Facing the Reality of Atheism – Jon Noyes’ Story

01/07/22 • 0 min

Former atheist Jon Noyes was driven to fully live out his life-long atheism, but his pursuit was challenged when he began to consider which worldview best fit with reality.

Recommended Resources

A Game Plan for Discussing Your Christian Convictions – Greg Koukl

The Story of Reality: How the World Began, How It Ends, and Everything Important That Happens in Between – Greg Koukl

The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus – Gary Habermas and Michael Licona

CSLI Events & Resources

How to Pray for Others who are Suffering with Nancy Guthrie

January 21, 2022 at 8:00 pm Eastern

Registration Link

C.S. Lewis Institute Spiritual Checkup please go to www.cslewisinstitute.org/asc

Episode Transcript

Today, we’ll be listening to Jon Noyes’ surprising journey from atheism to Christianity. As an atheist, Jon’s list for reasons for disbelief in God and Christianity was long. In my research survey, he listed twelve distinct reasons supporting his once-held atheism. They range from lack of intellectual evidence and rationality to negative experience with Christian hypocrisy, from social and moral disdain to a personal distaste for religious people and institutions. There was hardly an unchecked box on the survey. He even took extra time to type in his strongly atheistic view that Christians were deluded and superstitious people who needed to change their false presuppositions and false beliefs. For him, atheism was objective, known through science, logic, and experience. There was no doubt that God did not exist. He enjoyed the benefits of disbelief, not only intellectually but in social relationships it gave and the moral freedom it granted. He was quite happy as an atheist.

Jon was a convinced atheist with no intention towards changing. Yet today Jon’s passion is helping others discover the truth of Christianity, having completed an advanced degree in the study of worldview, and has worked full time in Christian ministry. It’s clear that a dramatic transformation has taken place. I hope you join in to hear his whole story, not only what informed his atheism but what breached those stalwart walls and prompted him to reconsider what he once thought so ignorant. What would cause someone so resolute to change his view about God? To move from an anti-theist, atheist position to becoming a passionate follower of Jesus Christ? I can’t wait to hear, and I hope you’ll come along.

Welcome to the Side B Podcast, Jon. It’s great to have you on the podcast today.

Thank you so much, Jana, it’s great to be with you. I love the work that you’re doing and how you’re doing it, and I’ve been looking forward to this for a few weeks now.

Fantastic! Fantastic! As we’re getting started, Jon, why don’t you tell the listeners a little bit about yourself, so we’ll know who’s telling this story?

Sure. So my story is probably typical, average. I grew up in a town south of Boston, Massachusetts, called Plymouth. The home of the pilgrims. To a pretty normal family. I grew up playing soccer and enjoying life in a suburb of Boston, and I just had a great childhood. I went to Plymouth North High School. When I graduated there, I moved to Washington, DC, and went to study criminal justice at American University. And I loved DC and living in our nation’s capital for, well the four years of college, but then after that, I got my first job, different than what I thought I was going to be doing. I ended up actually being a paralegal at a fairly prestigious law firm in DC, working on a lot of appellate work in front of the Supreme Court and having just a lot of fun in Washington, DC, and then I felt a pull to pull me out to California, so about 15 years ago now, I hopped on a plane and moved to sunny southern California, where I’ve been ever since, and I absolutely love where I live. I live in Newbury Park, California. It’s maybe about 45 miles north of Los Angeles and 8 miles from the coast, and this valley that I live in, it’s just the best place to raise a family.

And I have a beautiful wife. Her name is Riana, and she’s my rock. I love her with all my heart. And then I have four a...

Former atheist Jon Noyes was driven to fully live out his life-long atheism, but his pursuit was challenged when he began to consider which worldview best fit with reality.

Recommended Resources

A Game Plan for Discussing Your Christian Convictions – Greg Koukl

The Story of Reality: How the World Began, How It Ends, and Everything Important That Happens in Between – Greg Koukl

The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus – Gary Habermas and Michael Licona

CSLI Events & Resources

How to Pray for Others who are Suffering with Nancy Guthrie

January 21, 2022 at 8:00 pm Eastern

Registration Link

C.S. Lewis Institute Spiritual Checkup please go to www.cslewisinstitute.org/asc

Episode Transcript

Welcome to the Side B Podcast, Jon. It’s great to have you on the podcast today.

Thank you so much, Jana, it’s great to be with you. I love the work that you’re doing and how you’re doing it, and I’ve been looking forward to this for a few weeks now.

Fantastic! Fantastic! As we’re getting started, Jon, why don’t you tell the listeners a little bit about yourself, so we’ll know who’s telling this story?

And I have a beautiful wife. Her name is Riana, and she’s my rock. I love her with all my heart. And then I have four a...

Previous Episode

Finding God After Decades of Atheism – Justo Amato’s Story

Like his father, Justo Amato was a resolved atheist well into middle age yet he unexpectedly came to believe in God.

Episode Transcript

Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to the Side B Podcast, where we see how someone flips the record of their life. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist but who unexpectedly became a Christian. It’s often thought that religious people are religious just because they grew up that way. They don’t know any different, so they just believe, and it is thought that, once they discover the truth about religion, they will no longer believe.But what happens when someone grows up in an atheist household, resolutely identifies as an atheist until middle age, and then comes to believe that religion, particularly Christianity, is true?

When someone has been an atheist for most of their lives, later into middle age, the odds of such a dramatic life shift from nonbelief to belief is often surprising, both to the person who’s making such a tremendous paradigm shift, as well as those around them. Those who are resolute in their own worldview often don’t seem to change, but sometimes they do, and we are generally curious as to how that happens.

Today, we’ll be listening to Justo Amato’s long journey from atheism to Christianity. Following in the footsteps of his own atheistic father, it wasn’t until his late 50s that Justo reconsidered his own beliefs. I hope that you join in to hear his story, not only to understand why he was an atheist for so long, but what changed to allow him to reconsider what he once thought impossible to believe. This should be interesting.

Welcome to the Side B Podcast, Justo, it’s so great to have you.

Thank you, Jana. It’s great to be here.

Wonderful, wonderful! As we’re getting started, Justo, why don’t you give us an idea of a little bit about who you are?

Okay. First thing, I was a little 4-month-old immigrant from Spain, so as a little boy, I don’t think I spoke any English until I went to kindergarten. Neither of my parents spoke English. My father spoke a little bit. My mother spoke none. And so my brother and I grew up speaking Spanish and English back and forth, always speaking English to one another but Spanish to my parents, and-

Your family. That’s fascinating. Your family moved over from Spain, so you were immigrants to the US. What part of the US did you grow up in?

Well, we settled in Bound Brook, New Jersey, and that’s where I lived up until I was 44.

Okay, so you grew up in the Northeast.

I did.

Yes. So what was that like, growing up in the Northeast in terms of both your family and your community? Was there a sense of religiosity? Was there a community of faith? Catholicism, I believe, is probably fairly strong in the Northeast. What was your world like growing up? Was there God in it?

No. My father was an atheist. As a young man in Spain, he saw the priests living very well while the community was struggling, and so he just became totally anti-church. So I never heard even the mention of God or Jesus, never saw a Bible. Most of my friends in my neighborhood were Catholic. One of my good friends was an altar boy. Why he was an altar boy, I’ll never figure out, because he was the wildest kid. But anyway, nobody that I knew really went to church on a regular basis. They went Christmas, New Year’s, for communion, but there were really no strong religious people in the neighborhood at all, and so I had no religious training, background, nothing, and it was that way until I was 28 years old. And then I went to the beach, and I met Annabel.

During that period of time, those 28 years, that’s a long time to really consider who you are and your beliefs and what you believe and what you don’t believe. I guess you considered yourself an atheist during that time? And if so, what did you think of Christians and Christianity and belief in God. What was that to you? Was that just something people did on Christmas, Easter, but there wasn’t much more to it than that? How did you consider or what did you think of religion and religious beliefs during that time?

To be honest with you, I didn’t give it much thought because my friends, they never brought up religion at all. I mean I had friends, six or seven friends. Nobody ever talked about religion. So I never even gave it much thought, Jana. And now I meet this young lady. She was 20. I was 28. And it turns out she teaches Sunday school, and she was at the beach with her friend, who was also a Sunday school teacher, so for the first time, I’m hearing about God and Jesus. I went to church with Annabel a few times before we got married, and I didn’t have a prob...

Next Episode

Losing Faith and Finding Belief – Marie Wood’s Story

Former atheist Marie left her devoted childhood faith in the face of intellectual doubts but eventually found her way to an intellectually robust belief in God and Christianity.

Resources:

Marie’s Non-Profit: MTM-CNM Family Connection http://www.mtm-cnm.org

Books

More Than a Carpenter, Josh McDowell

The Case for Faith, Lee Strobel

Works on the resurrection by Gary Habermas

Icons of Evolution, Jonathan Wells

Works by Nabeel Qureshi – http://www.nabeelqureshi.com (Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus and more)

C.S. Lewis Institute Resources and Events: https://www.cslewisinstitute.org/ Episode Transcript

Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to the Side B Podcast, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each episode, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist but who became a Christian, to the great surprise of themselves and others. In most of the stories we’ve listened to so far, the former atheists had little to no Christian belief or faith or exposure to Christians or Christianity before they became atheists.

But that isn’t always the case. Sometimes, someone is intimately connected with Christianity and then decides to leave it, decides to leave the faith and community they once loved, the beliefs they once held, not necessarily because they wanted to leave, but they felt like they had no choice. In their minds, they could not sustain intellectual belief in God or perhaps questionable moral platitudes in the face and pressures of what they may be finding or learning that opposes what they once thought was true. They find their faith crumbling against the weight of growing disbelief. They can no longer sustain their faith or intellectual integrity or even social acceptance and continue as a Christian. It becomes no longer true or real, good, or relevant. Deconversion seems inevitable. Atheism seemingly becomes their only choice. That is, until it isn’t.

In today’s story, Marie, a brilliant thinker, left the Christian faith she loved for what she thought was the intellectual respectability and truth of atheism. But her once-settled atheistic presumptions were challenged, and she became open to reconsider what she once left behind. She found her way back, not to the childhood Christian faith she left behind, but to a substantive, intellectually grounded Christianity that has informed her adult thinking and sustained her life in powerful ways. I hope you’ll come along and listen to her story and that you’ll stay to the end to hear her give advice to curious skeptics or even former Christians towards rethinking their faith, as well as advice to Christians on how best to think about and engage with those who don’t believe.

Welcome to the Side B Podcast, Marie. It’s so great to have you!

Oh, it’s great to be here!

As we’re getting started, Marie, so the listeners can know a little bit about you, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself before we get into your story?

Well, I’m Marie Wood. I’m married to David Wood. We’ve been married for 19 years. We have five boys, Lucien, Blaise, Reid, Paley, and Kepler, and I am very busy with the boys, and also I assist David with his work, and I also co-founded a nonprofit to support families affected by the rare disease that my sons Reid and Paley share, so that pretty much occupies my time.

Okay, great, and maybe we can learn more about that as we move through your story, and for those who are listening, I’ll put a link to whatever that nonprofit is in the episode notes. So let’s get started with your story, Marie. So that we can know about where you grew up, the community and the context of your belief or disbelief as a child, why don’t you just step us into that world of your family, of your childhood, of your community. Was there any sense of religion? Religious belief? Was there any reference to God in that world?

So I grew up in a Roman Catholic family, and we were practicing. We went to church every Sunday, and I always remember having a strong love of God at an early age. What was interesting was I ended up going to a Presbyterian church for preschool or for nursery and day care. So I actually heard the gospel at a very early age, and I really connected to it, and I used to just sing about Jesus all the time.

And I had this little T-shirt that we made at that nursery/preschool that said, “Guess who’s my best friend?” and it was a picture of Jesus with the long hair. And it was my favorite shirt. I loved that shirt so much that I wore it all the way until probably first grade.

But I love...