Wikipedia Co-Founder Shares His Path from Agnostic Skepticism to Christianity
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.
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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.”
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