Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger details journey from skeptic to 're-conversion' to Christianity
Larry Sanger may be a lifelong skeptic, but the co-founder of the world’s most popular online encyclopedia is certain he’s had a dramatic conversion to the Christian faith.
Sanger, 56, who co-founded Wikipedia in 2001 along with Jimmy Wales in pursuit of a “free and open” internet, detailed his roughly 35-year journey from “skeptical philosopher” to Christianity in a new blog on his personal website.
Outlining a philosophy he called "methodical skepticism," which rejects any belief that cannot be known "with certainty,” Sanger said after years of questioning and weighing the arguments for and against God's existence, he found himself unable to dismiss the possibility of a higher power, ultimately leading him to embrace Christianity.
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Despite his upbringing in the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod, which he called the “more conservative” of America’s two largest Lutheran denominations, Sanger recalled how his constant questioning of Christian ideas and theology led ultimately to him walking away from his faith shortly after his confirmation in the Lutheran church.
“Without realizing it, I probably stopped believing in God when I was 14 or 15,” Sanger said. “Even today, I do seem to remember the belief slipping away, as I occasionally mused that I no longer prayed or went to church.”
As a teen, Sanger decided to study philosophy, and committed to building a rational framework for understanding truth, or what he termed "rationalistic truth seeking." By the mid-1990s, Sanger said disillusionment set in as he left academia, frustrated by the lack of "any sincere concern for truth" within the academic philosophy community.
It was then that Sanger's search for truth began to focus on the question of God's existence. Unlike atheists who outright deny the existence of God, Sanger was open to exploring the possibility. "I was always willing to consider seriously the possibility that God exists. They [atheists] were not," he explains. "The atheists said that they simply lacked a belief that God exists, but their mocking attitude screamed that God indeed did not exist."
It was at that point, Sanger writes, that he began to regard himself as an agnostic rather than an atheist, willing to entertain the question of God’s existence without the dismissive stance often held by his peers.
His agnosticism, he continued, went something like this: “I neither believed nor disbelieved in the existence of God; I ‘withheld the proposition.’” In graduate school, Sanger later adopted a more fleshed-out view on agnosticism, which concluded with a presuppositional argument ending in a declaration that “any arguments that make use of the concept of God are literal nonsense.”
But it wasn’t until Sanger began to engage with Christian apologetics and philosophical arguments in favor of the existence of God — he specifically mentions the “First Cause” argument — that his faith journey deepened.
Sanger’s journey toward belief deepened as he began to engage with apologetics and the philosophical arguments for God’s existence, particularly the "First Cause" argument.
But while these arguments were compelling, Sanger said, they could not definitively prove the existence of the God of the Bible. By 2005, after leaving academia behind, Sanger said he began to notice increasingly anti-Christian sentiment, particularly in the U.S.
"I had too much respect for Christian family and friends," he wrote. "Some of my favorite people were Christian, too. And some of them were extremely intelligent … "Perhaps, I had not given Christianity a fair shake."
It wasn’t until Sanger began to personally study the Scriptures for himself that he discovered the Bible was “far more interesting and — to my shock — coherent than I was expecting. I found it could sustain interrogation; who knew?"
He downloaded the YouVersion Bible app “and immediately made Bible study a serious hobby,” leading him past the superficial and into a deeper dive of theology, which Sanger described as “what rational people do when they try to come to grips with the Bible in all its richness.”
Sanger pointed to what he called his “re-conversion,” a phase in which he began listening to arguments from Christian apologists like Stephen Meyer and William Lane Craig, which challenged him to not only rethink how he viewed the arguments in favor of deity from his younger days, but also to acknowledge that “so much of what is believed about that deity comes from the Bible and cannot be discovered by ‘pure reason.’”
In Feb. 2020, Sanger began reading the four Gospel accounts of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. It was then, he wrote, “that I said I should admit to myself that I now believe in God, and pray to God properly.”
“It was anti-climactic,” he added. “I never had a mind-blowing conversion experience. I approached faith in God slowly and reluctantly — with great interest, yes, but filled with confusion and consternation.”
Following what he called a quiet, “uncomfortable” conversion, Sanger says he now believes that he has arrived at "something like an Orthodox Christian faith” and aims to become a defender of the Christian faith for others around the world through his writing.
And as for church? After giving it a shot in May 2020, just as churches were forced to shut down due to the coronavirus pandemic, Sanger said he still doesn’t have all the answers.
“I am sorry to say that I have not yet adopted a church home,” he wrote, adding that he continues to research various denominations to make the best choice. “While I think I am called to worship with my fellow brothers and sisters in Christ, face to face, I am aware that my presence is probably going to be like, well, a bull in a china shop, if I am not very careful.”
Around that same time, Sanger acknowledged Wikipedia had become “badly biased” and that the site’s “NPOV,” or neutral point of view, “is dead.”
Referring to the Jesus article on Wikipedia, Sanger said, “It simply asserts, again in its own voice, that ‘the quest for the historical Jesus has yielded major uncertainty on the historical reliability of the Gospels and on how closely the Jesus portrayed in the Bible reflects the historical Jesus.’”
In other places, however, Sanger said, Wikipedia’s article asserts the Gospel accounts are “not independent nor consistent records of Jesus’ life,” which reveals, according to Sanger, that Wikipedia is “not neutral.”
“A great many Christians would take issue with such statements, which means it is not neutral for that reason … ’” he wrote.
