Former atheist Spencer grew up in an abusive home, and while his mother took him to church, it felt more like a manipulative act than genuine faith. Witnessing the hypocrisy of the self-proclaimed Christians around him, Spencer began reading philosophical books. He determined that Christianity, like other religions, was irrational and needed to be challenged.
He often engaged in debates with Christians, attempting to liberate them by dismantling their beliefs. He eventually found Christians that not only listened to his criticisms, but helped him look for real answers to his questions. After much study, Spencer began to see Christianity and the God of the Bible in a whole new light.
Guest bio:
Spencer Durrenberger is a chemist in Texas, with a Bachelor’s degree in Biology and Physics from the University of Texas at Arlington. He currently works in the medical field, specializing in oncology with Humana Pathology, where he contributes to groundbreaking medical research focused on cancer.
Resources Mentioned: The Gospels
For History, read Luke
For History from the perspective of the Law, read Matthew
For Why God became Man, read Mark
For The Divinity of Christ and Beauty, read John
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Episode Transcript
Spencer Durrenberger
00:00 – 00:23
Things had started changing and especially my interactions. Now that I was talking with these people, I was interacting as if God existed and having a discussion as to why he didn’t exist. While existing in a way trying to have that conversation and having no response back. However, that response back actually did happen. I was just stubborn is the nice way to put it.
Jana Harmon
00:27 – 01:59
Welcome to eX-skeptic where we explore unlikely stories of belief. I’m Jana Harmon. In each episode, we hear from those who once were atheists or skeptics but against all odds became followers of Christ. If you enjoy today’s episode, be sure to explore more than 100 more transformative stories on our website at exskeptic.org or visit our YouTube channel for even more powerful testimonies. We always love to hear what you’re thinking. Feel free to share your thoughts with us@infoxskeptic.org.
Now you’ve probably heard the argument that rational people don’t believe in God, that faith is only for the simple minded. Some claim that science and rationality are the only intelligent paths, while religious belief is seen as weakness or ignorance. In fact, many skeptics make it their mission to save others from what they see as the irrationality of faith. In today’s episode, we’ll meet Spencer Durrenberger, a former atheist who once fully embraced this mindset. A self-proclaimed ‘hyperrealist’, Spencer was driven to rescue the religious from what he saw as their delusions. But today he’s a passionate follower of Christ, dedicated to helping others find truth and life in Jesus. So how did such a radical transformation occur? I invite you to stay with us as we dive into Spencer’s powerful story. Hi Spencer. Welcome to eX-skeptic. It’s so great to have you with me today.
Spencer Durrenberger
02:00 – 02:01
Good to be with you as well.
Jana Harmon
02:02 – 02:14
Wonderful. As we’re getting started, I’d love for the listeners to get a sense of who you are now. Can you introduce us to yourself, perhaps where you live and work a little bit about your education and yourself?
Spencer Durrenberger
02:14 – 02:41
Yeah. My name is Spencer Durrenberger. I grew up in Houston, but I’m living in Dallas. I came up here for school at UT Arlington for a degree in both biology and physics and then a minor in math. I then transitioned into the medical field where I work now doing work on oncology, particularly with hematopathology. I do a lot of chromosome analysis and other things like that.
Jana Harmon
02:42 – 03:11
I’d love to get to know a little bit about your life and because you’re sitting here before me as a former atheist, a skeptic, from what I understand, a pretty strong atheist. And so, I would love to know a bit about your story, your backstory, how that all started. Give us some ideas of how you grew up, your family, your religion or faith, if there was any, or not. Give us a picture of what that looked like.
Spencer Durrenberger
03:11 – 05:28
Most people, I’d say, are not unaccustomed to some sort of drama in their families. I grew up with a lot of abuse. All of the abuses – I’ve suffered all of them and they will harden one’s heart pretty significantly. As you suffer through things, you either pour it out in negative ways or you bottle it in or different aspects, depending on which psychologist you’re talking to. And in my case, I converted it into thinking about the world and thinking about, you know, how the world could come to be this way through all of that struggling, I guess is the best way to put it. And the sufferings would be from both parents, I guess is also something to caveat there though. They are not who they were, they definitely were not the best people to have raised kids. And so, when it came to things like going to church after the divorce, you know, church was used not as a, we’re trying to be Christian, but church was used as more so a place for my mom specifically to find people who could be more easily manipulated, people who she could have affairs with. There’s a lot more to that side of the story. But it was, it definitely calloused me to the purpose of a church. So going to, it was waste of my time and waste of others time. The kids’ ministries were all about having fun and not about teaching anything of substance. There’s no intellectual growth, just a lot of feeling based things. And for someone who suffers a lot of physical, mental, emotional pains, feelings kind of get turned off a lot easier or a lot quicker. So yeah, just that appeal to emotion was just not strong. Didn’t make for a good case in my head. So, I just had never found a really good use of it and eventually was able to convince my mom not to be going to church. But yeah, church never really played a major role at that point.
Jana Harmon
05:28 – 06:45
Okay, first of all let me say I’m sorry. It sounds like you really suffered quite a horrendous upbringing in your family. Abuse is something that is incredibly destructive to the human soul and heart. And I can understand why you would want to turn off the emotional aspect of who you were because of the pain that you’d suffered, and how a fluffy church environment for a child made no sense to you because what was going on at home was very serious and very horrific it sounds in many ways. And so, you grew up in a family, obviously that went to church, but for you it was just a facade, a charade, something like you say your mom used for manipulative purposes. So, there was nothing genuine about it. It sounds like there was not genuine love there, not genuine love in the home. That’s a hard and very trying way to grow up. And you said at some point you started to reject anything that was even related to religion or church. How old were you at that time?
Spencer Durrenberger
06:45 – 08:44
My parents split at six, so roughly about seven. I really started opening my eyes to some of these errors and these inconsistencies that just didn’t seem to fit with what people were saying and what people were doing. And the great hypocrisies I was seeing amongst people, particularly among people who would call themselves Christians, I didn’t understand at that point in time, especially at that age, the concept of like nominally Christian people who don’t actually follow through but just call themselves such. So without that wiser, older bracket, it was very easy to just lump everyone who called themselves a Christian or a believer in something into this. Religious people are hypocrites, religious people are bad. And that definitely took hold a little further down the line. Maybe about nine, I started reading things like Plato’s Republic. My dad’s a very rational man, very high-minded man. He got me introduced to very big philosophical works very early on in part in, through certain fantasy series, and then into the meat of some of these works like Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. I finished these before I was maybe 12 or 13 and seeing how that worldview clicked a lot better with kind of the self-made man and the high-valued man. And that if you can’t affect the outside world, especially from someone who’s suffered a lot, you can’t fight your way out of these bubbles. But you can fight internally, and you can make yourself stronger and you can make yourself better than others who are not doing this. So, you can make yourself a good person, you can make yourself a giving person, you can make yourself this, that, the other. So it was easier to work internally and on that kind of a framework than all these hypocrites who just said one thing and did other things.
Jana Harmon
08:45 – 09:06
It seemed to make better sense of your reality I would imagine. So, you were living, your parents were divorced, I presume. Did you maintain a relationship with both parents at this time? It sounds like obviously you had a relationship with your father, very strong intellectual one, but you still maintained a relationship with your mother as well?
Spencer Durrenberger
09:06 – 09:28
Yes, I lived with my mom until I was kicked out at 15 and then with my dad until graduating high school. Well, until maybe 17. Something in that ballpark. It’s been a few years. I tend to not remember all the specific details on some of the things that matter less.
Jana Harmon
09:29 – 10:01
Right. So, in your father and your mother, your father was encouraging you to read all of these, this literature and this philosophy really that was wrapped up in an atheistic worldview, it sounds like. Did he profess any faith at all? I know you mentioned that your mother used church or manipulated church for her own good, but did, did your father ever express faith in God or was he. Did he dismiss all of that?
Spencer Durrenberger
10:02 – 10:23
Dismissed it pretty outright. My mom had encouraged him to go to church, but her not being a believer and him not seeing any point in it, it just never really clicked. And not with his more intellectually skewed worldviews as well. That hyper rationalization, it just, it didn’t fit if, if you don’t follow those pieces up.
Jana Harmon
10:23 – 11:05
So as you were reading these works and you sounds like you were convinced that this was the proper view of reality in light of your own experience from your younger childhood as well as your later years, more rational years and difficult. You had difficulty the whole time, but I presume that you never accepted any kind of belief in God or as any kind of reality. That you too moved along the lines of your father into a more rational, rational atheistic perspective. Is that right? Or when did you identify as an atheist or as an agnostic or how did you identify?
Spencer Durrenberger
11:06 – 12:20
I didn’t really grasp the identification process until high school. I would say I was a non-believer, more generically, not believing in anything because a belief in something seemed kind of an instant insufficient thing to focus one’s mind on. So just the complete ignoring or apathetic atheists, I guess is the best way to put it. And then as I moved into high school and started getting influenced with other friends who were more atheistic and were more high-minded or high social status people, the materialism and the directness of what we can do for ourselves and kind of that hedonistic humanism definitely influenced more things. It wasn’t something I necessarily clung to, but the atheistic arguments that they rooted, why they would do things made more sense. And so, at that point I at least affirmed atheism, though not necessarily to that side of their philosophy. I definitely stayed more of an objectivist along Ayn Rand’s existentialism.
Jana Harmon
12:22 – 12:52
So how long were you invested in this worldview did you find? And how much? I guess I could say, you know, there’s one, it’s one thing to believe something from an idealistic perspective, I mean in terms of ideology, but it’s another thing to actually live that ideology out. Did you consider yourself an existentialist? Did you become a nihilist? Did you really buy in heart and soul and life into this point of view?
Spencer Durrenberger
12:53 – 14:23
Yes and no. So, there were steps along the way. And it kind of goes into a lot of the pieces of the story. There were definitely pieces that I would interact with in the world, things that would happen, songs I would hear that would speak a wise truth, something that really couldn’t be ignored, but it didn’t fit with my worldview. But those pieces would be set to the side. I did try and live out the more objectivist, hyper-rationalist side of things starting in high school when I really encountered my first real Christians and people who were walking and talking and living as a Christian. And it definitely flew in the face of the other Christians and non-believers around me. And I became much more militant, probably too hard of a word, but I would say adamant and opposing against Christians. And it really kind of cauterized, I think is the right word, my intentions that this was a problem. Christianity and other belief systems were problems in this world and they needed to be addressed because they weren’t objectively rational. And so, starting in high school, freshman, sophomore year, for the next long while I sought out believers of things to start what became a long, long train of ripping people from their belief systems with hyper-rationality.
Jana Harmon
14:23 – 14:47
So, it’s one thing to disagree with someone else’s perspective, particularly religious perspective. It’s another thing to have a sense of contempt for it and want to tear it down. What do you suppose fueled that level of contempt that you became? It sounds like fairly aggressive in pursuing the destruction of religion, tearing down the beliefs in other people.
Spencer Durrenberger
14:48 – 15:42
I wish I could, you know, find a blame other places or even, you know, someone could argue, you know, we can blame our childhoods and this, that the other. It was really just in me more than anything else I saw the hypocrisies of the world. I saw it from childhood. I saw it moving forward and hypocrisy at its root is a contradiction of state of beings. Just that that hyper-rationalism just can’t deal with that hypocrisy, can’t deal with that contradiction. So, when I saw it, I sought to correct it. And that corrective force worked itself out as more of an aggressive attacking force than a, more of a gentle calming force, more like an avalanche instead of a river. It sought to just boulder and bulldoze its way through other people’s minds and just became an attack.
Jana Harmon
15:45 – 16:34
In your way of thinking, did it feel like you were in a sense on mission, doing something good, in a sense accomplishing your purpose? Is this how you know the strength of your inner strength, in your self-made manhood and personhood that you were able to overcome this and you needed to. It was almost like the strong over the week and trying to get rid of whatever that was and that I’m sure you saw some purpose in that, some goodness in that, that you were justifying your actions. What did that look like? Like if you met a Christian, would you have some kind of frank discussion or would you just criticize or would you listen to the other perspective at all?
Spencer Durrenberger
16:35 – 17:04
I would actually, I would pretty quickly, you know, ask why you’re a Christian, what makes you believe what you believe? Why would that convince you that that’s a good thing to believe in, to trust in? What evidence do you have for that? And it would be very much so a conversation that was directed with great animosity and just seeking to find a weak point in their beliefs so that it could be exploited.
Jana Harmon
17:06 – 17:35
Yeah, you had mentioned obviously that your father was hyper-rational. You perceived yourself probably also as a hyper-rational person, that you presumed that there was no rational base for religion, in this case particularly Christianity. When someone tried to present evidence or any sense of logic or rationality undergirding their Christianity, was that accepted by you or was that dismissed out of hand?
Spencer Durrenberger
17:35 – 18:52
For the most part, I didn’t encounter many solid evidence given. There were pieces here and there. You know, we trust the Bible because it’s the word of God. Cool. You know, prove it. And where do we see that it’s the word of God? And outside of a couple of Bible verses given, there weren’t really much evidence for that. Some of the arguments I believe because this, that the other. Okay, prove it. You know, miracles happen. Prove it. Like it’s hard to find that proof, when you actually dig into it. And people just weren’t prepared for those kind of conversations. Teenagers even into college, they weren’t prepared for those conversations. And even though I was definitely attacking Christianity, I did move even into Hindus and Muslims and Buddhists. Everything was on the table for me because all of it fell short. Obviously the, you know, looking back now, the giant blinding eye was that I fell short too. But it was more so, you know, I saw everyone else falling short with their beliefs and it was trying to gird them up and encourage them to be better, to be stronger. And that meant getting rid of the weak link in their life, which was religion.
Jana Harmon
18:53 – 18:58
So, you perceived religion, generally speaking, as something for the weak?
Spencer Durrenberger
18:58 – 18:59
Yeah.
Jana Harmon
18:59 – 19:03
What did you think religion or particularly Christianity was?
Spencer Durrenberger
19:05 – 19:42
It was a set of moral values. At the end of the day, it set up moral systems, but it also set up rules and regulations, none of which necessarily made anyone better. They still had to choose to follow these things. And so as long as they weren’t following it, having those rules just made you worse than not having them. So, the correction wasn’t to focus on what are the moral issues and what are the rules and regulations to follow. It is on becoming strong enough to make those choices and to choose to live moral lives.
Jana Harmon
19:42 – 20:11
There’s also a presumption that you were making, that you’re talking about a little bit here as a hyper-rational person in a godless world. There is no particular standard of goodness by which you’re judging religion to be not good. It sounds as if you had a sense of moral and rational superiority in your world, in this hyper-rational world and you were making judgments based upon what?
Spencer Durrenberger
20:11 – 21:26
Big blind spot? No, it’s one of those, everyone knows what goodness is and it’s easy to avoid it. It was very intuitive at that point. I could come to that part of it with rationalization and you know it when you know it. No one would disagree that these things are good. And it was purely action based. You know, if I help someone who fell down, everyone says that is a good thing to do. So, everyone would do that. Anyone not doing that’s not doing a good thing. And it was just very pragmatically moral and it skipped the undergirding of where that morality came from. And it just a giant blind spot. It took a long time before I started to hear those arguments and how they were addressed from major skeptics like Hitchens and others. And obviously, The God Delusion came up early on in high school and other things. So, it was a long time before I found those moral arguments having a necessity for an undergirding. But it was something to be dealt with along the way. It never really needed to be stopped and addressed, which is obviously a major error.
Jana Harmon
21:28 – 22:02
Yeah, we all have our own blind spots, don’t we? When we believe what we believe and we have good reason to believe what we believe, sometimes we don’t understand the fullness of or the implications of our belief system. So, you’re going along, you are on your moral and rational high horse and you’re tearing down of the Christians and religious systems around you. Take us from there. What, what happened next? How long were you in this phase of really seeking to make the world right with hyper-rationalism?
Spencer Durrenberger
22:02 – 22:39
It was through a couple of years of undergrad and then when I moved to UT Arlington, my first year there is when I first found real Christians in mass who were living Christian lives because that’s really what they’ve given their lives to. So, the better part of six, eight years, I was starting my confrontations and then genuinely like seeking out and pulling people from their religious beliefs. And I continued to do that after going to college, but it wasn’t until I got to my freshman year.
Jana Harmon
22:39 – 23:00
So, you were actively trying to de-convert religious people? That’s what it sounds like. And so you were an evangelist for atheism, essentially. You were influential that way and you started meeting some genuine Christians whom I presume you weren’t able to de-convert.
Spencer Durrenberger
23:01 – 26:12
No, that was kind of I’d say the first big stone, lots of pebbles along the way. But the first big stone that caused me to have to shift and adjust was a group of guys started with a guy named Irvin, and I think he’s now preaching or leading over in Louisiana. And he met me at midnight one night as I was studying and wanted to talk to me about Christianity and evangelize and bring the good news. And I warned him it was not going to be a good idea to waste his time on me. I was going to pull him from his religion, and he was not going to want that. So, he was better off moving on. I had more studying today. He’s like, ‘no, I would love to sit with you. I’d love to talk.’ And I was like, ‘all right, bring it on.’ So, I thought, with fair warning he’s going to get what he deserves. And yeah, I threw a bunch of biblical contradictions at him just to start off. And he’s like, ‘whoa, I’ve never addressed anything like this. I’d never heard of some of this, you know, can I come back to you later this week, next week and see if I’ve come up with any answers.’ I was like, ‘sure, whatever, get out of here, go on, that’s fine.’ And he came back the next week and was like, ‘I have some answers for you.’ And I was like, ‘all right, let’s hear it.’ And that started a process of him and then a couple of his friends as well that came along and they’d sit down with me and try and bring some scripture to bear and I would just rip it to shreds. And they would go, ‘huh, I don’t know how to deal with this,’ or ‘have you thought about this way instead of that way?’ And it started these great conversations. It led me to going to the Baptist Student Ministry, the BSM on campus, wonderful organization, just God honoring place. And I grew up in music. I sung in choirs for over a decade and I sung even in college. You know, the music you sing in choirs is more Christian related music. Some of the great masses and the great multi-part pieces that have been written over the centuries are all Christian music. Christians have had the biggest hand in choral music. So, you get a lot of that, and the music is very uplifting, very inspiring. There’s something about it that just sends a shiver down your spine when you hear these four part eight-part hymns with these beautiful harmonies. And so, I was like, yeah, ‘I can go just for the music part of it.’ And so, I went to listen to the music. And even though I stuck around for a while that semester and the next semester working with the AV team, their audiovisual team, I never really engaged beyond just the minorist amounts for the Christians I’d met. They were very young in their belief, whether they were longtime Christians or new believers, they were just very young. And my rational mind was so conflicted with these people who are supposed to be really good people, being really dumb people. So, it was another struggle that eventually pushed me away. And I pushed away for other reasons as well.
Jana Harmon
26:12 – 26:52
So you were having conversations with these Christians. There was something about them that seemed rather good and yet not intellectual or not rational or not intelligent, but there was enough for you to draw them or them to draw you into conversations, to draw to choral services, to draw you towards the Baptist Student union, that you’ve still found some goodness there, enough to even participate, I guess, at the AV production level. But yet you were willing to leave that behind when that phase of your life was over. So, walk us on from there.
Spencer Durrenberger
26:53 – 30:51
They were good at heart, which was good. And anyone, I guess, could be good at heart. So that didn’t necessarily contradict anywhere. And that was nice. They were very wise, which, seeking wisdom made it a good place, even if they weren’t necessarily as intellectual. I was, I would have liked. They did have wisdom, but the wisdom sources seemed to dry up a little bit. Then I got involved with a lady friend and we started a very worldly relationship and that definitely pulled away. You know, spend time with girlfriend or spend time with the people I don’t believe with. So that was a really easy, easy solution. And that aspect really pulled me away for a couple of years along the line. A major part of this being that Gary, who was leading the Baptist student ministry, the BSM, he was constantly reaching out to have conversations with me, check in with me, and just reiterate the gospel from multiple points of view and multiple ways and analogies of breaking it down. I probably heard it 30 different ways, some of it on repeat, but like, for the most part, he just constantly trying to be there both for me and with the gospel. So, both while I was going and then for the years when I wasn’t there, he would just find me on campus randomly, as it felt to me. And typically, at times when it wasn’t the easiest for me, he would run into me and then be like, ‘hi, I haven’t seen you in a couple of months. Let’s talk.’
I didn’t have, kind of going back, I didn’t have the best relationship with family, so I didn’t have a lot of financial support. I worked multiple jobs while a student and had to pay my own way. So, there was definitely times when I was short funds for food and just didn’t eat for a couple of days. And so, he would find me during one of those times, be like, ‘we’re having food. Come and talk with me.’ And I’m like, ‘oh, I’ll come and talk,’ but I’m really doing this for the food. And so, it was stuff like that, right? God’s timing, you know, looking back was so perfect. But, in my head in the moment was very much so ‘I’m doing this out of necessity and not because I want it.’ So, it took until another relationship down the road in my senior year that things really started to change. As far as my story goes, that’s definitely the big one. It went from just a general, worldly relationship to a very, very physically intensive relationship. You know, had its perks for that, but it was missing a lot of the other aspects of what a real relationship was. And especially as I was older and really seeking to understand what it would look like to move toward marriage and other things, I wanted that full relationship with the emotional connection and the mental connection and the physical and intimate connections. And even despite those four pieces, there always seemed to be something lacking. And the person I was with, we weren’t as well connected intellectually, which was fine, but it definitely seemed like there was more than just that missing. And in walks Gary one great day in December and invites me back to the BSM and just kind of knew that I was looking for something and probed and asked and I didn’t have a good answer for him. And he just encouraged me to come back, kept talking with me, and December break happens came back in January. And then the people I had met just in the brief couple of weeks of December started finding me on campus and he kept finding me on campus and I kept coming back to the BSM.
Jana Harmon
30:51 – 31:45
At that point, you felt that there was something missing in that relationship that you were in. But it feels as if, when you’re speaking to me, that you were actually sensing something missing in your own life that would draw you back to the BSM. Right? There was something that this hyper-rational view of the world and of yourself wasn’t providing. Yeah, so what could you pinpoint what was missing even not just in that relationship, but in your own life that allowed you to be willing to actually go into a place where you felt, in a sense, that you were seen. Right? That you were loved, that these are, are good people. Perhaps they had something in their own lives that you didn’t have in your own. What was it that kept drawing you back there? Do you have a sense of that?
Spencer Durrenberger
31:45 – 33:47
Even to this day? No, I think it was more intuitively. It’s kind of like a missing tooth. If you’ve ever like lost a tooth at an adult age or thinking back to childhood age, you can kind of stick your tongue into that missing spot. You know it’s missing, right? But you don’t really think about it. But you know, there’s that air that passes through when your mouth’s closed or when you open your mouth and it’s just there’s something missing, but you can’t quite place it. You don’t know I’m missing a tooth. You know that you’re missing space like that. That break is not supposed to be there. And the break that was missing was more like a wall to a house instead of just like a door or like a tooth. So, it was a bigger piece that was definitely becoming more and more evident as time had passed. This fight I was doing of rationalizations wasn’t working. It wasn’t. It wasn’t pushing enough people. It was too slow, even. So yeah. And then the relationship really kind of put the head on it. There was a big part of that relational aspect that is missing. If you just have it, you know, physical and emotional and mental, especially if one of those pieces is missing, the gap becomes so much bigger. And that gap is definitely the spiritual connectedness that you need with somebody, especially as you would push towards, like marriage and things. You need that spiritual connection. But I couldn’t put a name to it during that time. It wasn’t until after I became a Christian that I could look back and name it. Oh, it’s the spiritual piece. I had actually asked the girl if she had a belief or anything like that that wasn’t really an important part of her life. And it definitely was visible that that wasn’t an important part of her life. So, when Gary and others started coming along again and just really taking hold of me in a way, it was more like a tide was slowly rising and I was just getting pushed into it. Less my control and more something was happening and I was kind of not able to stop it and was seeing where it was going because maybe it had the answer I was missing.
Jana Harmon
33:50 – 33:53
Yes, I’m impressed by Gary and his persistence.
Spencer Durrenberger
33:54 – 33:54
Yeah.
Jana Harmon
33:54 – 34:13
So, you were drawn back to the BSM and what did you find there when you went back with perhaps even a little bit more open attitude or her willingness to see what’s there than before?
Spencer Durrenberger
34:13 – 35:42
When I got back that following January, it was definitely different. The Bible still didn’t, you know, say anything new. I knew all of that. There was still that disconnect there. Things had started changing and especially my interactions now that I was talking with these people, I was interacting as if God existed and having a discussion as to why he didn’t exist, while existing in a way, trying to have that conversation and having no response back. However, that response back actually did happen. I was just stubborn is the nice way to put it, and arrogant. I would raise my right hand and my fist at him and accuse him of things and then find, you know, these mercies and these gifts of people loving on me. But not in a just like, feelings way. It was more so people coming alongside and like, ‘oh, you’re hurting with this. You know, let me just hurt with you’ and ‘you’re succeeding on that. Let me celebrate with you.’ And it was, it was a genuine lifestyle. That was a difference that shifted and allowed me to see that there was more going on. And it was at that point that my conversations with God started to change. And even as I continued to accuse him, real miracles started happening. He started trying to really open my eyes and I was not able to see him still.
Jana Harmon
35:43 – 35:46
Real miracles? What do you mean by that?
Spencer Durrenberger
35:47 – 36:25
I am talking, I mean as a biologist and a physicist. Empirical data is absolutely what we live on. We don’t make philosophical. We shouldn’t, I shouldn’t say don’t. We shouldn’t make philosophical claims based on evidence. We do as scientists, but we shouldn’t. We should make observations and resulting data. But, you know, even as a physicist, knowing the laws of the universe and the world, how they work, I was seeing a real counter to the laws of nature things happening. And I couldn’t explain them, I couldn’t understand them. I would get more angry at God for seeing these things.
Jana Harmon
36:25 – 36:28
Can you give an example of what that might look like?
Spencer Durrenberger
36:28 – 40:18
Yes. And to be fair, and I’ll go into this a little more in a second, a lot of the more detailed pieces of things that had happened, including some of the miracles, I just don’t remember. There was a big chunk basically of my mind that was wiped clean after I became a Christian. But as far as the miracles go, there was the one I do remember. There was a big thunderstorm that blew through, probably rained for an hour or so, and I loved going out into storms. Something about the rain coming down, especially in a big thunderstorm, and you feel the thunder and feel the crackling of the lightning, the heavy droplets. It just washed you clean. You know, you don’t really think yourself morally unclean, but you think yourself dirty somehow sometimes. And just that kind of full washing was just something I loved. And I did it. I still do it on occasion, and just walk out in the rain and just be. Be cleansed by the gift of God from the rain. But at that point, yeah, just raining and this essentially bubble over my head. I couldn’t get rained on anymore for a while. I walked around for about 10, 15 minutes. The rain poured all around me, but everywhere I walked. I walked into campus and walked back over to my apartments, and no rain, but everywhere around this little circle around me. I got splatter on my toes from when it hit the ground and splashed around, but I couldn’t get rained on. And there’s no, that’s not rational, that there’s no way that can happen. It’s an impossibility. There’s no, you know, cloud that would follow you. No bubble of clouds that would just part for you, because clouds aren’t thinking beings. Clouds can’t think. So, it doesn’t make sense.
And there were other things like that. Just pure, intangible, contrary to nature things that don’t make sense. And I couldn’t deal with it. I didn’t know how to explain it. I was terrified to tell people, especially any of these Christians about it because it was just, how do you deal with that as an atheist, that these real contrary to nature things happen? And so, I got angry with God more. And I, along with being with the Christians, I was also really enjoying my time with the atheists. I didn’t end up having to break the relationship with the girl. Just the, the physicality of that relationship made me feel too unclean to also be with the Christians. There was a disconnect there, some moral disconnect, but an intellectual disconnect as well from the Christians. So, there’s a lot of weird internal contradictions going on that I was struggling with. Made that last semester at school really exciting. Yeah, there were a lot of, as the world would call them, coincidences. But as anyone who knows anything about math or anything in the Christian world, there are no coincidences. Everything happens for a reason. And there was plenty of things. I was going out to give a talk on a poster, and I was trying to understand if I should forgive my parents before becoming a Christian, if that was where I was going. But is forgiveness important? It was kind of like the message for a couple of weeks. And so, I was really struggling working over this and was on a bus to go give a presentation. And I think it was this McDonald’s sign said ‘it’s time to forgive,’ which has nothing to do with how much a burger is or how much your fries are, what kind of deals they have. No, a really, really random sign has nothing.
Jana Harmon
40:18 – 40:21
Yeah. A great improbability.
Spencer Durrenberger
40:21 – 42:13
Yes, that’s the phrase that’s going to be on that doesn’t make it. There were scores of those, probably pushing a hundred. And I just, I couldn’t really rationalize how these things were all coming about. But I just had great brothers and sisters come to me and be like, ‘I wanted to find you today. I woke up, I knew I had to find you, knew I had to talk to you about this.’ I was like, ‘man, that’s so weird. I woke up this morning and was like, I don’t know how to deal with this issue and how it relates to Christianity and the rest of the world.’ And they were just, ‘I had to find you today and I had to talk to you about this. Don’t know why, but I did.’ And we’d sit down for an hour or two and we talk about how Christians work within certain world aspects, how they work with orphans and how they work with sociology and how they work with science and just different pieces that weren’t clicking. They come and find me, and we talk. Great wise people bringing great wisdom. And I struggled. It was torment more than anything else. Even with it, I just kept having at that point seeing so many just have to know that I don’t get two science degrees because I’m a non-curious person. I need to know these things whenever I’m introduced to them. And so yeah, I kept going back and it was about beginning of April when I really almost forgot about school to the point to just be around the people at the BSM and to find people who are teaching. I started going to people’s churches as they started inviting me. I went to about four or five different churches and the messages were okay, they never really clicked, but you know, I was entertaining that idea that maybe that was where the wisdom was at. And I, since I’d been avoiding church, it was the piece I was missing.
Jana Harmon
42:15 – 42:22
Did you begin reading the Bible again with a, perhaps a different perspective, more openness?
Spencer Durrenberger
42:22 – 43:15
Yes, I did. I was recommended by Gary to read either John or Matthew, which I still think for any believer is probably the two best ones to go into seeing how things were fulfilled over time, seeing kind of the prophecies come to light and seeing this greater picture and his greater purpose come out of Matthew. Even though I’d read it dozens of times, been through Bible studies, I did start to see things slightly differently, especially after some of the miracles. And then, Jesus calling people out for, ‘hey, you know, if I’d done these miracles over entire and done these miracles, they would have believed. But y’all are just too hard of heart.’ I was like, ‘man, is that what I’m doing here?’ So it was very on the nose, more so than John would have been. So, I think that’s great providence, God encouraging that book upon me.
Jana Harmon
43:15 – 44:00
So, you were reading scripture, you were finding some things in there that were meaningful for you, that you found yourself in scripture in terms of perhaps your own stubbornness of heart. But yet there were still these things, these bigger issues that loom from childhood. And for good reason. I mean, you opened the story by introducing the abuse that you had experienced as a child. And it’s hard to get beyond that. You said the problem of evil or pain was probably your biggest and greatest obstacle. How was that issue resolved, or has it been resolved for you prior to becoming a Christian?
Spencer Durrenberger
44:01 – 49:13
It didn’t get resolved prior to becoming a Christian. Actually, that was kind of the key last piece was all these things and with the coincidental timing of the friends who’d come and find me to talk about that one thing I was looking for. I’d been avoiding a good friend, Will, who had been encouraging me to come to his church as he found out I was now visiting other people’s church as an atheist. And he’s got the biggest evangelistic heart I know. And he was dead set, always finding me, asking if I was going to someone’s church, asking if I was willing to go to his church, constantly avoiding him because I heard his church was a lot more conservative, a lot more, you know, science isn’t really a thing. Earth was created. One Saturday guy calls me up and is like, hey, I know you’re coming to church with me tomorrow, but I have to go out of town. I can’t be there tomorrow, but we can go next week. Happy to take you next week. Like, that’s fine. You know, I’ll find something else to do tomorrow. And Will comes over my shoulder, and it’s like, ‘hey, good to see you. So, you’re free tomorrow, huh?’ And I was like, ‘oh, that’s really bad timing. Great, I’ll pick you up tomorrow morning. Like, this will be great.’ And I was like, ‘oh, I can’t really say no now because I’ve always had an excuse, and I can’t just say no. That’s just being rude. And you know us morally good atheists, we can’t be rude to people. That’s bad.’ I said yes. And I sat under one of the best teachers I’ve ever sat under. And I spent years after becoming a Christian listening to him teach Pastor Pennington. And he was going through Romans 2 and Galatians 3 and that the law was given to the Jew to the Hebrew to follow it, and that they would be more condemned under the law for knowing it. And it wrecked me really. It really got me thinking because I had spent all these years as an atheist studying the law. I read through Leviticus multiple times and Numbers and Deuteronomy. I had read through pieces of all of these books, some of the prophets. I had read through the New Testament so many times and I was very well versed.
And so, to have that condemnation being that the more you know, the harder your judgment because you chose while knowing not to follow. I had a real conundrum at that point. If God does exist, I’m going to be judged so hardly. If God doesn’t exist, then nothing. I’ve also kind of wasted my time studying all this law. At the end of the day, it’s not benefited me in any way. It’s only benefited the people that I was able to bring from their belief. But then there’s these people who I can’t bring from the belief, even knowing all this law. You know, I met these great believers who were just too solid to be moved, that they had answers to the contradiction. They had answers to the ambiguities and the internal struggles. So, for those who can’t be moved, there’s always going to be a group of people who are untouched. And for those who can, you know, I’m not able to get to them in numbers. So, I’m left with the issue of am I doing all of this for myself or am I doing all of this for other people? And I definitely thought I was doing it for other people, but that was part of that disconnect. So then is it for me? And if it’s for me, then I’ve kind of wasted my time or I’m going to be judged. And that’s a really hard thing to come to. I didn’t think I wasted my time. There was a purpose in everything. I found that out a long time ago. So, if there was a purpose and I knew all these laws, what was that purpose? It was to be judged. And so that really clicked and hit me.
And then Will on the way home asks a wonderful, penetrating question. ‘Can you believe in a God who will give you the right answer and the time you need to know it and not a moment before?’ And I didn’t have a good answer for that. I sat there and thought, and we drove in silence for the first time for like 10 more minutes as we got home. And I was like, I don’t have an answer for that. And I went home and that afternoon and that evening I wept like a little girl and just was a wreck. And it all came out. It all clicked that I had done it all wrong. And my big fight, my big fist in the air had been for nothing. I’d wasted my time. I was going to lose. You can’t beat an all-powerful God who knows it all because you can’t learn anything before you need to know it. I ask a thousand questions a day and I only get to know the answers to those that he determines. I get to know. So good to do that. But yeah, it was definitely the big click. So, what’s the answer to evil in this world? I had no idea. I didn’t. But I knew if I needed to know it, he’d give it to me. And so, I very much so did ask that night, all night, it was probably 10, 12 hours of crying and praying, of asking to be taken out of the world so I’d sin less, so I’d cause less destruction, seeing that I’d done so much harm.
Jana Harmon
49:13 – 49:27
Along with the law, there is grace. So, did you learn of the grace of Christ that covers all of that sin? Sin against the law.
Spencer Durrenberger
49:27 – 51:27
It was in the preaching that, as Paul preaches in Galatians 3, that grace is what we get over the law. The law wasn’t made to show us that we are able to earn salvation and clean our own sins. That it’s grace alone that can really cleanse us of our iniquities and of our sins and correct our path back to where it’s supposed to be. That the pollutions, the transgressions that we have in this world that we’ve made between one another and that we made between God and ourselves, there’s only one person who’s made the right sacrifice to cleanse that. Like the water in the rain washing me clean. It was somebody else alone who could do that. And that was it. I could only cause more harm than I could do. I can only continue to sin. I could only continue to do purposeless things or to cause more harm in breaking relationships. So that’s also not a good way out. I mean, it’s kind of where Nietzsche goes with his nihilism anyways, if you really hold to that. You know, the purpose of pain is nothing, so why suffer? There’s no reason to suffer. So, if that’s life’s purpose and you are going to experience pain, there’s no reason for it. But if there’s another way, if there is something else, if there’s somebody else, that’s a life worth living. And that was it. I came to Gary the next morning. I’m sure I looked a wreck because I’d been crying all night and like, was outside the door ready to go. And he got in at 8 and was like, ‘I don’t know what’s going on, but I am lost, I am worthless and unclean. And I spent all night praying and asking. He didn’t kill me. I don’t know what’s going on.’ And yeah, he’s like, ‘I think you’re a Christian now.’ Like, I don’t know how I should feel about that. I’ve spent so many years, a decade fighting against him.
Jana Harmon
51:27 – 52:18
Yeah, that’s a huge awakening, isn’t it, that, that the law makes us conscious of our sin. That when we know when something’s wrong and we are the offender, that’s a horrible place to stand. But that is the beauty of the cross and that’s the beauty of grace. So, once you understood that, it was like the rain had washed you clean. You’re covered in the righteousness of Christ, no longer guilty. And so, we are a new creation. All things are past, Sin is forgiven as far as the east is from the west. And you can stand before God with gratitude because of the grace that he has extended you. What a wonderful place to arrive. I’m sure for you it was very life changing. Talk to us about that.
Spencer Durrenberger
52:21 – 54:58
So that was May 2nd in 2015, the 14th, 16th, something like that. I was on a plane to Alaska. So, in just a couple of weeks, I was gone from the rest of the world. As I went to go serve with the Student Conservation Association. Great opportunity to work with the Forest Service, But I was relatively alone. There was four of us on this team, on the smaller team of like 30 people in Alaska. Yeah, it was me and an NIV. From the moment I got on the plane and opened the book, it was, it was new. I had mentioned it earlier with the miracles, but all of the words were new like I’d never read them before. I’ve had the great grace of time to get to know the Word with fresh eyes. Because the stubbornness that corrupts the things that we put into our brains, you know, the points of view and the philosophical systems that we attribute them under, can still linger even after a Christian. So, to have been so corrupt that it needed to all be wiped away, I consider just such a blessing and a miracle in and of itself. But I started going to the church with Will and sitting under that pastor, and it was a great joy because he’s such a good teacher, that I realized everyone around me and in this church was so rooted in the Word, knew so much information. They were spouting off Bible verses, they were connecting things all over the place. And I felt like a toddler walking into a high school or a college class going, ‘oh, people know information.’ And I’m just new, I’m young. It was very much so a break in what I was coming into, because some of these were younger kids, high schoolers just starting college. Many of them are older, obviously, but just finding that younger group of kids who are so well versed. And I had nothing. I had nothing but questions. I came back from Alaska, it was very much so just a pouring in for the next couple of years, and some good brethren, brothers and sisters who really came along, and just hours of conversations, hours of, ‘well, what about this?’ ‘How does that logically fit with that?’ ‘How do we, I see this in the Scriptures, but how do I interpret that with how I would do things at work, or how I would do things in the community, or how the church is supposed to function with this, or, you know, just what free will and grace look like.’ These were hard things.
Jana Harmon
54:58 – 56:40
Yeah, it sounds like you were invested in a body of believers who took the scripture seriously, who wanted to understand their faith at a very deep level. And you dove in, it sounds like to the deep end of the pool. And you were this hyper-rationalist with scientific mind, rational mind, and here you are believing in Scripture that it’s true, that it is rational enough to believe, but it has supernatural content in it there. And so, I’m sure that some people are thinking, ‘okay, you go from disbelief to belief, and all of a sudden you believe the Bible’s true and everything in it.’ And I know that belief isn’t only grounded in rationality. Right? But there are certain evidential, rational components to our belief that give us substance and weight to the reasons why we think that it’s true. If a skeptic was sitting across the table from you and was pushing back a little and saying, ‘so, yeah, you experienced these miracles in your own life. Now you believe a book that has supernatural miracles in it. Did you even test to see whether or not this text was reliable, whether it was worthy of belief? It just sounds like you were drawn to these people. You saw a need in your life. That’s what I often hear. But so, you just jump in and then you make it sound like it’s worthy of belief because you want it to be true.’ How would you respond to that kind of a skeptical response?
Spencer Durrenberger
56:41 – 58:40
So there’s two prongs to that. First is the, the blind belief aspect of it. I didn’t go into it blindly believing. I questioned every word in it as I read it. I probably ended up with more questions than there are verses in the Bible in the first year of believing and just really digging into why it had to be the way it had to be. What was the purpose driven behind it? Could this be reliable? It still fit with the scars of my hyper-rationalism that was still in me. And so, it was easier to start with that premise. And it took great patience and grace from the people around me to deal with me and my questions and to really just have a heart for finding out that truth and giving an answer for themselves, for some who hadn’t actually worked to find those answers and that there were actual good reasons to believe that Scripture is both authoritative, written when it was. There isn’t one overarching argument. I can go to scripture to defend scripture, but that’s circular reasoning to most atheists and I wouldn’t waste their time with that. I would want to address point by point. ‘Okay, you have an issue with this one? Great, let’s deal with that one.’ And when I solve that answer, ‘is that going to solve all your problems? No. Cool.’ Then we’ll go to the next one and I will solve every one of these until your whole answer list is done. And when you’re out of questions and I’ve answered and proven them, then let’s move forward. I came kicking and screaming to the word. You know, there’s people who say, ‘God wouldn’t bring anybody kicking and screaming against their will to him.’ I am that definitive person who kicked and screamed and raised my fist to the last day and I lost at the end of the day. I took that battle all the way to him and lost. Turns out Almighty is almighty and not mostly mighty.
Jana Harmon
58:41 – 59:46
Yeah, I’m amazed. The Lord has taken you as you were in your rational mind and like you say, renewed it for greater purposes, given you a great, great purpose. Not only renewed life, but great purpose in what you’re doing. And I love hearing your story. For those skeptics who deem themselves rationally superior, hyper-rational, they could never believe in the superstition of religion, but yet there’s something compelling about you, about your story and your journey that they can look at you and say, ‘no, he’s an intelligent man and he’s logical and rational, but yet he has found something,’ and it opens the door for the possibility of belief or the possibility of God. How could you encourage someone who is curious enough to take a closer look? What would you say and what would you advise?
Spencer Durrenberger
59:47 – 01:01:11
It’s an easy recommendation to put them toward the Gospels. That would be probably my first step is if you haven’t in a while, read the Gospels again. You don’t have to start at Matthew or start at John but read one of them. If your questions are on history, go to Luke. If you have questions about how this happened over history as far as from the Jews into the Gentiles or from the law perspective, go to Matthew. If you want to see the manhood of Christ, that God would actually become man, go to Mark. You want to see the divinity and the beauty that is God, go to John. If you’re having trouble with understanding that divinity actually exists, it’s easy to go to the Gospels on that. I would also encourage going to church. We hear the Gospel. It’s a joy to hear the Word. And when you’re hearing it truly preached or just hearing it read out of the Bible, it’s a beautiful thing and it really works on you. It’s a living word and it definitely can’t not affect you to not add a double negative there, but you will be affected when you hear it. There’s just no way to avoid it. And I think that’s also kind of the scary thing is I read it all the time without having it affect me, but when I started hearing it, it was affecting me immediately and I couldn’t really get around it.
Jana Harmon
01:01:12 – 01:01:27
Yeah, there’s a posture of openness there that you, that you have when you’re listening, right? You’re listening to receive, not to just tear down. And it makes a Lot of difference, doesn’t it?
Spencer Durrenberger
01:01:28 – 01:01:28
Yeah.
Jana Harmon
01:01:29 – 01:02:21
So, I think of the Christians in your life, Erwin, was it Erwin and Gary and Will and these men that God placed in your life, who saw you, who invested in you, who persevered and relationally with you, spent time with you, took time to listen to all of your objections and to answer them. What amazing men that were put in your path actually to show you the way to Christ and to God. And I wondered what you would say to us as Christians thinking of those examples or anything else that you think would be meaningful for us, to help us to engage with those who don’t believe or are pushing back even like you once were.
Spencer Durrenberger
01:02:23 – 01:04:14
Humility is a big one. Big one. I had to learn many times had to learn it sadly. And it definitely coming with a humble heart that I might not have all the answers, but if I need the answers, I’ll be providing those answers and coming to somebody and saying, ‘let’s just have a discussion.’ That’s definitely easier to do now as a Christian but coming with that gentleness and that humility to say like, ‘I just want to talk with you and I just want to hear where you’re at and I want to bring the gospel to you.’ And not being afraid to actually bring the gospel from the beginning, these, these men were great. Not just to listen to my story, but then to also immediately make it a Christian discussion that it’s about Christ. At the end of the day, he’s not going to give you the lottery ticket, but he can make it so that that anxiety of the financial things aren’t a problem anymore. And it’s not that, Christ is this lucky golden ticket of he gets rid of all my problems, come to Christ because He takes away my burdens. It’s come to Christ because of who he is. And the blessings of who he is include the fact that I can then deal with things in a better heart, that I can get hope. There’s no hope in the world in its traditional, original sense. There’s no promise in the world. There’s no hope in that sense. There’s no promise that things will be good in a materialism worldview or any of the other philosophies. There’s no promise of that. There is promise in Christ. That’s not promise nothing bad will happen. It’s promised that there is life after this world. So, no matter how bad it gets, there’s goodness on the other side.
Jana Harmon
01:04:16 – 01:06:09
Well, I sit here listening to you, Spencer, and thinking of the way and the degree to which you have been redeemed. You are a man who of good and great intelligence and your rational mind has been transformed by his, by the word of God and by your perspective, your sense of purpose. As someone who came in kicking and screaming it seems that you are now fully in a sense, that you are satisfied and hope filled. And in spite of everything that has happened in your past, that you are a new creation in Christ. That he compelled you almost towards belief. He ordered your path and enabled you to see and to listen in a way that you were given new eyes and new ears and even a new heart and a new life, really life that is truly life. And I sit here celebrating with you for everything that he has done. The hounds of heaven were after you as Lewis said, who was the most reluctant convert of all of England and the great impact that he had and still continues to have. And I know that the Lord is using you in great ways to make impact for his kingdom and to help open the eyes of those who don’t see that they would come into and come and see and experience what you have found. And that is Christ. So, thank you so much for coming. And again, it’s just a joy and a privilege really to have heard your story.
Spencer Durrenberger
01:06:10 – 01:06:13
Thank you for inviting me. It was a great opportunity.
Jana Harmon
01:06:14 – 01:07:03
Wonderful. Thank you so much. Thanks for tuning in to the eX-skeptic podcast to hear Spencer Durrenberger’s story. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can contact me. Again, our email is info@exskeptic.org. We do love hearing from you. This podcast is produced through the C.S. Lewis Institute and the help of our wonderful producer Ashley Decker, audio engineer Mark Rosara, and ministry assistant Lori Burleson. You can also see these podcasts on our YouTube channel through the excellent work of our video editor, Kyle Polk. Jordan Harmon is our amazing graphic designer. If you enjoyed this episode, I hope you’ll follow, rate, review and share this podcast with your friends and social network. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll hear another unlikely story of belief.
