Timonen's testimony was especially interesting to me because beginning in 2006 he had been a collaborator with evolutionary biologist and committed atheist Richard Dawkins on some of Dawkins' projects.
Tapscott writes:
Timonen initially created Dawkins' website, then steadily became an indispensable resource for the then-high riding English evolutionary biologist and author of "The God Delusion," who was in high demand for speaking engagements, particularly on college campuses and at influential conferences across the U.S. and Europe.Today, the Timonens are active followers of Christ.
Timonen was riding high, but "during this time, there were definitely glimpses of emptiness in all of this, glimpses of people who were definitely not satisfied with their life." An experience at an atheist conference where Dawkins and fellow atheist advocate Sam Harris were speaking began opening Timonen's eyes.
Harris happened to mention something remotely positive about spirituality and the crowd rebelled, making it clear they didn't want to hear anything remotely good about anything in the way of spirituality, or suggestion that there might be an afterlife.
That intolerance made a deep impression on Timonen. "He was saying the most lukewarm thing about spirituality, but everybody just shut him down. It bothered me that no one was open to that and that there was such an attachment to a physicalist, materialist worldview.
"The materialist world-view means I'm only going to accept things that are within the natural world and I'm going to exclude anything spiritual or that I cannot explain with natural law. I think the atheist world-view has a lot to do with control. It's about controlling the walls of your sandbox, to say that 'if I keep everything within these walls of sand, then I am safe. I can understand it, I can explain it and that's it."
Not long after, Timonen's wife gave birth to their first child, a daughter, who came prematurely, and was not given much chance of living. Timonen recalled thinking that this child was the most important thing in his life, and yet, as an atheist, he had to believe his daughter was just another human who, like him, would simply live and then die a meaningless death.
"The atheist world-view can easily discount the value of a single human, and I remember wrestling with that and thinking 'but this is everything,' and it just felt wrong. It was a moment of realizing that the world-view was not connecting" with reality, he explained.
Then in 2020, Josh and his wife and daughter moved to Portland, Ore., where they witnessed the riots that exploded there and elsewhere in the wake of the death in Minneapolis of George Floyd. Neighborhoods Timonen had come to know and love were left in flames.
A few of the rioters were being arrested, but then they would be released without consequences the next day. Timonen was amazed when some of his young friends and business associates defended the rioters, claiming it was a "good cause." But what is a "good cause" in an atheistic worldview, he wondered, if there is nothing after death?
"Those kids rioting had no moral compass. That got me thinking a lot about that moral compass, where is it coming from. I thought I aligned with these people who were defending the riots, but I didn't, I thought, wait a minute, I thought we were the good guys. And I remember clearly thinking 'why are you defending what is clearly violence and destruction and desecrating our city"?
Timonen explains that he was also shocked during the COVID pandemic by how big institutions such as the government, the drugmakers and the medical profession, as well as individual Americans, sought to control people, to "police each other" with social distancing and mask-wearing mandates.
"That really shocked me and it felt like there was a wave of evil that had come over everyone. I think of it like an ocean wave where the individual particles are all being pushed in the same way. I also noticed that there was this upswell of Satanic imagery in the world," Timonen said.
"So you would see evil obviously rising on all these different fronts and at the same time people are celebrating Satanism, claiming that it's all just in good fun. Is this not just a coincidence, this working together, how many coincidence am I going to allow before I say maybe there is something else at work here," he explained.
That's when Timonen ceased being an atheist, because he realized the supernatural had to be acknowledged and considered. He and his family moved to Texas, where they found a culture vibrantly open to and publicly celebrating Christianity in a thousand informal ways.
One thing led to another: They began homeschooling their daughter, and they checked out a church. "We saw the fruit, we saw there was a difference, that people treated each other better, there was more respect. And I think it all goes back to the idea of the soul," he said.
Timonen also saw that a lot of the resistance to the tyranny of the COVID pandemic came from churches and the people attending them. Those people have "the firm foundation that Jesus spoke of. If you don't have that firm foundation, the world has a much easier time of it in pushing you around," Timonen realized.
So Timonen and his wife began a thorough reevaluation of their understanding of Jesus and Christianity. They dug into questions such as: Can the Gospel accounts of Jesus' life be trusted? Did Jesus really exist? Can we trust what people said about His life?
"And then you have to wrestle with is He who He said He is," Timonen said. He dove into "Cold-Case Christianity" by J. Warner Wallace and "The Case for Christ" by Lee Strobel. He became convinced the death and resurrection of Jesus could not be denied or rationalized away.
You can watch Timonen explain all this here. I wonder what Dawkins is thinking after at least two of his closer associates, Timonen and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, have both abandoned for Christianity the atheism that Dawkins has devoted his life to promoting.
