There were a number of events that led Sanger over time to revise his thinking and to wonder if perhaps he had written off Christianity too quickly earlier in his life.
Near the end of the conversation, he explained to Lecrae that one of the key points along his spiritual journey was that he became compelled by several classic philosophical arguments for God’s existence, arguments he had previously rejected.
Specifically, he mentioned the argument from contingency (there is a necessary being who created the world), the argument from causality (everything that exists must have a cause), and the argument from design (the universe is so intricate and complex that God must have created it).
“When I was a grad student, I used to teach these arguments and [also] as a young professor, and so I was very familiar with them,” said Sanger, “and one of the main things that I would say about them is, even if you admit the premises of the argument, they don’t really get you to the end result that God exists, especially the God of Christianity.”
“I was still stuck on that point, until I realized that the arguments together are like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle, which together depict a full image of God,” he explained.
Sanger said the arguments from contingency and causality led him to conclude there is “a necessary being that is the creator of the universe, all right? That’s a fuller picture of God, but it’s still not necessarily God.”
“[There] might be actually multiple beings of that sort,” he pointed out. “Why not? And maybe it’s not even like a mind at all. And why would we worship it? You know, maybe it’s just a force, for example.”
But then Sanger considered that nature is ordered, complex, and intricate. It seems designed. We even talk about the “laws of nature,” suggesting there is a being that has a “a design or a plan.”
“All of these things suggest something mental, right?” Sanger said. “So then we can draw certain conclusions about the mind-like features of the Creator, right?”
“And then the way that we get to the goodness of the Creator,” Sanger said, “is we observe that, well, this creator also helped emerge, or caused to emerge, life itself…life is the very thing that is good in itself, ultimately, human life in particular.”
