Though I didn’t answer the call into ministry until the age of 45, I can look back and see how God was preparing me all along. When I discuss my journey, many tell me they find the testimony compelling, even comforting. I thought, perhaps, it is time to briefly share my journey with the hope that it will bring support to those in similar circumstances and challenge those who only accept or promote emotional conversions to Christianity. After all, should our source of faith be, in part or in whole, an emotional experience? If our faith is built on (only) a foundation of emotions and feelings, does it not risk being displaced by equally strong counter emotions or feelings? In his book There Is A God: How The World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind, Anthony Flew details the scientific and logical path he took over his career as a philosopher to come to understand the requirement that there must be a “god” of some description. The route I traversed runs parallel to that of Dr. Flew’s but is distinct in one crucial way. I was not just uncovering logical and scientific elements but also was encountering the Bible in strategic ways, ways that fit in with and explained the scientific facts. What resulted, therefore, was not just some vague understanding of the necessity of a god but specifically a faith in the Christian God of the Bible. In 7th grade, having become bored with burning cheerios over Bunsen Burners to determine their caloric content, I discussed with a science teacher my desire to “make something from scratch” in our Middle School science lab. The teacher chuckled, explaining to me that the First Law of Thermodynamics states we could not “make something from nothing”. We could, she said, using Einstein’s famous E=MC2 formula as proof, convert the matter and energy that existed into different forms but could not create new stuff (or destroy what existed). “Where, then, did all the all the matter in the universe come from”, I asked. “Science can’t really explain that”, she responded. A short time later I heard a man preach on Genesis chapters one and two. He discussed God making all material things, adding that we could not add to or subtract from them. We knew this, he said, because the use of the original Hebrew phrase in Genesis 2: 1 – ‘Thus the heavens and the earth were finished’. The word translated ‘finished’ in English means ‘something completed and not to be redone’. The Bible teaches that matter has a supernatural origin (which is why science can’t explain it or reproduce it) and its creation cannot be redone or added to (which is what science calls The First Law of Thermodynamics). Through this learning, God had placed the first rational block in the foundation of my faith. Andy’s book, Clear Vision: How The Bible Teaches Us To View The World, can be purchased here.
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