All right. Hi, this is William Ramsey. Welcome to William Ramsey Investigates on tonight show of a very special guest. His name is Jim Ryan, and he is one of the founders in runs, what's called the Freedom from Atheism Foundation of the FFAF. It was founded in 2012, and it was founded in response to the perception of a rising intolerant atheism throughout the world.

So he's going to talk about that.

The website is F-F-A-F-A-F-A-F-W-E-E-B-L-Y.com.

So you can check out some of their information.

And I'll put it in the show notes as well.

So Dr. Jim Ryan,

are you there? I'm here. Thank you for having me, William. Awesome. Well, thank you for

agreeing to the interview. For people who may not have heard your background or the F-F-A-F,

can you talk about your interest in this subject of kind of combating atheism and how you got

into that? Yeah, yeah, it's a great

question. This is my background. I actually am a scientist, molecular biologist by training. So I

used to be an atheist myself, believe it or not. I wouldn't say a very militant one, but, you know,

I used to read a lot of the Richard Dawkins books and things like that when they first

came out, her selfish gene, extended phenotype, and such like that. So, uh, Carl Sagan's work. So I was,

I was a fairly, fairly active atheist. Um, and, uh, you know, during the course of my studies in

science, the more I studied, uh, I kind of came to the point where I started recognizing

that, you know, atheism didn't really make sense from a scientific worldview. I was actually

quite disappointed with it. So I eventually came to reject atheism. And in that process, you know,

a lot of my friends, colleagues who were atheists really had a very negative reaction to it. They thought I was, you know, very, very harsh, surprisingly hard. So I felt myself, I said, you know, I've kind of felt somewhat enlightened, you know, atheism isn't, doesn't really land up with science the way I thought. And I got really harshly attacked by a lot of people who I thought were good friends, a lot of people were great colleagues. And so I had this, you know, a very negative reaction of how I was treated by fellow

atheists, simply for changing my view. You know, and through the course of arguing with them

over the years, I eventually, you know, fell in with this group, the Freedom from Atheism Foundation.

I faced a bunch of other guys who had similar experiences and came to, you know, just wanted to,

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