This is your host, Michael Sherman, and you're listening to Science Salon, a series of conversations

with leading scientists, scholars, and thinkers about the most important issues of our time.

The first thing I want to ask you about is Christianity, because I know I've read a little bit of your biography.

I know that you were a Christian at one point.

So the first question is what led you to become a Christian when you decided to become one?

Right, yeah, I've written quite a bit about this in several of my books.

It was not a parental influence thing.

I wasn't raised religious.

My parents were not religious at all.

It was more of a peer group influence of my friends in high school.

And this was in the early 70s when the Born Again Movement was an evangelical movement was starting to take off.

This is before the moral majority and the influence in politics of Christianity,

which happened in the 80s.

This was about a decade before that.

But I took it pretty seriously and I went to Pepperdine University which is a Church of Christ

school in Malibu and I was a member of the first four-year graduating class from that

campus and it was all in all a good experience but I discovered once I left

that not being in the Christian bubble where you're surrounded by everybody else who believes the same as you,

it becomes more difficult to believe in the sense that the beliefs were never founded on good evidence in the first place.

They really are faith-based arguments.

You just believe or you don't believe.

And there may be good arguments you can use for why you believe, but in the end they only

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