A Broken Radio Dials In on an Unbeliever's Skepticism
"I just witnessed an event so mysterious that it shook my skepticism." So wrote Michael Shermer, editor of Skeptic, the official magazine of The Skeptic Society, of which he is the founder.
A Skeptic's Skeptic
Michael Shermer is a skeptic's skeptic whose skepticism is most strenuously exercised against all things supernatural. From a full-throated materialistic bent, he argues that all phenomena are reducible to natural causes ultimately explainable through science.
In his writings, interviews, and debates, Shermer projects an intellectual swagger that has become fashionable in freethinking circles. A number of years ago, during a PBS panel discussion on religion, when the topic of the Resurrection came up, he pressed a Christian physician for an explanation of how (how!) God did it. By presuming that the Resurrection must have occurred through a clever medical manipulation or else it wasn't credible, Shermer's question was designed to ensure that naturalism wins.
It was also designed to make his Christian opponent appear badly misinformed, intellectually challenged, or worse. For in our enlightened scientific age, smart people everywhere know "there is no such thing as the supernatural or the paranormal," Shermer reminds us; "there is just the natural, the normal, and mysteries we have yet to explain by natural causes."1
Such unswerving confidence in naturalism seals the imagination from any consideration of supernatural causation, even for things currently inexplicable by science (for example, dark energy, quantum behavior, abiogenesis, consciousness, the big bang, and so forth). However, when life collides with our worldview, it can create cracks in our ideological foundation and shake our confidence. In 2014, Michael Shermer experienced just such a collision.
A Fissure-Forming Event
The collision occurred on the day of his wedding in his California home. As Shermer tells it, his German wife-to-be, Jennifer, who shares his skepticism, was feeling lonely, with all her family and friends being thousands of miles away. She was particularly saddened that her late grandfather, the only father figure she had known, wasn't there to give her away.
Months earlier, Jennifer's belongings had been delivered to Michael's home from Germany, and among them was a precious keepsake: a nearly forty-year-old transistor radio her grandfather had owned. Describing his efforts to revive it, Shermer writes,
I put in new batteries and opened it up to see if there were any loose connections to solder. I even tried "percussive maintenance," said to work on such devices—smacking it sharply against a hard surface. Silence. We gave up and put it at the back of a desk drawer in our bedroom.
Just as the wedding was about to proceed, the couple retreated for a few moments to a back area of the house, from which
we could hear music playing in the bedroom. We don't have a music system there, so we searched for laptops and iPhones and even opened the back door to check if the neighbors were playing music. We followed the sound to the printer on the desk, wondering—absurdly—if this combined printer/scanner/fax machine also included a radio. Nope.
At that moment Jennifer shot me a look I haven't seen since the supernatural thriller The Exorcist startled audiences. "That can't be what I think it is, can it?" she said. She opened the desk drawer and pulled out her grandfather's transistor radio, out of which a romantic love song wafted. We sat in stunned silence for minutes. "My grandfather is here with us," Jennifer said, tearfully. "I'm not alone."2
In that silence, a crack formed in Shermer's worldview.
Later, his daughter told him that right before the ceremony she, too, had heard music coming from the bedroom, yet when Michael and Jennifer had been there just minutes earlier getting ready, they had heard nothing. Another crack. Another still, when, after playing classical music throughout the night, the radio went silent and didn't revive the next day, nor any time since.
Shermer admits that had this been another person's story, he would have chalked it up to a random probabilistic occurrence. "With billions of people having billions of experiences every day, there's bound to be a handful of extremely unlikely events that stand out in their timing and -meaning."
I should mention that Shermer's discovery of statistics was pivotal in his move from being a born-again Evangelical Christian pursuing theology to becoming a premier atheist pushing skepticism. Which makes his admission all the more interesting.
In his 2005 essay "Why I Am an Atheist," Shermer explains,
In science, I discovered that by establishing parameters to determine whether a hypothesis is probably right (like rejecting the null hypothesis at the 0.01 level of significance) or definitely wrong (not statistically significant), it is possible to approach problems in another way. Instead of the rhetoric and disputation of theology, there was the logic and probabilities of science. What a difference this difference in thinking makes.
But as Shermer found out on that, uh, providential day, personal experience can trump logic and probability to shake one's settled assumptions and beliefs.
Having had a mysterious experience he is at a loss to explain scientifically, might Shermer now entertain an openness to the existence of the supernatural? While he stops short of endorsement—"such anecdotes do not constitute scientific evidence that the dead survive or that they can communicate with us via electronic equipment"—he confesses that he has been rocked back on his heels, his skepticism shaken.
What Was It?
So was this a rare, probabilistic phenomenon of nature or a message from beyond?
Shermer dismisses the first possibility and remains agnostic on the second, but he says that whatever causal mechanism may be attributed to these kinds of occurrences, they gain their significance from their emotional impact, which, for his wife, was the heart-warming sense "that her grandfather was there and that the music was his gift of approval."
The word "gift" suggests that Michael Shermer could be onto something—a mystery that hitherto has eluded him: the grace of God.
In a piece on the compatibility of science and religion, Shermer asks how we can know that a God outside of time and space exists unless he steps "into our spacetime to make himself known in some manner—say through prayer, providence, or miracles?"3
Well, he has and he does, by those means and others.
Throughout history God has entered our world—through a burning bush, pillar of fire, angel, dream, or vision. Then, two thousand years ago, he entered through a stable to give us his ultimate revelation—the Word made flesh in the wriggling body of an infant, to demonstrate beyond all rational argument that he is a God of love, who loves with a love symbolized by a cross.
Today, he speaks to us through his Scriptures, creation, prophets, Church, and the Holy Spirit. Each is a gift of grace from a God who wants to be known by beings with whom he can have fellowship.
If God spoke to a first-century Roman centurion in a vision (Acts 10:1-8), and is speaking through visions to people today, as has been widely reported in the Muslim world, my bet is that he has spoken to a couple of skeptics through an old, broken radio.
Regis NicollRegis Nicoll is a retired nuclear engineer and physicist, a Colson Center fellow, and a Christian commentator on faith and culture. He is the author of Why There Is a God: And Why It Matters, available at Amazon.
Get Salvo in your inbox! This article originally appeared in Salvo, Issue #46, Fall 2018 Copyright © 2026 Salvo | www.salvomag.com https://salvomag.com/article/salvo46/skeptic-shock
