Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger announces conversion from skeptic to Christianity

For Larry Sanger, finding faith in God was a surprise, even to him.

"If you did not know this change, and if you knew me before 2020, this might be a surprise," Sanger, who co-founded Wikipedia, wrote in a recent blog post announcing his conversion to Christianity.

In the post on his website entitled, "How a Skeptical Philosopher Becomes a Christian," Sanger revealed how he had lost his childhood faith as a teenager and became a believer in "methodological skepticism." Over the years, his views began to slowly change as he re-examined the arguments for the existence of God, ultimately leading him to read the entire Bible and convert to Christianity.

In an interview with Fox News Digital, Sanger explained how his inquisitive nature led him to have doubts about God as a young adult but later led him back to God and faith in Christ.

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Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger described his journey from skeptic to faith, in an interview with Fox News Digital. (Getty Images)

As a boy, Sanger said he often wore out the patience of his parents and other adults in his life by asking complicated theological questions. 

He remembers asking his parents one day, "What is the difference between the mind, the spirit and the soul?"

But sometimes adult figures in his life had a hard time answering these questions. He remembers a certain pastor "brushing him off" after he posed theological questions, which left a bad impression on him and reinforced his skepticism toward God.

As a teen, he came to the conclusion that a person's worldview shaped the decisions they made, for good or bad. He told himself he would only adopt beliefs he had good reason to believe were true, in order to not make the same catastrophic mistakes he viewed others in his life making.

"I essentially razed all of my beliefs to the ground," Sanger told Fox News Digital. "That's what I told myself I was doing, and my belief in God went by the wayside at that time."

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Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger told Fox News Digital about how he went from a skeptic to Christian. (iStock)

Sanger's agnosticism was solidified in graduate school, he said. But pivotal events in his life spurred him to re-examine some of these beliefs.

After getting married and having his first child, he began to question his previous belief in rational self-interest, for example.

"I realized that I would be willing to die for these people… If I was willing to die for my wife and child, then I would be acting in their interest, not my interest. Then I thought, well, if I'm going to throw out that belief, what else was Ayn Rand wrong about?" he said.

Over several years, Sanger said his doubts about God began to fall away. He even found himself defending Christians in response to what he saw as an increasingly hostile attitude from atheists toward Christian beliefs.

He also became intrigued by the occult and the idea of a spirit world. This curiosity led him to read the Bible, cover-to-cover, in about 100 days, to understand its message from a Christian perspective.

At the same time, he began to re-examine arguments for the existence of God, such as the Argument from Causality, the Argument from Contingency, and the Argument from Design, and came to believe that these arguments fit together, like "pieces of a jigsaw puzzle."

To his surprise, Sanger found the Bible could withstand his questioning.

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Larry Sanger said reading the entire Bible in about 100 days in 2020 led him to a belief in God and his conversion to Christianity. (iStock)

"I discovered, to my shock and consternation, that it actually makes a lot more sense than I understood. That all the questions that I had asked before had been asked by other people and answered in various ways, some more plausible than others. Nevertheless, there's a whole tradition of asking my questions and many more that I hadn't asked," Sanger told Fox News Digital.

"The thing that I hadn't understood is that the reason why there is a 2000-year-old tradition of theology is that the Bible withstands questioning. If it didn't, you wouldn't be able to go on talking about it in such detail and the doctrines behind it," he continued.

He started to pray to God and eventually accepted Christ as his Savior in 2020. Sanger admitted that he was initially stunned by his conversion. He's been relatively quiet about his faith until now, he said, because he wanted to feel prepared to articulate his faith and defend it.

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The Wikipedia co-founder said that he has been working for several years on a book project compiling the arguments for the existence of God entitled, "God Exists: A Philosophical Case for the Christian God."