Jump directly to the Content
Jump directly to the Content

Sermon Illustrations

Home > Sermon Illustrations

A New Mother's Journey from Atheism to Faith

In his book Unbelievable, Justin Brierly shares the story of Jennifer Fulwiler who grew up in a loving family, but one in which religion was painted as clearly false. Jennifer says that she never remembers a time when she believed in God as a child. Raised on a diet of "science, reason, and evidence-based rational thought," her bedtime reading was Carl Sagan's astronomy book Cosmos. From a young age, she knew that the world ran according to a well-established set of natural laws, and science was the de facto way of understanding everything. Jennifer remained a happy atheist as an adult and into the early years of her marriage.

However, shortly after the birth of her first child, she experienced a dramatic shift in her thinking. Jennifer describes it this way:

I looked down and thought: "What is this baby?" And I thought "Well, from a pure atheist, materialist perspective he is a randomly evolved collection of chemical reactions." And I realized if that's true then all the love that I feel for him is nothing more than chemical reactions in our brain. And I looked down at him and I thought: "That's not true. It's not the truth."

This moment was a turning point for the young mother, one which would eventually lead her to Christian faith as described in her book Something Other Than God. Something had clicked for Jennifer. The scientific explanations she had grown up with weren't enough to explain the totality of what she was experiencing in the bond with her child. All of her knowledge of science couldn't explain the actual experience of fully fledged love.

Related Sermon Illustrations

Scientist Has Faith in Aliens but Not God

In a popular interview posted on YouTube, scientist Leonard Mlodinow, who co-authored The Grand Design with Stephen Hawking, declared, "Science shows that God is not necessary to explain ...

[Read More]

Atheist Finds Christ through Christians and Science

Sarah Salviander is research scientist in the field of astrophysics. A lifelong atheist, Sarah became a theist as an undergraduate physics student, when she came to believe that the ...

[Read More]