The Exodus
Introduction:
I became a Catholic at age 57, coming to the faith by a circuitous route. Fittingly, it was a trek that paralleled the book of Exodus: a life that began under tyranny, followed by an escape and some forty years of wandering in a spiritual desert. By the grace of God, I have made it home to the Church.
The tyranny took the form of a childhood ruined by a religious cult. The escape was an unexpected exit from that life, and the discovery of an affinity for math and science. The wandering in the desert was a period of profound and militant atheism, an equal-and-opposite-reaction to my strict, sectarian upbringing. But the secularism that had once seemed so liberating would prove just as toxic.
In what follows, I will give an account of what brought me here; it was an unlikely transformation, one that I hope brings a new perspective to those who have grown up in the faith. It does not illustrate a straight-line path from atheism to Catholicism. That would have been more efficient, but seldom does anything work out so easily. What I hope this account might illustrate is that bringing a secular person to Christianity will require taking baby steps, and Christian apologists know that general arguments for God are (often) the best place to start, rather than heading straight into the Gospel.
Egypt
As far back as I can remember, I knew we were different. We were not like other people. We were Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Those unfamiliar with the Witnesses may be surprised to learn that they are not simply another Protestant denomination seasoned with a few idiosyncrasies. In the estimation of many, the ‘JW’ faith isn’t really a Christian religion at all, as they deny Christ’s divinity, the Trinity, and other essential tenets.
My brother and I were taken to the ‘Kingdom Hall’ (the JW term for ‘church’) Sundays, Tuesdays, and Fridays. What transpired there were called ‘meetings’—and they were especially boring for a child. No rites, rituals, no sense of the sacred was evident during the long hours in that drab and spartan place. Even Saturdays brought something to dread: what we called ‘going door-to-door,’ the signature activity of our religion, in which we methodically canvassed entire neighborhoods, looking to make converts at people’s doorsteps, pushing the Watchtower and Awake! magazines. My brother and I functioned to help disarm otherwise leery people into engaging with our parents.
Our own forced study of Witness publications was relentless and conducted daily at home. We were given materials to read and questions to answer, in writing. Much of our time was utilized in this way, as there was little permitted otherwise—playing with non-Witness kids was forbidden. The families down the street were to be avoided, and out of the question was any involvement in Boy Scouts or Little League. These were ‘worldly’ things that would spoil JW children.
It was, paradoxically, the time among our peers during which the Witness life became the most burdensome. At school, the one place where we could cross paths with the worldly, we were seen as odd ducks, if not outright pariahs. It started anew every day: while everyone else stood and spoke the Pledge of Allegiance, we had to remain in our seats, inviting everything from curiosity at best to derision at worst. This was a religious dictate, as Witnesses give their allegiance only to God, and at the start of each school year, our father would visit our teachers, explaining to them how it would go.
With every holiday, we’d have an opportunity to demonstrate our eccentricity. Halloween was a recurring disappointment. Not only would we never be allowed to dress up, we’d be forced to exempt ourselves from any related school activity. Thanksgiving was no different. We were excused from making decorations, and all the traditional foods were avoided. And what of Christmas, that most joyful and quintessentially Christian celebration? Everything about it was verboten. No wreaths, no carols, no cards, no cookies, no parties, no tree, no greetings, and absolutely no presents. The Witnesses despise Christmas, and we never experienced it, even once, as children. Despite the explanations offered by our parents concerning its pagan origins, we were filled with envy for our classmates who could enjoy it. Equally depressing were birthdays: ours were never celebrated, nor could we attend the parties of other schoolkids. These too were worldly rituals with pagan origins.
A Witness childhood is simply a miserable way to grow up. There isn’t any upside. These people are hardcore. As far back as I can recall, I wanted to escape it. I hated everything about it, and even when I was too young to doubt its veracity, I wished it wasn't true. The picture it painted of God— always referred to as ‘Jehovah God’ so as to make it clear that we were of a different tribe—was unpleasant: his plans seemed odious, his rules capricious. And I was too young, too indoctrinated to understand that their idea of God was utterly different from the Christian one. Never once in the Kingdom Hall did I hear of the central miracle of Christianity, captured by that most profound of words: grace. The concept is anathema to the Witnesses, and so it was unknown to me.
Exodus
When I was twelve, my parents had a sudden and ugly divorce. I would be glad for this normally unhappy development, because all activities related to the Witness faith came to a blessed stop. Compulsory attendance at the Kingdom Hall was replaced with freedom to roam through the public library. Here was the allure of forbidden knowledge: we’d been sheltered from such learning, and told we’d never go to college where we’d be exposed to ideas which clashed with JW orthodoxy.
In the library, I kept returning to the physical sciences and mathematics shelves, where an elegance and beautiful profundity could be found. Soon I’d discover the direct experience of science when I pointed a cheap telescope at the night sky. At age thirteen, I’d join the Salt Lake Astronomical Society and experience fellowship utterly unlike that of the Witnesses.
This was during the early 1980s, when PBS had a new, momentous television series that enchanted me: Carl Sagan's Cosmos. I soaked up the measured optimism for a rational, humanistic future and the voice of reason, a voice unlike any I had been permitted to hear. Sagan exuded a hope that I shared, that we'd turn away from the backwards religions of the past and embrace a scientific, secular future that looked (to me) a lot like Star Trek. I was sure I'd see this happen in my lifetime.
I would go on to study physics in college, but during this time I would discover that art was no less inspirational than science. Hearing genius in the context of music was beyond anything I’d encountered before. The likes of Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Mahler and Wagner provided the needed, right-brained counterpoint to all the technical work I was doing. Particularly memorable was a performance of Mozart’s Requiem Mass that I attended at Temple Square, featuring the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Despite the overt religious context, which I disliked, I was yet moved by something too profound to be named. A seed had been planted.
40 Years in the Desert
After escaping from the confines of the Kingdom Hall, I was eager to attack all religion. The JW faith was the only tradition I had ever known, and it colored my opinion of all others. This was the early 1980s, and as the ‘new atheists’ such as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris were yet decades away from becoming famous, I learned my godlessness from the likes of Bertrand Russell and Ayn Rand. The Witnesses’ antagonism towards science, combined with my affinity for it, made for clearly defined battle lines. It was thrilling to see their worldview struck down, to know how the JW teachings about the age of a ‘young earth’ were laughably wrong, and how the biological explanation for the diversity of life could be empirically verified.
But none of that would make my dislike of religion as fierce as something I’d learn when I was 18, concerning medical events related to my birth. My mother, by now an ex-JW, decided to tell me about how I had been born with a rare, but well-understood condition, hemolytic disease of the newborn—a malady that occurs because of certain differences in parental blood types. It is an immune system disorder that may result in anemia, seizures, brain damage, or death.
Shortly after my birth, the hospital staff recognized that I was suffering from this condition and knew that they’d need to treat me promptly. Fortunately, an established and safe procedure was available to cure the disease: a blood transfusion. The Witnesses, however, are famously opposed to any medical use of blood, based on their unorthodox biblical interpretation, which they read as an edict against taking it intravenously—even to save lives.
When the physicians explained the treatment to my parents, my father said that he would not permit it. His plan was that I would go home; he would simply smuggle me out of the hospital if necessary. The doctors obtained a court order to proceed with the transfusion. My father was also given some education involving terms such as manslaughter. The blood exchange was performed and I recovered.
My mother told me all this to lift a decades-old burden from her conscience. Although they were both Witnesses at the time of my birth, her maternal senses overruled the religious mandates, though she kept this to herself. Privately, she was quite glad that the State of New York stepped in to save her child’s life.
I can say with no exaggeration that an organized religion very nearly killed me—and after learning this story, I had more reason to embrace atheism than most other nonbelievers ever could claim. It was personal. Being a champion of science and an enemy of all faiths would be my mission.
Ironically, during my long period of antagonism towards religion, I remained tacitly, if not vocally, pro-life. I couldn't help but see my early brush with death as a kind of attempted abortion, even as the roles had been turned on their heads: a devoutly religious father whose actions would take an infant’s life, and a secular government stepping in to defend it. If this was wrong, how could killing a child a few days earlier, in the womb, somehow be okay? As a result, I've never seen the pro-life position as requiring an explicitly religious foundation. You either value human life, or you don't. (I remain a supporter of a wonderful non-profit called Secular Pro-Life, which fights the abortion industry from a powerful position; one which abortion advocates cannot simply dismiss with their tired line that pro-lifers are “the religious attempting to impose their views on everyone.”)
As the internet was beginning to flourish in the 1990s, I was eager to engage in online debates pertaining to religion. I was certain that science and religion were in conflict, and as a freshly minted PhD scientist, I was especially appalled by attempts to use ’my’ physics to argue in favor of theism, as was being done with the so-called Fine-Tuning Argument (FTA), a topic which was beginning to get much attention. It was here that I first trained my fire, publishing a detailed article for The Secular Web (aka Internet Infidels) that would be praised by the late Victor Stenger, a physics professor who Richard Dawkins once referred to as the ‘Fifth Horseman of the New Atheism’. (I recently learned that my article was included in an atheism book featuring the most popular articles from The Secular Web’s several decades online. My atheism bona fides also included satirical writings that won favorable reviews from esteemed anti-religion writers such as the late professor Michael Martin.)
By this point, my worldview seemed rock solid, my experiences validated that I’d chosen the right beliefs, and my writings had established my atheist credentials. I was bitter about my childhood and bitter about another unwelcome change that only an uncaring universe would throw at me: when I was in my mid-twenties, I began to lose my eyesight, due to a genetic condition, retinitis pigmentosa. I wouldn’t be seeing the night sky—once my escape into nature—anymore. I’d eventually become legally blind, with only about 4% of my visual field remaining from my thirties onward. But at least my spiritual blindness would eventually be cured.
An Unlikely Theist Opens My Eyes
In the early 2000s, I came across the first thinker who would shake my atheist assumptions. He was a Scientific American columnist who popularized recreational mathematics, puzzles and games, and who was also a pioneer in the investigation and discrediting of all manner of charlatans and hucksters who peddled pseudoscience, paranormal, and New Age nonsense. As a founder of The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and ‘a one-man think tank and the father of modern skepticism’, he had been praised by many secular thinkers including Isaac Asimov, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Jay Gould, James Randi and Carl Sagan.
All this is cited to illustrate that the late Martin Gardner isn’t someone you might expect to make an atheist reconsider his worldview. Because of his immense body of intellectual and skeptical work, the irreligious are often shocked to learn that Gardner—whom they expect to be on their side— was an unapologetic believer who openly professed his faith in God. This all seemed paradoxical to me, and so I sought to understand how he could justify his theism.
His immensely readable book The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener presents his core arguments. Central to his reasoning is the concept of a ‘live option’ set forth by William James. He posits that the choice of believing (or not) in God is forced, live, and momentous. It is forced because one will either have such a belief or not. It is live because the idea is a plausible one, despite the occasional objection otherwise: there is nothing about this world, either from a logical or scientific perspective, that renders the idea of a realm (and a being) beyond our sensory reach as something that can be rejected out of hand. And it is a momentous decision (at least for many of us), because the entire structure of our lives, our actions, and our very souls, depends upon it.
Faced with a forced, live, momentous choice, and provided that it cannot be decided simply on empirical or rational grounds, is it valid to permit an emotional component into the decision? James and Gardner answer an emphatic ‘yes.’ This is the philosophy that regards faith as a justified ‘leap’, an idea described at length by the Christian existentialist Søren Kierkegaard. For me, it was a kind of gateway drug, because it allowed me to experiment with faith without feeling that I needed a purely rational basis for it.
I’d always harbored a devout wish that my consciousness would never be extinguished, that the experience of being and knowing and self-awareness would not come to an end: ‘All joy wants eternity, wants deep, wants deep eternity,’ says Nietzsche’s Midnight Song. This desire was, and is, as innate and unshakable as my desire to avoid pain, to live a long life, to experience happiness in myself and in others. I could not shake myself free from this admission. My rational side continued to insist that the odds that this world might include God and an afterlife must be infinitesimally small. To which Gardner responded, ‘One may, of course, hope for immortality and at the same time estimate the odds against it as high, as one may hope to win a sweepstakes without believing the win is likely.’ Slowly, I realized that a devout hope (and eventually a faith) in immortality could be yet embraced, because if the hope was misplaced, I’d never know. Unlike the case of putting your confidence into winning the lottery, you run zero risk of disappointment.
A few years before he passed away, I wrote to Martin Gardner to thank him for his book and express my gratitude for how much his ideas meant to me. I stressed that I had an unshakable hope, but not any outright faith in God. He wrote me back and said that his own faith was a kind of hope, and, in his words, ‘the distance from a strong hope to belief is small.’
My inner atheist did not take kindly to this exploration of new perspectives, and it hit back with the usual arguments. To get to true faith, I would have to put a face on hope. It would require getting a glimpse of the profundity of the Christian gospel, and seeing that the face was Christ’s. That would not occur for well over a decade. In the meantime, I continued to work out my justification for why a leap would be permissible, provided I could ever make it.
What became clear, eventually, was that the existentialist idea of inventing one’s purpose, in the context of a meaningless universe, was no less quixotic than the kind of faith that Gardner was pointing to. To choose to face life’s absurdity with a stoic aloofness was no less an emotional decision than to embrace a hope for the divine. It is to hear the tolling bell of the coming end, put one’s hands over one’s ears, and say, ‘why yes, this moment alone, and working for a future I’ll never see, that’s enough to content me.’ No, that was an unspeakable lie that decades of reading and reflection could never convince me of.
Such a dismal worldview is captured by Philip Larkin’s poem Aubade, in which the cycle of work and alcohol is punctuated by the blackest of ruminations about death. Despondency over the many plans that would never come to fruition was terrible, but that was the easy part. The real horror was the idea of not being. And all the grasping of the Existentialists and Humanists was, as captured in Aubade, mere ‘specious stuff’ that only made the despair worse. They could never answer Jude’s depressed child in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, who said, ‘I should like the flowers very, very much, if I didn’t keep on thinking they’d all be withered in a few days!’ This was my innate response to the attempted secular consolations that said that the value of the flowers was in their very transience. Specious stuff indeed.
I only found transient solace in science and mathematics, where there was natural beauty so profound that I could get lost in it and forget the existential dread. But in time, there was something uncanny here as well, something that demanded an explanation. Einstein himself felt it, writing, ‘We are in the position of a little child, entering a huge library whose walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written those books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books, a mysterious order, which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects.’ The idea that this order was all happenstance was not something I could account for.
Towering over all of this was my relentless questioning as to why there was Something rather than Nothing. The secular world offered no answer, nor any place to direct my gratitude for my existence. This sense of thankfulness was as palpable as my wonder that anything existed at all, as was a need for some kind of ritual way in which to experience a connection to something deep enough to explain everything, a way to say thank you.
A lifelong Catholic may wonder why I needed this foray into fideism, but I would remind them that turning an atheist to God is rarely instantaneous. The best Christian apologists looking to persuade atheists know to start with philosophy, not with scripture. I needed a gentle, yet meaningful, nudging toward God in the most non-sectarian, philosophical manner possible, so I could gradually become comfortable with the idea before I was ready to dive into anything more specific. Gardner provided that first serious look, while also introducing me to his intellectual heroes, whom I’d never have met otherwise: James, Kierkeggard, Miguel de Unamuno, and especially a curious, witty Englishman named G. K. Chesterton, whose works would subtly began directing me toward Catholicism. Should you find yourself engaged in discourse with a secular individual who insists that a skeptical intellectual cannot also embrace faith in God, have them read Gardner’s book.
Coming Home
Starting in about 2021, I’d feel the relentless pull of the divine grow significantly stronger. By now I’d been in the desert of atheism for some forty years, while the philosophical theism of Martin Gardner had been marinating in me for about half that period. I was intrigued by philosophical theism but could not actually make the leap. I considered myself nonreligious and still kept up with atheist perspectives with a kind of sluggish inertia. So it came as a shock when a YouTube debate featuring a popular young secularist, Alex O-Connor, left me more impressed with his Christian interlocutor, the erudite Catholic Bishop Robert Barron.
Soon I was watching every Bishop Barron video I could find. He gave me hope that the Catholic faith could do what forty years of secularism couldn’t: heal the trauma of my Witness childhood. Not only did he present a theistic philosophy that was interesting, he related the Gospel in its true form (not the JW version), which I’d soon come to find as the most profound message I’d ever heard. And he opened my eyes specifically to the glories of Catholicism, as he stressed its historical affinity for learning and intellectual rigor, and of course its unparalleled creation of, and celebration of, artistic beauty in the service of worship.
During college, I used listen to a radio show called St. Paul Sunday Morning, which featured a chamber orchestra located in that far-off city. I had no idea that a decade or so later I’d be living in Minnesota, and that there in the city of St. Paul, on a Sunday morning, something momentous would happen which would tie everything together.
On January 7th, 2024, fittingly during the celebration of Epiphany, I realized I was always meant to be a Catholic. At the gorgeous St. Agnes Church, I experienced a version of the Mass that not even most Catholics have: it was a full, live, orchestral performance of the glorious Theresienmesse of Franz Joseph Haydn.
I finally understood why classical music resonated with me as I absorbed it in this larger context, performed in a sacred space, with the stained glass and iconography, as it accompanied the rites specific to the Mass. From the moment the organ made the music not just aural but visceral, as the procession began from the back, with everyone standing and turning as if a wedding was about to begin, and as the mystical aroma of the incense reached me, it became more than the sum of the parts.
I wept throughout the entire musical performance. It was not to be stopped. The soprano’s voice, in particular, always my favorite instrument, spoke most deeply to me. I felt like Salieri in the film Amadeus, as he read through Mozart’s scores, hearing the music in his head, realizing that this music was of divine origin.
So this was what solemnity and reverence actually felt like. This was how God would speak to me. It is all obvious now in retrospect that this music would be integral to my conversion experience. But the music alone was not enough. What I understood on that day was that the Mass celebrated and re-presented the greatest act of love ever performed. That it was the unique vehicle through which God’s grace would become palpable to me. I’d thereafter keep attending these orchestral Masses, deeply moved by all of them, always compelled to take my place at the Communion rail with my hands crossed over my chest, impatient for the day when I could take part in it myself. Nine months later I would be Baptized and Confirmed and take my first Communion in the chapel at this holiest of places. I took the name Paul in honor of the city where this happened. I felt an affinity for his unexpected and momentous experience on the road to Damascus. I too was once an aggressive enemy of the devout, and the fact that he was blinded for a time after his conversion also seemed fitting.
It seems strange to me now that I was ever not Catholic. Somehow I always knew it was my identity, but God’s plans for me were never linear. I’m now trying to use the intellect and knowledge that God blessed me with to help others in the faith, by teaching science and math at a local Catholic high school, named for the great Chesterton. It is an opportunity for me to be a student again myself, learning from this devout community what it means to live the faith every day. Glory be to God in the highest.
© 2025 Christvs Dominvs Est. All rights reserved.
Michael Hurben earned his PhD in Physics from Colorado State in 1996 and lives with his wife, Claire, in Bloomington, Minnesota. He teaches at the Chesterton Academy of the St. Croix Valley in Stillwater, MN and is the author of The Physics of Birds and Birding (2025, Pelagic Publishing).
