For more than thirty-five years, Larry Sanger was the last person you would expect to pray. The co-founder of Wikipedia holds a Ph.D. in analytic philosophy and describes his adult life as that of "a devotee of rationality, methodological skepticism, and a somewhat hard-nosed and no-nonsense (but always open-minded) rigor." He stopped believing in God as a teenager. By graduate school he was a confirmed agnostic, holding that the very concept of God was beyond human knowing.
The Skeptic Starts Reading
God reached him through the tools he trusted most: arguments and texts. In the late 2010s, Sanger re-examined the classical arguments for God's existence and found them stronger than he had remembered. Then, in December 2019, looking for bedtime reading, he decided to read the Bible cover to cover, "this time for reasonably good understanding." Trained as a close reader of difficult texts, he read intensively, with commentaries and study Bibles, determined to understand Scripture on its own terms.
Toward the end of February 2020, soon after he started the Gospels, the skeptic reached a quiet verdict. "I said I should admit to myself that I now believe in God, and pray to God properly," he wrote. He did so silently, lying in bed, eyes closed. He calls the moment anti-climactic. A philosopher was finally telling himself the truth.
Meeting Immanuel in the Gospels
In the Gospels he met Immanuel. "Jesus of Nazareth was this Immanuel," Sanger wrote. "He was God With Us: the Son of God, approved and empowered by the Holy Spirit, he was one with God." He came to see the crucifixion as "Christ the perfect sacrifice," the Lamb of God and Savior of the world, and to understand salvation as Jesus's own sinlessness covering those who belong to him. "When I finished the Bible, I started immediately again (and I have never stopped since)," he wrote. The second time through, he read with a group that included his mother, father, and sister, believers who had waited decades for him.
On February 5, 2025, Sanger published his full testimony, roughly 25,000 words, on his own site, and the story traveled through Fox News, The Christian Post, and beyond.
Faith That Survives Scrutiny
Sanger spent a lifetime asking hard questions, and God did not waste one of them. For anyone weighing whether faith can survive honest scrutiny, his story stands as evidence that it can, and an invitation to open the book and see who meets you there.
