DrJ Testimony
How I Became a Creationist
Many times, churches will ask me to give them my "testimony." Yes, they usually want to hear all about how I accepted Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Savior. But they often want to know how I became a creationist, too. These two are one in the same story.
When I was in first grade, my mother was a secretary working at NASA in downtown Washington DC (I was born there and so were both of my parents--a rare thing in a city known for its transient population). She even took dictation from a then-young Carl Sagan, the fair-haired boy of science at the time and later host of the 70's "Cosmos" NOVA series.
My mother's bosses knew that she had a little boy at home who was interested in science. They would send her home with 8"x10" black-and-white glossy copies of the most recent photos from the moon probes or of famous astronauts like John Glenn (the first human to orbit the earth in a space capsule). I had all of the orbital and rotational periods of all of the planets fully memorized and could recite them for whoever asked me to--plus their number of moons or any other lore particular to each heavenly body. I was a science geek, before they had that name for it!
My grandfather got me a book called "The Boy Scientist" when I was in fourth grade. I read that thing over and over. Much of it I couldn't understand, but much of it I could. I read all about the greats like Newton, Galileo, Kepler, and Einstein. I had little microscope and was trying hard to culture hay infusions to grow hydra to look at. I had a telescope and began looking at the moon and the planets. I built a little Babbage device from a kit. I had an electronics kit. In sixth grade my triumph was breeding land snails. Y'know, the babies don't really "hatch" from their eggs. Instead, they just stick their head out and take off, staring off their life with their eggshell as their snail shell. They were amazing--and I had lots of them pretty quick!
By seventh grade, I had invented parallel circuitry--just without realizing that somebody else had beaten me to it about 100 years earlier. In eight grade I decided to ride my bike around the neighborhood all year and gathered all the seeds from all the plants that I could find, and put cardboard egg cartons all around my room with dirt in them for the seeds to grow. Every day I dug them up with a pencil to see how they were doing (which you're not supposed to do, but disturbing them was done--all in the name of science). I grabbed every kind of minnow, whirlygig, snail, crawdad, newt, and algae that I could out of the local creek and kept them all in an aquarium in my room. I also had tropical fish for a couple of years, and took four years of piano. I was a real lil' Renaissance man by high school age--and such a sci-fi nerd!
Being a Boy Scout, I loved hiking and camping the Appalachian Mountains just a few hours from DC. I eventually became an Eagle Scout and worked as a merit badge counselor at Goshen Scout Camps for the last two summers of my high school years. It was there in the Shenandoah Valley that I met Jay--Jay the Jesus Freak, we called him. He witnessed to this Nature counselor all summer long.
We soon realized that we were from the same high school back in the Virginia suburbs of DC. When summer was over and we got back from camp--you guessed it--we were in the same class, along with two others just like him. They all sat around me and I was surrounded--in "Bible as Literature" class. By Christmas I did the Baptist thing and walked down the isle in church one Sunday.
I really hadn't expected much to change about me. I knew and understood the "give your life to Christ" thing and the "confess your sins and repent" stuff. I guess people told me I would become a new creature, but I didn't have any idea what that really meant--until it happened. It freaked me out.
The moment I got saved, I knew I was different and that nothing would ever be the same again. Within minutes I was already unsure that I was up to this Christian task, as everybody in the church seemed to suddenly think that I was Billy Graham and was going to change the world. That was a tough rap for a 17 year-old evolutionist to take on! Little did I know how many of the other teens had been praying for me when they'd seen me start to attend church with my mom (who they all thought was my girlfriend--yeah my mom is still a hottie ... for a septugenarian).
Within a few hours it began to dawn on me that all of the Bible was true. Now, you'd think it'd have occurred to me before this--but it didn't. Suddenly, I just knew ... it all was true ... absolutely true. This was profoundly disturbing to me at once. I began to recall all of the Sunday School stories that I'd heard in my few trips to church during my upbringing. I now had to come face-to-face with the idea that miracles were really true--that they could happen. It wasn't long (probably on the way home in the car with Mom) that it dawned on me that this all meant that Jesus was really born of a virgin--a scientific impossibility. Also, Noah's Flood was real ... Jonah got swallowed by a whale (big fish), Moses parted the Red Sea, Jesus walked on water, and -- oh yes -- God made the world in six days and evolution never happened and Darwin was wrong. I was a now a creationist. I was terrified.
Everything that I'd ever believed in and had put my trust in had just been proven wrong to me! Well, not everything. All the parts of science that I had labored to learn and to master, that had nothing whatsoever to do with the Big Bang, Spontaneous Generation, or the Origin of Species ... could still be trusted. I had a lot of re-figuring to do. I went home and locked myself in my room and would not come out. I stared out into the empty space in my room and muttered all of the "science falsely so called" (see 1 Tim 6:20) that I could summon back up again that would clearly be in a direct conflict with the Bible that I now believed. It was a delirious nightmare. I was saved now. I knew Jesus! I loved Jesus. But I was also scared of Him. He had ruined everything--or so it seemed.
I didn't come out of my room until time to go to evening service at church. There was going to be a baptism that night anyway, so I had agreed that it would be a great idea to go on ahead and get baptized right after a little kid named Nells Ferre. My world had been rocked to its foundations. I went Christmas caroling that night with the youth group teens that had been praying for me so many months, my hair still wet from the waters of baptism.
At first I'd just decided to take it on faith that God made the world in six days and that the whole Bible was true and that I couldn't really put much stock in the world of science anymore. After all, I had a whole new realm of learning to dive into, and with the help of the Holy Spirit of God as my teacher! But it wasn't long before I ran across some creationist literature at the Christian bookstore. I read "The Creation-Evolution Handbook" and "Scientific Creationism." The rest is history.
It also wasn't long before I met people who professed to be Christian--even all their lives--who yet believed in evolution. Had they not had the same world-rocking experience that I had at the point of my salvation? I wondered. I never knew why some Christians didn't believe the Bible. I soon gave up wondering. I just knew it was true. And I also knew that I was going to have to have my facts and understandings in order by the beginning of my college career as a Biology major and years later, in my career as a high school science teacher. This had been my dream for many years, and that at least had not been changed by the Creator God of my life and breath.
So that's how I became a creationist. I got saved. And to this day, I am convinced that this is the only truly reliable antidote for the dark Darwinian delusion, once it has gotten a grip on the mind and heart of anyone interested at all in the sciences. Jesus delivered me from Darwin. That's the only way to look at it. I was free now--free from sin--free from error--free to pursue Truth, once and for all. Amen. DrJ
Many times, churches will ask me to give them my "testimony." Yes, they usually want to hear all about how I accepted Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Savior. But they often want to know how I became a creationist, too. These two are one in the same story.
When I was in first grade, my mother was a secretary working at NASA in downtown Washington DC (I was born there and so were both of my parents--a rare thing in a city known for its transient population). She even took dictation from a then-young Carl Sagan, the fair-haired boy of science at the time and later host of the 70's "Cosmos" NOVA series.
My mother's bosses knew that she had a little boy at home who was interested in science. They would send her home with 8"x10" black-and-white glossy copies of the most recent photos from the moon probes or of famous astronauts like John Glenn (the first human to orbit the earth in a space capsule). I had all of the orbital and rotational periods of all of the planets fully memorized and could recite them for whoever asked me to--plus their number of moons or any other lore particular to each heavenly body. I was a science geek, before they had that name for it!
My grandfather got me a book called "The Boy Scientist" when I was in fourth grade. I read that thing over and over. Much of it I couldn't understand, but much of it I could. I read all about the greats like Newton, Galileo, Kepler, and Einstein. I had little microscope and was trying hard to culture hay infusions to grow hydra to look at. I had a telescope and began looking at the moon and the planets. I built a little Babbage device from a kit. I had an electronics kit. In sixth grade my triumph was breeding land snails. Y'know, the babies don't really "hatch" from their eggs. Instead, they just stick their head out and take off, staring off their life with their eggshell as their snail shell. They were amazing--and I had lots of them pretty quick!
By seventh grade, I had invented parallel circuitry--just without realizing that somebody else had beaten me to it about 100 years earlier. In eight grade I decided to ride my bike around the neighborhood all year and gathered all the seeds from all the plants that I could find, and put cardboard egg cartons all around my room with dirt in them for the seeds to grow. Every day I dug them up with a pencil to see how they were doing (which you're not supposed to do, but disturbing them was done--all in the name of science). I grabbed every kind of minnow, whirlygig, snail, crawdad, newt, and algae that I could out of the local creek and kept them all in an aquarium in my room. I also had tropical fish for a couple of years, and took four years of piano. I was a real lil' Renaissance man by high school age--and such a sci-fi nerd!
Being a Boy Scout, I loved hiking and camping the Appalachian Mountains just a few hours from DC. I eventually became an Eagle Scout and worked as a merit badge counselor at Goshen Scout Camps for the last two summers of my high school years. It was there in the Shenandoah Valley that I met Jay--Jay the Jesus Freak, we called him. He witnessed to this Nature counselor all summer long.
We soon realized that we were from the same high school back in the Virginia suburbs of DC. When summer was over and we got back from camp--you guessed it--we were in the same class, along with two others just like him. They all sat around me and I was surrounded--in "Bible as Literature" class. By Christmas I did the Baptist thing and walked down the isle in church one Sunday.
I really hadn't expected much to change about me. I knew and understood the "give your life to Christ" thing and the "confess your sins and repent" stuff. I guess people told me I would become a new creature, but I didn't have any idea what that really meant--until it happened. It freaked me out.
The moment I got saved, I knew I was different and that nothing would ever be the same again. Within minutes I was already unsure that I was up to this Christian task, as everybody in the church seemed to suddenly think that I was Billy Graham and was going to change the world. That was a tough rap for a 17 year-old evolutionist to take on! Little did I know how many of the other teens had been praying for me when they'd seen me start to attend church with my mom (who they all thought was my girlfriend--yeah my mom is still a hottie ... for a septugenarian).
Within a few hours it began to dawn on me that all of the Bible was true. Now, you'd think it'd have occurred to me before this--but it didn't. Suddenly, I just knew ... it all was true ... absolutely true. This was profoundly disturbing to me at once. I began to recall all of the Sunday School stories that I'd heard in my few trips to church during my upbringing. I now had to come face-to-face with the idea that miracles were really true--that they could happen. It wasn't long (probably on the way home in the car with Mom) that it dawned on me that this all meant that Jesus was really born of a virgin--a scientific impossibility. Also, Noah's Flood was real ... Jonah got swallowed by a whale (big fish), Moses parted the Red Sea, Jesus walked on water, and -- oh yes -- God made the world in six days and evolution never happened and Darwin was wrong. I was a now a creationist. I was terrified.
Everything that I'd ever believed in and had put my trust in had just been proven wrong to me! Well, not everything. All the parts of science that I had labored to learn and to master, that had nothing whatsoever to do with the Big Bang, Spontaneous Generation, or the Origin of Species ... could still be trusted. I had a lot of re-figuring to do. I went home and locked myself in my room and would not come out. I stared out into the empty space in my room and muttered all of the "science falsely so called" (see 1 Tim 6:20) that I could summon back up again that would clearly be in a direct conflict with the Bible that I now believed. It was a delirious nightmare. I was saved now. I knew Jesus! I loved Jesus. But I was also scared of Him. He had ruined everything--or so it seemed.
I didn't come out of my room until time to go to evening service at church. There was going to be a baptism that night anyway, so I had agreed that it would be a great idea to go on ahead and get baptized right after a little kid named Nells Ferre. My world had been rocked to its foundations. I went Christmas caroling that night with the youth group teens that had been praying for me so many months, my hair still wet from the waters of baptism.
At first I'd just decided to take it on faith that God made the world in six days and that the whole Bible was true and that I couldn't really put much stock in the world of science anymore. After all, I had a whole new realm of learning to dive into, and with the help of the Holy Spirit of God as my teacher! But it wasn't long before I ran across some creationist literature at the Christian bookstore. I read "The Creation-Evolution Handbook" and "Scientific Creationism." The rest is history.
It also wasn't long before I met people who professed to be Christian--even all their lives--who yet believed in evolution. Had they not had the same world-rocking experience that I had at the point of my salvation? I wondered. I never knew why some Christians didn't believe the Bible. I soon gave up wondering. I just knew it was true. And I also knew that I was going to have to have my facts and understandings in order by the beginning of my college career as a Biology major and years later, in my career as a high school science teacher. This had been my dream for many years, and that at least had not been changed by the Creator God of my life and breath.
So that's how I became a creationist. I got saved. And to this day, I am convinced that this is the only truly reliable antidote for the dark Darwinian delusion, once it has gotten a grip on the mind and heart of anyone interested at all in the sciences. Jesus delivered me from Darwin. That's the only way to look at it. I was free now--free from sin--free from error--free to pursue Truth, once and for all. Amen. DrJ
