Apologists aren’t born that way. These are their stories.
Os Guinness was born to missionary parents and lived in China. They were under house arrest when he was 9, and they sent him back to England, where he spent his teenage years without his parents. He came to faith at the end of his school years after reading Sartre, Nietzsche, Camus, Dostoevsky and many others. His faith was stretched in many ways, including the time he studied under a guru. From the comparison of of other religions to Christianity, he developed a much deeper faith. Ultimately, he believes Christianity because he thinks it is true.
J. Warner Wallace was a cold case detective of some reknown. He followed his father’s footsteps in vocation and as an atheist, and he was highly successful. He didn’t know Christians growing up, and he had no experience with church or religion. The Christians he met when he was an adult didn’t impress him. They didn’t have very good answers to questions when challenged, and he wasn’t persuaded by any of it. That changed, however, when he challenged himself to consider the evidence.
Lee Strobel decided early on that there was no such thing as God, that the idea was “just crazy”. He believed people made up the idea of God because they were afraid of death. He had a background in journalism and law, and he become the legal editor of the Chicago Tribune. His skepticism bubbled over into cynicism. He become an amoral hedonist who won awards for investigative reporting, but was full of anger and rage – not even knowing why. His wife was agnostic, but she started going to church. It “seemed like the worst possible news an atheist could get”. His first reaction was to get a divorce, but he couldn’t deny the positive changes in her life. Then he thought he would disprove it and rescue her from “this cult”. He set out to disprove the resurrection of Jesus. This is his story.
Navigating by Faith 