What happens when a neuroscientist trained in rationalism begins to question the very worldview that shaped his career?
Trevor Lohman is a clinical neuroscience researcher and author of God’s Eye View. Raised with a nominal faith and drawn early into the promises of scientific progress, Trevor embraced atheism with confidence. For years, he believed that science held all the answers—until he realized how many of those answers rested on assumptions, unanswered questions, and even faith of a different kind.
Trevor shares how intellectual integrity, personal reflection, and the birth of his children led him to rethink everything. From the limitations of naturalism to the surprising relevance of Scripture, Trevor walks us through his journey from doubt to belief—and how science, far from disproving God, pointed back to Him.
Guest Bio:
Trevor Lohman is a clinical research neuroscientist, professor, and author whose academic path began in cellular and molecular biology before transitioning into gene expression and aging. Currently serving as an assistant professor at a medical school in Los Angeles, Trevor explores the intersection of neuroscience and cardiovascular disease. Despite a successful scientific career, Trevor experienced a seismic worldview shift. Once a staunch atheist deeply immersed in rationalism, he began to question the very foundation of his beliefs. His journey—driven by curiosity, intellectual honesty, and a deep love of science—led him not away from reason, but toward faith. His debut book, God’s Eye View, challenges the modern cultural divide between science and spirituality and reclaims the spiritual heritage at the roots of scientific inquiry.
Resources Mentioned:
Book mentioned:
“God’s Eye View” by Trevor Lohman
People mentioned:
John Lennox
Stephen Meyer
Michael Behe
Lee Strobel
Federico Faggin (physicist and inventor of the CPU)
Robert Sapolsky (critic of free will)
Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens (representing rational atheism)
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Twitter: http://x.com/exskeptic
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Email info: info@exskeptic.org
eX-skeptic podcast episode 124 transcript
August 01, 2025
The Mystery of Reality – Dr. Trevor Lohman’s story
Trevor Lohman
00:00 – 00:50
I built my entire worldview on rationality and logic, but my worldview is not rational or logical. So this is a problem. And so once I finally crossed that bridge, I was able to sort of like, put my ego aside and say, okay, you need to just start reading some stuff, you know, the Bible. And also talking to those handful of few friends I was comfortable talking about this with. And it was a three year process and it was incremental. It was, like, okay, maybe there is something out there, you know, maybe there is a creator that was like step one. Maybe there is an afterlife, you know, and maybe this story about Jesus really did happen, you know, so it was like incremental. And now I’m all the way in.
Jana Harmon
00:56 – 01:47
Hi, I’m Jana Harmon from the eX-skeptic podcast. Have you walked away from Christianity or you’re questioning whether or not it was even true to begin with? Maybe you’re asking if truth even exists or if it’s arrogant to say that one faith is right. These questions are more common than you might think. We’ve talked with over 120 former skeptics and atheists who’ve shared similar doubts and questions. That’s why we’ve created nine themed playlists on YouTube drawn from personal stories of former skeptics who’ve wrestled with these same issues, among others. Go to eX-skeptic on YouTube and find our playlist. Is it possible to believe again? Or what about other religions, among others? Once you’ve found them, you might want to share these themed playlists with others who might have their own unique questions about faith.
Trevor Lohman
01:47 – 01:47
Faith.
Jana Harmon
01:49 – 03:22
Hello and welcome to eX-skeptic, the podcast that shares unlikely stories of belief, powerful stories of those who once dismissed God, but found themselves reconsidering and ultimately embracing faith in Jesus Christ. I’m your host, Jana Harmon. What happens when a staunch atheist deeply committed to science as the only reliable path to truth begins to question that very assumption? In this episode of eX-skeptic, we talk with Dr. Trevor Lohman, a clinical neuroscience researcher who once saw religion as a crutch for the weak minded and science as the ultimate key to understanding reality. He was a militant atheist, bought into the popular narrative that reason and faith were fundamentally incompatible. But something shifted when science, particularly in its reductionistic form, began to fall short in answering life’s biggest questions. Trevor’s intellectual honesty wouldn’t allow him to ignore the gaps. His deep curiosity and willingness to reconsider long held assumptions opened the door to a broader view, one that ultimately led him to belief in God. If you’ve ever wondered whether science and belief can coexist or whether your doubts could actually be pointing you to somewhere deeper, this episode is for you. It’s a conversation for anyone who values evidence, reason, and the courage to rethink what they believe. I hope you’ll come along. Trevor, welcome to eX-skeptic. It’s so great to have you with me today.
Trevor Lohman
03:22 – 03:23
It’s great to be here. Thank you.
Jana Harmon
03:24 – 03:34
As we’re getting started, I would love for our listeners to know a bit about you, tell us a bit about your experience, your education, the kind of work you’re doing and even the new book that you have just released.
Trevor Lohman
03:35 – 05:14
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. So I’m a clinical research neuroscientist. My education background, I started off in cellular and molecular biology. I eventually did my doctoral work in gene expression related to aging and then sort of took a right turn into neuroscience and had a really great – what’s called a postdoc. In the research world, after you get your PhD, you kind of get another PhD because he can’t seem to stop going to school. And now I’m a assistant professor at a medical school here in LA studying the relationship between the cardiovascular system and the brain and whether or not some of these neurodegenerative diseases might actually have a vascular cause, which is very different from the book I just wrote, which is the subject of why I’m here today about. You know, I hesitate to call it a scientific case for God. I don’t know if science can really prove or disprove God. But I think in our culture we have come to a, we have a misunderstanding about what science actually is and we sort of treat it like a worldview that explains our existence when it very clearly doesn’t. And we’ve kind of massaged the history of science to make it look and feel a certain way. But when you actually go back and study these, you know, fathers of modern science, they had very metaphysical religious worldviews and they thought they were studying God and that’s not how science really works today. So that’s what the book’s about.
Jana Harmon
05:15 – 06:14
Yes, I would strongly encourage anybody to get it. It’s called God’s Eye View. I just spent the last couple weeks working my way through it. And it is phenomenal. It’s pushes the edges of your thinking. It delves into quantum physics, which, I will say that it’s a very intelligible, accessible read. Trevor makes this information not only understandable but in bite sized pieces that are comprehensible. But it really challenges your own faith system, belief system, challenges you to think beyond perhaps your own current ways of thinking. So yeah, no, it’s good. I think it is as science should be, it pushes the boundaries, it causes you to think, causes you to question in all the right ways.
Trevor Lohman
06:14 – 06:52
I really appreciate that because, you know, colleagues who have read the book, I think their impression might be that it’s sort of overly critical of science. But really I wrote it from the opposite perspective. I love science. I was fascinated by it as a kid, I still am. And I just feel like we’ve sort of lost our way. So the book was sort of a call to like, hey, let’s get back to what we’re good at, which is being curious and open minded and methodical and that’s not what science is now. And I don’t believe science and God are antithetical to each other at all. I think that’s a crazy idea. So thank you, that was nice to hear.
Jana Harmon
06:52 – 07:14
No, no, and I would like to address that question a little bit later on as we’re getting into your story. But let’s get into your story. I know you are from la or at least now, but where were you when you were growing up? Tell me about just how you grew up. Talk to me about your family. Was there any faith in your family at all back back then?
Trevor Lohman
07:15 – 09:28
Yeah, sure. Well, I actually was born, I can almost see the hospital I was born at outside my window right here. But, but very quickly after I was born, I moved all over the country with my mom and my stepdad. My parents were divorced, which is a, you know, a very common thing for kids of the 90s. And my stepdad was in the military, so he moved around a bit and that was fine. Regarding religion, I mean both of my, my mother and my father are both, they’re both believers and I believe, I think always have been. But religion was never something we really discussed much in the home. You know, we didn’t go to church, things like that. I think if you would have asked me when I was 7 or 8 or 9, actually my daughter’s 7 and I don’t know if she’s would say this, but probably seven, eight or nine. If you asked me what I was, I’d probably say I was a Christian, but I wouldn’t really know what that meant. Right? But going to school in the 90s, elementary school, middle school in the 90s, it was an amazing time. It felt Amazing. It felt like we were this close to figuring everything out. You know, we were watching the space shuttle, we had the human genome project going on, we had the Silicon Valley revolution. We had kind of learned that we can do anything with code. And then at the same time we learned we could do anything with code. We learned that there’s a code inside ourselves and we can sequence it and we can cure all disease and we can, you know, we were sort of starting to flirt with the idea that free will and what it meant to be human was all programmed in a language, in a cell. And it just felt like, of course this is the answer. You know, it was the first time that science could really convincingly say that we’ve, you know, we’ve got it all figured out, we’re this close. And obviously, you know, 30 years later that hasn’t really panned out to be the case. But at the time it was, it makes sense why rational atheism became so big in the 2000s. It just felt so convincing. If you weren’t firmly rooted in a religious tradition and I wasn’t the scientific.
Jana Harmon
09:28 – 10:00
The scientific narrative there that you were believing it, it was one of, it sounds like certainty. It was probably again around the time that the new atheists were starting to rise. And so can you speak to that? Did you have any of those kind of influences in your life that even made you more certain or made you feel that let’s just say a certain view of science was the more rational way to believe.
Trevor Lohman
10:00 – 13:18
Yeah, I mean, so in the early days of that movement it was very convincing. I mean the way it was presented was actually that it’s the believers who are certain and following sort of a blind faith. And we as rationalists using logic can be much more humble and open minded and curious. That’s kind of how it was sold to me. And I think everyone going, you know, as a child back then, and it kind of made sense because there wasn’t really, you know, Protestantism was dominant. Right. The American culture was very Christian. And so there was sort of this like rebellious upstart feeling in, in science that, you know, we’re going to use our minds to solve these mysteries, but without any preconceived notions or bias. That, that was, I think, the sell. That’s what got me in. You know, as a curious kid who was good at math and science and things, this seemed like the way to go, you know, because you get to solve mysteries and what kid doesn’t want to solve mysteries. Right. So anyway, so flash forward, you know, to I guess undergrad. This is like peak Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, rational atheism time. And I was a complete jerk. You know, I was like the typical militant atheist. You know, it was bizarre. You know, I’m embarrassed looking back on it. But I wasn’t alone. There was a lot of people like that. It kind of felt, you kind of felt superior, you felt intellectually superior. And it wasn’t until, I guess, maybe grad school where I started recognizing, I guess, what I would call sort of the central lie of that rational atheist movement, which was that it wasn’t unbiased, it wasn’t purely logical, it wasn’t purely rational. It was in many ways at a religious flair to it, which was kind of this cognitive dissonance in my head because, you know, I thought this was this better alternative to certainty. But in reality it’s just a different brand. There’s a, you know, this is now probably an overused quote, but Terence McKenna has that quote. You know, if there’s a phrase that characterizes science, it’s ‘give me one miracle and we’ll explain the rest.’ And so I’m like, yeah, even though that’s kind of a cliche and overused, it’s that we need to contend with that as scientists. Like, that’s a good point, right? You know, why is there something rather than nothing? And if science had been very like open minded and humble and said, yeah, it’s a good question, there’s certainly some room for God in there, right? There’s a lot of questions we don’t have answers to. But that’s not what they did. They dug their heels in and said, no, you know, we know this is the way we can explain this and that. And you know, Dawkins and Hitchens were very condescending to these types of questions because they didn’t have answers. And so you start to realize, like, oh, okay, I need to actually go back and re examine the last 20 years of my life.
Jana Harmon
13:19 – 13:57
Sometimes I think it’s helpful to understand the way that beliefs are not only formed, which obviously you’re telling me it was the most more intelligent, more scientific view of reality. With that view, there are certain limitations of the way in which, like you say, you can even answer the bigger questions. Like you were beginning to ask whether or not science could explain them. But how did you, how did you manage those bigger questions in your own life? Before you even started asking those bigger questions of science.
Trevor Lohman
13:58 – 16:27
Yeah. So if you know my belief system, if you could call it that, which I think you can. I think you can call atheism a belief system. This is like, actually a very deep conversation and difficult to untangle, looking back at my time as an atheist, because atheism sort of stole a lot of religious tenets from Christianity. Right. Atheism only worked because we kind of inherited the morality of Christianity. We could say we’re atheists, and someone might say, well, then how do you distinguish between right and wrong? And we’re like, well, of course we know how to distinguish between right and wrong. As if we came up with morality. Like, no, this was all already kind of handed to the rational atheist movement, this Christian morality. And so in a way, you could kind of do some mental gymnastics in your mind to convince yourself, like your belief system was. Was not only right, but morally superior because of, you know, all of these things that the media had told us about Christianity and the church and all these sort of negative connotations to Christianity. You kind of could walk around with, like, this air of superiority as long as you didn’t really examine those deep questions. And I didn’t. Right. So to answer your question, that was a trick. You just don’t think about it. And I think as you get older, your ability to just ignore those big questions diminishes, you know, especially after having kids. And you start going like, yeah, what is the meaning of this? And how do I really know what’s right and what’s wrong and why is there something rather than nothing? Those, those aren’t questions that any atheist can deal with directly. They have, like, little strategies for just, like, swatting those questions away. But even Christopher Hitchens said that, that those are the questions that gave him pause, you know, why is there something rather than nothing? Why does the universe appear to be finely tuned for life? And so to hear that from someone like him who’s made his whole life out of trying to debate Christians and, you know, all religious people, I think those are the questions that, that get you, and rightly so. But how did I deal with them before I became a Christian? I just didn’t, I guess would be the answer.
Jana Harmon
16:28 – 16:33
You just didn’t address them. You were more just curious about your own.
Trevor Lohman
16:33 – 17:20
I tried to ignore them. Right. And you try to come up with, like, quick little explanations if someone challenges you on those types of questions, but they’re typically snide and critical. Like, you know, why does the universe appear finely tuned for life? Well, that’s just because you happen to be in the part of the universe where life exists and the universe is huge and most of the universe isn’t finely tuned for life. And so this is just this form of bias that you as a simple minded believer have. And that’s not right when you start digging into it. You have to make a lot of assumptions and a lot of faith based arguments to be an atheist. So that’s something that I’ve heard many people say before.
Jana Harmon
17:20 – 17:36
Yeah, and you said at the beginning of that prior answer too that you made the contention that atheism is a belief system of sorts. Oftentimes today you’ll hear, I just merely lack a belief in God.
Trevor Lohman
17:36 – 17:36
Right.
Jana Harmon
17:36 – 17:44
I don’t, I don’t have to prove anything. The onus of proof or the burden of proof is on your sidem you who believe in God.
Trevor Lohman
17:44 – 18:59
That is the, everything hangs on that little argument is where’s the burden of proof? And I’ve used that line many times as an atheist and it’s completely ineffective. You know, you can’t make the claim that all matter in the universe exploded out of a single pinprick at the center of the universe and that as this matter is spiraling out of control through the universe, complexity emerges. First of all, it violates the second law of thermodynamics. But just put that aside for a second. Complexity emerges and consciousness emerges and subjective human experience emerges. And I don’t need to explain that. Right. All I have to do is say you’re wrong for your explanation. That’s of course ridiculous and it’s not scientific either. Scientists should have said, yeah, that’s a great question and we don’t have an answer and we should be willing to explore these ideas. And they did. You know, early scientists were like that. Scientists of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and even the early 20th century, they acted like that. It’s only very recently that science became this worldview, an alternative to God.
Jana Harmon
18:59 – 19:18
So you were beginning to question perhaps the limitations of the form of science, scientism, more reductionistic view of science and its inability to answer these bigger questions.
Trevor Lohman
19:18 – 19:19
Yeah.
Jana Harmon
19:19 – 19:28
So walk us through that and, and talk with us about how that started opening you to other possibilities and what that looked like.
Trevor Lohman
19:29 – 22:39
Yeah, well, I started to feel like a hypocrite. And if there was something that always for some reason bothered me even as a kid, it was hypocrisy. Right? And that was one of the amazing things about reading the New Testament for the first time was like, oh, that really bothered Jesus too. You know, hypocrisy is something that he did not like. And anyway, but before I got there, I felt like a hypocrite because I said, you know, I would claim that it’s foolish or simple or you’re making a lot of assumptions in your arguments. And then, you know, the Terence McKenna quote, give us a miracle and we’ll explain the rest. It’s like, give us a hundred miracles, asking for 100 miracles. We’re asking for the Big Bang, which actually was a religious idea. George Le Matre, a priest, proposed that idea. And Einstein famously argued against it, and all these physicists argued against it. And now it’s the bedrock of the scientific explanation of our existence. Right? But so that’s miracle one, and then miracle two is how do we get complex systems in a closed universe? This is like a detailed physics thing we don’t need to get into. But, you know, entropy should increase over time. But look around, like, this is a very organized world compared to like the, you know, the vacuum of space or a black hole or something. Complexity emerges. And that, that’s another miracle in an unguided system. It’s not a miracle in a guided system, which is the religious view. And then there’s abiogenesis. Abiogenesis is how did we get life from non life? And atheists actually have no answer for this. And I always thought they did. You know, I always thought, oh, well, evolution. But evolution only explains how if you, you know, if you take it at face value, it explains how you get a new species from another species. It doesn’t explain how the very first life came from non life. And you look at the explanations of abiogenesis and they’re kind of absurd. You know, one is panspermia from the discoverer of DNA, one of the discoverers, which is that microorganisms came to Earth on comets, and that just kicks a can down the road because where did that life come from? And then the other explanation is that molecules just started bumping into – this is Dawkins explanation – molecules just started bumping into each other in oceans, and every once in a while two of them stuck. And from that we got a system of code that can pass traits down through the generations. And now we have TikTok, and it’s a miracle. Abiogenesis is very clearly a miracle. So I’m like, okay, to be an Atheist I need to believe in, then there’s fine tuning. So I need to believe in four miracles, okay? So I said, well, if I’m going to believe in miracles, I should kind of explore some other explanations too, right? And you know, you really only have to believe one miracle to be a Christian. And so I said, I gotta explore this idea. And I did.
Jana Harmon
22:39 – 22:55
So, so talk with us through that. How, first of all, did you know any believers in your life? Were you doing this investigation on your own? What did that look like? How did you start addressing so of these doubts and questions?
Trevor Lohman
22:55 – 25:10
I did, I knew plenty of believers, but you know, I had been such a antagonistic person to them, right? So I, I couldn’t, I didn’t really feel comfortable. Again, I felt kind of hypocritical going to them and say, okay, I know I’ve been a jerk all these years, but can you explain to me what you think? You know, I, my pride didn’t let me do that. So I just, I just kind of started investigating it on my own. I’ve listened to some other episodes and other things like this and I am always a little envious of people that have like this like aha moment, whether it’s God literally speaking to them or just like an event that happens in their life and they’re changed immediately. It didn’t work like that for me. It was like three years of different things going on in my life. You know, I had children, it’s a big deal. And then I also started, I was a little perplexed how why Christians seem to be so maligned compared to other religions. Like there was like this weird double standard which immediately kind of piques my interest. You know, if you’re sort of a contrarian, you’re like, why is everyone picking on them so much? You know, maybe they got the answers right. So that was going on and then this scientific thing I’ve detailed was going on. You know, I really was realizing that I built my entire worldview on rationality and logic, but my worldview is not rational or logical. So this is a, this is a problem. And so once I finally crossed that bridge, I was able to sort of like put my ego aside and say, okay, you need to just start reading some stuff, you know, the Bible, and also talking to those handful of few friends I was comfortable talking about this with. And it was a three year process and it was incremental. It was, it was like, okay, maybe there is something out there, you know, maybe there is a creator that was like step one, maybe there is an afterlife, you know, and maybe the story about Jesus really did happen, you know, so it was like incremental, and now I’m all the way in.
Jana Harmon
25:11 – 25:57
So were you looking in terms of, again, investigating these bigger questions, perhaps, how can science fit better with reality? Not only answering these mechanistic questions that science does, but also these larger questions. Were you looking to experts like John Lennox, for example? I’m just trying to get a more granular view of what your pathway looked like. What were the voices that you were listening? Who were the voices you were listening to? What were the books that you were reading? How were you gaining this new perspective that perhaps God does exist? That perhaps science and belief in God do go together in a coherent way?
Trevor Lohman
25:58 – 29:44
Yeah, great question, because you’re right. It wasn’t just me seeing the hypocrisy in my worldview. It was also, you know, people like you mentioned, John Lennox. That guy’s incredible. And there’s this whole suite of people who are clearly incredibly smart and intelligent who believe. And so that was certainly a model, you know, because I was afraid of looking foolish. Right? When you, when you mock an idea for 20 years and then all of a sudden you espouse that idea, you are nervous to, to switch teams, basically. And I still struggle with that. If I could tell a quick story before I answer your questions. You know, a few weeks ago, a family member called and said, hey, Trevor, my son called me about your book that just came out and he says, ‘you’re a Jesus freak now.’ And man, that just triggered like some ancient, you know, stuff from when I was an atheist. And I, that was like, it bothered me. And I was like. And I felt like Peter. I was like, well, no, not exactly, you know, that’s, it’s really a book about science and physics and blah, blah, blah. And that, like, wrecked me for two weeks. I was doing some serious introspection, like, why didn’t I just say, yeah, you know? And I realized it wasn’t the implication that I believed in Jesus that bothered me. It was the implication that I believed in Jesus. And that was irrational. That bothered me because I had just undergone this like three year journey of, in my mind, proving to myself that this was actually the correct and rational worldview. And anyway, so to your point, seeing people like Lennox and Stephen Meyer and Michael Behe and these guys, I was like, oh, I can approach this this way in a way that doesn’t make me feel like a hypocrite. So maybe that’s just my ego, but also in a way that satisfies that part of me that doesn’t, that is nervous that I’m just going to believe something blindly that’s incorrect because, you know, that exists in humans. Humans believe things that aren’t true. Right? So I wanted to satisfy that part of me that felt like this was a logical understanding and correct the idea that this book, this really old book actually described things that happened and that is actually true. So yeah. Is it Lee Strobel that I quote in the book where and John Lennox too – this idea that, you know, in nature you observe patterns everywhere. You know, a seashell follows like a Fibonacci sequence and ripples in the sand. You know, you go, oh, nature did that. You can come up with like a natural explanation, a scientific explanation. But when you see, you know, ‘Jason loves Susie’ carved in a tree, or when you see a sign that says ‘Exit’ and it conveys intelligible meaning to you, that’s the sign of an intelligent mind and the fact that at the center of ourselves is an information system written in a code that we’ve now disentangled and can understand. In my mind, it’s more rational and more logical to believe that that comes from a mind. I have to believe that there is a Creator who built this finely tuned universe for life to emerge. And yeah, so all those thinkers like Lennox and Strobel and Behe were hugely influential.
Jana Harmon
29:45 – 30:36
So you were open minded enough when you were reading all of this information that you could see that the argument or the evidence, I guess best explanation for what we’re seeing and observing in the world might lie in the hands of the fact that there’s a transcendent source that that answers all of those miracles that were unexplainable within science alone. You also mentioned that you opened the Bible and of course, again, coming from a very, I guess, reductionist, reductionistic view of science and that nature is all there is. I know you probably had a preconceived idea of what you thought it was and what was that preconceived idea and how did it change once you started reading for yourself?
Trevor Lohman
30:36 – 33:50
I assumed that the Bible was just this like moralist finger pointing list of things, you know, you should or should not do. And many of these ideas were really antiquated and wouldn’t make sense in the modern world. And I had heard all the things about how it supports, you know, the mistreatment of women and slavery, all these things you hear in college campuses. And yeah, so I assumed Jesus would be this very unrelatable and God would be this very unrelatable person who was clearly the creation of the human mind, right? And I’d be able to see through that and see like, oh yeah, this is just because they thought this and they thought this. And then I read it, I’m like, oh my gosh, like this could have been written. I mean, this is directly applicable, you know, especially the New Testament, directly applicable to our society right now. And I also expected it to be very comforting, like overly so, like a way to address death anxiety for the masses, you know, that’s not what it was at all. It was, in some ways it was very much like, hey, if you’re a Christian, you’re going to be persecuted and the path is narrow, you know, very few of you are going to do it, right? And I was like, okay, so this doesn’t feel like, like a comforting fairy tale. So that right off the bat was interesting to me. And also it wasn’t, it wasn’t like a finger wagging, moralistic argument. It was kind of the opposite. It was an attack of hypocrisy. People who are finger wagging moralists but aren’t living a righteous life, those were like the enemy of the New Testament, right, the Pharisees. And I’m like, oh, this is, it was really, honestly completely antithetical to what I thought it would be. And that in and of itself made me go, why is that? You know, why didn’t I have this understanding? Like, why has pop culture and media, why did they give me a completely different understanding of this book? And so that was big. But then also at the same time, I was going back and reading some of, you know, with the subject of the book, some of these scientists in the 1900s, even back the 1700s, 1800s, they never put science forward as an alternative. They were trying to show all these mysteries that supported the idea that there was something beyond the natural world that they didn’t really understand. And so I go, okay, there’s a lot going on right now. You know, my logical, rational, atheistic worldview is collapsing. I’m reading the Bible and I’m like shocked by how different it is and what I expected and how much sense it made and how relatable, you know, Jesus is. And also in the meantime, the people that I used to worship, right? The fathers of science, they actually didn’t believe what I thought they believed. So it was just sort of this multi-pronged attack on my atheist worldview that sort of all culminated in belief.
Jana Harmon
33:51 – 34:12
So you came to a place of, I guess, belief that Jesus was a historical figure in, in 1st century Palestine or that he was who he claimed to be, God in the flesh and all of that.
Trevor Lohman
34:13 – 35:48
And even before I got to the fact that I believed he was a historical figure and a real person, I was just shocked by how much he did not feel like a creation of the human mind, you know, because he didn’t. Because you do comparative studies of religion and it’s all sort of about making you feel better or giving one group power over another group or you know, just making, just explaining away anxiety. That’s not – like Jesus was countercultural, very much countercultural. And it doesn’t really make sense, you know, because I think the atheist perspective is like, oh, and you’ve heard like the communist take on religion, the opiate of the masses. And the atheist perspective is this is just something that people invented to make themselves feel better or to take power away from a certain group. And the New Testament, and the Old Testament too, it doesn’t feel like that at all. It actually kind of feels real. You know, it doesn’t feel like a comforting story written by people. But then, yeah, you start digging into, you know, some of this, some of the archeological evidence and the historical evidence and it didn’t. I had always been told that it just flat out refutes the Bible. But then I started finding out, well, that’s also not true. That’s another lie for some reason somebody sold to me, which again raises my suspicion even further. And yeah, so it just all happened at the same time.
Jana Harmon
35:48 – 36:00
So it was making sense in terms of your – basically you were able to integrate science into this grander story of reality, I guess.
Trevor Lohman
36:00 – 36:00
Yeah.
Jana Harmon
36:00 – 37:12
In addition to the fact that you were finding that substantively the facts surrounding the biblical narrative were true and substantiated through evidence. So everything was coming together. Now there’s a very different understanding of belief that things are true and belief in the person of Christ, that’s a different step. Was it easier for you to make that step or how did that happen? Was it an understanding of who you, in reading the scripture, you get this sense that God, if he does exist, he’s, like you were saying, just amazingly grand, but yet in the person of Christ, so personal and he knows you better than you know yourself. And he’s perfect and we know that we’re not. Was there a sense of this, like, oh my, if this is real and this is true and Jesus is who he says he is, then there’s a response that happens.
Trevor Lohman
37:12 – 39:00
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know that honestly, as a kid, maybe as a teenager, college student, that was sort of one of my critiques of, for the religious, you know, of believers is like, man, if you really do believe that this story is true, I mean, you would conduct your life in a different way, you know. And so, yeah, I started reading this like, oh my gosh, you know, like, I think I’ve been wrong, you know, which is a big deal when we’re talking about eternity and salvation and yeah, that was one of the big things, is that this is such an unlikely story. You know, if you were trying, like, if you were. If you sat down with a group of your buddies and you wanted to come up with a religion that was exciting and pulled people in, this probably isn’t the story you would tell. You wouldn’t tell people like, you need to be faithful to your wife, you need to forgive the people that have wronged you. And if you follow me, you’re going to be persecuted. And you wouldn’t have the central figure of your religion be crucified. You know, you’d have the central figure of your religion throwing lightning bolts from the clouds like Zeus. You know, you’d have this powerful person that everyone wants on their side. Right? So it’s a very unlikely story. And so, yeah, it didn’t, it didn’t feel like someone sat down and said, okay, we’re going to come up with this religion that’s going to spread across the world and become the biggest religion in the world. But that’s exactly what happened. You have this incredibly relatable human God who, you know, paid the ultimate price and was. Suffered this horrible thing. And then, anyway, so, yeah, when I’m reading that, I’m just like, yeah, I really got to rethink everything, you know.
Jana Harmon
39:00 – 39:58
So, yeah, it is an extraordinary story. And in the way that this extraordinary God reaches down to each of us personally and calls us to himself to provide a life that’s like you say, it’s very counterintuitive. It’s counter cultural. I mean, Jesus, the countercultural figure, wants us to be like him. Right? And so it’s not, as you say, a religion of just mere comfort. It’s a tough road. It’s a road of surrender. Now you had mentioned earlier, and I always love to ask this question, especially as a scientist, how do science and belief in God go together? How can they go together? That’s a real paradigm shift for you. So, so if you could explain that.
Trevor Lohman
39:59 – 44:54
Yeah, well, I mean, this was one thing that bothered me also about belief as a kid was this sort of, this kind, I felt this was just my perception. I don’t actually think it’s true, but my perception was that there was like this rejection of curiosity. It’s like, hey, we’ve already got it all figured out, here’s the book. And so why explore all these other things? So that drew me to science and then I found the same close mindedness and science and now, you know, with a much deeper understanding of what science used to be and of the Bible. I think it is kind of obvious to me now that the two go together. I mean, first of all, I got the impression that Jesus encouraged curiosity. You know, he surrounded himself with 12 people who were constantly asking him questions. And there was never this like stern rejection of question asking. I never, I never felt that. And so that didn’t, so right off the bat I’m like, okay, so my initial impression that this book, the Bible rejects curiosity is not true. And also, you know, the, these, these scientists, I mean the subject of the book, these physicists, a lot of the things they were discovering kind of rhymed was stuff I was reading in the Bible, you know, and we don’t need to get into all the details, but this idea that belief is central to reality, I mean, of course Jesus says that over and over and over again. That’s, that’s this recurrent theme, you know, when, when he calls the disciple, is it Peter, I believe to walk to him on the water and as soon as he has doubt enter his mind, he falls into the water, right? And the, the mustard seed being able to move the mountain with the faith. I mean this is just all about how belief influences reality. And this is what all the 20th century physicists were saying in the, in the 20s and 30s is that our perception and our observation and our belief influences physical reality. So that was, I thought was fascinating. And then I found out that the scientific principles of thermodynamics tell us that we shouldn’t have this beautiful ordered world that we live in. You know, and it just, it just rings true in our life. I mean, what happens if you, you know, say I have a home in the mountains and I go there for six months to write another book. And I come back to my house, it’s going to be overrun, it’s going to be deteriorated and there’s gonna be weeds everywhere in my garden. And it takes, it takes intervention to maintain order. And that’s the second law. You know, we shouldn’t have this pocket of complexity that we live in unless someone reaches in and, and manipulates it. And so yeah, all of these foundational scientific principles, I mean we, I talk about photons and how information can be transferred over any distance and you start reading the modern scientific explanations for these things, they sound like religion. Like Federico Fagin, amazing physicist, invented the CPU. So this is not, you know, a fringe guy by any means. His current explanation of reality is that we’re like a drone where the real conscious perspective exists somewhere else and is receiving our viewpoint, our perspective through a quantum field. And I’m like, man, that sure sounds like a spirit animating the flesh. Like how would you describe quantum field theory to someone 2000 years ago? You know, not like that. And so you’d say spirit animates the flesh. And I’m like, okay, well the scientists, they’re trying, they’re now trying to come up with a substitution to religion, to Christianity, I would say using scientific vocabulary, maybe because they don’t want to swallow their pride. Right. But I’m willing to accept that maybe actually the Bible was telling us this stuff all along and that that’s a call for me to be more open minded. Maybe science actually supports the themes of the Bible and maybe we can as humans sort of tease apart the mechanisms of how things work. I don’t think we can ever actually fully understand God or souls or spirits. But, but at the very least the modern scientific explanations are not refuting those concepts. I think they support them. So I don’t know if that answers your question, but.
Jana Harmon
44:55 – 46:16
No, I just love that, that you are sitting there as someone who again is very highly trained. You are scientific, you love science. I think you say that, you say it in your book, you’ve said it here today. You love science. You’re not dismissing science, you’re just putting science in its rightful perspective. And actually I think showing how science can actually lead to more that if we are open minded and curious and willing to look – again your book, I just so highly encourage it – to look beyond our normal ways of thinking of just merely computational, you know, ways of considering science and looking beyond and into the mystery of quantum mechanics and what that might reveal and what that might imply. There’s just so much. There just, there’s a lot of mystery. But I also love the way that you’re pointing to an adequate cause for what we’re seeing in order and fine tuning and life and complexity and language code, all of those things. There has to be a sufficient cause.
Trevor Lohman
46:18 – 49:19
If I might add to that, we’re living in a weird time right now because we’re like in this transitionary time where I think rational atheism, Dawkins, Hitchens, that sort of, we’re kind of moving past that. And I am a little bit nervous for science and my colleagues in science that they recognize the flaws in their worldview. But rather than embrace a different older explanation, the Bible, Jesus, they’re kind of trying to make a new scientific explanation that they still say is a different and better explanation. But they’re using like supernatural things that we’ve traditionally would have dismissed, like quantum entanglement and the fact that maybe matter isn’t really there when you’re not looking at it. And they’re trying to construct a new explanation that explains some of these unexplainable things without using the word God for some reason. I mean, people use the word universe now to mean God. Like, ‘the universe just told me,’ or ‘I think this is what the universe is trying to say.’ Or, and you know, ‘the quantum field’ instead of spirits and you know, all these things and I’m a little worried that, that that’s the direction the field is going to kind of go. There are still some very hyper-rationalist, reductionist fields in science. My field is definitely one of them neuroscience. And you know, it was a study of free will that I think actually even before quantum mechanics kind of pushed me in this direction because there is this insistence that we didn’t have to explain the feeling of being alive. And what I mean by that is I feel like I’m in here and I’m thinking up the next words I’m going to say. And I’m saying them to you and you’re hearing them and you’re thinking your own thoughts and you’re replying to me. And it’s not just like we’re automatons, like two AI chatbots talking to each other, you know, using mathematical algorithms to determine the next best word to say, like no we’re actually like, we’re in here, you know, we’re experiencing it. It does kind of seem like there’s something special about being in your mind, observing your life, observing your inner world and your outer world. And neuroscience just said, no, there isn’t. And the burden of proof is on you, you know, person who thinks that this is, this subjective experience is real to prove us otherwise. And so, you know, I’m very familiar with FMRI and all of these studies that show like, this is the network where consciousness exists and I’m just not even a little bit convinced. And I think a lot of neuroscientists aren’t. They just don’t want to go against the grain. It’s usually not a good career move, but it’s just very unconvincing.
Jana Harmon
49:19 – 49:37
No, I hear you. Seems so counterintuitive to deny your basic experience of life, that you are a person who’s making choices, and to deny your own humanity in that way feels irrational to me.
Trevor Lohman
49:37 – 49:38
It really does.
Jana Harmon
49:39 – 50:31
So maybe it will be – you mentioned Stephen Meyer earlier – maybe it will be a Return of the God Hypothesis. I hope so. In some ways, hopefully your work will help guide people or open people’s mind. How would you describe your perspective now that you have a fuller sense of reality, a fuller explanation of reality? Would you say that your worldview is bigger and makes more sense? It’s more corresponding with reality, like within our own human experiences? Would you say that it has made a difference to you professionally as well as personally?
Trevor Lohman
50:31 – 52:32
Yeah, yeah, it. I mean, I think people accuse the religious worldview of being like, discordant with reality, but it’s the exact opposite. I mean, to deny that consciousness exists, like you said, is to deny the fundamental experience of being alive. So how could you not have some kind of like internal chaos holding that view that this is an illusion? And you know, you know it’s true because when you talk like, is it Sam Harris? You know, he talks about like, yeah, free will is an illusion, but I find that my life works much better if I just assume it’s true. I was like, okay, well, if you have to, if you have to assume my argument to live, then there’s something wrong with your argument, you know, and so yeah, that it’s completely incompatible, I think. And so you just, as an atheist, you just kind of have to box that somewhere else and just ignore it. And so that’s not, it’s not a worldview that works if you have to ignore all these fundamental principles. But there’s this effect that people like to quote in science all the time, usually being critical of religious worldview, but to just kind of turn it back on them. This Dunning Kruger effect, which is, you know, when you learn a little bit about a topic, your perceived competence just skyrockets. Right? But then the more you learn, the less confident you become. Right? And that’s certainly the case with this. I mean, the more I study the actual scientific explanations for things, the more I go, whoa. Like there’s no way for me to feel confident saying that there’s purely scientific explanations for this or at least scientific explanations that don’t have a Creator at the bottom of them somewhere. And so, yeah, the more I learn, the more open minded I get.
Jana Harmon
52:33 – 53:54
I think there are some people listening to you and, and they may have had some questions or thought, you know, I feel that I’m protecting something that really doesn’t make sense. I don’t like living in these useful fictions. Right. I have to live as if I’m making decisions, as if I have a mind that I’m thinking, I’m acting, I’m moving, I’m making a difference. I’m not just merely a determined, you know, being, and they’re listening to you and they’re thinking, okay, he’s intelligent, he’s thought about these things, he’s a scientist. And they would be willing to be curious enough to consider that there may be something more than the closed reductionistic worldview of scientism. How would you encourage somebody who’s willing to take that next step with their curiosity, with their openness and even in spite of, to your earlier point that they may have had some prior religious pain or hurt. You know, we all have confirmation biases and we all have issues and, but yet we all in a sense want to know what’s true.
Trevor Lohman
53:55 – 53:55
Yeah.
Jana Harmon
53:55 – 54:09
And so how can you encourage somebody to just kind of look beyond whether it’s hurt or prior in our own, just get ourselves out of the way really to look for what’s really true.
Trevor Lohman
54:09 – 56:24
Just having lived that, what you’re describing, having lived that experience, I would say first, you know, maybe even before you jump into the scripture, just examine your worldview first. Like go back and read what Heisenberg thought and Max Planck and Louis Pasteur and all these like foundational folks, what did they believe? And it’s going to be very different than what you believe as a rational atheist, even though you might be quoting their experimental findings, right. Or at least findings that came from them. You know, Heisenberg has a famous quote. You know, ‘the first gulp from the glass of natural sciences makes you an atheist, but at the bottom, God is waiting.’ It’s a great quote. And Louis Pastor has an almost identical quote. And that is, that’s actually a true experience. So if you, if you’re an atheist because you have a little bit of knowledge about scientific history, maybe try to get a lot of knowledge about scientific history because you might actually find God waiting at the bottom of the glass. Second thing is, if you have been hurt by religion, which I, I never really, I would say was hurt by religion, but I just, there was certain flaws I saw in religion that I really honed in on. If you’re one of those people, you need to really start trying to distinguish between God and the human institutions that exist on earth to worship Him. And it’s not that there’s anything wrong with those institutions. It’s just acknowledge that those two things are separate. Because most of the pushback I get is pushback on religion. And I’m like, I’m not even talking about religion in the book, I’m talking about God. And so just read, you know, once you’re a little bit more open minded and once you’ve examined your own scientific worldview has its flaws, just I, then I would go start reading, at least for me, the story of Jesus was by far the most compelling thing and just go read that and come to your own conclusions and differentiate the man, the God described in that book from whatever weird experiences you had that pushed you away from the church. That’d be my advice.
Jana Harmon
56:24 – 56:32
I think that’s very, very wise. And for those who want to find the story of Jesus in the Bible, where would they go first?
Trevor Lohman
56:32 – 57:22
4 books of the New Testament. It’s actually an incredibly short story, which was surprising to me. I just assumed the whole Bible was going to be about Jesus. It’s really the same story told four times from four different perspectives. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. And you know, I also, not to get into like a biblical history thing, but it’s, you know, we now know that these books are written at least Mark and Matthew at, you know, pretty much the time of Jesus. And so this is not this like fanciful, mythological thing. It’s probably an eyewitness account. And so why wouldn’t you want to read an eyewitness account of the most – even if you don’t believe he’s God – why wouldn’t you want to go read an influential account of the most influential man, if that’s what you think he is, to ever live.
Jana Harmon
57:22 – 57:47
And for us as Christians, I know that, that there are, we know, people like you or you were, that just thought at one time that science did have all the answers and they’re not really open towards another perspective. How can we as Christians meaningfully engage someone like that who might be resistant or think that they know it all?
Trevor Lohman
57:47 – 59:37
It’s tough. I mean, having been that person, I don’t know what someone could have said to me. You know, it may just be something that people just have to come to themselves, you know, and it’s, you know, it’s probably God who needs to soften that person’s heart, but maybe not. I mean, I think it is probably useful. I mean, listen, that’s what I try to do in the book. That’s who the book is for. Someone who is maybe not convinced that they know everything because they’re not ready, then I don’t think anything can convince that person. But once that first chink in the armor happens and you start. Someone starts kind of opening their mind and going, yeah, this doesn’t make a lot of sense. I mean, that’s who the book’s for. So I think it’s like, okay, you think you know everything about how the universe was created. Well, do you know that the, the people who invented this stuff didn’t feel that way? Like, do you know that Einstein didn’t feel that way? Do you know that Heisenberg didn’t feel that way? Planck, the people who actually came up with these theories. And you’re not, you’re not trying to say you’re smarter than Einstein and Planck and Bohr and Eisenberg, Right? So that is kind of one approach, I think, that would have worked on me because that’s just a level of hubris that I think even the most, the biggest know it all can’t swallow, Right? If it’s someone in your life that’s important to you, I don’t think you should just go out and harass people, but maybe you should. But if it’s someone in your life that’s important to you, you need to force them to contend with those questions because they can’t. And there’s only really one explanation that does, and that’s the religious explanation.
Jana Harmon
59:37 – 01:00:18
Yeah, that’s excellent. Trevor. Thank you so much for really bringing so much to the table today. I love your voice. Again, in my experience, in my research, it seems like those who were wrestling with some kind of cognitive dissonance with their own worldview, who had enough intellectual integrity and honesty to pursue the answers, find themselves in a very different place than they ever thought as believers in God who once called themselves atheists. And you are a living, breathing example of that and someone who’s actually trying to open the door for others to see.
Trevor Lohman
01:00:19 – 01:00:19
Yeah.
Jana Harmon
01:00:19 – 01:00:49
And so I again, I just thank you so much for coming on. I appreciate the writing that you’ve done. I encourage anyone again to go take a look at Trevor’s book God’s Eye View, and it’s again, well worth your time, well worth your reading and your investment. But at the end of the day, you’re sitting here as an ambassador of Jesus Christ and of that I’m most thankful of all. Thank you so much, Trevor, for coming on.
Trevor Lohman
01:00:50 – 01:00:51
Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Jana Harmon
01:00:53 – 01:02:17
Thanks for joining us on this episode of eX-skeptic. Trevor’s story reminds us that true intellectual courage means being willing to follow the evidence, even when it challenges our most deeply held assumptions. Once convinced that science had all the answers and faith was for the weak, Trevor came to see that science alone couldn’t account for the fullness of human consciousness or meaning or experience. His openness to reconsider and his pursuit of truth ultimately led him to a place he never belief in God. If Trevor story resonated with you, or if you’re on your own journey of questioning and exploration, we invite you to visit us at eX-skeptic.org and explore our curated playlists. Sign up for our email and join the conversation on YouTube or wherever you listen to your podcasts. If you’d like to explore your questions in conversation with one of our guests, we’d love to help. Just email us at info and we’ll get you connected. eX-skeptic is part of the C.S. lewis Institute podcast Network. If you enjoy this episode, please subscribe, leave a review, rate it, or share it with someone who you might think would benefit from hearing stories like these. Thanks again for listening and be sure to join us next time where we’ll hear another unlikely story of belief.
