By Jeremiah Love –
A former associate of renowned atheist Richard Dawkins has become Christian after his daughter, born in neonatal care at only 2 pounds, survived.
“If there was ever a time I would have wanted to pray it was there… In the butterfly room they put you in because butterflies live for a day and they’re preparing you for that very real possibility,” Josh Timonen says. “I was an atheist. I wasn’t praying to anyone. I remember thinking this is the most valuable thing in the world to me.”
Timonen helped Dawkins set up a website when the UK biology professor was thundering despisings towards Christianity through books and tweets in the early 2000s. Dawkins led the charge of the so-called New Atheist movement with conventions and interviews that promised that the dawning of the Age of Science would usher in a better society than the religion-repressed one of Christianity.
Instead, the Age of Science became the Age of Chaos, the Age of Woke Repression and the Age of Islamist Extremism.
Timonen initially liked the idea of helping Dawkins attack Christianity. It was heady stuff to work for the famous man, to film him at the Galapagos Islands and make videos about evolution.
He also liked that atheism meant he answered to no one for his moral choices, whatever they might be.
“The desire for an atheistic worldview that I think encouraged me to pull me that way based on just wanting a secular life wanting less restriction,” Timonen says. “I was you know introduced to drinking and having fun and these were all things that were like a finger on the scale of the decision-making of whether or not I was actually going to shed my faith and become an atheist.”
The birth of his daughter brought some intense reflection. If we are just evolutionary animals meant to survive by being the fittest, why did he feel so much love for his daughter? After all, she was just another meaningless creature, according to atheism.
The love he felt for his daughter seemed unscientific. It seemed to derive from something greater than a dog-eat-dog worldview. When his daughter barely survived the premature birth, he had more reflexions to consider.
The next step towards losing his atheism was 2020. On the one hand, antifa was rioting in the streets of Portland, where he had moved, and was destroying businesses and randomly attacking drivers.
While his co-workers justified the riots and overlooked the excesses, Timonen felt they were just not right. If antifa represented his godless set of values, why did they seem like the bad guys?
At the same time, 2020 brought Covid masks and government asserting control over the population. Particularly, government orders to citizens to turn in neighbors who were violating Covid lockdowns smacked of dictatorship. Again, it was the atheist worldview that was driving the authoritarianism.
The rowdy rioters and government authoritarianism rubbed him the wrong way. They were displeasures that lodged in his brain and would not go away.
When Timonen moved to Texas, his daughter was older. Both he and his wife wanted to surround their daughter with positive influences. They wondered where they find a social group that could socialize their daughter in a good way. They were homeschooling her.
“We saw a cowboy church close to our house,” he says. “We had no idea what to expect
but we visited this church. It was the first church that I stepped foot in in 20 years. My wife and I both kind of chuckled to each other saying, Can you believe we stepped foot in church?”
They attended, even though they were still atheists.
“We were after the cultural benefits,” he says. “We saw that people treated each other better.”
He liked that the churches opposed the government-enforced Covid restrictions.
“I noticed that a lot of the people who were standing up against the tyranny were Christians and churches,” he says. “I started to put those pieces together. I think it took a big, massive, chaotic experience like 2020 to open ourselves to a different worldview.”
Now attending church, he actually started researching the Gospel accounts and the historicity of Jesus. He found that outside sources verified Christ’s existence and showed the antiquity of the oldest New Testament manuscripts.
“Then you have to wrestle with, Is he who he says he was?” he says.
The case for the resurrection is “compelling,” he says, for the simple fact that so many people believed it even to the point of martyrdom.
“It makes no sense that many of these eyewitnesses went to brutal deaths still proclaiming that Jesus rose from the dead,” he says.
Once, Timonen contributed to people losing faith in God. Now he’s doing the opposite.
“I didn’t want to give up my atheist worldview. It’s very comforting to feel like I control this sandbox of ideas of the natural world and I’m going to stay here,” he says. “But at the same time I felt that Jesus did live and that he did rise from the dead.”
Related content: Apostate Prophet left Islam and left atheism, co-founder of Wikipedia found God, ‘atheism wasn’t enough’ says Ayaan Hirsi Ali Source: Decision Point.
