Founded in 2001, Wikipedia, an open-access online encyclopaedia, is one of internet's five most visited websites.

On 5 February 2025, one of its founders, Larry Sanger, revealed on his blog that he is now a Christian, explaining the path that led him there.

Sanger was born in 1968 into a Christian family that regularly attended a Missouri Synod Lutheran Church. But although he was confirmed there at the age of twelve, he gradually drifted away from the faith, as his own family stopped attending church.

"I probably stopped believing in God when I was 14 or 15", he says.

Sanger’s curiosity

The teenager who “was much given to asking too many questions” turned his passion towards philosophy.

According to his own testimony, Sanger understood that “only dogmatic people, who lack curiosity and are unable to answer hard questions, believe in God”.

He always felt he was driven by a personal truth-seeking mission. That led him to graduate in philosophy and prepare to become a university professor, engaging with irrationalists, nihilists and objectivists. Discouraged by the answers these movements provided to his questions, he aimed to develop his own philosophical system.

After defendeding his dissertation in 2000, he continued to teach at several universities until 2005, when he began to focus entirely on his internet projects, including Wikipedia.

On the existence of God

His position on God was initially agnostic. “I don't even know what ‘God’ means, and the arguments using the concept of God are nonsense”, he used to say.

However, when in 1994 one of his students presented the ‘Fine Tuning’ argument to justify the existence of God, “that made an impression on me; as I found I had no response, there were tears in my eyes, to my consternation. To this day I am not quite sure why”, writes Sanger.

He never sympathised with the most passionate atheists of his time, New Atheists such as Richard Dawkins. He considered their arguments “crass and obnoxious”.

This led him to come down on the theistic side of the debates, and although he still considered himself an agnostic, his respect for believing philosophers and their arguments led him to consider belief in the existence of God to be “at least rational”.

Something begins to change

His marriage in 2001 and the birth of his first child five years later changed his understanding of ethics as well, questioning atheistic positions. “If I am willing to die for my wife and children, would I be acting in my own self-interest at all?”, he wonders.

As his “reasons for disbelief fell away one by one”, his attitude towards the Bible changed slightly.

Sanger began in 2010 to read occasional passages of Bible stories to his children. But for him they were just that, stories without much relevance: “I merely assumed there wasn’t anything terribly deep to understand”, he recalls.

His view of religion became more favourable as he took a closer look at the world around him. “As a serious cultural force, inspiring us to live well, religion is a pale shadow of its former self. Even as a nonbeliever, this strikes me as a truly profound loss”, underlines Sanger.

“I never feared becoming religious. I was just unable to, because it struck me as entirely unjustifiable”. That is why, when he began writing philosophical essays on God, good and evil in 2017, something changed.

He now saw belief in God not only as reasonable or tolerable, but as “positively likable”. He “felt warm toward it”, and “had come to morally approve of it”.

A Bible that answers his questions

The new findings on the ‘Epstein case’, which uncovered an organised child trafficking and sexual exploitation scheme, horrified him. “What kind of world do we live in if our institutions allow this to happen with impunity?”

Thanks to books that a friend recommended to him, he discovered the connection between this kind of abuse and occult spiritual practices. The more he read about it, the more uncomfortable he became with the issue. Although he stopped reading about it, that experience fuelled his curiosity about the Bible's teaching on good and evil.

“When I really sought to understand it, I found the Bible far more interesting and—to my shock and consternation—coherent than I was expecting”, explains Sanger.

Realising that ”the Bible could sustain interrogation”, and that his questions were never “too many”, and that the Bible had answers to them, helped him to break down the barrier that kept him away from God.

The next step was to start “talking to God”, getting closer to the idea of praying that he had known since he was a child.

At this point, “I had already begun to believe in God, but I was not ready to admit it to myself, nor could I easily reconcile it with my own philosophical commitments”, says Sanger.

Conversion to Christianity

Following his new experiences, he re-examined the arguments for the existence of God that he had known until then, and began to write his own reflections on the subject. In February 2020 he admitted that he believed in God.

God Exists: A Philosophical Case for the Christian God began as a blog post, uploaded in mid-2020, but he quickly realised that it had potential as a book, so he took it off the web and is still working on its publication.

In the last paragraphs of his blog post, Sanger confesses that despite joining several Bible study groups, he is not an official member of a church yet. “I know I am called to worship with my brothers and sisters in Christ, but I keep asking too many questions”, he said. “If I am going to continue doing theological blogs and videos (and, in time, books). I wouldn’t want to start publicly contradicting my own [church] denomination”, he adds.

How many Larry Sanger’s are there around us?

“I never had a mind-blowing conversion experience. I approached faith in God slowly and reluctantly—with great interest, yes, but filled with confusion and consternation”, explains the philosopher.

This story is inspiring, but it also challenges us: how many Larry Sanger's are there around us? Reading and learning about his testimony inevitably prompts us to reflect on how we relate to those who doubt, question or seek answers.

‘Asking too many questions’ was what initially drove Sanger away from God, but it was also what led him, years later, to draw closer to Him.

Discovering for himself what the Bible had to say to his deepest concerns was crucial in his ‘slow’ journey to Jesus. But in the process, the philosopher was grateful to meet people and situations that challenged him, such as one of the students he was teaching in 1994.