The age-old question: Is there a God? If so, how can we prove it? For many, including Lee Strobel—best-selling author and former atheist—this question lies at the core of their worldview. Lee was once firmly convinced that there was no God, believing that, without proof, faith was nothing more than a delusion. But everything changed when his wife became a Christian. Determined to find evidence to discover the truth, Strobel launched a journalistic investigation into the origins of Christianity and the credibility of Jesus. Little did he know, this search for truth would eventually turn his world upside down and transform his life.
Continue reading for highlights from this episode of the Even You podcast, or watch the full interview with Lee Strobel below.
What did you believe before coming into a relationship with God?
My parents were part of a church in the Chicago area, but their attitude was once you got through the initial religious indoctrination, you make your own decisions. So three steps led me to atheism. The first one was in middle school when I started asking those embarrassing questions middle schoolers ask, like, “If God is good, why does He send people to Hell? If God is good, why does He allow suffering?” And nobody wanted to engage with me about that. And I thought, “Oh, I get it. They don’t want to talk about it because they don’t have any good answers.” The second step was in high school when I studied biology and was taught that neo-Darwinism explains the origin and diversity of life. So I thought God’s out of a job. And then the third step was during my freshman year at the University of Missouri, where I was studying journalism. I took a course on the historical Jesus taught by a skeptic, and he pretty much said you can’t trust anything that the Bible tells you about Jesus. Those three steps cemented me into atheism. I also had a very difficult relationship with my dad. If you study the famous atheists of history, all of them either had a very bad relationship with their dad or their dad died when they were young or their dad divorced their mother when they were young. And as Freud said, the implication is, if an earthly father has disappointed you or let you down or hurt you in some way, you don’t want to know about a heavenly Father because He’s only going to be worse. Could that have played a factor in me walking down the road to atheism? I think it probably did. I think there weren’t just intellectual objections; there was a psychological situation that led me down that path of skepticism.
If you hadn’t become a Christian, where do you think atheism would have led you?
Boy, it would not have been pretty. I was a heavy drinker. I was living an immoral life. I was a narcissist. My attitude was, if there is no God, the most logical way to live your life is as a hedonist—someone who just pursues pleasure. Why not? It’s one life. It’s all we got. I think it would have taken me down some very dark paths, and I probably would have hurt a lot of people along the way.
How did your story to Christianity begin?
My wife was agnostic, if I can call her that; she just couldn’t put the pieces together. She wasn’t hostile toward God, but she just couldn’t quite figure it out. We had a neighbor who was a Christian and a nurse. They became best friends. She invited my wife to church. After many months of checking things out, she came up to me one day and gave me the worst news an atheist husband could get. She said, “I decided to become a Christian.” The first word that went through my mind was “divorce.” I was going to walk out. And then I thought maybe I could rescue her from this cult if I could just disprove Christianity. I learned at Yale Law School and the University of Missouri Journalism School how to evaluate evidence, how to marshal a case. And I thought, give me a good three-day weekend, and I can probably disprove Christianity. It can’t be that hard because isn’t it based on mythology and legend and make-believe and wishful thinking? So that’s what launched me into my own investigation of the evidence. My attitude in this investigation was to be like an umpire at a baseball game that calls a ball a ball and a strike a strike. I didn’t set out to disprove it; I set out to see where the evidence points, thinking that it would point away from God. What shocked me is the more I investigated it, the more it began to point me toward Christianity being true.
What was your wife doing while you were investigating Christianity?
She was growing as much as she could, but I was discouraging her. I discouraged her from going to church. She did go, though, many times. She would hold private Bible studies with her friend while I was at work. They would get together and talk about God and grow in her faith that way. She was part of the church as much as she could be. But I was pretty hostile toward the thing. I was pretty angry. I remember at one point she wanted to give money to the church, and I said, “I got a good idea. Instead of giving money to the church, let’s just flush it down the toilet. Because that will have the same effect.” So, she was fighting a lot of headwinds in her faith. But she was growing, she was learning. She did a great job by not making it God against me. Instead, she reached out to me in a positive way, in a winsome way, understanding that I was hostile and not provoking me but intriguing me and pointing me toward things that I might find interesting.
How long did your investigation take you?
It was a year and nine months. It took me from January 20, 1980, until November 8, 1981. January 20 was the first time I went to a church with my wife. That was when I heard the gospel. I thought Christians believed that if you live a pretty good life and try hard, you’d go to Heaven. The pastor got up and said, “No, that’s not what we believe. The way I spell other world religions is D-O—you have to do a bunch of things and try to earn your way to God. Christianity, I spell D-O-N-E. Jesus said on the cross, ‘It’s finished, it’s done.’ He’s paid for our sin, and He offers forgiveness and eternal life as a free gift of His grace.” I was shocked by this. It was a fulfillment of a dream that I had when I was a kid. I had a dream in which an angel appeared to me and started talking to me about Heaven. And I said to him, “Well, I’m gonna go there someday.” And he said, “How do you know?” I said, “What do you mean, how do I know? I’m a good kid, I obey my parents. I’ve been to Sunday school a few times. Why would I not go to Heaven?” And he looked at me and said, “That doesn’t matter.” I remember being shocked and stunned. And he said, “Someday you’ll understand,” and disappeared. It’s the only dream I remember from my childhood. It was a very vivid dream. On January 20, 1980, when I heard the gospel, the first thing I thought of was that angel. I thought, Oh, now I understand. I’m not saying nobody ever tried to share with me before. I just didn’t get it. That’s how I know that date, January 20, 1980. And I know the final date because it was a culmination of that investigation over almost two years.
What happened on November 8, 1981?
I spent almost two years looking at the evidence, a lot of it for the resurrection of Jesus. If Jesus claimed to be the Son of God, if He died and returned from the dead, that’s pretty good affirmation that He’s telling the truth. So I realized the resurrection is the key. So I sat down that day and thought, a good juror reaches a verdict. The evidence is in; I just need to reach a verdict. And so I reviewed all of it one last time, all the books and documents and things I collected, microfilm. Then I sat back and I said, “Wait a minute. In light of the avalanche of evidence that points so powerfully toward the truth of Christianity, it would take more faith to maintain my atheism than to become a Christian.” That’s when I realized this is true. God, You win. This is true. And then I didn’t know what to do. Leslie pointed out a verse to me, John 1:12, which says, “Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God … .” I realized just believing is not enough. I had to receive this free gift of God’s grace, and then I would become a child of God. So I got on my knees, poured out a confession of a lifetime of immorality, repented of that, and received this free gift of God’s grace. And didn’t feel any different. You know how some people say at that moment of conversion, they had a rush of emotion? I didn’t have that. I had the rush of reason. This is true. This is true. This isn’t make believe. It isn’t wishful thinking. It’s not legend. It’s not mythology. This is based on historical data that can be trusted. I went and told my wife, and she burst into tears. She threw her arms around my neck, and she said, “I almost gave up on you a thousand times.” She said, “When I was a new Christian, I met some women at church, and I told them about you. I said, ‘I don’t have any hope for my husband. He’s the hard-headed, hard-hearted legal editor of the Chicago Tribune. He’s never going to bend his knee to Jesus.’ And this one woman named Sylvia put her arm around me and said, ‘No one’s beyond hope.’” And so these women prayed for me for two years, and that prayer was answered on November 8, 1981, at about three in the afternoon.
Do you think God used that year and nine months to prepare you for your next assignment?
I think God does do that. He prepares us, and sometimes it takes time. When I left journalism to go into full-time ministry at a church, that was a big life change for me because I was all in as a journalist and I was at the top of my profession. I was at the biggest newspaper between the coasts. I was doing books. I was doing TV. And I felt God’s call to put all that behind, take a 60% pay cut, and join the staff of a church. When I did that, I thought I was never going to write another book. I joined the staff of that church in 1987. I didn’t write “The Case for Christ” until the late 90s. I think God used that time to kind of let me step back and say, “You’re not in the book manufacturing business. You’re not there just to write a bunch of books. You’re there to live a life that I want you to lead and to draw upon that and help people find Me and grow in their faith.” So it was about six years where I wasn’t doing books. I think that was healthy because it prepared me spiritually to say, “Maybe I’m ready now. Maybe God didn’t just redeem my soul; He redeemed my skills.”
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