After years of being a non-believer, the co-founder of Wikipedia announced that he is now a follower of Jesus.
Larry Sanger made the announcement earlier this month via a blog on his personal website.
"It is finally time for me to confess and explain, fully and publicly, that I am a Christian," said Sanger. "Followers of this blog have probably guessed this, but it is past time to share my testimony properly."
Sanger says anyone who knew him before 2020, may see this change as a surprise.
"Throughout my adult life, I have been a devotee of rationality, methodological skepticism, and a somewhat hard-nosed and no-nonsense (but always open-minded) rigour. I have a Ph.D. in philosophy, my training being in analytic philosophy, a field dominated by atheists and agnostics. Once, I slummed about the fringes of the Ayn Rand community, which is also heavily atheist. So, old friends and colleagues who lost touch might be surprised."
Sanger's goal is not to portray himself as a converted enemy of faith. Rather he would like to reach those who were as he once was, a rational thinker, open to the idea but not fully convinced.
"I pray that this exercise in autobiography is not too vain. So I will try to state the unvarnished truth, on the theory that a story with “warts and all” will ring truer and persuade better."
The Wikipedia founder starts with his childhood by saying he grew up in a Christian home with one of his great-grandparents being a professor of musicology and church organist and his father an elder in their church.
"Throughout my later childhood in Anchorage, Alaska, I was much given to asking “too many” questions. For example, I heard, as a child, much talk about “mind,” “spirit,” and “soul,” and I asked my parents—on the way to church, when I was perhaps eight—to explain the difference between these, or whether they were not perhaps the same. I repeatedly debated with friends about the origin of the universe, and discussed the question, “If we say we need God to explain where everything came from, then why don’t we need something to explain the existence of God?” I was confirmed at age 12 in the Lutheran Church, but soon after, my family stopped going to church."
That's when things started to take a turn for Sanger. He lost his faith in his teen years as his dad started looking into New Age religions.
"Without realizing it, I probably stopped believing in God when I was 14 or 15: even today, I do seem to remember the belief slipping away, as I occasionally mused that I no longer prayed or went to church," said Sanger.
When he became a high school junior, he was introduced to philosophy. He says it was that course that changed him forever.
"I started spending a great deal of time thinking and writing about various philosophical questions, but especially about the existence of God, the problem of free will and determinism, and the possibility of knowledge. I never stopped."
During graduate school, he considered himself agnostic.
"I never aligned myself with the so-called New Atheists of the Dawkins and Dennett stripe. I found them crass and obnoxious. I partook, a bit, in discussions of atheism and agnosticism online, but, to my surprise, I found myself arguing more about methodology with the atheists than about God with the theists," Sanger explained.
In 2019, after writing two philosophical essays titled “Why Be Moral,” and a companion piece, “A Theory of Evil,” Sanger was drawn to read the Bible.
"I was looking for some bedtime reading, when it occurred to me, “I did want to read the Bible eventually. Why not that?” So I decided to go ahead and start."
Sanger adopted one of the YouVersion Bible app's easy-to-use 90-day study plans and quickly realized that he did believe in God.
He dug deep into the word and also started a course on theological study. This eventually led him to where he is today.
Sanger hopes by sharing his testimony, he'll be able to reach others just like him.