At one point in his late teens, Sanger decided to consult a pastor about his philosophical questions. Not wanting to put the pastor of the church he grew up in on the spot, he sought out a different pastor.
“I probably just sounded like a snot-nosed kid,” said Sanger, “probably not very, you know, respectful back in a day when respect was required a little bit more than it is today…nevertheless, I had real questions. And I kind of got the brush-off from him.”
Sanger said he likely asked a question about the Problem of Evil, which essentially says that if God were good, he would want to eradicate evil, and if God were all-powerful, he would be able to eradicate evil. Yet evil exists. Therefore, there must be no good, all-powerful God.
“A lot of pastors are not able to handle questions like that because they don’t have a lot of philosophical training,” Sanger said. “Now that one in particular, a lot of pastors do have training in because that’s sort of meat and potatoes theology.”
“It should be,” Lecrae interjected.
“But some of the other, more abstract questions about the particular arguments for the existence of God, they have never really studied, much of them,” said Sanger. “They don’t have to in order to be a pastor.”
Because of the pastor’s response to him, Sanger concluded that not only do Christians not have the answers to the questions he was asking but also, “I went one step further than that,” he said. He decided, “There are no answers” to those questions.
His reasoning was that “if there are any good answers to questions like this, then a pastor is surely going to have an answer.” Because the pastor did not, Sanger concluded at the time there were none.
“That’s what really sealed me in my unbelief,” he said.
Lecrae and Sanger could also both relate to concluding at different points in their lives that religion must just be for backwoods, uneducated people who had never asked thoughtful questions. However, said Sanger, that view is “just wrong.” In fact, “some of the most brilliant people in the world throughout history…were Christians of one sort or another.”
“Even today,” he said, there are “lots of very smart Christians out there in every field.”
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