Engaging with atheists: Guillaume’s story

This is an extract from the recently published Engaging with Atheists.

I grew up in a wonderfully loving family in France, near Paris. My dad was a mathematician and computer scientist, and my mother “religiously” devoted herself to the well-being and education of her children. All in all, I was pretty happy with my life, and in a thoroughly secular culture.

On holiday, I met a girl from New York, who believed in God—an intellectual suicide by my standards. We started dating, and my new goal in life was to explain to her why all this was untenable, so that she could put this nonsense behind her, and we could be together without her misconceptions standing in the way. So I started thinking about the whole thing. What good reason was there to think God exists, and what good reason was there to think atheism was true instead?

So I picked up a Bible to figure it out. And at the same time, since I’m a scientist, I figured there was at least one experiment that could be carried out to dis-confirm the belief that God exists: I thought “if any of this is true, then there is a God who exists right now and presumably cares greatly about this project of mine”, so I started to pray with the air as an atheist: “If there is a God, then here I am, I’m looking into this, why don’t you go ahead and reveal yourself to me. I’m open.” Well, I wasn’t, really, but I figured that shouldn’t stop God if he existed.

So I read in the Gospels about this Jesus of Nazareth. And there, it didn’t exactly feel like what I expected. I was impressed by the authority of that man’s teaching. Additionally, even as an atheist, I knew that the person of Jesus of Nazareth was not just a piece of mythology; it seemed clear he was at least a person of history who walked the roads of Palestine in the first century, and apparently his story was compelling enough that these ancient followers of his believed it and even suffered for preaching his death and resurrection. These considerations were making it harder to completely throw out the whole thing, and I knew that at some point I would need to give a coherent account of who I thought Jesus in fact was.

I decided I would try and visit a church, to see what those Christians do when they get together. Frankly, I went to that church like I would go to the zoo: to see some weird exotic animals that I had read about in books, but had never seen in real life. I remember thinking that if any of my friends or family could see me there in church I would die of shame. I also remember finding it troubling to see that these people seemed to actually believe what they practiced. They genuinely thought their prayers were being heard by God.

I don’t remember a word that the preacher said on that day. He finished his sermon, and I thought, “I have heard enough, I saw what I needed to see, now let me get out of here”. I jumped on my feet, and started quickly walking down the aisle toward the large exit door at the back of the church, very carefully avoiding making eye contact with anybody, so that I wouldn’t have to introduce myself to any of these people.

I reached the back door, opened it, and I literally had one foot out the door, when I was suddenly stopped in my tracks, as a strong chilling blast in my chest went up from my stomach all the way to my throat. I stopped there, frozen on the spot with goose bumps all over, and heard myself saying: “this is ridiculous, I have to figure this out”.

So I put my foot back in, closed the door in front of me, turned around, and went straight to the head pastor. “So, you believe in God, ugh?” —”Yes”, he responded with a smile. “So how does that work out?” I asked. “We can talk about it”, he said. And after people left, we went to his office. He briefly prayed for me, which I obviously felt a bit awkward about, but at least it was reassuringly consistent: he really believed in it. And we started to talk...

You can read the rest of Guillaume’s story at theologui.blogspot.com.

You can view a video of his story at www.cbn.com.

More testimonies and suggestions for Bible passages to open up and discuss are in the book -- plus plenty of practical advice on how to share the good news with all kinds of atheist, and not be trapped into fruitless arguments.