Repeated failing a polygraph test led a physics academic to God

Premier Unbelievable? last year featured a discussion that asked the question, ‘can you be a serious scientist and believe in God, and believe in miracles?’ But as such conversations often do, it soon turned towards more ethical matters.  

This chat about whether there is conflict between atheism and science took place between atheist Youtuber and Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society Phil Halper, and Tom Rudelius, Assistant Professor of Mathematical & Theoretical Particle Physics at Durham University.

Most of the discussion focused on morality and not science, but that’s part of the reason the discussion was so fascinating. Both men have impressive scientific credentials, yet Halper’s decision to reject faith, and Rudelius’ turn to Christianity, were prompted not by scientific evidence but by the moral argument. 

I find it interesting that arguments outside one’s area of expertise often provide the impetus for change in religious beliefs. I’m reminded of the atheist philosopher Antony Flew who became a deist because of the scientific arguments from design and fine tuning, while former National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins became a Christian because of the moral argument. Perhaps this is because when we are entrenched in our chosen academic fields, we have a hard time seeing past the reigning dogma, but when we encounter data outside our specialty, we tend to approach it with an open mind and feel freer to allow it to reshape our lives. In the case of Halper and Rudelius, science only served to strengthen the decisions they had already made on moral grounds.

Dueling moral dilemmas

Halper left his Jewish faith after a history teacher challenged him to look at historical events through the eyes of each of the participants, a valuable paradigm for sure, but one which radically changed the way he viewed Judaism:

“I was taught in history class that you should look at stories from other people’s perspectives…and every year we have to do the Passover and I started to look at the Passover from the Egyptians perspective and suddenly I was utterly horrified by what I was reading. The massacre of the Egyptians, the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart didn’t seem fair, but also all the animals were killed… This is terribly wrong, and I turned against my faith.” 

Morality was also an inflection point for Rudelius, but rather than being turned off by the behavior of the characters in the Bible, he found himself drawn to it because it offered the only solution to his own sin problem. Prior to his conversion he was raised in a largely irreligious household where he felt quite comfortable in his moral skin:

“I always felt like the important thing in life is to enjoy it and to be a good person. I felt that was really the goal of religion too, and I felt like I was doing those things okay on my own, so why do I really need religion?”  

His ethical complacency, however, was shattered after repeatedly failing the requisite polygraph test needed to obtain security clearance for an internship at the National Security Agency (NSA).

“I went in and started failing this test and I realized pretty quickly that I was going to fail not only if I were lying but just if I felt guilty about anything. So, for about four hours I shared everything that I could think of that I’d done wrong in my life and for the first time the message that my brother had been telling me how people are broken, people are sinful, people are in need of forgiveness, that message started to really click with me. I realized I’m not as good a person as I think I am and probably that means that no one else is either.” 

His repeated attempts at passing the polygraph began to look more like serial visits to a confession booth where he progressively bared more of his soul to the woman administering the test. He described this experience in his book, ‘Chasing Proof, Finding Faith: A Young Scientist’s Search for Truth in a World of Uncertainty’ (Tyndale).

“I told her everything that came to mind, but every time we reran the test, I became fixated on something new. The test would end, and I would have to confess again. Start. Stop. Fail. Confess. Repeat. The cycle went on and on…I had been broken down and had my deepest secrets pulled out of me one by one. Yet, I walked out that day with my head held high. I walked out knowing I was a Christian.” 

Interestingly, it was the alleged evil actions of God that persuaded Halper to leave his faith, but it was Rudelius’ awareness of the evil in his own heart that convinced him to turn his life over to Jesus.

For more testimonies:

Hope in despair

From radical atheist to Christian

Death has lost its sting

Fighting against God

Security clearance

I found Rudelius’ journey fascinating because it was a polygraph test that set off his moral alarms. It wasn’t that the test revealed any major crimes, but it exposed the cumulative significance of all his minor indiscretions. The lie detector test, while excluding him from the NSA, served as an even more dire warning that he might be blacklisted in heaven. 

Rudelius retook the polygraph multiple times, failing with each attempt as he continued to recall additional moral failings. His story reminded me of how Martin Luther obsessed over his sins. Eric Metaxas described Luther’s quandary this way:

“Luther was obsessive about confession. In fact, it eventually got to the point that his confessor—who ended up being Staupitz—began to get fed up with his maddeningly overscrupulous confessee. Once, Luther actually continued confessing for six consecutive hours, probing every nook and cranny of every conceivable sin and then every nook and cranny within each nook and cranny, until Staupitz must have been cross-eyed and perspiring just listening. When would it end? But Luther didn’t care. He was simply determined to keep digging until he got to the bottom of it all. But he never did. He did not yet understand that there really was no bottom, that we were sinful all the way down.” (from EricMetaxas.com)

Rudelius concluded that his transgressions weren’t unique to himself but were common to all people, and that striving to be holy like God is holy is a very tall order when ‘there is none who does good, not even one’ (Romans 3:10). His repeated failures at passing the test made him painfully aware that acquiring heavenly security clearance was impossible for man but assured with Jesus. 

Divine skill set 

Halper and Rudelius both struggled with the OT, yet as Halper noted, “Tom got past his struggles with the Old Testament (OT), and I did not.” Halper interestingly asked Rudelius if he would consider a Christian version of Gnosticism to rid himself of the evil OT demiurge and accept the good God of the New Testament (NT). Rudelius explained that since he is a follower of Jesus and Jesus was a Jew who embraced the law, prophets and psalms, and considered his suffering, death and resurrection to be the fulfillment of the Jewish messianic hope, he had no problem accepting the OT even when it raised difficult questions.

Rudelius attributed the apparent discrepancies between the way God is portrayed in the Old and New Testaments as contextually necessary emphases on specific aspects of God’s character, such as his justice in the OT and mercy in the NT. I rather like this explanation because as a father, husband, physician, teacher, and tennis player, various aspects of my character are preferentially revealed with each role I assume. In isolation they may seem out of place or excessive, but in combination they define who I am. Similarly, God isn’t defined by his justice, mercy, intellect, or creativity alone but by the body of his work progressively revealed in the words he spoke into creation, the words he breathed into scripture and the Word made flesh. 

It’s one thing for God to lay the foundation of the Earth, prescribe the limits of the sea, and bind the chains of the Pleiades, but quite another to walk its dusty roads, eat with sinners and suffer and die on a cross. So rather than hold them in tension, maybe we need to ask what happens when they are combined? What if a God emptied of his ‘omnis’ (omnipotence, omnipresence, omniscience) looked just like Jesus? The first is necessary to create and uphold the universe, but a completely different skill set is necessary if one is to save sinners.

While I think we can relate to the disquiet Halper experienced reading the OT, we need to remember that those concerns were already recorded in Holy Scripture. Halper’s struggles with the God of the Old Testament were preceded by David, Solomon, Job, and the prophets, so while he may have thought he was leaving the teachings of his faith, he was actually doing midrash with his forefathers, with one big difference: Halper felt the need to reject it while his ancestors felt it was worth canonizing. 

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Proto-morality 

Halper doesn’t dismiss the notion of objective morality but correctly points out that there is also a subjective component that gets culturally tweaked over time. It is, however, his inability to ground the objective nature of morality that leaves his worldview wanting. He doesn’t believe we make up morals as we go but rather proposes that we discovered them through a multi-million-year process of trial and error. To support his argument, he suggests that animals display a “proto-morality” which we humans have since acquired and refined through the evolutionary process. Personally, I’m not convinced. It seems more likely that he is anthropomorphizing the orderly instinctual behavior he sees in the animal kingdom and confusing it with morality. 

Morality cannot be conducted in a vacuum because it is based on the proper exercise of relationships, whether they be between humans and God, humans and humans, or humans and animals. The common thread holding these various relationships together is that at least one participant is a person with free will. Missing from this list of moral relationships is the one between an animal and another animal because in that scenario neither party is a person nor possesses free will. It is for this reason that we don’t accuse animals of wrongdoing towards other species even when we find their conduct abhorrent and would never tolerate it if perpetrated by a human. 

If animals have a “proto-morality” then shouldn’t we at least hold them “proto-accountable”? The answer is no, because they lack the requisite free will necessary to establish morally rigorous relationship limits. Interestingly, when it comes to the relationship between humans and animals, animals have no obligation to treat humans morally, but humans with free will and a heavenly mandate are commanded to treat nature with kindness, care and respect.

I appreciate Phil’s love of animals, but I don’t believe that his conceptual ‘evolutionary maker’ mandates that he care about the creatures he had to outwit, outlast and out survive on his way to the top of the evolutionary heap. Is it possible to acquire a sense of right and wrong by mutating and naturally selecting? It seems to me that a good God asking us to care for his good creation provides a much stronger ecological mandate than the familial obligation of a monkey’s uncle. 

Halper stated that, “When we determine rules of morality we use our judgment, we basically use our moral instinct and our moral intuition and our reason.” Maybe our moral instinct, moral intuition and reason aren’t the result of the evolutionary supersizing of our lizard brains, but the actualisation of our corporate image bearing. 

The problem of suffering

Halper finds suffering to be one of the most powerful arguments against the existence of the Judeo-Christian God. He has published several papers in peer reviewed journals on the problem of animal suffering and has a new film on the subject featuring other leading atheists such as Peter Singer and Alex O’Connor. He broke down his argument into five parts. The first is that because animal suffering was present for hundreds of millions of years before humans appeared, the purported fall of mankind recorded in Genesis cannot be responsible for the introduction of suffering and death into the world. Second, science has shown that we evolved from lower life forms through a process of catastrophe, suffering and naturally selected death thereby making evolution our creator and not a good God. Third and fourth, God commanded his people to cruelly destroy ethnic groups and punished people by using floods and plagues resulting in significant amounts of human and animal suffering. Finally, God facilitated our slow painful death at the hands of global warming because he gave his stamp of approval to the consumption of greenhouse gas producing meat.

While pain and suffering are significant arguments against the existence of an all-good, all-powerful God, removing him from our houses of worship still leaves the planet with the same amount of pain and suffering. Blaming God may be an effective form of ‘primal scream therapy’, but it doesn’t make the problem go away. Without God, pain and suffering become brute facts like gravity and taxes, without remedy. So, to be fair, Halper must also give evolution a good tongue lashing because of its own checkered past of kill or be killed. I prefer to put my hope in a God who promises a future with no mourning, crying, pain or death rather than relying on the good will of scientists who gave us atomic weapons, napalm, super-bacteria, and the internal combustion engine. 

As someone who is actively involved in fostering abandoned and diseased cats, I share Halper’s concern over the amount of animal pain and suffering in the world, but I wonder where in his atheist worldview he got the crazy idea that we should care for the ‘least of these’? It sounds to me like he is pining for Eden and his admirable concern for animal suffering is more consistent with the Biblical promise of lions lying down with lambs, than it is with ‘nature red-in-tooth-and-claw’. 

Atheist great commission

An atheist creed is ‘life is hard, then you die,’ so in order to fulfill the great atheist commission they must be willing to baptize people in the name of the pain, the suffering and death because that is the only sacrament a materialist worldview can offer its adherents. Rudelius recognizes that a “generic theism” does no better than atheism at explaining the problem of evil, pain and suffering, but is persuaded by personal God who emptied himself, took the form of a servant, and redeemed it by obediently humbling himself to the point of death, even death on a cross. In the end, I much prefer the Garden view afforded by an open tomb than the obstructed view seating of a sealed casket.

Erik Strandness is a physician and Christian apologist who practiced neonatal medicine for more than 20 years and has written three apologetic books. Information about his books can be found at godsscreenplay.com