Back to Genesis: The Devolution of Atheist John Wise
The facts of biology, a loving wife,
and the truth of God’s word
conspired to unravel his atheism
and its intellectual carryovers
by John D. Wise, PhD
Perhaps CREV readers are wondering, Who is John Wise and how and why did he become a contributor to Creation Evolution Headlines?
Good questions!
I was an atheist professor of philosophy for almost a quarter century before returning to Christ in 2019. This story has been told elsewhere, so I won’t belabor it here. Many of the threads of that story, however, are woven into my life’s fabric over the following six years described here. The most significant of these is my alter ego, my wife Jenny.
We married in August 2019, vowing to serve the Lord together for the remainder of our lives. We began a podcast ministry that same year: The Christian Atheist (TCA), reaching out to the gospel’s most hardened demographic. Although time is pressing and our ministry has become more varied these days, TCA remains a vital part of our lives.
For Jenny, those early podcast years were confusing. She believed the Bible from Genesis to Revelation. My default position as a former atheist and a reformed academic was theistic evolution and a progressive view of scripture. Young Earth Creation, I believed, was the “silly” side of Christianity, and “Creation science” was an oxymoron. This made Jenny uneasy, but she feared making marital waves. As the 2023 podcasting season was closing, however, she approached a crossroad. Would she continue in silence or stand up for the integrity of God’s word? She said this:
One day I watched a video of Dr. Kurt Wise on why he was a young-earth creationist. It was the final straw for me. It was time to stand up. Over the next two months, I read everything I could get my eyes on in the YEC science world, arming myself with knowledge so I could take my stand.
Though Jenny had seen God’s amazing work in my life since our wedding, she was unaware how meticulously He had been cultivating the soil of my heart and mind. Line upon line, precept upon precept over those five years of scripting the podcast, God’s word took root in my heart. Unbeknownst to either of us, it was about to burst into flower.
Watch and share a Short Reel about John’s story on our YouTube Channel. Click to view.
Our 2024 podcast season began with a focus on scripture – a deep dive into the book of Malachi. My study of this little bookend to OT revelation sparked a revolution, becoming for me a panoramic vista on God’s word – Genesis to Revelation. The Bible came alive and came together as never before – not just for me – but for US. Jenny and I began to live to share together the Bread of Life, “every word that comes from the mouth of God.” To this day, that podcast series on Malachi remains, I think, one of our greatest contributions.
Then, incredibly unexpectedly, my pro-forma belief[1] in evolution came crashing down around my ears. Our one hundred and forty-first episode of TCA was published amid the events described above. It came as a surprise to Jenny when I read it to her (as I always do when I finish a transcript for the podcast), and when I’d finished reading it, she stood up from her office chair, walked across the room to me, wrapped her arms around me and kissed me with a passion I will never forget, even in eternity.
Here is the full text of that podcast, only slightly revised. We titled it (in a nod to philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn), “The Structure of a Scientific Revolution”:
We take a break this week from our series on Malachi, but stay tuned, as we have a great deal more to discover!
Over the last few weeks, I have attempted to “keep up” the weekly Monday posting of a new episode of the Christian Atheist but have routinely fallen behind. As most of you know, I teach philosophy online for the University of Arizona, and Jenny and I have a photography business – all to live and to fund this ministry. Our lives are, thus, very full and fulfilling. Since the first of this year and our re-formulation of this podcast to reflect a new phase in our lives, the research we engage is itself a full-time occupation, a true labor of love for us. It is our delight.
Jenny and I feel that God is putting us through an intensive course of learning – remedial in some ways (especially for me) – all to prepare us for something. Whatever that something is, we are intensely excited both to continue the preparation, and to begin it.
To know God is to love Him, and to love Him is to serve Him.
Here we are, Lord, send us.
What are we learning? Perhaps the question, what aren’t we learning, would be easier to answer. Jenny has always been for me an Old Testament anchor. I had not really read the Bible for twenty-five years, so I had a great deal of “catching up” to accomplish in a short time. Hopefully, I did not display my ignorance too graphically in those early years of this podcast.
However, my ignorance was on display – even in our very first podcast, as we shall see in today’s episode; I pray my ignorance did not lead others astray.
Jenny’s faith in and deep knowledge of the Bible – developed over the course of my atheist quarter-century – were, like so many of her qualities, my perfect complement; exactly what God knew I needed when I returned to Him. She helped me to do what I do best as a philosopher – put things together, see and explicate patterns. Together, God has given us the privilege of publishing (to date) 140 episodes of The Christian Atheist and 72 episodes of No Compromise (not to mention all the Simple Gifts podcasts – 740 so far).
Our change of focus from apologetics to knowing God this year has not (as I had feared) contracted our range of study but infinitely expanded it! God is Truth, so to seek Truth in all things is to seek to know our LORD. And – this is where the rubber meets the road in this season of TCA – to know God is to seek to know and understand His word, the Bible, as it relates to everything else.
So … what have Jenny and I been studying together? First and foremost, the Bible itself, and with a joy and enthusiasm in discovery that neither one of us has experienced before. It is coming alive for us daily.
What else?
Plants and birds, natural edibles, archaeology, astronomy, mathematics, and among other things, what I want to emphasize today: cellular/molecular biology and human genomics. These fields, like so much of what we are studying together, have exploded in recent years. Researchers are discovering complexity and design in astonishing detail – micromachines (there is no way to avoid the machine analogy at this point) at the cellular level are performing millions of complex, indeed intentional tasks, all necessary to function seamlessly with an accuracy beyond our most complex engineering capabilities at the macro-level, just for life to continue in its most ordinary functioning.
To begin to understand these highly specialized fields of research, we have had to go back to grade-school biology and rebuild our knowledge base. Then we had to play massive “catch-up” to learn about the unprecedented series of new discoveries over the past three decades, the vocabulary that has proliferated and modulated as new understanding has changed the entire landscape of what happens in living cells and the organisms built from them. Without continually developing our understanding of the technical terminology we could not “follow the science,” and the learning curve has been very steep. We’ve made great progress, but we both still consider ourselves neophytes – what we have yet to learn dwarfs what we have learned.
The discoveries of the last two decades in genomics alone are revolutionary. Regrettably, because of their complexity and specialization these discoveries (and by extension their implications for a broader understanding of the world) have not “filtered down” to the popular, or common level of understanding. It is tragic that these groundbreaking discoveries and their far-reaching implications for broader scientific theory and research are known only to the handful of scientists doing the work and those few outside that small circle who can understand and are motivated to promote them.* The reams of data yet to be processed in our investigations are staggering. We have only scratched the surface, yet even what we have been able to glean would fill a season of our podcast.
Let me end this topic with an important impact our ongoing research has had on my worldview. In episode one, our pilot episode of TCA, I said this:
I am a lover of science, all that it has discovered and the stories that it tells. I believe the universe is probably 13.8 billion years old, as cosmologists tell us, not 6,000 as young-earth creationists assert. I do not claim to know how humans arrived on this earth, but I am inclined to believe that evolution is the best answer we’ve given so far, and for me “rings” true with my understanding of God. Scientific accounts are compelling and evidence-driven, tested in the crucible of the real, and Christian faith does not prevent either the search for, or the acceptance of scientific answers.
While the broad spirit of my words here has not changed, I could not, today, write these same words. As for the age of the universe, we will save that for another time, but for now, my embrace of evolutionary theory has utterly collapsed under the weight of evidence. Michael Behe’s argument of irreducible complexity, so quickly dismissed by the popular press, the political elite, and the dogmatic scientific establishment when it was presented in his 1996 book, Darwin’s Black Box, has proven prescient. We are now discovering that it is not just individual parts of biological life that are irreducibly complex, but life itself. It could not have evolved by natural processes. When I wrote those words in 2019, I was aware of Behe’s argument, but I was unaware at that time of the state of research into biological life processes. I dismissed Behe’s argument and sided with the “scientific establishment.” I chose human reasoning over God’s declared truth.
With God’s help, I will endeavor to never make that mistake again.
In the quote from my first episode of TCA above, you will note that I couched my language in the familiar-to-our-listeners Socratic terminology: “I don’t claim to know, but I am inclined to believe.” I have said repeatedly, follow the evidence and allow reality to correct your conception of it. I have taught, since day one of the Christian Atheist, that the retreat into certainty, the failure to acknowledge our fundamental ignorance and human limitations, is the bane of an honest asking, seeking, and knocking – an honest pursuit of the Truth.
It turns out my faith was profoundly misplaced in the doctrine of evolution.
This is not a change from the process I began when I first walked away from God after Bible college in pursuit of the Truth. My journey continues, and Truth continues to make itself manifest. As I find it, I want to always be willing to turn from ignorance toward knowledge and understanding. It is my delight to find I am wrong, and to then align myself more tightly to the Truth – to God. Our journey of faith is always an asymptotic approach, and never a final arrival at certainty.
When our scientific knowledge was extremely limited, evolution appeared plausible, even if only because it stood within the broader set of assumptions formed in the heady atmosphere of Hegelian thinking pervading the 19th century. We knew so little about genetics and the machinery of life. Given what we have now discovered, evolution has lost even the appearance of plausibility, except for those dogmatic believers who continue to cling to it in the face of the evidence.
As a Christian, I am ashamed that I so willingly cast off the creationist position, that my faith in His word was so weak. As my walk with our Lord continues, I will strive to be more faith-filled, more rational and evidence-centered in my pursuit of Truth. A recurring theme in all our research is that those who bet against the truth of God’s word end up on the losing side of the controversy. This is especially true in Biblical archaeology, where time after time what is merely “mythical” in the Bible to the secular mind, is found veridical. This fact should be unsurprising to believers – though I continue to be surprised, laughing aloud at myself each time it happens. After all, this pattern is the history of God’s chosen people throughout the Bible.
In his book, God and the Astronomers (1978), eminent 20th century physicist Robert Jastrow, a self-proclaimed agnostic, said:
For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance, he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.
This quotation well-describes my own continuing faith-journey since beginning The Christian Atheist. It has taken several years of serious thought, investigation and earnest Truth-seeking with many twists and turns, not to mention some personal moments of utter bewilderment, to acknowledge my own misplaced faith in the theory of evolution. It turns out that all those believers sitting in pews, never having studied all the “smart” people – scientists, philosophers, theologians and, yes, atheists – that I have over the course of my nearly-60 years of life, were correct, and it was me that was wrong.
Jenny was there all along, waiting patiently for God’s truth to collide with my hyper-rationalizations about life, waiting for me to again turn from error to Truth.
My prayer now? “Lord, I believe. Help thou my unbelief.”
I have sought, from the time I turned from God to atheism, to find Truth. It turns out that every time I trust human rationalizations over God’s revealed word, I am embarrassed to discover that it is God, and not man, who can, and should be trusted. As Paul said,
“Let God be true and every man a liar.”
*Note: This is why David Coppedge’s Creation Evolution Headlines is so important in today’s world. Here you can stay abreast of scientific advances and their implications. Its weekly headlines should be a must-read for all informed believers and seekers in today’s world.
The journey from that podcast to writing and working together with Jenny for Creation Evolution Headlines and its amazing editor, David Coppedge, is a bit of a blur. It is also a blessing far beyond the just-desserts of this former traitor to our Lord.
How did it happen? An enigma wrapped up in a mystery. God only knows. Perhaps David could explain His workings behind the scenes as he considered us.
I cannot.
Praise God. Here Jenny and I stand. We can do no other.
[1] “Pro-forma” because I had never honestly cared enough, even as a Christian, to really look at the evidence for either side. Evolution was the answer “Science” gave, and I loved science. The Genesis account was obviously mythological cosmogony. Every culture has one. What did it matter? I could be a Christian and not be so naïve as to believe the creation account in Genesis was historical. This laissez-faire approach to origins, however, began to be seriously challenged almost from the start of our podcast ministry as I interacted with unbelievers.
Editor comment: We are happy for John’s journey out of atheism and back to the Bible, and for Jenny’s role in gently prodding him to study the Scriptures with new eyes. We’ve had several good conversations by Zoom. Having “been there” in the world of unbelief, Dr Wise now has a unique perspective in reaching atheists for Christ combined with gentleness from his own experience. His skill from his education and reading in philosophy gives him the intellectual tools for “casting down arguments and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ” (II Corinthians 5:7).
As is true for many intellectuals coming out of unbelief, the writings of C.S. Lewis were instrumental in his journey. Like Lewis, John and Jenny have been “surprised by joy” at the view of life from the creation worldview. We are glad they are enjoying CREV.INFO which is, of course, one of many creation ministries seeking to continue the Apostle Paul’s mission from Christ “to open their eyes, in order to turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan to God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins and an inheritance among those who are sanctified by faith in Me” (Acts 26:18).
John and Jenny have additional skills, and have enthusiastically taken on roles to help us, such as in developing content for our new YouTube channel. We look forward to more articles from John with his intellectual chops and skill at articulating the Biblical worldview with passion and joy.
John Wise received his PhD in philosophy from the University of CA, Irvine in 2004. His dissertation was titled Sartre’s Phenomenological Ontology and the German Idealist Tradition. His area of specialization is 19th to early 20th century continental philosophy.
He tells the story of his 25-year odyssey from atheism to Christianity in the book, Through the Looking Glass: The Imploding of an Atheist Professor’s Worldview (available on Amazon). Since his return to Christ, his research interests include developing a Christian (YEC) philosophy of science and the integration of all human knowledge with God’s word.
He has taught philosophy for the University of CA, Irvine, East Stroudsburg University of PA, Grand Canyon University, American Intercontinental University, and Ashford University. He currently teaches online for the University of Arizona, Global Campus, and is a member of the Heterodox Academy. He and his wife Jenny are known online as The Christian Atheist with a podcast of that name, in addition to a YouTube channel: John and Jenny Wise.