Co-Founder of Wikipedia Reveals His Journey from 'Skeptical Philosopher' to Christian
Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger has announced that after years of being an "agnostic" and a "skeptical philosopher," he has now converted to Christianity.
"It is finally time for me to confess and explain, fully and publicly, that I am a Christian," the 56-year-old wrote on his blog.
"Followers of this blog have probably guessed this, but it is past time to share my testimony properly. I am called to 'Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature.' One of the most effective ways to do so is to tell your conversion story. So, here is mine," he began.
In the detailed account, Sanger takes readers through his decades-long conversion process.
The online encyclopedia co-founder recalled early memories of going to the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod, with his parents.
"My father was an elder in our church when I was a small child. I remember a few Bible commentaries on the bookshelves, which I found forbiddingly difficult," he wrote.
Sanger said that he asked many questions about God and faith as a young child, but by his teen years he resolved that God did not exist and belief in Him seemed "irrational."
"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," he shared.
A few years later he settled in, becoming a "philosopher and a so-called methodological skeptic," which he describes as "someone who withholds beliefs" that cannot be known "with certainty."
Sanger shared, "When I got serious about matters, I would say, 'I do not even know what 'God' means.' But generally, I called myself an agnostic."
By the time he arrived at college, Sanger knew he wanted to study philosophy and aimed to become a college professor.
However, he quickly became disillusioned with academia because of a lack of "any sincere concern for truth" among fellow philosophers.
Sanger said he took the most issue with modern atheists who claimed that "they simply lacked a belief that God exists, but their mocking attitude screamed that God did not exist."
"I was always willing to consider seriously the possibility that God exists. They were not. Nor was I very hostile to religion," he explained.
By 2001, Sanger had started Wikipedia and also began to more seriously search out whether God existed.
"After enough years of dealing with these 'adepts,' the thought slowly dawned on me: maybe, just maybe, I too had been indoctrinated, in a way. Perhaps I had misunderstood things I only thought I had understood," he wrote. "Perhaps I had not been exposed to the best representatives of the faith. In short, perhaps, I had not given Christianity a fair shake. And yes, I couched this in terms of 'Christianity' to myself: I never found any interest in other religions. This thought sat uncomfortably in the back of my mind for many years."
In 2010, he decided to crack open the Bible – not for him, but for his sons – because it is "the most influential book in the history of the world, bar none."
"One cannot call oneself well educated in the West if one has not read it," he expressed while admitting that reading parts of it did not "make much of an impression."
"It was interesting literature, to be sure. I know now that I simply did not understand what I was reading very well. I merely assumed there wasn't anything terribly deep to understand," Sanger explained.
Sanger would not revisit the Bible until years later.
After completing a 7,000-word essay titled "Why Be Moral," and a companion piece, "A Theory of Evil," he began to think more about the root of good and evil.
I concluded the latter essay this way:
What makes humanity loveable, and what inspires the most devotion toward heroes and leaders, is the capacity for creation, the ability to invent, build, preserve, and restore whatever is good, i.e., that which supports and delights flourishing, well-ordered life. What makes evil individuals worthy of our righteous anger is their capacity for destruction of the good, due to their contempt for human life as such.
If so, then the love for God may be understood as a perfectly natural love of the supremely creative force in the universe. For what could be greater than the creator of the universe, and what could be more loveable? And then it certainly makes sense that they would regard Satan as a force most worthy of our hatred and condemnation, since Satan is held to be an essentially destructive entity, the one most contemptuous of human life as such.
He concluded that in both essays, he was beginning to show a change in his attitude toward Christianity.
"Whereas before I had been merely skeptical and cool toward Christianity, I now felt warm toward it. I had come to morally approve of it – it was not just tolerable, but positively likable," he said.
Sanger decided, this time, to read the Bible for himself.
"I am not sure why I began to read the Bible so obsessively and carefully, as I did," he described. "When I really sought to understand it, I found the Bible far more interesting and – to my shock and consternation – coherent than I was expecting."
Sanger downloaded the YouVersion Bible app and used a 90-day reading plan to make "Bible study a serious hobby."
He began a deeper dive into theology to only realize that "despite having a Ph.D. in philosophy, I had never really understood what theology even is."
"Theology is, I found, an attempt to systematize, harmonize, explicate, and to a certain extent justify the many, many ideas contained in the Bible. It is what rational people do when they try to come to grips with the Bible in all its richness," Sanger explained.
The former philosopher said at this point, he also began to "talk to God." By 2020, Sanger began reading the four Gospel accounts of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John and told himself, "I should admit to myself that I now believe in God, and pray to God properly."
Sanger admits his conversion is "anti-climatic," but true and sincere.
"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," he shared.
Sanger added that while his conversion has been "uncomfortable" at times, he is a part of "something like an orthodox Christian faith."
Although he has not found a church home, he encourages everyone to read the Bible daily.
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