Peter Byrom was born and raised in East Sussex, England, to a Christian family. He grew up nominally religious but abandoned the traces of his faith when he left home for college. Byrom believed that Christianity was incompatible with intellectualism, so he removed his interest in God and turned to atheism. This transition was fast-tracked by a roommate raised in a Christian home but turned away from religion.

The roommate, Byrom recalled during a recent conversation with CBN’s Faithwire, was a fan of Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist, and encouraged the new atheist convert to read his book, “The God Delusion.” Byrom read the book and was intrigued by the forceful approach championed by Dawkins and others like him. “I was very taken by what Dawkins’ definition of faith is,” Byrom said. “He said faith believes something without any evidence. Now I know that’s a false definition of faith; that’s not what faith means. But at the time, I bought that.”

Byrom didn’t take long to buy into the Dawkins philosophy, hook, line, and sinker. After finishing “The God Delusion,” Byrom dove headfirst into other content from Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett. These men are known as the “Four Horsemen of the New Atheism,” a term coined in 2006 by journalist Gary Wolf to describe 21st-century atheists who believe religion should not be tolerated as an acceptable alternative to atheism.

However, Byrom’s dive into atheist content didn’t yield the results Dawkins may have wanted. Instead of serving as the sage atheist leading Byrom away from his faith, the famed author served as more of an evangelist to the then-college student. When asked how he came to believe in Jesus, Byrom joked, “There’s an extent to which you might have to blame YouTube.”

Byrom remembered watching an endless stream of YouTube videos of Dawkins debating with unprepared Christians who didn’t represent the faith well. That satisfied Byrom for a while, but it didn’t last. Byrom soon stumbled upon videos of Christian apologists debating atheists. He was particularly impressed with William Lane Craig, a Christian philosopher who runs the ministry, Reasonable Faith.

At that point, Byrom realized that many of the arguments used by Dawkins and others to advocate atheism weren’t all that strong. What indeed took Byrom by surprise was that he started to open up to the possibility that Christianity was true. On his shift toward belief in God, Byrom said, “It was surprising. And, at first, it was actually quite unwelcome because I kind of entered into this almost as an interest, really, and I was rooting for people like Dawkins and so forth. Because I actually didn’t find the idea of there being a God, an authority like that, very attractive, and I would’ve preferred that it wasn’t true, but I just kind of got hooked.”

Byrom found himself so intertwined in the issue that, at one point, he even went to an event hosted by Dawkins and, during a question-and-answer portion, asked the atheist why he had refused to debate Craig. Dawkins, for his part, claimed Craig is a “professional debater” rather than a bonafide scholar and asserted his schedule is too full to debate the Christian apologist.

As for Byrom, he said the “tipping point” in his shift from atheism to Christianity “was that I did come to realize that the objections that I had to Christianity, including the arguments of the new atheists, really weren’t strong enough. I didn’t have any intellectual objections, any strong enough ones left. So all that I had remaining were actually just my very personal, emotional reasons for not wanting to come to faith.”

He has since had the opportunity to meet with Craig and his wife, Jan, who impressed upon Byrom the importance of taking his newfound faith seriously.