watch video by philosopher Michael Horner
I decided to become an astrophysicist at the age of eight. I set to work reading all the physics and astronomy books in the children's section of my library. My family supported my voracious appetite for knowledge. However, my teachers worried that I was becoming overspecialized. They assigned me lots of extra-curricular projects in the social sciences, which eventually sparked my spiritual quest.
In my last year of high school, I studied the Thirty Years' War for one of those extra projects.Why would Catholics and Protestants shed so much blood over trivial doctrine? I wondered. I posed tough questions to my teacher, who ducked them in his usual way, and sent me off to the library to read books on comparative religions.
I quickly discovered that all the major world religions are based on holy books, supposedly from God. However, I was a skeptic. Like the astronomers of my time, I upheld the "Big Bang" creation theory. I felt God must be impersonal and unconcerned for trivial human beings. Therefore, these holy books must be frauds, products of man's imagination. Energized by youthful pride, I decided to prove it. My yardstick would be the facts of history and science.
I went after each holy book, one by one. I searched for statements about nature and history, then tested them to see if they were accurate. First I tackled the 3,000-year-old Hindu Vedas. They claimed civilizations living on the back side of the moon and cities on the sun. After finding a couple dozen such absurdities, I confidently concluded the Vedas were a human product.
The way I saw it, God created the natural world where we see consistency and no contradiction. If this same God was communicating to us in written form, then it must be likewise: consistent and free of contradiction.
I moved on to the Buddhist writings, then to Islam's Koran and on through all the religions of the world. In each case, after several hours of study, I collected enough scientific and historical misstatements to convince me that each was of human origin.
I had a gut feeling the Bible would be the most difficult, so I saved it for last. After reading just two chapters, I saw that the Bible was different from the esoteric poetry of the other books. The Bible was direct and specific. It gave names, dates and places. My struggle with the other books was to find things to test. But every page of the Bible gave several things to be tested. The Koran had a dozen predictions; the Bible had 3,500! My notebook with historical and scientific statements that I tested and found accurate grew fat. But after two years, my notebook reserved for established errors lay empty.
I'll admit I found lots of unsolved problems, things I still can't understand today. But that didn't bother me, because that's exactly what we see in nature!
The Bible alone correctly predicted the birth and deeds of people by name-King Sirus, King Josiah, and the Messiah-sometimes hundreds of years before they were born. More than 200 predictions detail the return of the Jews to Israel, which I verified with articles in the London Times and the Jerusalem Post.
If we consider just 13 of the Bible's predictions, what's the probability that all 13 were coincidence? The answer is less than one chance in 10 to the 138th power. My friend, that number is so large that it means the Bible is more accurate than our most trusted laws of physics! This shocked me and sent me to my knees.
At 1:07 one morning, I turned my life over to Jesus Christ. I knew I had offended God with my pride, and I accepted the pardon made available through Christ. I gave Him control of my life, knowing it meant sharing it with my lab partner the next day. Funny thing: once I made my commitment, I eagerly anticipated that conversation. Pretty soon I was having more fun talking to people about Jesus Christ than discovering quasars at the edge of the universe.
God has given much evidence to our generation. Better yet, He says three times in the Bible, 'Put Me to the test, and I'll prove it to you!' This scientist did. And I'm convinced that science proves, and proves conclusively, that we're interacting with the God of the Bible.
Start giving the Bible a chance and read this summary of the main points of the Bible.
Copyright 2001 Power to Change.Used with permission.
