Former atheist Dr. Dan Mizell left Christianity and embraced science as the most rational way to understand and live in the world. Over time, he began to question whether the natural world was sufficient to explain reality. His search for answers led him to a more solid foundation for knowledge, ethics, and life in God.
Episode Transcript
Hello and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to Side B Stories, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist or skeptic but who became a Christian against all odds. You can hear more of these stories at our Side B Stories website at www.sidebstories.com and see more of these amazing stories on our YouTube channel. We always welcome your comments via our Facebook page or YouTube channel and on our email at info@sidebstories.com. We love hearing from you!
Many people grow up with a notion that belief in God and belief in science don’t go together, that you either need to choose one or the other. That you’re either rational, reasonable, and scientific or deluded, superstitious, and religious. After all, science brings knowledge, objective knowledge about reality, rather than just merely the comforts of a subjective, human-constructed religious story. Leaving religion behind for a more robust, sober-minded science is a common tale. But what happens when the pristine perception of science begins to break down? When it doesn’t meet someone’s elevated expectations for knowledge, for life, within.
In our story today, former atheist and mechanical engineer Dr. Dan Mizell once fully embraced science and the natural world as the most rational basis for understanding reality. That is until his pristine worldview began to crack under the weight of closer examination, of practical living. He began to question whether or not the natural world was sufficient to explain reality and answer his growing questions. I hope you’ll come along to hear Dan tell his thoughtful story of moving from disbelief to belief in God, of finding a comprehensive, integrated worldview where science and faith comfortably fit.
Welcome to Side B Stories, Dan. It’s great to have you with me today.
Thanks for having me on.
I’d love for the listeners to know a bit about you. Who you are, where you live, perhaps your family, your education. Love to hear all about that before we get into your story.
Okay. Yeah. So I’m currently a mechanical engineer working in the hydraulics field. We live in northern Michigan, I have a wife and now four kids, one who recently arrived.
That sounds good to me!
Is that it?
Yeah. So northern Michigan. I know…. I’m just going to say it anyway, because I know this is going to air probably not during the winter, but it has been very bitter cold up there, I imagine, in northern Michigan, hasn’t it?
Yeah. It does get pretty cold. We get a lot of snow. We’re right by Lake Michigan, so we get some moderation of temperature from that but a little bit of extra snow. Actually, just last night I was out teaching my three-year-old daughter to ski, so that’s always an adventure.
Oh wow! What fun! And I love that you’re teaching her so young. It’s amazing to see those little ones just zooming down the slopes, and they’ve been on slopes. Almost as early as they can walk, they can ski, and they’re such naturals, so good for you. Well, let’s get into your story. And let’s start at the beginning. Tell me, have you always been from Michigan? Where is your family of origin from? And what did your home look like in terms of just your family life and was religion or God any part of that?
Yeah. So I was born and raised in southeast Michigan, so almost to Ohio, but on the Michigan side of the border. And great family growing up. We lived a mile away from my grandparents and a bunch of cousins. I was an only child myself, but I had a lot of family around, so it was a really great environment. In terms of religion, we sort of viewed religion as this impersonal god, but we felt a very strong cultural obligation that you should go to church. You should be a good person. If you’re a good enough person, you’ll go to heaven, that sort of mentality. It wasn’t really this personal relationship. But very devout in my family’s own way, that there was this emphasis that we would always go to church, even if we’re on vacation, so it was…. I’m getting out in the weeds.
No. You’re fine.
I guess there was a hesitance to get into the big questions of religion. It was just sort of, “This is what we do. This is what our family has always done. Let’s not think about it too hard.” And that sort of informed my view on religion that, “Oh, well, maybe we’re not supposed to ask the big questions.” My dad, he was a truck driver for his whole career, but he was very interested, very inquisitive about a lot of subjects, and so I could always come to him with questions about, “Hey, how does a radio work?” or “How does a light work?” or whatever it was, and he would usually have a good answer for me. And so, kind of in the very early days, it started to set up this dichotomy of, if I’m interested in a scientific and a technological question, those answers are available, and we can ask those, and we can be interested in those. But if there’s a question about God or a question about religion, it’s almost taboo, where we don’t like to ask too many questions about that. So now I realize that’s not a…. I got the wrong impression. But that’s definitely what I had growing up.
And as well, going to church, the church we went to, a lot of the preaching kind of had the message that science and religion are not compatible. The old trope. I don’t think this was ever mentioned, but it was sort of the theme of a lot of it is, “Science says your grandpa was a monkey, and your grandpa’s not a monkey, right?” That sort of thing, and at the same time, I was reading science magazines and reading about Darwinian evolution, and well, it kind of made sense internally, at least. And so, again, it kind of felt like, “Okay. There’s people talking about these things that have good answers and good reasoning behind their position, and then there’s these other people in the church that, they also talk about the same subjects, but maybe not with as much intellectual rigor.” That was the impression that I got. There are people, of course, on both sides with intellectual rigor and on both sides without it. And I was, I think, hearing one group from one side and the other group from the other.
But again it sets up this picture of the world where, if I want intellectual rigor, if I want answers, if I want things to fit together in a cohesive worldview, I should go to science and technology and learn about those things. And religion is kind of this thing over here that helps you deal with fears and maybe belonging. But that’s not where you ask questions. That’s not where you should be inquisitive.
Interesting. So it sounds like religion was a bit compartmentalized. It was important enough for your family to participate. It was even on vacation that you would go to church. So, in some ways, it was very important, but in other ways…. Yeah. Some things were off limits. Like you say, you got the impression that, if you’re intellectual, if you’re scientific, maybe it doesn’t provide that kind of rigor. So as you were getting older, it sounds like you were obviously in school, learning about Darwinian evolution and reading science magazines. How old were you when you were starting to wonder…. I mean. Let me just say this: Were you able to compartmentalize church, set it aside, still participate, and still kind of believing science and technology on the one hand and church on the other hand, kind of on parallel tracks? Or were you starting to reject the religious aspect of whatever that was and move more firmly or fully towards science and technology and leave religion behind?
I think that definitely through high school it was very much compartmentalized. It was, “There’s this religion thing we do on Sundays, and there’s this science and technology thing we do other times.” And I was getting the message, subliminally really, from both sides that there’s a barrier in the middle, and information—thoughts don’t cross that barrier. And so that was probably right up until going to college. I hadn’t thought that really deeply about religion. It was just, again, a cultural almost obligation that I felt, that, “This is what my family does. We go to church.” And so growing up in southeast Michigan, I ended up going to college in the very western end of the northern peninsula of Michigan, at Michigan Tech University. So it was about a twelve-hour drive all the way through Michigan to get there. So about as far as you can go and still be in Michigan. And I actually ended up meeting my now wife up there, and that really started to make me ask questions, because she was also raised in a religious family and was less hesitant to ask the heavy questions about religion, and so, when I started dating her, we started having these conversations that made me pretty uncomfortable, because I didn’t know—I hadn’t thought about these questions in as much depth as I was starting to. And she was also raised in a bit of a different tradition than I was within Christianity, and so we had some differing opinions, and there was a lot of—I wouldn’t even say conflict, but a lot of interesting discussions. And I would say over the course of about the first two years of my undergraduate studies, we had basically talked each other out of our belief.
We had… I don’t even want to say discovered discrepancies. We had maybe imagined that there were these inconsistencies in Christianity, but really a lot of that came from us. I’ve heard the analogy of we came over scripture. We were almost judging the contents of scripture through our own lenses, and those lenses were, of course, very heavily influenced by the current prevailing scientific viewpoint. And so whenever something in scripture seemed to conflict with that, we would have to go around and around in circles, and ultimately we’d say, “Well. I don’t know. Maybe that’s wrong.” Never having the humility to say, “Well, maybe we misunderstand that,” or, “Maybe we should let this scripture help us understand what science is trying to tell us.” No. We were too proud for that. So we ended up bit by bit chipping away at what faith we had. And really-
Yeah. I was going to say.
Go ahead.
I was going to ask you a little bit about that, in terms of the faith that you had. Did you ever actually believe that God existed? Or was it just more of a cultural routine or ritual that you participated in, like you say, for belonging, for community, for to go where your parents went or whatever? Or was there any real felt belief even in the proposition that God exists? And there’s something or someone real at the end of all of these rituals? Or was it just again just something you did?
I would say, probably the whole time I would have agreed that there is a God, just that there was no personal relationship, at least for me, with that God. And so I had this conception of a very, not uncaring, but a remote God. That you could pray, but you shouldn’t really expect an answer sort of thing. And so—did you have another?
As you were starting to question and you’re looking at scripture, you and your girlfriend. And you’re looking at perhaps how it doesn’t match up with a scientific worldview. Things like miracles or perhaps other things that might have been giving you trouble. I know you were having discussions between the both of you. Did you ever seek counsel or find an intelligent Christian or anyone? Was there anyone in your world with whom you would even talk about: Do science and belief God go together or not? Or were you just making these judgments on your own?
Yeah. Not really at this stage. It was really kind of this echo chamber between the two of us, and, “Why should we ask anyone else? We’re the smartest people,” kind of mentality, and, “We can figure this out. We’re smart undergraduate college students. We’re going to get to the bottom of this.”
Yes.
And for the first few years, we did attend to church on campus, but it was just this kind of slow, slow falling away. And really, the concept of worldviews has been really helpful in understanding not only what led us away but also what ended up bringing us back.
And so I think what really drove me to reject Christianity was the kind of the two competing worldviews. There’s science, and then there’s religion, and I kind of viewed both of them as a model for understanding the world. And in one model, there’s this supernatural being that, does all these things and interacts, but on the other model, there’s… it doesn’t seem to need that. There’s just these natural laws, and we’re not going to ask where those natural laws came from. We’re just going to accept that they exist and they have explanative power. They can use these laws to predict what’s going to happen in the future. You can use them to build useful things. And that seemed more interesting, more useful. It had, in my mind at the time, better explanations for what was going on. And meanwhile, the Christian worldview, in my mind, it answered the same types of questions but involved this kind of wishy-washy supernatural being that I didn’t feel was necessary to explain at least the questions that I was interested in asking, which was a subset of all the questions that could be asked.
And it’s interesting. When you presuppose that there is no God—you mentioned miracles. Miracles can’t happen in a purely naturalistic worldview. They’re not allowed because there’s no supernatural. And so if something does happen that somebody might call a miracle, well, there must be a natural explanation for that. And maybe science just hasn’t understood the phenomenon that’s going on. That was the sort of explanation that I would come up with when presented with something that might appear to be outside of scientific understanding. So by presupposing that there was no God, I could define away anything that might point me to God.
So it became a comfortable, I guess, rational, reasonable place to live for you intellectually, I presume.
Yeah. That’s a good way to put it. It was comfortable. I didn’t have to ask uncomfortable questions. And it really wasn’t, “I’m rejecting God.” It’s a, “I don’t believe that there is a God.” It’s a, “What you see is what you get.” There’s the natural world, and we can study it, and learn things about it, use it for our purposes, but ultimately there’s no before, there’s no after. This is all it is. And it’s simultaneously a very empty way to view the world, in terms of fulfillment and purpose and all of those things, but it’s also, in a way, a comfort that nothing really matters. You go into this nihilistic…. There’s no greater purpose, so I don’t have to worry about what the greater purpose is. I can just do do my thing, be a good person, whatever that means, and live happily ever after, right? It’s what I thought.
Well, how did that work for you? Was that existential emptiness, or the emptiness that is a part of the naturalistic worldview, did that affect you personally? Or were you able to, like, “Hey, I’m good. I’m fine with all of that. There is nothing more than the natural world.” Like you say, “There’s nothing to worry about. Things just are. I’m sober-minded. I’m rational. I don’t need….” You characterized Christianity as maybe perhaps for those who needed something like that, for belonging or whatever, but that you didn’t necessarily need that, I guess, as a rational being who can make sense of the world through a scientific lens. Did that work well for you? Was that able to answer—I mean, like you said, you weren’t asking certain kinds of questions. You were accepting certain types of realities that came with that worldview. So yeah. How did that work? Was it easy?
Well, if you had asked me, I would have said, “It’s working great!” So in that time period, finishing up undergraduate studies, my wife and I got married as atheists, and I had decided to go on to graduate school to get my PhD in mechanical engineering. And so really digging deep. Undergrad wasn’t enough. “I want to get to the bottom of what science and technology has to offer. I want to really discover something new.” And so I was fully into it. “This is all there is. I want to do it all the way.” But I think you see where this is going. It was not providing what I needed. And I was becoming a less and less pleasant person to be around. I’m trying to think how to word, what it was, but…. This understanding thing is supposed to be making me wise and happy and understanding, but there are all these people that are annoying me. Because, if I’m the center of my intellectual universe, what’s preventing me from being happy? What’s preventing me from fulfillment? Well, it must be my surroundings. It must be something about the people that are around me that are keeping me from being happy. It must be that I’m not having the work opportunities that I’d like to have, and so that’s…. Of course, I’m never going to turn the lens on myself and say, “Well, maybe there’s something inside that’s making me unhappy.”
And so there were really three things that ended up coming to the surface that were unsatisfying with the way I was viewing the world. And so happiness was one. And I was just very…. Day to day, I would get along, and, yeah, I could laugh and do life. But there was a deep sense of unfulfillment, and that ate at me and made me unhappy. And so there were several things that I tried to be happy. I like learning. I like doing new things. I like, as I said, science, technology. So yeah. I went through a series of hobbies in graduate school. I got into amateur radio, making radio contacts all around the world with a radio antenna in the backyard. That was a lot of fun. I enjoyed that. It brought a temporary reprieve from this deep unfulfillment. But ultimately—I mentioned before that the little things that people do started to annoy me, and well, guess what’s on the other end of the radio? It’s other people. So they started to annoy me, too. And so that sort of…. “Well, I guess that wasn’t it. I’m still not feeling this fulfillment that I should feel, that I deserve,” actually. By definition, I should feel fulfillment. And so I actually went and got my pilot’s license. There’s a flight school there at Purdue University. And so I went and got my pilot’s license, because surely that will offer fulfillment. And again, I enjoyed the learning. I enjoyed the process of learning that. And so that was one of the struggles.
The second struggle was the question of morality. And I probably couldn’t have even told you at the time, and I still can’t tell you within the secular worldview that I had at the time, why I felt that there should be an objective morality. There should be an answer to: How should I live my life to find fulfillment and to be a “good person,” whatever that means. So I did a lot of searching in literature and online and just conversations with my wife about, “How do you determine what’s right and wrong? What’s the scheme here? If only there was a book that would tell me what was right and wrong.” Of course, I’m not going to read the Bible.
Of course not.
That one doesn’t count.
Of course not. Yes.
But I’ll read all the other books. I’ll read all the books that people wrote. And… again with the unfulfillment. Nothing was satisfying, because it all would boil down to someone’s opinion, what someone thinks about what’s right and wrong. And some people have very good, logical, reasoned positions on how to make these moral judgments. But I got to a point where I could, if you gave me the Cliff Notes version of, like, “Okay. This is how this person thinks about morality.” I don’t need to read the rest of the book. I can piece together for myself what they’re going to say about topic X and topic Y and topic Z just by knowing how they’re approaching the question and what their bent is. And so it was unsatisfying. It’s like, “Okay, well, it’s just what a bunch of people think.”
And the third problem came kind of late in my graduate school. And so I actually spent seven years at Purdue, got a master’s and a PhD in mechanical engineering. And so, toward the end of that, I started getting a little disillusioned with the process of science. Peer review is touted as the pinnacle of human knowledge. It’s this self-correcting process and kind of a gold standard, if you will. And being a PhD researcher, I had the opportunity not only to write papers, do presentations, but also to be on the other end of that, of reviewing other people’s submissions to journals and so on. And it makes you start thinking about, “Okay, if I’m this flawed person with flawed understanding, and it’s my job to decide whether this piece of logic and reasoning that someone has presented to me is valid, is worthy of publication and becoming, in a way, doctrine. Well, the other people doing it are also flawed beings with limited reasoning abilities and limited knowledge and limited life experience. So it’s just a system of the blind leading the blind.” And I went all the way down that rabbit hole of, “Okay, if I can’t trust these complicated topics, what do I really know for sure?” Because in that worldview, I’m simply a collection of biology that has—I have senses, and I think I can trust my senses, but about that time I also had to start wearing glasses, because I couldn’t really trust my senses 100%. And so you start thinking about, “What do I really know?” Like, “Okay. If I drop something, it falls down, so I suppose there’s something to this gravity thing,” but the more complex you get, into physics theories or math concepts or whatever it is, the more you’re having to rely on what someone else wrote down or told you. And if I am having these doubts about my own reasoning, again, you kind of get into that circle of, “Do we, as humanity, really understand anything? Can I know anything about this worldview that I have been clinging to?
And is there any really objective science? As you were discovering, there are biases. There are flowed opinions. Broken individuals trying to make judgments, subjective judgments, about what’s supposed to be an objective process.
Right.
Really, when you look at it…. I mean, you were obviously honest enough with yourself, whether it was internally with this existential honesty or with the goodness question, that, “Well, if there’s no real standard, then it’s just people’s opinions,” and then that carried over into even the way that science is analyzed. “Well, it’s my opinion.” You’re sitting in a place of judgment, in a seat of judgment, and you’re not certain of the knowledge that you possess, and then you’re trying to—oh, goodness! You can go down a rabbit hole, can’t you? In terms of what is real, what can be known, what is objectively good or bad, and what about this emptiness inside? There’s a lot there. So what did you do with all of that? I mean, did it push you to nihilistic despair? Or how did you handle this, when all of these things started coming together?
Well, I suppose at some level I would only think about one aspect at a time and then kind of recoil into, “Well, I’m just going to do what I know and get through the day,” sort of thing. I don’t know that I ever…. Well, until things really hit a head, I don’t know that I truly despaired. It was always this, “Well, there must be an answer. I’m going to come back to this, and I’m going to figure it out.” But I continued getting more and more frustrated with my own fulfillment, my own happiness, continued to struggle with the question of morality, continued to struggle with, “What can we even know?” And then—well, I should stop there and transition over to what was going on with my wife.
Okay.
So, we had both fallen away from faith, and she, obviously, had moved down to Indiana with me to Purdue, and we had, in the interim, had our first child, our son. And this was right around 2016. And so there were a lot of political tensions and a lot of turmoil going on about the election in that year. And she actually came back to faith before I did. She was looking around at the culture and saying to herself, “There’s a lot of hope being put on flimsy foundations.” She saw how much faith and hope people were putting in one political party or the other or one candidate or another, and realizing that, “Well, somebody’s going to lose this election.” And then the election happened, and indeed, people that had put their hopes on the party that lost despaired. And she was, I suppose, wise is enough to see that, no matter which side of that divide you’re on, eventually your side is going to be on the losing side. And if that’s your only hope, talk about despair! And the culture since then has really continued to divide. So she decided that there has to be an answer to not despairing over the state of the world, the political tensions, whatever it is that causes people to despair. And so she remembered from her youth, I think, is essentially what happened, that, “Well, Christianity claims to provide that.”
And so, even though she didn’t believe at the time that it was true, she decided to give it a try, to in her words, to live like it’s true and see what happens. And so she started attending a church that one of her friends attended. And so here I am struggling with all these questions, and I see her start going to church, and it’s like, “That’s interesting. My worldview precludes that being a valid solution, but if that helps you, if that works for you, sure. At the very least, it’s a social gathering. You’ll make friends.” I can see there are benefits there. Maybe even if the doctrines aren’t true, there’s still a practical benefit. And I was, at the same time, with the morality question, getting to a point where—and still being in this Darwinistic evolution mindset—I got to a point where I could defend the idea of Christian ethics from a secular standpoint, believing at the time that it was all a human construction and that, in days of old, there must have been many—and indeed some other religions are still surviving. If you imagine a Darwinian evolution process going on with religions through societies over the centuries, the doctrines that match human nature the best will be the ones that survive. That was the logic that I had built in my head. And so Christianity, being one of the most successful, widespread religions, well, the teachings must match really well with human nature. So the answers that I find in Christian thought, perhaps they are actually the best that have been come up with for the questions of morality.
And so I was starting to come around. I don’t know if the Holy Spirit was intensively working on me at the time or not, but maybe my heart was starting to soften a little bit, so I was not hostile about my wife going to church. It was more of a, “Okay, yeah. I see why you’re doing that. It makes sense. It’s not for me yet. I’m not going. But sure, you do you.”
Sure.
And so we proceeded. It must have been many, many months of Sunday mornings. She would take my son, go to church, come back. And I’m just trying to decide—maybe I’ll skip over some of the details of her process. So let’s see. What came next?
So did you—I’m curious. You had that question of moral authority, essentially, or objective morality and Christianity? Were you willing to investigate Christianity from a—where do objective moral duties and obligations come from? How do you find that? Is that coherent with the Christian worldview? I mean, were you pursuing that actively? And if so, how were you finding answers or searching out this question?
So, I think at that time I was still very much internally convinced that this is all a human creation. There’s no supernatural. I was still very much in the secular worldview. But things started to happen in an accelerating way. So probably the first thing that really kind of shook my worldview was—I worked in a lab with a bunch of people from very different backgrounds. There were people from India, from Asia, from Europe that would come here to study hydraulics. And whenever somebody had a successful defense of their dissertation, we’d all, of course, go out for dinner and go to the bars afterward and celebrate. And one of those nights, somehow the conversation of ethics came up, different ethical systems. And so one of my close friends and colleagues was involved in Ratio Christi, the apologetics movement on campus. And so it was primarily, actually, a debate between him and one of the other members of the lab, and so of course the Ratio Christi gentleman was advocating for, “There’s a transcendent God that gives a moral code, and that’s the only way that you can have a coherent system of ethics, is if it’s objective, if it’s based on something outside of our human experience.” And the other, also a friend from grad school, was arguing the basically the complete opposite, the very individualistic, relative morality that, “Well, if it feels right for me to do it, I should do it,” which really breaks down pretty fast.
Yes, it does.
If two people disagree on what feels right in certain ways, that really… and that’s where I think a lot of what I was searching for, came from that conflict of, “What happens when two people disagree with with ethics?” There’s got to be a rule book. There’s got be some way to decide between these two disagreeing parties, but not the Bible.
Anything but Christianity. Right.
Right, right. But, like I said, I was starting to come around to, okay, even if I’m going to just look at Christianity as a human invention. I was starting to come around to the idea that, “Well, maybe it’s the best we’ve come up with so far.” But anyway, this gentleman I was friends with made really good arguments that started to get the wheels turning. His assertion that there has to be an objective morality based on something outside of humanity. Really it struck a chord, that really was like, “Okay. That explains why I have struggled for so long to find a secular morality, and it’s always come up short. I’m not ready to believe yet, but that’s the best argument for why I’ve failed so far to find this.” And so that was basically it for that night. But what was really interesting is I looked around, and two or three of the tables around us at the restaurant we were at started having conversations about ethical systems and how it intersects with faith. So it was interesting to see that that night. Like, “Wow! A lot of people are struggling with this, and they overheard.” We may not have been the most quiet conversation-
Yeah! Your conversation was obviously contagious to those around. But I’m curious, too. I mean, as someone who believed in Darwinian evolution, you didn’t believe the explanation for where morals and ethics, how they evolved over time and that sort of thing. You didn’t buy into that narrative?
I think I believed that narrative, but it wasn’t satisfying. It left a lot of questions because like, okay, yeah, you can believe that, but there’s got to be a best one. In my soul, I felt there must be an answer, there must be a correct answer. And Darwinian evolution can’t tell you what the best answer is. It can tell you what the most successful answer has been, but it can’t tell you what’s ultimately right or best. What does best even mean in a context without a transcendent being to define what is best? So that conversation really made progress in chipping down my barriers. It was the first time that I had been presented with: Christianity has an answer to your question and in a way that the secular world can’t answer. And so I think several months passed after that. And at this time, I was still learning to fly. I was still doing that. And so I still had that hope that, “Okay, this is really what’s going to make me happy.” I was even considering just maybe, maybe this engineering thing, maybe that’s what’s making me unhappy. It’s got to be something external acting on me that’s making me unhappy. And so maybe I just need to drop this whole grad school thing, go be a pilot, and surely, surely, I will be fulfilled forever with what I’m doing now.
And so I pursued that. I got my private pilot’s license, and I have a distinct memory: The day after getting the promised license that was going to be my ticket to everlasting happiness, waking up the next morning, sitting on the couch. I’m thinking, “Why am I not happy?”
It didn’t take you to the promised land. No. Okay.
No. It did not. And part of that is realizing, “Okay, I’m a grad student.” I had scraped together enough money to get this license, but it’s expensive to continue on that path, to become a professional pilot. You have to have a lot of hours flying, and those don’t come free. I was very good at doing math, and so I did math on the budgetary constraints and realized, “This isn’t going to work. I can’t just drop everything and go this way.” So, even if it was my source of happiness, I’m going to have to do something else to make money and come back to it.
It’s an expensive source of happiness. Yeah.
Yes. Yes. And so, there was almost this increasing despair, as this hope that I had been clinging to, I see it slipping through my fingers. And I’m like, “Well, even if it was the answer,” which maybe I still thought it was the answer. Maybe I was realizing that it wasn’t. But in any case, I wasn’t going to be able to achieve it in the near future. And so that stewed for, I think several days, several days. So it was probably a Saturday that I passed the test, and then I think it was a Wednesday that this had really kind of boiled to a head, of, “I have to get out of this situation,” like, “This grad school is making me unhappy. Maybe I just need to go find a job somewhere, make some money, continue this pilot path, or whatever. I need to change something about what’s going on. This external factor, whatever it is, I need to change it, and then I’ll get past this unhappiness.” And so I stayed up way too late searching job boards and, “What can I do?” And just nothing, nothing jumped out at me as, “This is the answer. This is what’s going to get you past this.”
And so real late at night, I flop into bed. I don’t know—well, I do know. It was the Holy Spirit put the thought in my mind at that time, “Why don’t you pray about this?” I had no plan. Every avenue I had searched out that day left me less fulfilled than I started. And so just kind of reflecting on it as I’m falling asleep, or not falling asleep, which was the reality. I was just lying in bed stewing about…. I’m an engineer. I can’t let things go. I don’t know how to solve it. And so I’m just tossing and turning and, “What am I going to do? What can I change? What’s the problem? I don’t know!” And I was like, “Well, why don’t I pray? If there’s a God, maybe He’ll help.”
And so I prayed some very simple, very… maybe for the first time in my life, really ready to surrender. And it was something like, “God, if you’re there. I’m lost. I need help.” And instantly, this tension, the sense of, “I can’t fix this on my own,” the sense of just dread about, “What am I going to do?” it evaporated. And I felt this peace. And I just—it was shocking. “Well, wait a minute. That’s never happened before.” Like, “Why do I feel like it’s going to be okay? Maybe there’s something to this.”
And as I said, my wife had been going to a church for some time now, and so as I’m lying in bed, I’m thinking, “Well, okay. That was an answer. I need to pursue this. I need to figure out where that answer came from, Who it came from. And if this is real, this is going to change things.” And so, yeah, okay, I remember now. This was a Thursday night that that all had happened. Friday morning, I wake up, and everything seems more distant when you wake up in the morning, and I fall back into this secular, science-y way of thinking of, “Well, was that real? Was I just searching for some comfort and some pattern… I awakened some ancestral pattern of brain cells-”
Right, right. Trying to explain it away. Right. Yeah.
Right, right. And like I said in the beginning, in that worldview if something supernatural happens, well, it’s just that science doesn’t understand that yet. And so, yeah, I start falling back into that way of thinking. And I go to work at the lab, and so a different friend, also a Christian, that works at the lab, at lunch, we were—I forget how the conversation came up, but I really started to go down the rabbit hole of what can we really know. And just like clockwork, he’s like, “Well, that sounds like an epistemological question,” and just was able to rattle off the top of his head…. And I’m not even going to do it justice right now. I can’t say it as well as he said it that day. But because there is a God that knows everything, we can know some of those things. And that really kind of made me take a step back again and go, “Wait a minute. [57:08] That’s another answer. Does Christianity have the answer to all the things that are troubling me?” And so I kind of redoubled my conviction, then. I’m like, “Okay. That was an answered prayer last night. This is another answer. I need to follow up on this. I need to go to church this Sunday,” and I really kind of set my heart to do that. And so of course the end of the day comes. You go home. And so I’m—all weekend, all Saturday, just trying to, “How do I bring up this topic?”
I was going to say!
How do I say, “Hey, I’ve decided to go to church tomorrow with you.” How do you start that conversation? It’s going to be so out of the blue. She’s not going to believe it. And so we’re eating lunch, and I’m just like, “How do I say this?” and out of the blue—and my wife had not… she had not shied away from talking about faith and religion, but she had also not pushed it on me, because I think she knew that would not go over well-
Right. Of course.
… with my personality at the time. But she asked at lunch. She said, “I don’t want to sound like I’m nagging, but have you been praying?”
That’s an interesting question.
That’s a really interesting question.
That’s not what I expected. Yeah.
No. Me either. But again, it was God the Holy Spirit at work, pulling me in. And I was having an internal roadblock on, “How do I start this conversation?” And so, God said, “Here. Here’s the conversation. I’ll start it for you.” And so yeah. I was like, “Well, as a matter of fact, yes, and I want to go to church with you on Sunday.” And she almost panicked, because this was a non-denominational church. They do believer’s baptisms. And so the only time I had stepped foot in this church was when she had gone through the new membership class and gotten baptized. And I went that day, and there was a guest preacher that week that…. I had a bit of a bad taste in my mouth. It seemed like he was more interested in selling his book than preaching the gospel. And so she was a little worried, because apparently this guy was somewhat of a…. not regular but a repeating theme, and she was worried, “Oh, no! What if-”
“What if he’s there?”
“What if he’s preaching?” Yeah. “What if he’s there? This is the one chance, and what if it gets blown?” And I basically was like, “It doesn’t matter. I need to do this. God has answered my prayers. I’m going.” And she was like, “Okay. We’ll see how this goes.”
So she started doing some praying!
Yeah, probably, probably. And so the next morning, we wake up, and yep, this is really happening. We all get in the car and go. And we all get there, and it turns out they’re doing baptisms. And so they have the pool built into the up front area, and they say…. Well, first of all, they do the whole thing where, “Everybody close your eyes and bow your heads, and if you’re feeling God move in your heart, raise your hand,” and I’m sitting there, going, “Don’t look at me! Don’t look at me! I’m scared!” I did not raise my hand.
Sure.
I tried to shrink into my seat, but internally, I’m wrestling with, “But I do think that God is working in my heart, and I do think that God called me to be here today.” And, “Is it a coincidence that they’re doing baptisms?” And so, after that, they have the sermon before the baptisms, and the pastor was talking about when the apostles were called by Jesus and how they just immediately, when they felt the call, they dropped everything, and they followed in faith, and I’m sitting there thinking, “You’re talking to me. God put those words in your mouth to talk to me right now.” The other side of my brain’s going, “Or maybe it’s the music.”
Right. Right.
“You guys have practiced this. You know how to get a reaction out of people. Do I trust what’s going on here? Do I think this is actually something? Or do I think this is all a…. Am I being manipulated?” And so I’m just in turmoil. “What do I do with this?” And I knew that my wife had gone through this weeks-long class to learn about the faith and learn about this church and really make an informed decision about getting baptized, and so I’m thinking, “I’m going to wait. I’m going to wait until I can go through that and really understand what I’m committing to before I commit.” And the Holy Spirit said, “No. You’re going to get up. And go do this.”
“This is your moment.”
“This is the moment. You’re being called.” And so, just in this turmoil, I turned to my wife, who’s sitting next to me and has no idea what’s going on inside of me. And I tell her, “I’m going.” And she—I think her response was, “You’re what?”
I’m sure she was stunned.
Yeah. Yeah. I was stunned. And so I walk up front, and then they had… I don’t even know if he was…. I guess they would have called him a deacon or an elder or whatever. Somebody was up front. And if you felt moved, you were supposed to go talk to him. So I’m like, “All right. I’m going to go talk to him.” And I just kind of briefly explained. It’s like, “Well, I feel like God has called me to be here. I feel like there have been events that have led up to this moment. I think that I’m being called.” He’s like, “All right. There’s a room in the back. We’ve got some shorts and a T-shirt you can put on and come back and get baptized. It’s like, “Okay. That’s the answer. This is what I’m here for.” And so I do that, and I kind of feel bad for the—the praise band, I think, had not planned on waiting for that to happen, so I got back out, did the full immersion baptism, and coming out of that, it was really this… like a weight lifted and almost like seeing the world in color for the first time It was this amazing, just… well joy. It was joy. I had joy.
And I remember my wife…. You know, so I went back, sat down, and my wife’s almost just has this horror on her face.
Horror? And you’re filled with joy.
Well, because—yeah, right. Well, for the first time, I was filled with joy. And so she was used to me being grumpy and not liking people, and she’s like, “Oh, no. People are going to want to talk to you about this, about what just happened.” And I’m sitting there going, “Well, of course. I want to talk to them about it.” And, of course, the sanctification process takes a long time, so I’m not going to say I was a perfect person, even today, but especially not then. So it’s been this very long road of learning what it means, but there was an instant transformation. There was this instant, “I am a different person now.”
And so I suppose the best way to sum it up is then, on Monday morning, I went back to the lab, and I told the guy that had had given me the argument about, “We can know things because of God.” I went up to him, and I said, “I got baptized yesterday.” And his immediate response was like, “Well, what does that mean to you?” And I was like, “I don’t know. Something happened. I don’t know.” And so I really started down this road. I’m like, “Oh, I’ve got to read a lot. I’ve got to read the Bible. I’ve got to figure out what I actually believe, because I’m sort of starting with a blank slate. I know vaguely what the church that I grew up in taught, but now is my time to really decide what I believe.” So yeah.
And this was about maybe a year from my graduation from Purdue, and so, I spent that year not only preparing to defend my PhD thesis, but also learning about the faith and, “What do I believe?” And at the end of that, there’s a really kind of a clean break. So we ended up in a church here in northern Michigan that’s not very similar to the church that we were both baptized into, but it’s humbling in a way, because you realize that, “Hey, I think this church we have now is closer to what I see as doctrinally, but this church that we do now does infant baptism. It doesn’t do believer’s baptism.” And yet, I have this strong experience…. God moves in that kind of church, too. And so it’s really this…. I think a lot of branches of Christianity have a lot of truth in them, and it keeps me humble to not think that other people are getting it wrong.
Like you said, that God has omniscience. He’s all knowing, and He has allowed us to understand and to know certain things, but we certainly don’t know everything, right? And so there is some liberality there.
I’m thinking of the person who’s listening, Dan, and going, “Wow! Okay. You’re a very obviously intelligent man, brilliant, with a PhD from Purdue. Very admirable. And it speaks to your level of intellect, and you obviously had made some decisions in your life, early on, to kind of reject the God narrative and move to the science narrative, and here you are. Now, there was a process of moving back towards the reality of God, reality and truth of God. I think, when I’m listening to your story, I’m hearing elements of both-
Absolutely!
… that there were elements that you were understanding more that perhaps the reality of God is sufficient to explain objective morals, this issue of what is good, what is not, and Who decides, but it was also that knowledge and the ability to have it. Within the naturalistic worldview, we just have random collection of molecules that are moving in a blind, kind of random process, that you can’t even trust your own reason, but yet, you were hearing that, if there’s this transcendent mind that is the ground of all reality, Who is the source of all knowledge, that it allows us, in our own selves, to have warrant to know things. So, from that perspective, you were becoming, let’s just say, open and perhaps… convinced is too strong a word, but you could see how the Christian narrative, or the Christian worldview, explained those things that had been bothering you, but then on the other hand, you’ve got these experiences of God that are directly answers to prayer, an overwhelming sense of peace that you hadn’t had, people bringing up conversations about how you could know things, even—I find it kind of humorous, but it just makes so much sense that, at a celebration for someone passing his oral defense on a PhD, that you guys would be sitting around, talking about ethical issues or whatever. But that seems almost like an answer to prayer. You have mentioned the Holy Spirit, that you were being led in very intentional ways to answer the questions that were brewing in you, whether existentially or intellectually, and brought you to this point of readiness, so that you knew that you were being called, even from the scripture, even from what was happening that morning. It felt very, very personal and very spiritual.
Yes.
So that it was enough. It wasn’t as if you had to do this long search to find out that every T had been crossed and I dotted and every potential question answered, but you knew enough, that God had revealed Himself to you in a sense, and in very palpable ways, so that it allowed you to say yes. “Yes. This is the day. This is the day I’m being called. And this is the day I’m saying yes.”
So, for those out there who are maybe a little bit skeptical of your story, as, again, an intellectual who once believed that there was a strict dichotomy, a compartmentalization, that science and faith don’t go together, how do you, as a scientist, now kind of approach that understanding of science and what you believe in terms of God’s existence?
So I suppose the way that I look at science now is, well, the whole world, is that all truth is God’s truth. And we have many ways to access that truth. We can look at it through…. Scripture is God’s revealed word to us, so that’s a great way to learn about truth. But there’s also truth in God’s creation. So when we study creation through science, that’s another way to look at truth. And the fullest understanding of that truth comes when you look at it all together and break down these barriers.
So just because you believe in God doesn’t mean you don’t believe in science or what science is able to show in terms of the processes of the natural world or that kind of thing, but yet the presence of God is fully explanatory. Let me say that again. But because God exists, that even gives you a warrant for the basis of doing science itself, right? The rationality, the order of it. There’s explanation for the origin of the universe, fine tuning, all of these things within science that you can say, “Oh, yes. There’s agency, and there’s mechanism,” because we can know things!
We can know things.
Right! We have a rational mind, and we have a predictable, orderly universe, that we can even conduct…. Have a hypothesis and test it and all of those things that are provided as even grounds for science itself. It’s terribly integrated, and I think sometimes there’s just this false dichotomy that’s presented, that you can’t believe in both or they’re very separate if you do try to believe in both. But no, you’re telling me it’s a very integrated, comprehensive system, when you look at truth and reality together. The book of nature and the book of scripture, and the way that God reveals himself.
Right.
It’s really a beautiful thing. Is there anything else you want to add to your story before we get to the advice part? Or have kind of covered your story?
I think that’s the story. Yeah.
Well, it’s a good story. It’s a really great story. And I’m sure your wife, when you picked her up off the floor, I’m sure she just so intrigued and amazed at the way that God met you, in so many very, very specific ways.
I think, at first, didn’t believe it. At first, she was like, “This can’t be real,” but then, over time, the Spirit worked on me, and I have become a different person than I was then. And so she has seen the fruit of the Spirit.
That joy and that peace has remained. That’s beautiful.
Right.
So if there is a curious skeptic listening who may be open to your advice about a way that they could take a step forward towards knowing or understanding this God that you’ve found, on the One who satisfies your soul and your mind, what would you say to them?
Oh boy. It is difficult, because the culmination of my story is so personal. It’s hard to say, “Well, go have a personal experience.”
Exactly! As if you could contrive it. Right.
Right. But what I can say is just, on reflection on the whole journey, I think that the Spirit, God, was leading me the whole time, even when I rejected the very idea that there was a supernatural or a God, my steps were being guided. And so I constructed this wall between spirituality and reason and science. And I think that was so that I could realize the depths of the flaws of that way of thinking. And then, bit by bit, the Spirit broke those walls down and prepared me to be ready to surrender, to surrender my sense of control, really, of, “I’m going to decide what’s right and wrong,” and accept what God is leading me to.
And, in my limited knowledge and understanding, I often think, “Well, couldn’t God have just done that in a faster, more efficient, less painful way, but the reality is I was too stubborn for that, and so God knew exactly the fastest, easiest, least painful way to get me from where I was, in this sort of cultural obligation, but no real connection, to the robust faith in a personal God that I have now. And I don’t think I—there was no way to get me here without everything that I went through. And so…. I don’t know if that’s advice, as much as it is an encouragement and hopefully a comfort if someone’s feeling like God is maybe absent. Perhaps it’s a phase. It’s a short time of discovering the your full need for a Savior.
Yeah. I love, in your story, and perhaps this is a word based on your story, is that you reached a point of openness to kind of seek towards truth. You were wanting to find an answer. You weren’t ignoring it. And you finally were willing to even look in the direction of God. And and even pray.
As a last resort.
As a last resort, but hey, and even prayed. And sometimes I think it’s just, like you said, it was a very simple prayer.
But it came from a place of true openness and not presupposing what the answer should be. Just being really ready to accept whatever answer came, because I finally realized I didn’t have the answer.
I mean, it really is from that place of humility and willingness to receive that sometimes we find. And so that’s wonderful.
Absolutely.
So, for Christians, I think, Wow! You have really some really great touch points in your life of Christians. not only your wife, who became a Christian, who was patient with you, not pushy, persevering, and I think there’s something to be said there. You had these intelligent—you had a couple of guys, really intelligent Christians who understood in a very deep way, their own worldview, about whether it’s epistemology and how we know things, or whether it’s where you do find objective morals and duties. This quest on what worldview provides the best ethics? They knew those things. They were prepared to discuss with you, in a substantive way, things that you were trying to find answers for. You could go anywhere with this, but what would you encourage us as Christians, in terms of being prepared or being patient, or just being present in someone’s life to be able to answer those questions.
Yeah, I think you’re hitting all the nails on the head there. One anecdote that really sticks out to me is, the first Christian I mentioned, the one that was involved in Ratio Christi, apologetics, and we had the moral discussion, to start breaking down my wall of resistance. A few months after my conversion—and I had started going to the Ratio Christi meetings with him. He, just in conversation one day, said, “You know, all this apologetics. We’ve never convinced someone.” I was there, as part of this conversation. I was like, “Wait a minute!”
Case example!
Right. “You’re looking at him!” And so, from his perspective, he’s been arguing these points and having these discussions and planting these seeds, but he’s never seen the fruit come. But I, having had one of his seeds planted in me, saw the whole story. I was like, “Well, no. The words that you spoke to me at the right time in my journey made all the difference.” And so I suppose that’s an encouragement to Christians: Don’t be discouraged that the words you say, even though they may not seem to have an effect right away, you never know what someone’s going to carry with them for days, months, years, and will end up being part of what breaks down that wall or causes them to open up.
Yeah. I think that is a really good word. Greg Koukl says we need to really consider ourselves as gardeners, planting seeds, and we won’t necessarily see the harvest, but to be faithful and obedient in the place and the times that we’ve been given. And, like you say, I’m sure your friend was very encouraged just by realizing, “Yes. Sometimes it does make a difference.” Sometimes we see it, sometimes we don’t, but we just trust the Lord. Yeah.
I hope so.
I mean, in terms of our investment through apologetics and asking good questions.
Right.
And sometimes we see immediate results. Most times, we don’t. We don’t know what’s going on in the heart and mind of someone else. But to help someone along that process, we just, we’re obedient to have those conversations and trust the Lord with the rest. Yeah. That’s a really good-
Yep. Absolutely.
… a good word. Well, Dan, wow! I love your story. You’re obviously a very thoughtful person, and I’m imagining that there are people who are going to be listening to your story who are really encouraged by you and by your story, that you are obviously, again, an intelligent person who thinks deeply and introspectively. And you were willing to look at where your worldview didn’t provide, where you thought it would, whether it’s intellectually or in your own life, existentially, and you were willing to become open, and you actually ended up finding what you were looking for. And it sounds very simple.
Or what I was looking for found me.
Yes! Yes! Yes! You were found. You were found.
He drew me in.
As you said, God was never left you. He was patient with you.
Right.
And allowed you to go your own way, to discover that your own way wasn’t the best way.
And maybe, on some occasions, thwarted my way, so that I did not engage in more self-destructive behaviors.
Yeah, yeah, just kind of protected you. And it really is a beautiful story, to see your journey away and then back, to find, I think you used the word robust, the robust Christian worldview, and more than that, a very deeply personal God. And I hope that people will be encouraged. I know that they will. That that’s possible for them as well.
So thank you so much, Dan, for coming along, for telling your amazing story. So many are going to be blessed through it.
Yeah. Thanks for having me on. I hope we didn’t run too long. There’s a lot to it.
Yeah. There is, and it’s all good. So thank you again.
Thank you.
Thanks for tuning in to Side B Stories to hear Dr. Dan Mizell’s story. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can contact me through our email. Again, that’s info@sidebstories.com. If you’re a skeptic or atheist who would like to connect with a former atheist or skeptic with questions, again please contact us through our email.
This podcast is produced through the C.S. Lewis Institute and the help of our wonderful producer Ashley Decker, audio engineer Mark Rosera, and ministry assistant, Lori Burleson. You can also see these podcasts in video form on our YouTube channel through the wonderful work of our excellent video editor Kyle Polk, and Jordan Harmon is our incredibly creative graphic designer.
If you enjoyed it, 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 see how another skeptic flips the record of their life.
