- [Narrator] Paul Earnst hasalways been a deep thinker.

Whether it was science or philosophy,

he was the one constantlyasking why and how.

When Paul was a child, hegravitated toward science.

- And I liked knowing how things worked,

I wanted to drill down tothe basis of something,

whether it taking apart an alarm clock

or later a motorcycle or a car engine.

- [Narrator] Paul excelled in science,

and his thirst for knowledge grew.

Throughout high school and college

he studied humanism and materialism.

He majored in chemistry,but philosophy was his

main area of interest.

- And so even though Imight think about where

the universe came from,where there's a God,

is it a life after death.

I pushed those into unknowables.

The picture I had of Christians is that

since they weren't in science

they were in anotherrealm that was unknowable.

And some of it actuallylooked kind of silly to me.

I just wasn't interested in that.

- [Narrator] Throughouthis 40s, Paul's world view

remained secular, totally anti-religious.

Then something happened.

The bit five oh, 50 years old.

Paul's mortality, whichwas once irrelevant,

now had new meaning.

- I have a fear of dying, Idon't wanna go into oblivion

or even worse yet, intosome kind of judgment.

- [Narrator] A friendof Paul, Tom Anderson,

wrote a paper called An Attorney

Gives a Defense of the Deity of Christ.

Paul read it and he took it to heart.

- I knew if this is true,this changes everything.

This is huge.

So I could immediately tellthat this was something big

that needed to be pursued.

But the bigger part of the picture is

this individual had a roadmap for connecting the dots

to where I at firsttime saw the possibility

of knowing whether it was true or not.

And I thought I'm not gonna live forever,

maybe I better look intothese things and settle them.

- [Narrator] Then anotherfriend gave Paul a book

called The Case for Christ.

- The book interviews Christian scholars

on various topics like the resurrection,

the reliability of the text, as though

this investigative reporter, Lee Strobel,

is interviewing these different experts.

And so I begin to mimicthe process of what I see

going on in the Case for Christ.

And it sort of put me into some turmoil,

is it true, maybe it is, maybe it isn't.

And that went on for about a year.

- [Narrator] Paul weighed the evidence,

pouring himself into philosophy,science, and religion.

However, one book remained unread.

- Up to this point, I'd been reading books

about the Bible, and othertypes of evidence for it.

But I hadn't actually read the Bible.

I was sort of afraid to read it,

that it would take me away from what

I was now hoping was true.

But through my studies, Ilearned about this passage

called Isaiah 53 and I read it.

And it was a picture of the cross

and I said there's got tobe a transcendent being

above who has control of this book

and knows the beginning and the end

because there's information in here

that only a being outsideof time could know about.

I began to see that the Christian scholars

really did have theupper hand in this game.

They had the goods.

And it became increasingly apparent

that the atheist sidewas a very weak argument

and was really based on the presupposition

that the natural world was all there is.

The tide really turned infavor of Christian truth.

And at that point Ireally formed the idea,

I'm compelled to believe this.

- [Narrator] Alone in hisstudy, while reading Isiah 53,

Paul asked Jesus Christ into his heart.

- It was a feeling I would say of trust

and of hope because I was aware

of a level of hopelessness in my life.

So I would say that thepart of Christianity

that struck me first and largest was hope.

- [Narrator] Paul has been a Christian,

a follower of Christ since 2001.

That was the same year he married Mary.

- When he talks about Isiah 53 to others,

he tears up because it's so powerful.

The deep love of our lordJesus is beyond words for me.

There's only victory inChrist and both of us,

if we're speaking about our faith,

we speak about Jesus.

- So if Jesus rose from the dead,

why did he rise from the dead?

And the best explanation outof all the possible ones,

you know both naturaland from other religions,

was that the God of the Bibleraised Jesus from the dead.

- [Narrator] Paul'sbook, You Bet Your Life

shows his investigativejourney to Jesus Christ.

- Jesus rescued me, he paidmy ransom, he paid the price

so in a way there's adebt I can never repay

except to live for him.