Few questions weigh heavier on the human heart than death. Is there anything beyond this life? How do we face death without fear?
Dr. Stephen Iacoboni has wrestled with these questions every day for more than forty years as a medical oncologist. Once a committed scientific atheist, he sought answers in medicine, science, and humanism—only to find them insufficient in the face of mortality. Through the witness of his patients and the growing cracks in naturalistic explanations, Dr. Iacoboni came to embrace faith in God, discovering a hope that transforms both life and death.
In this conversation, he shares his journey from childhood faith to scientific atheism, through years of treating patients at death’s door, to finally returning to belief in Jesus Christ. Along the way, he examines the failures of naturalism, the role of science, and the undeniable human longing for meaning that points to something greater.
Guest Bio:
Dr. Stephen J. Iacoboni is a veteran oncologist, author, and speaker whose medical career spans more than forty years. Trained during an era dominated by scientific materialism, he once embraced an atheistic worldview. But through decades of walking with cancer patients in their deepest suffering, he rediscovered the reality of the human soul and the hope of faith. He is the author of The Undying Soul: A Cancer Doctor’s Discovery and Telos: The Scientific Basis for a Life of Purpose, where he shares both his personal journey from atheism to faith and his case for meaning and design in life. Today, Dr. Iacoboni continues to write and speak on the intersection of science, medicine, and spirituality, encouraging both doctors and skeptics to see beyond a purely mechanistic view of life.
Resources Mentioned:
America’s Christian Credit Union (ACCU): AmericasChristianCU.com/Jana
Stephen’s Resources:
• Book: The Undying Soul
• Book: Telos- The Scientific Basis for a Life of Purpose
Connect with eX-skeptic:
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eX-skeptic Ep. 131 Stephen Iacoboni Transcript
Stephen Iacoboni
00:00 – 00:34
I asked her, I said, why aren’t you afraid? Everyone else is afraid. You’re suffering. I’m giving you chemo. Everyone around you is sad. Why are you happy all the time? And she said, she said, ‘God gave me cancer to show you how to die and how to live.’
Jana Harmon
00:43 – 03:25
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Stephen Iacoboni
03:25 – 03:27
Well, thank you, Jana. It’s great to be here.
Jana Harmon
03:29 – 03:48
Wonderful. You are a man of quite a lot of credentialing and esteem and amazing work. Can you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about what that looks like, what your educational path was, the of kind kind of work you’ve done for so many decades that has been so impactful for so many lives?
Stephen Iacoboni
03:49 – 04:41
Well, sure. I love talking about myself. Not really, but, so I’m a medical oncologist, which means that I am an internist who treats cancer with medicine as opposed to surgeons and radiation oncologists who either operate or radiate. And I’ve been doing that for over 40 years. And I’m well past retirement age, but have no intention of retiring in part because I love my work and there’s a great need to be fulfilled. And the good Lord’s keeping me kind of healthy, pretty healthy, really. And so I’m good with it. I’m good to go.
Jana Harmon
04:41 – 05:46
Yeah. Yeah. That’s amazing. I can see why you would still be working in such a, I can’t imagine working in a world where you’re facing death and dying and the potential for life or not on a daily basis. You really have to be a very special person to be in that world of healing. And from what I’ve read and from what I know about you, you do extraordinary things in the lives of your patients. So let’s go back into your story. You mentioned there, the good Lord, but I know that the good Lord was part of your early journeying, but more of a religious view of God, and then you left that behind for quite a long time. So let’s just start in your early life. Tell me about your upbringing. Tell me about whether religion or God was a part of all of that. Your family life, your school and education, and how you interacted with those concepts personally.
Stephen Iacoboni
05:46 – 13:14
So if you were Sherlock Holmes, you could easily, after meeting me, deduce the following, my age with my last name. I probably, and in fact am the grandson of four Italian immigrants and was born in the 50s. And I like to point out to people that people of my age, the Boomers, we are the really the last generation to straddle the two worlds, the secular world and the spiritual world. Because really, before 1960, there wasn’t much of a secular world in our society. And so I grew up in a picket fences kind of environment. Went to 12 years of Catholic school and then went to a private, non-sectarian liberal arts college in Southern California. All of that followed by medical school in none other a place than Berkeley, California in the middle 70s when everything was hot and juicy, so to speak, and Haight-Ashbury and the hippies and so on and. But as a youngster, what strikes me as I think about it now, is my teachers were almost all nuns and we went to church every Sunday. And what we were taught was considered the absolute truth that God was watching over everything and there was right and wrong and you were here for a purpose. And it actually made life very easy to have everything so neatly explained. And of course, as a young person, that’s very important. There are a couple of things about my life, they’re a little bit unique. My father died suddenly and tragically with a heart attack in the middle of his otherwise really successful career. He was being groomed to be the governor of the state of California. He was going to be the Attorney General and then the governor, he was active in politics. All that changed. And my mother, with a high school education had to raise three boys. And the other thing that’s striking about that is that at the time we were all of course emotionally devastated, but there wasn’t any question in our mind that that it was God’s will, that it was the way it was, that my father was in heaven and was time to carry on. I was 11 at the time and deeply devout. All that changed when I went to college because it was the 60s and our society itself was faced with a lot of difficult questions and contradictions that every society has to deal with, like the Vietnam War, civil rights and so it was a difficult time. And then on top of that, I happened to be a scientist or studying to be a scientist. And one of the driving forces in our society that doesn’t get mentioned often enough that led to the secularization of our culture was that the scientists who had always said that there’s a God that created everything, which is why there are laws of nature that the science absolutely depends on. I mean, you can’t do science if gravity stopped being gravity, right? These scientists said, well, we’ve figured it all out, we’ve. Watson and Crick had figured out the structure of DNA and turns out that organisms are chemical machines and if you’re smart like us, you’ll understand these revolutionary new concepts and that what Charles Darwin said was true and that we are the product of a 5 billion year evolutionary process, but there was no God that intended any of that. And we are stuck here on this little planet on the edge of some insignificant solar system in the midst of a inconceivably large universe that began with the Big bang. And you have to make the most of it. I have to confess that at the time in my life when I was told that I, there were certain rules I no longer had to obey and I was 21 years old, I thought, okay, that’s good. I can not be so monastic in my, in my day to day living, so to speak. And then the other thing was my professors, especially it being San Francisco and Berkeley, we were all committed scientific atheists. And if you weren’t committed scientific atheists, that you weren’t a member of the club. My mother had died also at an early age. I had, however, two brothers and a sister. But my mentors were my professors and they were the ones who I had to please to get a good grade and get into school and graduate. And they were the ones who I looked to for things besides how to figure out thermodynamics. And these were the my, like I said, my mentors. And they were scientist scientific atheists. And I thought, okay, well, I guess that’s where we’re at. I’ll just. As long as I’m here on this planet, I’m going to do two things. I’m going to avenge the death of my mother who died of a rather slow, painful death from cancer. And I’m going to do the hardest thing a person can do just to just to thumb my nose in the face of the cynicism and be a medical oncologist, which in those times was considered like going to Siberia because it was so harsh and challenging. And so that’s what I did.
Jana Harmon
13:15 – 14:24
Wow. I’m curious obviously that there were a lot of influences that caused you to move or paradigm shift from a religious orientation and belief in God. And things were rather certain to this place of kind of a messy world really. And things became a lot more uncertain philosophically, moved towards a different paradigm altogether, leaving God behind within your studies. From a personal perspective, when you, when you adopted the scientific atheistic worldview of your professors at Berkeley, but just having lost both of your parents, how did that affect your life personally? And I find it also interesting how you moved into a field oncology where you are going to be faced with this question of death on a daily basis, but without God and a religious construct for something or a hope for something more, how did that play in your life?
Stephen Iacoboni
14:25 – 17:27
You know, the big existential question really is death. If you, if it’s 70s 80s America and you’re a white male in medical school, you don’t have to worry too much about your career path or a nuclear war or famine or the things that a lot of people around the world do have to deal with. We’re comfortable and we’re safe. And in fact, you have to go out of your way to put yourself in a dangerous situation. You have to climb mountains or jump off of cliffs with a parachute. And people do that because life, in some ways, suburban life is kind of boring. And so I thought, okay, well, Steve, you think you figured it all out? I want you to face death. And to do that, you have to do some be in a, as a friend of a colleague of mine said, Dr. Iacoboni is a unique physician because he takes care of people who are sick enough to die, as opposed to a pediatrician or a general practitioner or a gynecologist. And I wanted to stare it in the face and see if I could stare it down. One of the other things I like to tell people as I was searching for a worldview, and there is this thing, of course, called humanism. And I thought, oh, this is perfect. And then I realized, wait a minute. Humanism is the last six commandments of the ten. It leaves out the first three that have to do with God. So it’s basically a bunch of Judeo-Christians who still believe in the ten Commandments and want to behave as if they’re Jews or Christians, but they don’t want to acknowledge where that wisdom came from, which I thought was actually kind of made them look silly. One of the great blessings of my life, of course, is that I was instilled with a deep sense of right and wrong. So even after I left the, walked away from the first three commandments, I adhered strongly to the other seven. I might have stolen a Snickers bar once or twice, but that’s about it just to see if I could do it. And then, so anyway, so I was instilled with all the right values and I thought, well, I’ll just live my life that way.
Jana Harmon
17:27 – 18:40
And yeah, now when you were becoming a scientific atheist in Berkeley, and from what I read in your incredible books, you have the Undying Soul, where you tell your story, as well as Telos, where you really describe what it was like to be a scientific atheist. And the way that you talk about your, I hesitate to use the word indoctrination, but I believe you used that word in terms of the way that you were taught, in a sense, that bodies are merely mechanical machines, that we are physical entities, nothing more. And that you were even, I love the analogy, that you as a physician were just to be a mechanic fixing the machine. And did you really take that view of humanity? I mean, especially in the sense of being an oncologist. You’re there to fix their body, but there’s really nothing more than that. Is that how you approached your practice of medicine?
Stephen Iacoboni
18:43 – 24:02
I tried to and I failed, fortunately. And I like to say I failed very early on because I found that the, you know, when you’re going to medical medical school is overwhelming. You’re just studying and sleeping and eating fast food for 10 years, and there’s not a lot of time to reflect or contemplate on what’s going on. You just have to memorize the next textbook and take the test and move on. But when I started, when I left the classroom to go into the hospital and a clinic, I just fell in love with the human interaction. And it’s like someone thinks you’re a movie star because you walk in the room and you just. I’m just Steve. I hardly know anything. I hope I don’t screw this up. And the people say, well, oh, Doctor, I’m so glad you’re here. I need your help. And you me?, you know, and the human side was unavoidable in science, the history of science in general. This led me to study the history of science. And the history of science in general is this long list of vast oversimplifications that people hung onto for sometimes centuries just because they thought they had it figured out. Like, the world is flat and the sun goes around the Earth. And so I go, okay, I guess it’s settled and we can go on with our lives. Not stop thinking about that anymore. Now we know that it’s so vastly more complicated than that. It’s like a ball of twine that will never completely unwind which is the fun part of it, just like all the galaxies going on and on and on and on. Well, why should there be a finite universe if there’s an infinite? God can make all the galaxies he wants. People find comfort in simple answers. Anyway, when I was a first grade and I was learning about Adam and Eve, I raised my hand and asked the nun, if Adam and Eve were simply seeking knowledge, why were they punished? Because that’s what we’re supposed to be doing here every day in school. You want us to learn, to seek knowledge. What was the sin? And she didn’t give me a good answer. In fact, she just ignored my question. Well, she did give me an answer, but it took me until, you know, 10 years ago to understand what that answer was, which is exactly the answer, which is why we have scientific atheists, which is Adam and Eve took the fruit from the tree of knowledge, metaphorically speaking, and they called it their own. This is my knowledge. I know life, I know DNA, I know genetics, and therefore I am God. There’s nothing wrong with getting knowledge. That’s what we do. But you have to say, this knowledge belongs to God, and I am just the person He’s letting see it at the moment. I mean, Darwin said there’s an evolution, and I see that it was random and undesigned. He took the fact of evolution and turned it into something else just so that he could get all the credit for it. So people latch on to simple explanations, and they do it in part because it gives them power. You have to get to a point in life where you realize whatever you think you know, you don’t really know much. There’s more, way more than that. And you have to interpret what you know as best you can, but understand that science and thinking is always evolving. But what the other thing that’s really interesting about this, as I explained in my book Telos, is that Aristotle had all the answers 2,500 years ago. And that’s all we need to know is what he said, except to let St. Thomas Aquinas Christianize it, which is what he did. Now we really know all we need to know. And so there are simple truths that are timeless, but everything else that is a fact, like scientific facts always change. They have to change because it’s just an observation. Mathematical facts never change. Two plus two can never be anything but four. And yet the force of gravity on planet Earth is not constant. It changes a little bit all the time.
Jana Harmon
24:03 – 25:05
Yeah. Yeah. So as you were a doctor and you would walk into the rooms of your patients, and you were the movie star, you were the one who had the knowledge and you could help them and you could treat them. But again, coming from a scientific, atheistic perspective, did you ever find limitations within that naturalism that caused you to think maybe there is something more? Because at that point in your life, you lived several actually decades within this naturalistic framework that nature is all there is. There is nothing supernatural, then there’s no afterlife. But you were confronting patients day after day with this sense of, okay, I’ll try to help you live your life as long as you can. But you couldn’t give them hope for something more, even in the face of death. How did you deal with those tensions? And did you start to feel more palpably the limits of your naturalism?
Stephen Iacoboni
25:08 – 25:10
So I see you’ve read my book.
Jana Harmon
25:13 – 25:14
Read both of them.
Stephen Iacoboni
25:17 – 34:06
And I do talk about that in detail. In the first book, the Undying Soul, I tried to remain indifferent and just be clinical. And it created a lot of tension. And I didn’t understand it because I thought, well, I’m the mechanic. And your carburetor needs to be adjusted. I’m going to adjust it. What more do you want from me? And I don’t know whether. And I had lots of colleagues who got away with that. They see 30 people a day dash in and out of the room and so on. Some people are more accessible or seemingly more accessible. And if you seem accessible and you’re not accessible, then people who want a piece of you and don’t get it are frustrated. So I had a talk with a friend who said, you need to let that go. And I thought, well, if I get emotionally involved with these people, then the losses will mount up and be devastating. But I did anyway because it was just getting too hard to not care. And so I just jumped in, all in, and let my patients know I cared about them. I found myself in, I put myself in a rural setting, partly because I didn’t. I grew up in LA and San Francisco, and I didn’t want to deal with traffic and smog and crime and crowding. And I’m a country boy, and I wanted to be able to get out into the mountains without spending three days driving to get there. Like on a weekend, you know, Saturday afternoon, just go somewhere for a hike and then come home. You know, it’s part of what you do as a doctor to understand the socioeconomics of your clientele. I mean, you have to know whether they’re going to have trouble paying for their medicine or whether they can drive to see you as frequently as you need to, and who’s at home to take care of them. And what they did for a living that may contribute to their condition, whether they can go back to that or not. And, whether they drink or smoke. And in the process, you find out, you know, whether they go to church or not. And many, many times my patients wouldn’t say, do you go to church? They would say, what church are you going to? As it was a given that you must be going to church. You’re not a monkey. And so I thought, okay, well, I don’t have to provide any existential counseling because these people have clerics. That’s their job. But it turns out that if you’re a cancer doctor and you see a patient two or three times a month for a year or more during one of the most emotionally demanding periods of their life, it’s sort of like being with someone and your plane crashed in the mountains and you spent a year of making your way back to civilization. You create a bond. And also, I was the smart one in the room, so to speak. And so they wanted me to give them existential answers. What’s going to happen to me? And I didn’t have any answers. And I realized, you can’t keep copping out. You should have an answer. And it was at about this time, where I’ve been going, doing this for 20 years, that I realized in the late 90s, see, back in the 70s, they said, well, the scientific atheists said, well, we know what DNA is, and we know how cells work, and we know it’s all genetics and chemical, but there are a number of things we don’t quite understand, the complexities that we need to sort out. And then we’ll write one big chemical equation for life. And then all of you people can turn your churches into department stores, because that’s all they’re good for. And that if you believe in God, you believe in only because of the gaps in our knowledge called the God of the gaps. You probably are familiar with that term. So in the late 90s, I said, well, you know, I’ve been so busy studying and working and raising a family, I said, you know, if I’m going to answer these questions, I need to go back to the unanswered questions of 1975 and see what answers have been given. Because I wasn’t really studying basic science anymore. I was just being a doctor, giving medicine to people and checking their lab results. And somewhat to my surprise, when I went back, I found out that the gaps had exploded, that what they thought was a very simple thing turned out to be a complexity beyond imagination. And that the little gaps that were supposed to have been closed by 1999 had expanded into these vast canyons that were insurmountable to traverse. What’s going on here? What did I miss? And so I just dug deeper and deeper until I realized what I had just told you a few minutes ago about the seduction of easy explanations to complex problems and how I had fallen into that. And one of the things about me that I was never willing to surrender was my intellectual integrity. And I don’t mean to sound like a snob. I’m just a person who wants to know the truth. And I had a very rigorous education. And I said, well, what’s really going on here? And the more I read, there is this saying, you know, this guy, I’m not going to use his name, but he said, there’s enough evidence now that I can be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. Well, now what’s happened in the past 20 years is that we now can be intellectually fulfilled believers in Jesus Christ. Because all the science of the last 25 years points right back to the God of Abraham, period. I was just at an annual meeting with Discovery Institute last weekend, and we were saying it’s not even possible to doubt this. It’s just like we’re back to 1940 when everyone said, yeah, of course there’s a God. Yeah, how can there not be a God? There’s a sun up there and there’s water and everything. And everyone understood simple things. Anyway, so about this time, I was coming out of my atheist delusions, scientific atheism delusions, and realizing the joy of affirming for people their faith. And it turned out really, that they didn’t want much more from me than that. They just wanted affirmation. You know, so if you go, I use this other metaphor. If you go to church or synagogue or temple or mosque every Sunday or Saturday, and the person up there says, well, there’s a God, and these are the commandments, and you must do this and that. You go, yeah, okay, well, you’re getting paid to say that, and I appreciate you saying it, and I’m glad you’re up here doing it, but we’re the choir and you’re preaching to us, so good for you. But what do the really smart people think, Like Stephen Hawking and all these guys are on TV telling us that if you believe in God, you’re stupid. And so for the smart guy, meaning me, the scientists, to say science proves God, not the other way around, it’s very affirming to them. They don’t want to really. They don’t have to know the science. I mean, they can. If they want to, they can read my book, but they just want to know that the guy or the gal who studied the science said, yeah, actually the science points right back to God.
Jana Harmon
34:07 – 34:46
Yes. I’m curious. You said that when people would come into your practice, they were many times church going folk and you were affirming them in some way in their faith. But you were a physician who still held to atheism, but you were becoming a little bit disillusioned with those beliefs and innocence in that. So how, I’m sitting here wondering how were you affirming someone in their beliefs or faith in God when you yourself weren’t holding to that belief?
Stephen Iacoboni
34:47 – 36:02
Of course, for a period of time I was conflicted, but doctors tell white lies in the office all the time. Oh, you’re fine or it’ll be okay. And you know, there won’t be. You know, it’s important to point out that a physician is morally and ethically, if not legally constrained to not talk politics or religion with a patient until they’re given permission. In other words, I can’t walk into the room and tell somebody who to vote for or what church to go to. But there comes a time in the relationship when they want to talk about these things, and certainly not early on. It’s like any relationship, you don’t start talking about the heavy stuff first. But so I don’t, you know, I don’t proselytize. It’s like you said, I just give them permission to believe. In other words, I’m a scientist. And these other people who are telling you that science has disproven your beliefs, they’re wrong. You don’t have to worry about it.
Jana Harmon
36:03 – 36:24
You said that you started to become a little bit disillusioned, a little discontented with that atheistic worldview. What did you do with that? What did you do with that? Those tensions that you were feeling. Yes. How did you pursue the way out of your secularized atheism towards something else?
Stephen Iacoboni
36:25 – 37:36
It’s hard to leave your place of comfort. And as I described, I had given up so much of my time and energy to be an elite intellectual physician scientist. And there was still sort of the feeling that, well, if you just give all that back to God, put the fruit back on the tree, that then you’re not so damn important after all, like you thought you were and everyone thinks you are. My wife had to always sort of give me my comeuppance and, and I actually found great satisfaction in doing menial chores because I said, oh, no one’s life depends on whether I do this correctly or not, like, make the oatmeal or something in the morning. But when I found out how easy and satisfying it was to give people what they wanted and how it somehow made sense, even though I hadn’t come to the intellectual reconciliation.
Jana Harmon
37:37 – 38:00
So what was it, though, that allowed you to move again from this place of disillusionment towards belief? I know you spoke of your patients coming in. Many of them were churchgoers, people of faith. Did their response to death have any impact on your view of life and death and the potential or possibility of God?
Stephen Iacoboni
38:00 – 44:12
Well, absolutely. And one of the things that frustrated me early on was that, you know, in a godless, like when my father died, he said, oh, he’s in heaven now. I remember his older brother, my uncle, in the depth of my grief, he said to me, Stephen, God picks his prettiest flowers first. And so we moved on. And I was struck by the fact that everyone was fighting the inevitable in a way that was not good for anybody. And so I understand the fear of death is an extremely motivated force, one of the most motivating forces. That said, I thought at some point, a person who’s wracked in pain and nauseated and can’t even get up and go to the bathroom, at some point they would say, I’m ready. And most people don’t. And I thought, well, this denial of death is stupid and it’s counterproductive. So that was hard for me. These people were churchgoers. And I thought, well, you’re just hypocrites. Until I ran into. I didn’t run into. I was sent two individuals in particular, who I profile in the first book, who came into my life and said, I’m going to show you how to die, Stephen. Because I had spent, you know, I’d seen thousands of patients fighting, swimming upstream, not trying to get swept away by the waterfowl, swimming as hard as I could instead of just relaxing until it happened. And you say, you see, if someone performs any one spectacular feat that’s remarkable, that person shows you that it’s possible if you hit 60 home runs in a year or win seven Super Bowls. And if one person can say, I’m going to show you how to die, and I’m doing it for you, Steve. Dr. Icaboni, I’m here. I have one patient tell me that. It’s in my book. And she said. I asked her, I said, why aren’t you afraid? Everyone else is afraid. You’re suffering. I’m giving you chemo. Everyone around you is sad. Why are you happy all the time? And she said, she said, God gave me cancer to show you how to die and how to live. And the thing about it was, you know, she was the most self effacing person in the universe. She was poor, she had a devoted family. I went to visit her in her home. In her deathbed, she lived in this tiny little cabin in the woods somewhere. She wasn’t rich or famous or trying to draw attention to herself. Everything she said and did was totally sincere. You know, it’s one thing for someone to say, yeah, I can do that, and then they try and do it and they can’t. But this lady came in and took her chemo with a smile on her face, sick as heck, with a high white count and a high fever. And she never complained, she wasn’t putting on an act. And so like when someone finally gives you the key to a door that’s been unlocked to you for your most of your life since you left God at age 18, you go through that door and you know, you go, oh, I got the key. I’ve been looking for this. Where’s it been? And you know, I truly believe I was set out in the wilderness. So I thoroughly understand the scientific atheism argument because I lived it, I believed it, I thoroughly understand it, I studied it, I give lectures on it to my colleagues. I said, here’s what the argument is and here’s the flaw. And believe me, the flaws are very hard to find because they’re not discussed. You have to dig into layer, layer, layer, down to the very basic beginning of it. What was Charles Darwin’s absolutely fundamental flaw which completely destroys his argument? Actually there are several, but, and so I, you know, I look upon that period of time in my life when I had to wander in the wilderness as a way to understand what other people are going through and how they see the world so that I can talk them out of it. You know, if you’ve never been in that position, it’s kind of hard to talk to someone about their beliefs and why they believe that way.
Jana Harmon
44:12 – 44:47
The patient who came to you very simply, who approached death without fear and with much grace, who came to show you what it looked like to live and to die? Well, what was it that informed her ability to do that in such a profound way? And so much so that she gave you what you called the key to a different kind of way of looking at perhaps your own worldview. What was that?
Stephen Iacoboni
44:47 – 47:23
We all know that faith is a gift. To believe in something you can’t touch or see or feel requires something special from you. Some people have more of it than others. And so when she showed me, this really isn’t that hard, Steve. She never called me Steve. I was talking to myself. But yes, what really did it for me was when I went to her home, which was like an hour’s drive away, and I met on a Saturday. And she was in this really, I mean, it’s all a storybook, this humble little cabin. She’s in her deathbed, surrounded by the family, and she’s laying there and she did the one thing that my mother did for me when my mother was in the same situation. You walk in the room and you expect the person to be full of self pity and wanting you to help them in some way. But there was none of that. She was just so happy that I had shown up. Like, there she is, suffering and dying in a way that’s hard to imagine. Her bones were all eaten away, she was in terrible pain, and yet she was happy to see me. Why would you be happy about anything? God puts you in a position that, you know is the old saying, when the master, when the student is ready, the master will appear. God puts you in that position and then you can’t turn away from it. And you know, that’s the other thing is that I had a friend who was helping me on my journey towards back to God. And she said, and this is really profound, the simplest things are the most profound. She said, Stephen, it’s not that seeing is believing. It is that you will not believe, you will not see until you believe. You have to believe first in order to see it. So my advice to the listeners is if you want to see something, you have to believe it first and it will come to you, but you have to believe it first before you’re going to ever see it. Because if you keep saying, oh, that wasn’t a miracle, or that wasn’t special, or then you’re going to miss it.
Jana Harmon
47:23 – 47:35
Yeah, I think there’s something to be said for having, as William James would say, the will to believe that there has to be a willingness to see what’s there.
Stephen Iacoboni
47:36 – 48:16
Well, when you have this intellectual barrier like, no, it can’t be true, it can’t be true, it can’t be true. You know, in the intelligent design community, we joke about scientists who say, well, boy, it sure looks designed, but I know it’s not. Sure looks designed, but I know it can’t be because Darwin said it can’t be. Eventually, like I did, like a lot of us did, you break down and you go just to put a cap on it, you know, the science of the 90s and the 80s that was supposed to close the book on Abrahamistic faith is all overturned now.
Jana Harmon
48:16 – 50:55
You’ve come really full circle, haven’t you? You started your life was a belief in God, you left it behind and then you came back to the place where you started. But even more so you were given eyes to see that all of reality makes the most sense if there’s, if God exists and that we matter because God has created us in this incredibly beautifully ornate and complex way and there’s really no other way to explain it. And so now you can, you can take your perspective that is so deep and so wide and so grounded now to your patients and affirm them with a genuineness of knowing personally and intellectually and existentially in every way that this is a God ordained and God fueled and filled world in which we are valuable and that there is a place for us after death and that death is nothing to fear. That’s what I’m hearing from you, is that life is valuable and death is even, you use the word key and doorway or gateway even to his presence, which is an amazing way to live, not only for living life in his fullness, but anticipating what is to come. I really, really appreciate your story. I appreciate your honesty, your humility. And I think I appreciate more than anything that you are extending even past retirement age into investing in other people to help them see and feel and find what you were able to find. You are now being the key, hopefully Lord willing, in the doorway for others to come and come in and see that there is something more. Thank you, Dr. Iacoboni, for such a rich conversation and for really helping us to see that the, the story and sometimes the narratives that are given even by the most intellectual people in the world are not necessarily the smartest or the wisest, but it takes eyes to see that there is something more and that sometimes we do need to shift our paradigms in the right direction. So thank you so much for coming on.
Stephen Iacoboni
50:55 – 51:05
I appreciate it, Jana, it’s been a real honor and privilege and I thank you for hosting me today and thank you again.
Jana Harmon
51:07 – 52:02
You’re so welcome. Dr. Stephen Iacoboni’s story is a powerful journey of honesty, science and faith. If you’d like to go deeper into his story or learn more of the scientific basis for a life of purpose, I encourage you to read his books the Undying Soul and Telos. Both explore the intersection of science, death, and the search for meaning in profound ways. If you’re new to eX-skeptic and would like to hear more stories like this one, be sure to subscribe to the podcast and YouTube channel or visit us at eX-skeptic.org, where you’ll find curated resources, playlists, and ways to connect. eX-skeptic is part of the C.S. lewis Institute podcast Network. Special thanks to our producer Ashley Kelfer for making today’s episode possible. Thank you again for joining us. I hope you’ll be back next time for another unlikely story of belief.
