been said that it's very difficult as
an example, to be a missionary in France. So I
started just thinking about this. I love world history and
I'm wondering, is this a result of the Age of Enlightenment?
(07:44):
Is this a result of the great French philosophers that
basically told us that an every day and every way
we're getting better and better and we don't need God.
So why has God been shown the door, so to speak,
for a couple of centuries in France? Why is that?
S5 (08:00):
Yeah, I'm not sure that I have the full historical
lines that I can retrace for you to explain exactly
how we came to be there, and I haven't lived
in France for many years now, so my my view
is going to be remaining anecdotal. But as far as
my own upbringing and my environment, it seemed like people
around me were. So there was an acceptability to religion
as some sort of a practice or a tradition. Um,
(08:21):
but the general understanding was that serious people, intelligent people,
don't really believe this. They might do this as a hobby,
but they don't really believe that there's a supernatural God
who created the universe. And God forbid that he has
a son and that he raised him from the dead.
So this was my kind of assumption that, uh, that
smart people don't really believe those things. And there are, yes,
(08:44):
the enlightenment. There's definitely some very strong French voices in
the enlightenment, and I engaged with some of them in
the book to give a bit of a French flavour.
But we're we're still somewhat on the on the teachings
that Christianity is for silly persons, and that it doesn't
really require our time to figure this out.
S1 (09:01):
Yeah. Well, and I have to tell you, it isn't
just France that has that general impression. We are seeing
that more and more here in the United States. And
that raises a panoply of questions like, are faith and
reason at war with one another? Does Christianity and science commingle?
Are the two mutually exclusive? So many things I want
to ask you, but I want to get into the
story of how you are raised and sort of a
nominal Catholic family, and how God took you from where
(09:24):
you were to where you are, and what was the
catalyst for you to discover whether or not the scriptures
are real? The confessions of a French Atheist brand new
book by Guillaume Bignon. I'm so glad we're going to
spend the hour together. Call a friend who doesn't yet
believe in Jesus. Have him listen. The world needs hope
(09:44):
and we have the greatest news ever told. But how
do we share it effectively? That's why I've chosen Why
Jesus by Ray comfort is this month's truth tool. Transform
your approach to evangelism through step by step guidance and
real life examples. As for your copy of Why Jesus,
when you give a gift of any amount to in
the market, call 877 58, that's eight 7758 or go
(10:06):
to in the market with Janet Parshall. We are spending
the hour with Doctor Guillaume Bignon. He's the author of
confessions of a French Atheist How God Hijacked My Quest
to Disprove the Christian Faith. Absolutely fascinating read. I commend
it to anyone who believes also that Christianity is just
(10:26):
nothing but silliness. So, Guillaume, I want to go to
the use of the word atheist because for most people
listening and you're talking to people all across the United
States right now, the word atheist carries with it a
sense of animosity, that there's an anger toward God, which
is paradoxical in and of itself, because how can you
be mad at something or someone you don't believe in?
Would you say categorically at your young age, were you
(10:48):
an an agnostic or an atheist?
S5 (10:52):
Uh, so I would describe myself as an atheist. I
would not necessarily affirm that there is animosity in the
word itself. The word simply says that it's someone who
affirms that there is no God. Now, in my own
personal case, I was also a very much, uh, obsessed
with religion. And I had I had really resentment towards
the idea of God. So I was not neutral. I
was clearly hostile. But not all atheists have to be dispassionate.
(11:15):
So I wouldn't like to lump all atheists in that
group otherwise. Atheism is simply the view that there is
no God, and it's certainly the view that I affirmed
while also being hostile to religion.
S1 (11:26):
Was there an epiphany in your life when you said
he simply does not exist? Because, and I grant you,
there isn't. I think it's the way the word is
perceived as opposed to an accurate descriptor. But was there
a point where you just said, he's not there? I
don't believe on this. I'm walking away. Or was this
the slow, steadfast arrival at that position?
S5 (11:46):
Yeah. My conversion to Christianity was dramatic, but my initial deconversion,
if you will, to actually be an atheist was really
just natural. Just the air we breathe. I did grow
up in the Catholic Church, but like I said, it's
more of a tradition, maybe sometimes a bit of superstition.
And as soon as I was old enough to tell
my parents, I didn't really believe any of this, I
(12:07):
simply stopped going to church. But my life fundamentally was
not very different. So it was a very undramatic deconversion
and simply embrace the fact that, yeah, I don't believe
any of this. So I'm not going to practice it
and all will be, well, that was my plan at least.
S1 (12:22):
Nice. You thought. Yes.
S5 (12:24):
Yes, I was very much. Yeah. I was very much
hoping that religion would not make a comeback. And somehow
that didn't pan out.
S1 (12:32):
That's right. It roared back. It didn't just come back.
It roared back. So you're six foot tall. You and
your brother are both very athletic. You played professional volleyball,
traveled all over the place. So it raises the question
and obviously very gifted academically studying math, physics and engineering sciences,
I noted earlier. So being an atheist, all of us
have a worldview, if that's the way you begin, if
(12:52):
that's the grid through which you pushed all of your decisions,
how did your atheistic worldview impact the choices of what
you would do and your behavior?
S5 (13:01):
Yeah. So I didn't see it at the time as
this being very fundamental to me. I simply believed that
there was no God and I was trying to seek
my own happiness in life. It seemed to be like
my plan. I want to just position myself to enjoy
this life and be happy within it. Uh, so that
drove some of my personal decisions. And this is where
I simply sought for happiness in various avenues. Volleyball was
(13:23):
one of them. I wasn't quite pro. I was a semi-pro.
But anyway, I was playing volleyball in National League. Uh,
I was also playing music in a rock band, and
I really enjoyed writing music, playing live and, uh, simply
recording our own songs And, uh, on the front of studies. Yes,
I studied engineering, math, physics. And I became a software engineer.
(13:44):
So I thought all of those things were important pieces
for me to leave my good life and to be
happy with it. So that was my intent, uh, as
an atheist, uh, trying to live my life in that way.
S6 (13:55):
Yeah.
S1 (13:55):
Your life was overflowing. I mean, there was so much
going on. It was almost like, I don't believe in God,
and I don't need him, and there's no space in
my life. And then you go on a vacation. What happens?
S5 (14:05):
Yeah. That's right. So this is the big clincher. So
this is how I was confronted again with the idea
of religion. I went on a on a vacation in
the Caribbean, and then all sorts of improbable events happen.
So I can't really quite hit all of those stones. Uh,
all of those milestones in the small interview like this.
I tell the full story in the book, but this
is the kind. It's the stuff of movies. I still
(14:25):
feel like it's a bit surreal to me. Uh, but
it's full, like travels and betrayals and improbable meetings. So
all of that, uh, conspired against me. But the some
of the, uh, essential milestones are that I, uh, randomly
met an American woman, uh, on a Caribbean island. They
were hitchhiking. Uh, they were not even stopping to pick
(14:46):
me up. They were actually stopping to, uh, ask for directions.
And providentially, they they ended up being exact neighbors of
where I was going. So we got into the car,
we went to their hotel and started to, uh, see
them on the island, uh, starting I ended up in
a relationship with this woman and very quickly learned that
she was a professing Christian, which was an intellectual suicide
(15:09):
by my lights and and also that her view of
morality and relationship was also very different than what I needed.
So that was a very strong, uh, point of opposition
as well. And I set out to but she was
very exotic. She was a former model and actress and American.
So all of that was very exotic to me. I
was very determined to make this work. So I pursued
(15:31):
and figured, well, you know, I'm going to be disabusing
her of her silly beliefs. And then she will let
that go and we'll be happy together. That was kind
of the plan at the time. So this was the
open door that led me to be confronted like, okay,
she believes this stuff. I'm going to have to explain
to her why this is nonsense. And with a little
bit of common sense, I should be able to do that.
That was the plan.
S1 (15:51):
Yes, but God had a different plan and it involved hijacking.
Let me go back to Vanessa for a minute, if
I can. So C.S. Lewis said it beautifully. He said,
Christians are the best argument for and against Christianity. You
noted some of the notables of this woman. Uh, her
obviously beauty, her experience, the job that she did. But
did you ever stop and look at her and go,
(16:12):
why would a woman with all that talent even gravitate
toward Christianity? I mean, how did you see. I mean,
there was a living epistle. You didn't know the word
at the time, but this is a living epistle. And
aside from the fact that her views on marriage and
sexuality were 180 degrees different than yours, did you think? Well,
it's just this is a little bump in the road.
As soon as we can work the kinks out in
her thinking here, this won't be a problem.
S5 (16:34):
Yeah, that was really the idea there was to say, well,
she's great on all these points that I do see.
So why, how do I get rid of that very
undesirable points that that just doesn't work for us. And
that was the idea. So she, she she ended up
playing that role initially to confront me to this idea.
And then ultimately I flew back to France. She flew
(16:54):
back to New York, and we were in a very
problematic long distance relationship. And as I set out to
investigate the claims of Christianity, I ended up meeting a
pastor in France. And with him, lots of conversation ensued that, uh,
really were decisive on my own thinking.
S6 (17:10):
So yes.
S5 (17:11):
She was instrumental in making me meet that pastor in
France as.
S6 (17:14):
Well.
S1 (17:14):
Yes, but I want our friends to make sure they
don't miss the point that really, this was about you
being obviously an intellectual. I'm going to disprove. So that's
what started it. And I and I love the way
that people sometimes think. In fact, I've heard so many testimonies, Guillaume,
where people have said former Muslims, for example, I'm just
going to go to that word. I'm going to disprove
it and it's all going to be taken care of.
(17:34):
And what do you know? The word just has this
funny way of not returning void. We're going to come back,
pick up the story on this long distance relationship, which
gets you into a church and the conversations with the pastor.
We'll start there when we get back. We are visiting
with Doctor Guillaume Bignon. He's the author of confessions of
(17:57):
a French Atheist How God Hijacked My Quest to Disprove
the Christian Faith. Now, great detail in the book, by
the way. I'm hop skipping and jumping over the top.
Not to give you a book report, but just to
give you a sense of the flavor of this book
and the story of Guillaume's spiritual journey, which is fascinating,
and one that I think that you will not only
enjoy yourself, but share it with someone else who's also seeking.
(18:17):
You know, the word tells us that if we seek him,
we will find him. If we seek him with all
of our heart, he will be found. So God uses
this woman that you meet in the Caribbean as a
catalyst and you being an intellectual An explorer decide that
what I'm going to do is disprove this. How? You
picked a church, an evangelical church, and you decided to go. Guillaume,
you write in the book, you talk about the hand
(18:39):
of God and what it was like to see these people.
You refer to it as like you were going to
attend a zoo. Talk to me about that and tell
me what happened that day.
S5 (18:48):
Yeah. So this I was very self-conscious, and I figured
that this was already an intellectual crime to even visit
the church. So I was really terrified of losing my mind.
And I visit this church, and I figured, you know,
if I'm going to be looking into what Christianity claims,
I need to see what those Christians do when they
get together. And so I visited that church and I
(19:10):
sat down and I, you know, I was very, very uncomfortable.
But I thought at least they were praying. And it
seemed a little bit different than what I had seen
in in my childhood. These people really seem to believe
that they were talking to a real God. They were
not just reciting pre-written stuff. They were really talking to
their creator. And I thought there was an interesting, authentic, uh,
nature to that. But I sat down, I listened to
(19:32):
the pastor, uh, and I don't remember a word that
he said on that sermon. I don't know if I
was too absorbed in my thought. And again, very uncomfortable.
But at the end of the sermon, I thought, all right,
I've seen what I needed to see. And I tried
to escape because I didn't want to introduce myself to anyone.
And it's that in that place that I had, one
of the first very key turning experiences is that as
I was trying to escape the church, I opened the
(19:54):
door and I was immediately frozen by a wave of
chill that went from my stomach all the way into
my chest and grabbed me by the throat. And I
was frozen on the doorstep. And I heard myself thinking,
this is ridiculous. I have to figure this out. And
I turned around and I went straight to the head pastor,
and I introduced myself. So it was a very strong
experience just trying to flee that church and having to
(20:15):
be stopped in my tracks, turning around. And I ended
up introducing myself to the head pastor, who was eventually
the most important influence to lead me to Christ. So again,
God had a different plan for me on that day.
S1 (20:28):
Certainly. Did you ever stop and think what would have
happened if. And I guess you could only call it
the spirit of the Lord just kind of stops you
in your tracks. What if you hadn't been stopped? You
ever thought about how your life would be different?
S5 (20:39):
Yeah. Extremely different, I'm sure. Yes. I would not have
the kind of conversation that ensued for the months after that.
And I would probably not be a Christian in the US.
It's hard to guess whatever else God might have concocted,
but certainly this was one path that was an unlikely path,
and it's one that turned out really good for me.
S1 (20:56):
And experiential for someone who's very academic. I mean, that
that might have caught you off guard just a little bit.
I also praise God for the willingness of this pastor
to meet with you. Did you feel that that he
couldn't match you in terms of intellectual mano a mano?
That it was going to be. Oh, okay, he's going
to answer some questions. In other words, it wasn't necessarily
(21:17):
intellectually a level playing field. Or maybe it was because
you thought, I'm I'm into philosophy. I'm into reason. I'm into,
the examination of great ideas. You know, he seems to
be tied back to. What seems sophomoric at its at
at some level. So how did you even open up
your heart and your mind to hear what he had
to say to you?
S5 (21:36):
Yeah, I didn't necessarily see this as a contest with him,
but certainly one thing was surprising to me is that
he seemed to be intelligent. He seemed to be well educated,
and he didn't seem to be emotionally unstable like I
would expect a Christian to be. No, he was a
smart person, and he still believed that God created the
world and that Jesus was raised from the dead. So
that was one first intellectual challenge to realize you don't
(21:57):
need to be absolutely out of your mind in order
to believe these things, that sensible people can believe that
there was one first key intellectual shift that happened in
meeting and discussing with this pastor in Paris.
S1 (22:07):
Wow. So, Guillaume, it has to go from the head
to the heart. At what point did that transition take
place and how did it occur?
S5 (22:14):
Yeah. So it's after a few months of discussing with
the pastor where a number of my intellectual objections came
crumbling down, where I just realized that I was wrong
on a number of points and I'm happy to go
through those. I discussed them in the book, but intellectually
my barriers for faith simply vanished, and I started to
appreciate the intellectual, uh, credentials of Christianity, that it was
(22:35):
a respectable view to take the New Testament as historically
reliable documents telling us what happened with Jesus, who he
claimed to be, what he did, and that he was
ultimately raised from the dead. So, intellectually speaking, through these
months of discussions, I came to appreciate my objections were
no good. And the, uh, the case for the reliability
(22:56):
of the Bible was actually quite good that I could
take those documents as historically reliable, and to trust that
now I knew what happened to Jesus and that he
was raised from the dead. So this intellectual part was
resolved through this conversation. And to answer your question about
the emotional part, certainly coming to terms with the intellectual
aspect was a necessary condition for me. I was not
prepared to commit intellectual suicide. But no one, no one,
(23:19):
no one is a Christian would just intellectually affirms that
God exists. I take a Christian to be someone who
has been gripped by the gospel, that he's repented of
his sin and placed their trust in Jesus. And that
embrace of the gospel is something that clicked only very
late in that process, where my experiences came to match
(23:39):
my intellectual understanding, where my own, uh, my own personal
situation raised a crisis where, um, God reactivated my conscience
and I realized that I had done even a very
recent past, some really, uh, really immoral deeds that required
some forgiveness. And in that place of guilt, the gospel
(24:00):
came to life. And this is where the intellectual credentials
drop down to the heart. And I appreciated the truth
of the gospel.
S1 (24:07):
Wow, wow, what a place to take a break. There's
so much more. And I do in this back half.
Want to get to some of those questions that had
to be answered. Those dragons that had to be slayed.
But I just want to put a capstone on your
journey of faith, because the woman who became the reason
for you to begin the journey does not end up
being your soulmate. So I want to pick up on
(24:27):
that part of the story when we return. Confessions of
a French Atheist Doctor Guillaume Pignon is with us. He's
the author of the book Very Gifted Man, and he
really is a living example about how faith and reason
can coexist back after this. Our team of partial partners
(24:54):
is growing, and I love communicating behind the scenes with
this special group of friends who are devoted to giving
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(25:14):
in the market with Janet Parshall dot. The French mathematician
Blaise Pascal once said, in faith, there is enough light
for those who want to believe and enough shadows to
blind those who don't. Think about that for a bit.
We have the privilege of spending the hour with Doctor
Guillaume Pignon. He was born and raised in France, where
(25:36):
he studied math and physics and engineering science. He currently
works as a software engineering manager in California. After a
wholly improbable conversion, and you heard part of that story
in the first half of our conversation from atheism to Christianity.
This intellectual explorer decided that he would then earn a
master's in biblical literature, with an emphasis on the New
Testament and a PhD in philosophical theology. Again, his areas
(26:00):
of interest include the metaphysics of free will, natural theology,
and soteriology. So this pastor opens the door. You read
the scriptures, your arguments begin to fall. There's a transition
of the heart. The Lord stirs this real calling for
repentance in your life. and now your relationship with Jesus
Christ becomes very, very real. Now, what do you do
(26:21):
with all of that?
S5 (26:23):
Yes. So that's that's pretty much the question I asked myself.
And so at the time, given that everything seemed to
have been ordained by God and his providence to bring
me to all of this, I reasonably but wrongly assumed
that it was his will for me to marry this
woman that I had. That was the first domino in
this series of events. Uh, and so I made the
(26:44):
radical decision of leaving everything I had in France. So
I quit my volleyball team, I quit my job, I
left my band, and I got a job to, uh,
move to New York. Uh, providentially, again, I was working
in finance, so to find a job in New York,
that worked out well. I found something on Wall Street, uh,
and I moved to the US. Uh, and it's where
(27:04):
the twist is indeed. Like, like you mentioned that this
relationship actually didn't work out. Uh, after a few months,
after I moved, it became very clear that our relationship
was terrible. There was conflict all the time. It was
just not meant to be. And we broke up. And
this is in this place of big unknown where I
started to wonder, well, is that what I get? I'm
following you, God. And I thought this was clearly your
(27:27):
your leading. And I give up everything. I come to
the US and so why? And it turns out that
in isolating me like this and cutting off all of
my relationship and my commitments, this is the same time
that I started to spend some time explaining to my
family and friends in France, trying to tell them that
I hadn't lost my mind in becoming a Christian. And
so I started to give them reasons for why I
(27:50):
had changed my view on this and why my life
was so different. And, uh, just in small beginnings and
a bit more time spent to this, I realized I
really enjoy this. I really enjoy giving reasons and discussing
big ideas. And so this is what led me to
read a good bunch from people who, uh, provide these
sorts of material. I had thought of good reasons for
(28:11):
why God existed on my own, and I realized they
were defended in the literature. And then I discovered new
ideas as well, in watching documentaries and watching debates and
reading and following the footnotes. And so I realized, if
I'm going to be doing this or I started doing
this all of my evenings and weekends, and this was
a fun season of life, and I realized if I'm
(28:32):
going to be doing this for all of my time,
then I might as well get a degree out of it.
And this is how I ended up in seminary, to
get a master's in New Testament Studies that I followed
up later on with a PhD. So this is the the, the,
the shift that God did to isolate me, to send
me to my research and then to seminary and to
(28:52):
actually be engaged in this field today. So that was again,
in God's providence, probably not the story that I would
have written myself, but a very a much better one
than I would have.
S1 (29:02):
Always, always is the better author. So some are going
to ask, what is philosophical theology?
S5 (29:07):
Yeah. So this is just a nice label to say
that we're doing theology. So we are thinking about God
and discussing various important ideas of God. And why is
it philosophical? It's just a way of of saying that
we're thinking very carefully and rigorously. So we're using tools
of the philosophy department, that is the rigorous analysis of
arguments and words and ideas, the laws of logic, employing
(29:30):
all of these tools of philosophical analysis to some of
the important questions about God. So that's that's really in
a nutshell, what philosophical theology is discussing big ideas like, well,
the existence of God, the nature of God, the nature
of free will. So some big philosophical questions, all of
that applied to a Christian worldview, because obviously I'm interested
(29:50):
in defending some of the views that the views that
Christians should take on those questions.
S1 (29:56):
Yeah. Amen to that. So you write in the book,
before I could accept Christianity intellectually, I knew I would
have to accept the existence of God and the miracles
of Jesus, especially his resurrection. I want to splinter those
two apart. So as a thinker, how does one prove
the existence of God? It becomes a stumbling block for
those who say, if I can't find it in a laboratory,
if I can't produce it in a petri dish, if
(30:18):
God is spirit so I can't see or touch or
feel him, therefore he has to be a figment of
my imagination. How did you get to the point where
you could say with certainty, God is?
S5 (30:29):
Yeah. So certainty is a psychological state. So it's going
to be like, how? How confident are you or how
certain are you? I think what what happened with me
is that I had a number of objections against God's
existence that I realized were really no good, and seeing
them crumble one after another definitely lowered my confidence in atheism.
And my confidence in the Christian view was increased by
(30:52):
realizing that. So some of my objections were about what
I would need to have in order to know that
God exists. I was under the impression that we needed
to have absolute certainty before we could know anything. And
I also thought that basically knowledge came from science, right?
This is how you really know things in the world.
It's by using the scientific method. You have science and
(31:12):
that's what's telling you what's true. And so those two
assumptions turned out to be quite easily disposed of because
they are actually self refuting. Uh, you don't need science
to prove God. Um, because you can know some things
that are completely apart from science, including the claim that
you need to to have scientific evidence in order to
(31:34):
know anything. So I didn't have scientific proof that you
need scientific proof before you can know something. So that
very claim was self-refuting itself. And there's plenty of things
in life that we know, and it's just not coming
from science, some very mundane things. Uh, so again, science
is important. It's a great way of knowing some truth
about the natural world. But, uh, this was not a
(31:56):
necessary piece for me to know anything. Now, it so
happens that, uh, since then, I've discovered there are some
pretty good scientific reasons to believe that God exists. So
they are there. Uh, but I didn't feel like they
were necessary. And I think that we can know that
God exists wholly aside from these scientific reasons. And as
far as certainty is concerned, this is also another one
that I really had to let go, because I realized
there was also plenty of things that we know. And
(32:18):
I'm not taking. I'm not saying just believe, right? It's
not blind faith, like some things we know are true,
and yet that we don't have an absolute certainty for them.
And a very important class of such beliefs, I came
to discover, is simply those beliefs that we acquire by testimony.
Somebody tells us because they know, they tell us, and
(32:39):
now we know. There's kind of a simplicity to this,
but there's plenty of important things that we know just
like that. I know my date of birth like that.
I know my name. I know who my parents are
just like that. How do I know? Because somebody who
knew told me. And so I appreciated that. It's a
perfectly respectable way of forming knowledge. And then I came
to see the evangelists, the writers of the gospels, in
(33:01):
the New Testament, as pretty much giving us that they claim,
at least that they're telling us, look, we were there.
We've seen Jesus. We've investigated, we've talked to the eyewitnesses to.
And this is what happened. This is what Jesus said,
and this is what Jesus did. And in the end,
he was crucified and he was risen from the dead.
And they're saying, you know, we're telling you this because
it's really important. And eternal life hangs on this. John
(33:24):
tells us this much. So as a skeptic looking at
these documents, I came to see them as basically that
a testimony by people who claim to see all of
that and to tell us. And if I thought that
we could form knowledge by simply somebody who knows who
tells us something, then why not trust these four guys
who are telling us what they have seen? They could
(33:45):
very well give us knowledge of what happened with Jesus.
So that that's really how I came to see the
testimonial evidence of the New Testament.
S1 (33:53):
Wow. So let me linger on the historicity of the
Gospels because, um, you know, you and you know, this
being in California and working with software, but there are
some tech giants who want to be the guardians of truth,
who want to be, despite their protestations, the arbiters of truth.
And what's paradoxical is so often it's anything but it.
(34:13):
It's truth, but it masquerades itself as opinion. It masquerades
as truth. But in fact, it's it's an opinion. So
we have an opinion that floats out there, that the
historicity of the Gospels is utterly unreliable because they were
ignorant Bedouins, that the people who wrote those books, it
was five 600 years hence from the actual experience. Now
(34:33):
all of that can be proven, but we we are
not able. Unfortunately, so many of us in the church
capital C universal to be able to contend for the
faith by pushing back on the inerrancy of that. So
talk to me about the historicity of the Gospels. How
and why can they be trusted?
S5 (34:49):
Yeah, sure. So the first thing to note before I
even dive into this is that knowing how to defend
the reliability of the New Testament is not necessary for
someone to actually know that what they're saying is true,
and this might be counterintuitive. So I want to just
just mention that quickly. Um, what counts is that the
sources would be reliable for you to know the truth
(35:10):
when you read them, but you don't need to be
also able to defend the reliability of the sources before
you can know that it's true. And the example I
give for this is my knowledge of the Holocaust. I
know that the Holocaust happened, but how do I know this? Well,
because I was told when I was in school and
I had the historical sources telling me that it happened. Now,
I also know today that there are people who deny
(35:33):
that it happened, and they do have some degree of arguments. Now,
I'm not even aware of those arguments, so I'm not
even positioned to defend the historical reliability of the Holocaust.
But nobody would say that. Therefore, I don't know that
it happened. Simply, the sources themselves are reliable and I
trust them. And therefore I know that this is the truth. Similarly,
for the Gospels, they are reliable, and we don't necessarily
(35:57):
need to be equipped to defend their reliability before we
can know that they are true. Now, I do defend
their reliability and I'm happy to talk about that, but
I'm saying it's not necessary before we can know the
truth of the Gospels.
S1 (36:07):
That's such a key point, and I do hope our
friends resonated with that. The book is called confessions of
a French Atheist, and I have to tell you, it
isn't just Guillaume's spiritual journey. It's very much that. But
he really and truly, brilliantly unpacks some of the criticisms
and teaches us a higher, greater value on God, a
greater view of God, a greater belief in the reliance
(36:28):
on the authority of His Word, and a better way,
by the way, to share what we know is the
authenticity of Christianity. We're going to take a break and
come right back. The books on my website for your perusal.
Confessions of a French Atheist how God Hijacked my Quest
to Disprove the Christian Faith back after this. I told
(36:49):
you this hour would go very quickly, but if I've
piqued your interest in reading confessions of a French Atheist,
I will have done my job. This isn't, as I
say so often, a book report. This is a flyover
so that you can dig deeper into ideas that I
hope stimulate your imagination and really facilitate your obedience and
going out and influencing and occupy until he comes. So
(37:10):
you have this brilliant man, Doctor Guillaume Bignon, who is
very much a Renaissance man between volleyball and music and
studying math and physics and engineering science. And then after
coming to faith in Jesus Christ, deciding that this is
not a hobby, this is a hunger. And so he
gets a master's degree in biblical literature with an emphasis
on New Testament, and then a PhD in philosophical theology.
(37:33):
And he, by the way, serves on an executive committee
of a society of French speaking Christian scholars. So he's
he's teaching us all, and we're not at the same level.
That's perfectly okay. But he's teaching us how to think
deeply about these hugely important ideas. And may his tribe increase,
particularly in these latter days when the world is crying
out for answers, is Gabriel. And how do I know
(37:55):
him personally? So let me go to the second part.
I said it would parse out Guillaume. The two things,
the existence of God and the other was the question
of miracles. C.S. Lewis writes about this. So to the
postmodern mind, miracles are oh so passé, so medieval, so
over there. How does one deal with the miraculous? It is,
by its very nature, ununderstandable, if there's such a word.
S5 (38:15):
Yeah. It seems to be a stumbling block for many.
And for me it was just the idea that if
you believe in miracles, it's just superstition and that science
should be, you know, the opposite of that. And simply
a bit of reflection on this allowed me to realize that, look,
if God exists, this is a supernatural agent, and that
opens the door for all sorts of possible miraculous things
(38:37):
to happen. And the question really therefore cannot be brushed
as saying, well, therefore miracles are impossible. No, they're only
impossible if God does not exist. So the buck is
passed down. And really the question boils down to is
there a God? If there is one, then yes, whatever
he does in the world doesn't have to be according
to the natural laws and we can expect to see
some miraculous interventions. So if you think of the key
(39:00):
miracle claim of the Christian faith, the resurrection of Jesus,
it can't be arbitrated on simply considerations that, oh, well,
it would have to be a miracle. Well, yeah, that's
pretty much what Christians say. If Jesus was raised from
the dead, that would have to be a miracle. And
this is what we claim, in fact happened. So there's
no philosophical consideration that in principle exclude that it's really
(39:21):
going to boil down to whether God is real. And
if he is, then he has the prerogative of raising
someone from the dead.
S1 (39:27):
Hmm. Well, very succinct answer. So let me just hop,
skip and jump over a couple of other ones, too.
At some point, even if you were to win some
Lee slay the dragons of mythology held by the skeptic,
the seeker, the atheist, and you just waylaid every single
argument at some point. There has to be that journey
from the head to the heart. You gave that as
(39:48):
part of your testimony as well, even if every intellectual
pushback was addressed, At what point does someone take not
a giant leap of faith, but that next step of faith?
S5 (40:00):
Yeah. So I think that for me, it came very
tight to my understanding of the gospel. So as part
of my research at the time, as an atheist, I
was reading the New Testament. And in my conversations with
that pastor, he had given me a nice booklet to
guide me through the basics of the Christian faith. And
it was a well thought out booklet that would send
me to the scriptures to read the answer for myself
so I didn't have to trust him. I just had
(40:21):
to read the sources and see that it was there
for myself. And again, as a Christian, looking back, there's
power in me being in the word and just having
the truth of scripture impact me. Um, and I, I
walked through this basic material and wondering why I don't
understand it all. There was one question that came over
and over again in my notes that I still have
at home, written in French of me going through this booklet,
(40:44):
which was Why did Jesus have to die? I don't
understand this. It's almost hilarious looking in retrospect, because this
is the basics of the Christian life. But it was
a very big stumbling block for me. I did not
understand the connection between Jesus dying on the cross 2000
years ago and my life as a Christian if I
were to become one. And it's, uh, through my studies
and through my experiential struggles, that at the end of
(41:06):
my investigation, I came to also have my conscience reactivated
by God, where I literally really I was afflicted with
guilt for something horrible that I had done in the
very recent past, and I had covered with lies in
order to not talk about it and to hide it
from everybody else and from me. And God just took
this and shoved it in my face, and my conscience
was torturing me. And in that place of deep pain,
(41:29):
the intellectual pursuits finally clicked and made sense. And now
I understood. Well, that's why he had to die for me.
He died for me to pay the penalty for my sin.
And so this is when the experience, the existential came
to meet the intellectual and I was all in. I say,
all right, this is the message. This is the truth. I'm.
I ask for forgiveness. I give you my life. And
(41:51):
from that point on, the guilt evaporated and I lived
the true spiritual renewal. So the experiential and the emotional
came to meet the intellectual respectability that had been placed
there by my investigation in the first place.
S3 (42:03):
Wow.
S1 (42:04):
Let me distill this down, because you used the word once,
but I think it's sort of the linchpin in what
you just said. And that is you had to get
to a point where you recognized your own sin because otherwise,
this quote, Christopher Hitchens, this child abuse, cosmic child abuse
of Christ dying on the cross is meaningless and has
no relevance for your own life. Is it possible to
have someone? And I know it's a journey so it
(42:25):
isn't an A necessarily equals B, it's an A might
be the B at the beginning. That takes you ultimately
to Z, but is there a way to be able
to recognize the validity of Christ's crucifixion without recognizing your
own sin? Otherwise it makes no sense.
S5 (42:38):
Yeah, I suppose there might be a bit of a delay, right?
In my case, a little bit. There was the intellectual understanding.
I guess this is what happened. I don't understand why.
And then the experience all kicked in. In God's providence,
perhaps he can bring those two ingredients in somebody else
at two different times. I don't wish it for them,
because I think that once you realize, like, once you
(42:59):
have your cure, you understand that you need the cure.
So you want the need and the solution to come
at the same time. And this is how they came
to be in my own story, my own scene found
the perfect savior. And this was a very life changing moment.
S3 (43:11):
Wow.
S1 (43:12):
Last question in an hour that, as I knew, would
go far too quickly for someone listening to you and
they're saying, well, I don't have all of the initials
after my name that Gillon does, but I really want
to be able to winsomely answer questions when people want
to know questions about the resurrection and miracles and the
existence of God. Where do I start? Put them on
the first step of that journey. Where do they go?
S5 (43:32):
Yeah, I mean, I do offer some of that material
in my book. So as part of the story, I
also explained the defense of the faith. So that's one
place to start. And then there's a lot of very
accessible literature to learn how to defend the gospel. And
the reliability of the Bible and the existence of God,
especially in the English language. There's a wealth of literature,
so follow the footnotes. Some of the authors that I
(43:53):
reference in my book are good places as well. Uh,
you know, also just know how to present the, the
simply the message of the Christian faith. Uh, before you
even dive into reasons, it's very powerful to simply explain it.
I know I had never heard the gospel until I
was 25 years old, and just a good, clear presentation
of it was life altering in itself.
S3 (44:14):
Wow.
S1 (44:14):
What a great note to end this on. Thank you
so much, Guillaume. The book is again is called confessions
of a French Atheist How God Hijacked My Quest to
Disprove the Christian Faith. And absolutely the antithesis happened as
a result of that. Now we have the wonderful work
of Doctor Guillaume Leinen. I hope you'll read the book
and then just share it with somebody else who is
(44:35):
asking these important questions, because they're questions that deserve an answer.
My thanks to Guillaume and to you, friends. We'll see
you next time.
Hi friend, thank you so much for downloading this podcast
and I truly hope you hear something that encourages edifies, equips, enlightens,
and gently but consistently pushes you out there into the
marketplace of ideas. But before you start to listen and
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perfect fit for both the marketplace and getting out there.
It's Ray Comfort's book. Why? Jesus? If you listen to
(00:22):
the broadcast with any regularity, you know we love Ray.
He is bold, unashamed of the gospel. And yet in
such a winsome way, he delivers a truth narrative to
the man in the street, so to speak. He's written
the book Why Jesus? To Teach You How to Walk Through,
by examples and through real conversations he's had on how
to share the gospel in exactly the same way. Listen,
(00:43):
we're called to go and tell. It's not an opt in,
opt out clause. That's where we're supposed to go. And
in truth, how can we keep this good news to ourselves?
So I want you to have Why Jesus as this
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with Janet Parshall. Now please enjoy the broadcast.
S2 (01:50):
Here are some of the news headlines we're watching.
S3 (01:51):
The conference was over. The president won a pledge.
S4 (01:54):
Americans worshiping government over God.
S3 (01:56):
Extremely rare safety move by a major.
S4 (01:59):
17 years the Palestinians and Israelis negotiated.
S3 (02:04):
Between the parties.
S1 (02:17):
Hi, friends. Welcome to In the Market with Janet Parshall.
You heard the chaos in the marketplace of ideas as
we started all kinds of booze, all kinds of merchants
selling and buying all kinds of goods, some counterfeit, some shabby,
some hollow and some bedrock faith and fact and truth.
And that's why you and I must show up in
the marketplace of ideas. So this program is designed to
(02:39):
get you to think critically and biblically. Newsflash they're not
mutually exclusive ideas. You come to faith in Christ. Not
only is your heart transformed, but your mind is renewed.
And one of my favorite kinds of conversations. Because you
know what my goal here is? My goal is to
lovingly get you out there now. It wasn't my idea.
It was Jesus's idea. And if you don't believe me,
(02:59):
listen to the conversation he has with his daddy on
his way to Calvary. John 17. My prayer is not
that you take them out of the world, but that
you protect them from the evil one. Sanctify them with
thy word. Thy word is truth. Sorry, no going to bed,
pulling the covers over your head and just waiting until
it's all over. You are to influence and occupy until
(03:19):
he comes. And it's getting well. I was going to
say difficult, but it's not. Let me rephrase it. I
think it's now requiring some muscular Christians. I really do
bumper sticker Christianity has come and gone. It doesn't cut
it anymore. If the Oxford Dictionary word of the year
was post-truth, it means we've juxtaposed this whole idea that
truth is knowable and it is applies to all people,
(03:41):
in all times and in all places. Rather, our feelings supersede.
And when that happens, you have chaos, cultural chaos, moral chaos,
chaos of the first degree. And that's what we're living
in right now, days of chaos and lawlessness. Because man
is doing basically what's right in his own eyes. So
along come you and me, living epistles. Ooh, there's a
weighty idea. Someone literally reading your life to see whether
(04:03):
or not you are living with the eloquence of the gospel.
Not easy stuff, by the way. Particularly because more and
more the culture is rising up against us. No surprise
if you're in the word, you understand this is the timeline,
I get it, but I want to be able to contend,
as it says in the book of Jude, for our faith.
I want to be able to give a reason for
the hope that resides within me, and that isn't done
by flicking through a computer screen for five seconds. It
(04:24):
isn't done by spending five seconds in the word. It's
done by rolling up your sleeves and studying to show
yourself approved unto God. It's going to take some sweat equity.
It's going to take some commitment. It's going to take
some work. So the kinds of conversations I love are
people are going to say, this is who I was now,
this is who I am. And they are able with
power to articulate why they believe in the historicity and
(04:48):
the authenticity and the reliability of the Scriptures of Jesus Christ.
Such is our guest today. He's written a new book
called confessions of a French Atheist. Although watching him for years,
I'm surprised it took so long for the book to
come out, because I've gone back years and he's been
telling this story of how he came to faith in
Jesus Christ, who he was versus who he is now.
(05:10):
And so we're going to spend the hour with a
man who's going to show us, through his testimony what
it means to think critically and biblically as well. Doctor
Guillaume Bignon is with us. He was born and raised
in France. He studied math, physics, engineering, science. Notice the
doctor in front of his name. He currently works as
a software engineering manager, but he's a whole lot more
than that. He has a wonderful story of how he
(05:33):
came to faith in Christ. You're going to hear that
this hour, but I will tell you that now, as
though just studying math, physics, and engineering science wasn't enough,
he decided that he would also dig in to the
Word of God. And so now he has a master's
in biblical literature, with an emphasis on the New Testament
and a PhD in philosophical theology. I bet you're wondering
what in the world is that? We'll answer that question
(05:54):
during the course of the hour. By the way, you
want to know his areas of interest? Get a little
closer to the radio. I love this stuff. Skeptics, cynics, seekers.
You get front row seats. Get a little closer. So
as areas of interest include the metaphysics of free will,
just chew on that for a minute. Natural theology and soteriology.
And I am so thrilled that Doctor Guillaume Benoit is
(06:15):
with us. Binion fillet. Mignon Binion I'm going to get
this right. My Spanish better than my French. So welcome.
I'm so glad that you're with me. Thank you for
the gift of your time. Thank you for finally putting
your story in a book. It took a while. That's
my first question. Why so long to finally get confessions
of a French Atheist out in printed form? So we
can read your story, not just hear it.
S5 (06:35):
Hey Janet, thank you so much for having me and
thank you for your kind words. So why it took
me so long? Well, that's because I have so many
lives lived at the same time. So, you know, I have, uh.
I am a father of five young children. I am
working full time as a software engineering manager for a
tech company in California, but for the last 15 years,
I was on Wall Street as a software engineer working
(06:57):
on the trading floors of banks. And all of this
activity of researching, writing, speaking at conferences, all of that
is happening in my secret life with my secret identity
as a Christian philosopher. So one thing at a time,
but with a bit of perseverance, we finally got to
this writing, and I'm doing also a bit of a
publication on different topics. So this is the this was
(07:18):
the right time in God's providence, and I'm happy that
the book is out now.
S1 (07:21):
Oh, I'm thrilled. And I've been waiting quite some time
for the book, and I'm absolutely thrilled and have so
been looking forward to this. So I have a million
questions and I know the hour is going to go
too fast, but let me just start here. I want
to know first about the spiritual lay of the land
in France. It's been said that it's very difficult as
an example, to be a missionary in France. So I
started just thinking about this. I love world history and
I'm wondering, is this a result of the Age of Enlightenment?
(07:44):
Is this a result of the great French philosophers that
basically told us that an every day and every way
we're getting better and better and we don't need God.
So why has God been shown the door, so to speak,
for a couple of centuries in France? Why is that?
S5 (08:00):
Yeah, I'm not sure that I have the full historical
lines that I can retrace for you to explain exactly
how we came to be there, and I haven't lived
in France for many years now, so my my view
is going to be remaining anecdotal. But as far as
my own upbringing and my environment, it seemed like people
around me were. So there was an acceptability to religion
as some sort of a practice or a tradition. Um,
(08:21):
but the general understanding was that serious people, intelligent people,
don't really believe this. They might do this as a hobby,
but they don't really believe that there's a supernatural God
who created the universe. And God forbid that he has
a son and that he raised him from the dead.
So this was my kind of assumption that, uh, that
smart people don't really believe those things. And there are, yes,
(08:44):
the enlightenment. There's definitely some very strong French voices in
the enlightenment, and I engaged with some of them in
the book to give a bit of a French flavour.
But we're we're still somewhat on the on the teachings
that Christianity is for silly persons, and that it doesn't
really require our time to figure this out.
S1 (09:01):
Yeah. Well, and I have to tell you, it isn't
just France that has that general impression. We are seeing
that more and more here in the United States. And
that raises a panoply of questions like, are faith and
reason at war with one another? Does Christianity and science commingle?
Are the two mutually exclusive? So many things I want
to ask you, but I want to get into the
story of how you are raised and sort of a
nominal Catholic family, and how God took you from where
(09:24):
you were to where you are, and what was the
catalyst for you to discover whether or not the scriptures
are real? The confessions of a French Atheist brand new
book by Guillaume Bignon. I'm so glad we're going to
spend the hour together. Call a friend who doesn't yet
believe in Jesus. Have him listen. The world needs hope
(09:44):
and we have the greatest news ever told. But how
do we share it effectively? That's why I've chosen Why
Jesus by Ray comfort is this month's truth tool. Transform
your approach to evangelism through step by step guidance and
real life examples. As for your copy of Why Jesus,
when you give a gift of any amount to in
the market, call 877 58, that's eight 7758 or go
(10:06):
to in the market with Janet Parshall. We are spending
the hour with Doctor Guillaume Bignon. He's the author of
confessions of a French Atheist How God Hijacked My Quest
to Disprove the Christian Faith. Absolutely fascinating read. I commend
it to anyone who believes also that Christianity is just
(10:26):
nothing but silliness. So, Guillaume, I want to go to
the use of the word atheist because for most people
listening and you're talking to people all across the United
States right now, the word atheist carries with it a
sense of animosity, that there's an anger toward God, which
is paradoxical in and of itself, because how can you
be mad at something or someone you don't believe in?
Would you say categorically at your young age, were you
(10:48):
an an agnostic or an atheist?
S5 (10:52):
Uh, so I would describe myself as an atheist. I
would not necessarily affirm that there is animosity in the
word itself. The word simply says that it's someone who
affirms that there is no God. Now, in my own
personal case, I was also a very much, uh, obsessed
with religion. And I had I had really resentment towards
the idea of God. So I was not neutral. I
was clearly hostile. But not all atheists have to be dispassionate.
(11:15):
So I wouldn't like to lump all atheists in that
group otherwise. Atheism is simply the view that there is
no God, and it's certainly the view that I affirmed
while also being hostile to religion.
S1 (11:26):
Was there an epiphany in your life when you said
he simply does not exist? Because, and I grant you,
there isn't. I think it's the way the word is
perceived as opposed to an accurate descriptor. But was there
a point where you just said, he's not there? I
don't believe on this. I'm walking away. Or was this
the slow, steadfast arrival at that position?
S5 (11:46):
Yeah. My conversion to Christianity was dramatic, but my initial deconversion,
if you will, to actually be an atheist was really
just natural. Just the air we breathe. I did grow
up in the Catholic Church, but like I said, it's
more of a tradition, maybe sometimes a bit of superstition.
And as soon as I was old enough to tell
my parents, I didn't really believe any of this, I
(12:07):
simply stopped going to church. But my life fundamentally was
not very different. So it was a very undramatic deconversion
and simply embrace the fact that, yeah, I don't believe
any of this. So I'm not going to practice it
and all will be, well, that was my plan at least.
S1 (12:22):
Nice. You thought. Yes.
S5 (12:24):
Yes, I was very much. Yeah. I was very much
hoping that religion would not make a comeback. And somehow
that didn't pan out.
S1 (12:32):
That's right. It roared back. It didn't just come back.
It roared back. So you're six foot tall. You and
your brother are both very athletic. You played professional volleyball,
traveled all over the place. So it raises the question
and obviously very gifted academically studying math, physics and engineering sciences,
I noted earlier. So being an atheist, all of us
have a worldview, if that's the way you begin, if
(12:52):
that's the grid through which you pushed all of your decisions,
how did your atheistic worldview impact the choices of what
you would do and your behavior?
S5 (13:01):
Yeah. So I didn't see it at the time as
this being very fundamental to me. I simply believed that
there was no God and I was trying to seek
my own happiness in life. It seemed to be like
my plan. I want to just position myself to enjoy
this life and be happy within it. Uh, so that
drove some of my personal decisions. And this is where
I simply sought for happiness in various avenues. Volleyball was
(13:23):
one of them. I wasn't quite pro. I was a semi-pro.
But anyway, I was playing volleyball in National League. Uh,
I was also playing music in a rock band, and
I really enjoyed writing music, playing live and, uh, simply
recording our own songs And, uh, on the front of studies. Yes,
I studied engineering, math, physics. And I became a software engineer.
(13:44):
So I thought all of those things were important pieces
for me to leave my good life and to be
happy with it. So that was my intent, uh, as
an atheist, uh, trying to live my life in that way.
S6 (13:55):
Yeah.
S1 (13:55):
Your life was overflowing. I mean, there was so much
going on. It was almost like, I don't believe in God,
and I don't need him, and there's no space in
my life. And then you go on a vacation. What happens?
S5 (14:05):
Yeah. That's right. So this is the big clincher. So
this is how I was confronted again with the idea
of religion. I went on a on a vacation in
the Caribbean, and then all sorts of improbable events happen.
So I can't really quite hit all of those stones. Uh,
all of those milestones in the small interview like this.
I tell the full story in the book, but this
is the kind. It's the stuff of movies. I still
(14:25):
feel like it's a bit surreal to me. Uh, but
it's full, like travels and betrayals and improbable meetings. So
all of that, uh, conspired against me. But the some
of the, uh, essential milestones are that I, uh, randomly
met an American woman, uh, on a Caribbean island. They
were hitchhiking. Uh, they were not even stopping to pick
(14:46):
me up. They were actually stopping to, uh, ask for directions.
And providentially, they they ended up being exact neighbors of
where I was going. So we got into the car,
we went to their hotel and started to, uh, see
them on the island, uh, starting I ended up in
a relationship with this woman and very quickly learned that
she was a professing Christian, which was an intellectual suicide
(15:09):
by my lights and and also that her view of
morality and relationship was also very different than what I needed.
So that was a very strong, uh, point of opposition
as well. And I set out to but she was
very exotic. She was a former model and actress and American.
So all of that was very exotic to me. I
was very determined to make this work. So I pursued
(15:31):
and figured, well, you know, I'm going to be disabusing
her of her silly beliefs. And then she will let
that go and we'll be happy together. That was kind
of the plan at the time. So this was the
open door that led me to be confronted like, okay,
she believes this stuff. I'm going to have to explain
to her why this is nonsense. And with a little
bit of common sense, I should be able to do that.
That was the plan.
S1 (15:51):
Yes, but God had a different plan and it involved hijacking.
Let me go back to Vanessa for a minute, if
I can. So C.S. Lewis said it beautifully. He said,
Christians are the best argument for and against Christianity. You
noted some of the notables of this woman. Uh, her
obviously beauty, her experience, the job that she did. But
did you ever stop and look at her and go,
(16:12):
why would a woman with all that talent even gravitate
toward Christianity? I mean, how did you see. I mean,
there was a living epistle. You didn't know the word
at the time, but this is a living epistle. And
aside from the fact that her views on marriage and
sexuality were 180 degrees different than yours, did you think? Well,
it's just this is a little bump in the road.
As soon as we can work the kinks out in
her thinking here, this won't be a problem.
S5 (16:34):
Yeah, that was really the idea there was to say, well,
she's great on all these points that I do see.
So why, how do I get rid of that very
undesirable points that that just doesn't work for us. And
that was the idea. So she, she she ended up
playing that role initially to confront me to this idea.
And then ultimately I flew back to France. She flew
(16:54):
back to New York, and we were in a very
problematic long distance relationship. And as I set out to
investigate the claims of Christianity, I ended up meeting a
pastor in France. And with him, lots of conversation ensued that, uh,
really were decisive on my own thinking.
S6 (17:10):
So yes.
S5 (17:11):
She was instrumental in making me meet that pastor in
France as.
S6 (17:14):
Well.
S1 (17:14):
Yes, but I want our friends to make sure they
don't miss the point that really, this was about you
being obviously an intellectual. I'm going to disprove. So that's
what started it. And I and I love the way
that people sometimes think. In fact, I've heard so many testimonies, Guillaume,
where people have said former Muslims, for example, I'm just
going to go to that word. I'm going to disprove
it and it's all going to be taken care of.
(17:34):
And what do you know? The word just has this
funny way of not returning void. We're going to come back,
pick up the story on this long distance relationship, which
gets you into a church and the conversations with the pastor.
We'll start there when we get back. We are visiting
with Doctor Guillaume Bignon. He's the author of confessions of
(17:57):
a French Atheist How God Hijacked My Quest to Disprove
the Christian Faith. Now, great detail in the book, by
the way. I'm hop skipping and jumping over the top.
Not to give you a book report, but just to
give you a sense of the flavor of this book
and the story of Guillaume's spiritual journey, which is fascinating,
and one that I think that you will not only
enjoy yourself, but share it with someone else who's also seeking.
(18:17):
You know, the word tells us that if we seek him,
we will find him. If we seek him with all
of our heart, he will be found. So God uses
this woman that you meet in the Caribbean as a
catalyst and you being an intellectual An explorer decide that
what I'm going to do is disprove this. How? You
picked a church, an evangelical church, and you decided to go. Guillaume,
you write in the book, you talk about the hand
(18:39):
of God and what it was like to see these people.
You refer to it as like you were going to
attend a zoo. Talk to me about that and tell
me what happened that day.
S5 (18:48):
Yeah. So this I was very self-conscious, and I figured
that this was already an intellectual crime to even visit
the church. So I was really terrified of losing my mind.
And I visit this church, and I figured, you know,
if I'm going to be looking into what Christianity claims,
I need to see what those Christians do when they
get together. And so I visited that church and I
(19:10):
sat down and I, you know, I was very, very uncomfortable.
But I thought at least they were praying. And it
seemed a little bit different than what I had seen
in in my childhood. These people really seem to believe
that they were talking to a real God. They were
not just reciting pre-written stuff. They were really talking to
their creator. And I thought there was an interesting, authentic, uh,
nature to that. But I sat down, I listened to
(19:32):
the pastor, uh, and I don't remember a word that
he said on that sermon. I don't know if I
was too absorbed in my thought. And again, very uncomfortable.
But at the end of the sermon, I thought, all right,
I've seen what I needed to see. And I tried
to escape because I didn't want to introduce myself to anyone.
And it's that in that place that I had, one
of the first very key turning experiences is that as
I was trying to escape the church, I opened the
(19:54):
door and I was immediately frozen by a wave of
chill that went from my stomach all the way into
my chest and grabbed me by the throat. And I
was frozen on the doorstep. And I heard myself thinking,
this is ridiculous. I have to figure this out. And
I turned around and I went straight to the head pastor,
and I introduced myself. So it was a very strong
experience just trying to flee that church and having to
(20:15):
be stopped in my tracks, turning around. And I ended
up introducing myself to the head pastor, who was eventually
the most important influence to lead me to Christ. So again,
God had a different plan for me on that day.
S1 (20:28):
Certainly. Did you ever stop and think what would have
happened if. And I guess you could only call it
the spirit of the Lord just kind of stops you
in your tracks. What if you hadn't been stopped? You
ever thought about how your life would be different?
S5 (20:39):
Yeah. Extremely different, I'm sure. Yes. I would not have
the kind of conversation that ensued for the months after that.
And I would probably not be a Christian in the US.
It's hard to guess whatever else God might have concocted,
but certainly this was one path that was an unlikely path,
and it's one that turned out really good for me.
S1 (20:56):
And experiential for someone who's very academic. I mean, that
that might have caught you off guard just a little bit.
I also praise God for the willingness of this pastor
to meet with you. Did you feel that that he
couldn't match you in terms of intellectual mano a mano?
That it was going to be. Oh, okay, he's going
to answer some questions. In other words, it wasn't necessarily
(21:17):
intellectually a level playing field. Or maybe it was because
you thought, I'm I'm into philosophy. I'm into reason. I'm into,
the examination of great ideas. You know, he seems to
be tied back to. What seems sophomoric at its at
at some level. So how did you even open up
your heart and your mind to hear what he had
to say to you?
S5 (21:36):
Yeah, I didn't necessarily see this as a contest with him,
but certainly one thing was surprising to me is that
he seemed to be intelligent. He seemed to be well educated,
and he didn't seem to be emotionally unstable like I
would expect a Christian to be. No, he was a
smart person, and he still believed that God created the
world and that Jesus was raised from the dead. So
that was one first intellectual challenge to realize you don't
(21:57):
need to be absolutely out of your mind in order
to believe these things, that sensible people can believe that
there was one first key intellectual shift that happened in
meeting and discussing with this pastor in Paris.
S1 (22:07):
Wow. So, Guillaume, it has to go from the head
to the heart. At what point did that transition take
place and how did it occur?
S5 (22:14):
Yeah. So it's after a few months of discussing with
the pastor where a number of my intellectual objections came
crumbling down, where I just realized that I was wrong
on a number of points and I'm happy to go
through those. I discussed them in the book, but intellectually
my barriers for faith simply vanished, and I started to
appreciate the intellectual, uh, credentials of Christianity, that it was
(22:35):
a respectable view to take the New Testament as historically
reliable documents telling us what happened with Jesus, who he
claimed to be, what he did, and that he was
ultimately raised from the dead. So, intellectually speaking, through these
months of discussions, I came to appreciate my objections were
no good. And the, uh, the case for the reliability
(22:56):
of the Bible was actually quite good that I could
take those documents as historically reliable, and to trust that
now I knew what happened to Jesus and that he
was raised from the dead. So this intellectual part was
resolved through this conversation. And to answer your question about
the emotional part, certainly coming to terms with the intellectual
aspect was a necessary condition for me. I was not
prepared to commit intellectual suicide. But no one, no one,
(23:19):
no one is a Christian would just intellectually affirms that
God exists. I take a Christian to be someone who
has been gripped by the gospel, that he's repented of
his sin and placed their trust in Jesus. And that
embrace of the gospel is something that clicked only very
late in that process, where my experiences came to match
(23:39):
my intellectual understanding, where my own, uh, my own personal
situation raised a crisis where, um, God reactivated my conscience
and I realized that I had done even a very
recent past, some really, uh, really immoral deeds that required
some forgiveness. And in that place of guilt, the gospel
(24:00):
came to life. And this is where the intellectual credentials
drop down to the heart. And I appreciated the truth
of the gospel.
S1 (24:07):
Wow, wow, what a place to take a break. There's
so much more. And I do in this back half.
Want to get to some of those questions that had
to be answered. Those dragons that had to be slayed.
But I just want to put a capstone on your
journey of faith, because the woman who became the reason
for you to begin the journey does not end up
being your soulmate. So I want to pick up on
(24:27):
that part of the story when we return. Confessions of
a French Atheist Doctor Guillaume Pignon is with us. He's
the author of the book Very Gifted Man, and he
really is a living example about how faith and reason
can coexist back after this. Our team of partial partners
(24:54):
is growing, and I love communicating behind the scenes with
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(25:14):
in the market with Janet Parshall dot. The French mathematician
Blaise Pascal once said, in faith, there is enough light
for those who want to believe and enough shadows to
blind those who don't. Think about that for a bit.
We have the privilege of spending the hour with Doctor
Guillaume Pignon. He was born and raised in France, where
(25:36):
he studied math and physics and engineering science. He currently
works as a software engineering manager in California. After a
wholly improbable conversion, and you heard part of that story
in the first half of our conversation from atheism to Christianity.
This intellectual explorer decided that he would then earn a
master's in biblical literature, with an emphasis on the New
Testament and a PhD in philosophical theology. Again, his areas
(26:00):
of interest include the metaphysics of free will, natural theology,
and soteriology. So this pastor opens the door. You read
the scriptures, your arguments begin to fall. There's a transition
of the heart. The Lord stirs this real calling for
repentance in your life. and now your relationship with Jesus
Christ becomes very, very real. Now, what do you do
(26:21):
with all of that?
S5 (26:23):
Yes. So that's that's pretty much the question I asked myself.
And so at the time, given that everything seemed to
have been ordained by God and his providence to bring
me to all of this, I reasonably but wrongly assumed
that it was his will for me to marry this
woman that I had. That was the first domino in
this series of events. Uh, and so I made the
(26:44):
radical decision of leaving everything I had in France. So
I quit my volleyball team, I quit my job, I
left my band, and I got a job to, uh,
move to New York. Uh, providentially, again, I was working
in finance, so to find a job in New York,
that worked out well. I found something on Wall Street, uh,
and I moved to the US. Uh, and it's where
(27:04):
the twist is indeed. Like, like you mentioned that this
relationship actually didn't work out. Uh, after a few months,
after I moved, it became very clear that our relationship
was terrible. There was conflict all the time. It was
just not meant to be. And we broke up. And
this is in this place of big unknown where I
started to wonder, well, is that what I get? I'm
following you, God. And I thought this was clearly your
(27:27):
your leading. And I give up everything. I come to
the US and so why? And it turns out that
in isolating me like this and cutting off all of
my relationship and my commitments, this is the same time
that I started to spend some time explaining to my
family and friends in France, trying to tell them that
I hadn't lost my mind in becoming a Christian. And
so I started to give them reasons for why I
(27:50):
had changed my view on this and why my life
was so different. And, uh, just in small beginnings and
a bit more time spent to this, I realized I
really enjoy this. I really enjoy giving reasons and discussing
big ideas. And so this is what led me to
read a good bunch from people who, uh, provide these
sorts of material. I had thought of good reasons for
(28:11):
why God existed on my own, and I realized they
were defended in the literature. And then I discovered new
ideas as well, in watching documentaries and watching debates and
reading and following the footnotes. And so I realized, if
I'm going to be doing this or I started doing
this all of my evenings and weekends, and this was
a fun season of life, and I realized if I'm
(28:32):
going to be doing this for all of my time,
then I might as well get a degree out of it.
And this is how I ended up in seminary, to
get a master's in New Testament Studies that I followed
up later on with a PhD. So this is the the, the,
the shift that God did to isolate me, to send
me to my research and then to seminary and to
(28:52):
actually be engaged in this field today. So that was again,
in God's providence, probably not the story that I would
have written myself, but a very a much better one
than I would have.
S1 (29:02):
Always, always is the better author. So some are going
to ask, what is philosophical theology?
S5 (29:07):
Yeah. So this is just a nice label to say
that we're doing theology. So we are thinking about God
and discussing various important ideas of God. And why is
it philosophical? It's just a way of of saying that
we're thinking very carefully and rigorously. So we're using tools
of the philosophy department, that is the rigorous analysis of
arguments and words and ideas, the laws of logic, employing
(29:30):
all of these tools of philosophical analysis to some of
the important questions about God. So that's that's really in
a nutshell, what philosophical theology is discussing big ideas like, well,
the existence of God, the nature of God, the nature
of free will. So some big philosophical questions, all of
that applied to a Christian worldview, because obviously I'm interested
(29:50):
in defending some of the views that the views that
Christians should take on those questions.
S1 (29:56):
Yeah. Amen to that. So you write in the book,
before I could accept Christianity intellectually, I knew I would
have to accept the existence of God and the miracles
of Jesus, especially his resurrection. I want to splinter those
two apart. So as a thinker, how does one prove
the existence of God? It becomes a stumbling block for
those who say, if I can't find it in a laboratory,
if I can't produce it in a petri dish, if
(30:18):
God is spirit so I can't see or touch or
feel him, therefore he has to be a figment of
my imagination. How did you get to the point where
you could say with certainty, God is?
S5 (30:29):
Yeah. So certainty is a psychological state. So it's going
to be like, how? How confident are you or how
certain are you? I think what what happened with me
is that I had a number of objections against God's
existence that I realized were really no good, and seeing
them crumble one after another definitely lowered my confidence in atheism.
And my confidence in the Christian view was increased by
(30:52):
realizing that. So some of my objections were about what
I would need to have in order to know that
God exists. I was under the impression that we needed
to have absolute certainty before we could know anything. And
I also thought that basically knowledge came from science, right?
This is how you really know things in the world.
It's by using the scientific method. You have science and
(31:12):
that's what's telling you what's true. And so those two
assumptions turned out to be quite easily disposed of because
they are actually self refuting. Uh, you don't need science
to prove God. Um, because you can know some things
that are completely apart from science, including the claim that
you need to to have scientific evidence in order to
(31:34):
know anything. So I didn't have scientific proof that you
need scientific proof before you can know something. So that
very claim was self-refuting itself. And there's plenty of things
in life that we know, and it's just not coming
from science, some very mundane things. Uh, so again, science
is important. It's a great way of knowing some truth
about the natural world. But, uh, this was not a
(31:56):
necessary piece for me to know anything. Now, it so
happens that, uh, since then, I've discovered there are some
pretty good scientific reasons to believe that God exists. So
they are there. Uh, but I didn't feel like they
were necessary. And I think that we can know that
God exists wholly aside from these scientific reasons. And as
far as certainty is concerned, this is also another one
that I really had to let go, because I realized
there was also plenty of things that we know. And
(32:18):
I'm not taking. I'm not saying just believe, right? It's
not blind faith, like some things we know are true,
and yet that we don't have an absolute certainty for them.
And a very important class of such beliefs, I came
to discover, is simply those beliefs that we acquire by testimony.
Somebody tells us because they know, they tell us, and
(32:39):
now we know. There's kind of a simplicity to this,
but there's plenty of important things that we know just
like that. I know my date of birth like that.
I know my name. I know who my parents are
just like that. How do I know? Because somebody who
knew told me. And so I appreciated that. It's a
perfectly respectable way of forming knowledge. And then I came
to see the evangelists, the writers of the gospels, in
(33:01):
the New Testament, as pretty much giving us that they claim,
at least that they're telling us, look, we were there.
We've seen Jesus. We've investigated, we've talked to the eyewitnesses to.
And this is what happened. This is what Jesus said,
and this is what Jesus did. And in the end,
he was crucified and he was risen from the dead.
And they're saying, you know, we're telling you this because
it's really important. And eternal life hangs on this. John
(33:24):
tells us this much. So as a skeptic looking at
these documents, I came to see them as basically that
a testimony by people who claim to see all of
that and to tell us. And if I thought that
we could form knowledge by simply somebody who knows who
tells us something, then why not trust these four guys
who are telling us what they have seen? They could
(33:45):
very well give us knowledge of what happened with Jesus.
So that that's really how I came to see the
testimonial evidence of the New Testament.
S1 (33:53):
Wow. So let me linger on the historicity of the
Gospels because, um, you know, you and you know, this
being in California and working with software, but there are
some tech giants who want to be the guardians of truth,
who want to be, despite their protestations, the arbiters of truth.
And what's paradoxical is so often it's anything but it.
(34:13):
It's truth, but it masquerades itself as opinion. It masquerades
as truth. But in fact, it's it's an opinion. So
we have an opinion that floats out there, that the
historicity of the Gospels is utterly unreliable because they were
ignorant Bedouins, that the people who wrote those books, it
was five 600 years hence from the actual experience. Now
(34:33):
all of that can be proven, but we we are
not able. Unfortunately, so many of us in the church
capital C universal to be able to contend for the
faith by pushing back on the inerrancy of that. So
talk to me about the historicity of the Gospels. How
and why can they be trusted?
S5 (34:49):
Yeah, sure. So the first thing to note before I
even dive into this is that knowing how to defend
the reliability of the New Testament is not necessary for
someone to actually know that what they're saying is true,
and this might be counterintuitive. So I want to just
just mention that quickly. Um, what counts is that the
sources would be reliable for you to know the truth
(35:10):
when you read them, but you don't need to be
also able to defend the reliability of the sources before
you can know that it's true. And the example I
give for this is my knowledge of the Holocaust. I
know that the Holocaust happened, but how do I know this? Well,
because I was told when I was in school and
I had the historical sources telling me that it happened. Now,
I also know today that there are people who deny
(35:33):
that it happened, and they do have some degree of arguments. Now,
I'm not even aware of those arguments, so I'm not
even positioned to defend the historical reliability of the Holocaust.
But nobody would say that. Therefore, I don't know that
it happened. Simply, the sources themselves are reliable and I
trust them. And therefore I know that this is the truth. Similarly,
for the Gospels, they are reliable, and we don't necessarily
(35:57):
need to be equipped to defend their reliability before we
can know that they are true. Now, I do defend
their reliability and I'm happy to talk about that, but
I'm saying it's not necessary before we can know the
truth of the Gospels.
S1 (36:07):
That's such a key point, and I do hope our
friends resonated with that. The book is called confessions of
a French Atheist, and I have to tell you, it
isn't just Guillaume's spiritual journey. It's very much that. But
he really and truly, brilliantly unpacks some of the criticisms
and teaches us a higher, greater value on God, a
greater view of God, a greater belief in the reliance
(36:28):
on the authority of His Word, and a better way,
by the way, to share what we know is the
authenticity of Christianity. We're going to take a break and
come right back. The books on my website for your perusal.
Confessions of a French Atheist how God Hijacked my Quest
to Disprove the Christian Faith back after this. I told
(36:49):
you this hour would go very quickly, but if I've
piqued your interest in reading confessions of a French Atheist,
I will have done my job. This isn't, as I
say so often, a book report. This is a flyover
so that you can dig deeper into ideas that I
hope stimulate your imagination and really facilitate your obedience and
going out and influencing and occupy until he comes. So
(37:10):
you have this brilliant man, Doctor Guillaume Bignon, who is
very much a Renaissance man between volleyball and music and
studying math and physics and engineering science. And then after
coming to faith in Jesus Christ, deciding that this is
not a hobby, this is a hunger. And so he
gets a master's degree in biblical literature with an emphasis
on New Testament, and then a PhD in philosophical theology.
(37:33):
And he, by the way, serves on an executive committee
of a society of French speaking Christian scholars. So he's
he's teaching us all, and we're not at the same level.
That's perfectly okay. But he's teaching us how to think
deeply about these hugely important ideas. And may his tribe increase,
particularly in these latter days when the world is crying
out for answers, is Gabriel. And how do I know
(37:55):
him personally? So let me go to the second part.
I said it would parse out Guillaume. The two things,
the existence of God and the other was the question
of miracles. C.S. Lewis writes about this. So to the
postmodern mind, miracles are oh so passé, so medieval, so
over there. How does one deal with the miraculous? It is,
by its very nature, ununderstandable, if there's such a word.
S5 (38:15):
Yeah. It seems to be a stumbling block for many.
And for me it was just the idea that if
you believe in miracles, it's just superstition and that science
should be, you know, the opposite of that. And simply
a bit of reflection on this allowed me to realize that, look,
if God exists, this is a supernatural agent, and that
opens the door for all sorts of possible miraculous things
(38:37):
to happen. And the question really therefore cannot be brushed
as saying, well, therefore miracles are impossible. No, they're only
impossible if God does not exist. So the buck is
passed down. And really the question boils down to is
there a God? If there is one, then yes, whatever
he does in the world doesn't have to be according
to the natural laws and we can expect to see
some miraculous interventions. So if you think of the key
(39:00):
miracle claim of the Christian faith, the resurrection of Jesus,
it can't be arbitrated on simply considerations that, oh, well,
it would have to be a miracle. Well, yeah, that's
pretty much what Christians say. If Jesus was raised from
the dead, that would have to be a miracle. And
this is what we claim, in fact happened. So there's
no philosophical consideration that in principle exclude that it's really
(39:21):
going to boil down to whether God is real. And
if he is, then he has the prerogative of raising
someone from the dead.
S1 (39:27):
Hmm. Well, very succinct answer. So let me just hop,
skip and jump over a couple of other ones, too.
At some point, even if you were to win some
Lee slay the dragons of mythology held by the skeptic,
the seeker, the atheist, and you just waylaid every single
argument at some point. There has to be that journey
from the head to the heart. You gave that as
(39:48):
part of your testimony as well, even if every intellectual
pushback was addressed, At what point does someone take not
a giant leap of faith, but that next step of faith?
S5 (40:00):
Yeah. So I think that for me, it came very
tight to my understanding of the gospel. So as part
of my research at the time, as an atheist, I
was reading the New Testament. And in my conversations with
that pastor, he had given me a nice booklet to
guide me through the basics of the Christian faith. And
it was a well thought out booklet that would send
me to the scriptures to read the answer for myself
so I didn't have to trust him. I just had
(40:21):
to read the sources and see that it was there
for myself. And again, as a Christian, looking back, there's
power in me being in the word and just having
the truth of scripture impact me. Um, and I, I
walked through this basic material and wondering why I don't
understand it all. There was one question that came over
and over again in my notes that I still have
at home, written in French of me going through this booklet,
(40:44):
which was Why did Jesus have to die? I don't
understand this. It's almost hilarious looking in retrospect, because this
is the basics of the Christian life. But it was
a very big stumbling block for me. I did not
understand the connection between Jesus dying on the cross 2000
years ago and my life as a Christian if I
were to become one. And it's, uh, through my studies
and through my experiential struggles, that at the end of
(41:06):
my investigation, I came to also have my conscience reactivated
by God, where I literally really I was afflicted with
guilt for something horrible that I had done in the
very recent past, and I had covered with lies in
order to not talk about it and to hide it
from everybody else and from me. And God just took
this and shoved it in my face, and my conscience
was torturing me. And in that place of deep pain,
(41:29):
the intellectual pursuits finally clicked and made sense. And now
I understood. Well, that's why he had to die for me.
He died for me to pay the penalty for my sin.
And so this is when the experience, the existential came
to meet the intellectual and I was all in. I say,
all right, this is the message. This is the truth. I'm.
I ask for forgiveness. I give you my life. And
(41:51):
from that point on, the guilt evaporated and I lived
the true spiritual renewal. So the experiential and the emotional
came to meet the intellectual respectability that had been placed
there by my investigation in the first place.
S3 (42:03):
Wow.
S1 (42:04):
Let me distill this down, because you used the word once,
but I think it's sort of the linchpin in what
you just said. And that is you had to get
to a point where you recognized your own sin because otherwise,
this quote, Christopher Hitchens, this child abuse, cosmic child abuse
of Christ dying on the cross is meaningless and has
no relevance for your own life. Is it possible to
have someone? And I know it's a journey so it
(42:25):
isn't an A necessarily equals B, it's an A might
be the B at the beginning. That takes you ultimately
to Z, but is there a way to be able
to recognize the validity of Christ's crucifixion without recognizing your
own sin? Otherwise it makes no sense.
S5 (42:38):
Yeah, I suppose there might be a bit of a delay, right?
In my case, a little bit. There was the intellectual understanding.
I guess this is what happened. I don't understand why.
And then the experience all kicked in. In God's providence,
perhaps he can bring those two ingredients in somebody else
at two different times. I don't wish it for them,
because I think that once you realize, like, once you
(42:59):
have your cure, you understand that you need the cure.
So you want the need and the solution to come
at the same time. And this is how they came
to be in my own story, my own scene found
the perfect savior. And this was a very life changing moment.
S3 (43:11):
Wow.
S1 (43:12):
Last question in an hour that, as I knew, would
go far too quickly for someone listening to you and
they're saying, well, I don't have all of the initials
after my name that Gillon does, but I really want
to be able to winsomely answer questions when people want
to know questions about the resurrection and miracles and the
existence of God. Where do I start? Put them on
the first step of that journey. Where do they go?
S5 (43:32):
Yeah, I mean, I do offer some of that material
in my book. So as part of the story, I
also explained the defense of the faith. So that's one
place to start. And then there's a lot of very
accessible literature to learn how to defend the gospel. And
the reliability of the Bible and the existence of God,
especially in the English language. There's a wealth of literature,
so follow the footnotes. Some of the authors that I
(43:53):
reference in my book are good places as well. Uh,
you know, also just know how to present the, the
simply the message of the Christian faith. Uh, before you
even dive into reasons, it's very powerful to simply explain it.
I know I had never heard the gospel until I
was 25 years old, and just a good, clear presentation
of it was life altering in itself.
S3 (44:14):
Wow.
S1 (44:14):
What a great note to end this on. Thank you
so much, Guillaume. The book is again is called confessions
of a French Atheist How God Hijacked My Quest to
Disprove the Christian Faith. And absolutely the antithesis happened as
a result of that. Now we have the wonderful work
of Doctor Guillaume Leinen. I hope you'll read the book
and then just share it with somebody else who is
(44:35):
asking these important questions, because they're questions that deserve an answer.
My thanks to Guillaume and to you, friends. We'll see
you next time.
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