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They have conquered the evil one by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony (Revelation 12:10-11).
All testimonies of God’s grace are incredible. But I have a category of “amazing testimonies” for which I have kept a file through the years.
To qualify for my list, the person must be a well-known atheist or agnostic who changed their thinking to believe in God (but not necessarily a Christian) because of evidence.
I find courage to overcome by reading these testimonies:
You must picture me alone in that room at Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929, I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. ~ C.S. Lewis
We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many different languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books. ~ Albert Einstein
I now believe that the universe was brought into existence by an infinite Intelligence. I believe that this universe’s intricate laws manifest what scientists have called the Mind of God. I believe that life and reproduction originate in a divine Source. ~ Antony Flew
I pause for a moment with the quote from Antony Flew. Everyone has heard of C.S. Lewis and Albert Einstein – but who is this Antony Flew? Simply, the world’s most elite atheist in the last 100 years. Flew changed his mind and wrote this quote in his book, There Is a God… How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind.
Pause… wow.
Okay, now take a deep breath and read the following quote. It is written by Francis Collins who directed perhaps the largest scientific undertaking in history – mapping the human genome.
He talks about his conversion:
My most awkward moment came when an older woman, suffering daily from severe untreatable angina, asked me what I believed. I felt my face flush as I stammered out the words “I’m not really sure.” Her obvious surprise brought into sharp relief a predicament that I had been running away from for nearly all of my twenty-six years: I had never really seriously considered the evidence for and against belief. That moment haunted me for several days. Did I not consider myself a scientist? Does a scientist draw conclusions without considering the data? Could there be a more important question in all of human existence than “Is there a God?” And yet there I found myself, with a combination of willful blindness and something that could only be properly described as arrogance, having avoided any serious consideration that God might be a real possibility. Suddenly all my arguments seemed very thin, and I had the sensation that the ice under my feet was cracking.
All of us will have a “thin-ice moment” and perhaps become a “reluctant” convert. It takes faith, but more and more the evidence accumulates, the only reasonable conclusion of an honest scientist, philosopher, car salesman, or YouTube personality should be…
I believe.
And thinking of “thin ice” – can you imagine standing before the throne of God without faith?