Sanger told CBN News the skepticism he held for most of his life went back to his childhood and his unsure perspective on all religions. Despite that reticence, he did dabble in attempts to communicate with a Higher Power.

“I wasn’t necessarily praying to God, per se, but I had a sort of internal dialogue,” he said. “And sometimes, I even wrote it out …. with some supremely wise being, and, sometimes, I would even call that being ‘God,’ not that I believed that that was God, but in order to just sort of clarify my thought.”

Sounds like praying to a god to me.

“There was a period of time in which I knew things were changing, but I can’t pin it down to a particular moment when I just decided I now believe that God exists,” he said. “There is a moment when I said, ‘OK, I have to admit that what I’m doing now is praying to God,’ and there also was a moment when I prayed something like the Sinner’s Prayer after, I guess, two months or so into reading the Bible.”

Sounds like you kind of always did, and you chose Yahweh, because that’s probably culturally familiar.

It’s kinda interesting that “mocking atheists” were the impetus to deconstruct, but he didn’t apply skepticism to both claims. There is simply no way to end up at Christianity by applying skepticism, because the Bible definitely doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, and the evidence we have can only get you to deism or polytheism at best.

I don’t know for certain, but it certainly doesn’t sound like he was using skepticism to inform his epistemology. It sounds more like he just grew up as an atheist and never bothered to steelman his own beliefs.