by Rosemary B Althoff
One beautiful autumn evening I looked up at the stars and said, “I don’t believe in God.”
What in the world led up to that?
From early childhood, I believed in God. I was a toddler when I saw the flannel board story of Noah and the Ark that saved eight people from a destroying flood. I was a little kid at a Christian summer camp where I learned the story of Adam and Eve, the first people in the universe. God made them on the sixth day of creation, set them in the Garden of Eden. Soon, they were tempted by a beautiful snake to eat the forbidden fruit. That’s how sin—whatever that is—entered the world. Adam and Eve had to leave the garden, grow old and die, and their only hope was a descendant who would eventually be born to crush the snake’s head. As a child, I believed the Bible stories with all my heart.
One of my favorite Bible passages was “He made the stars also.” I loved stars and planets and comets and all the glories of space. My dad worked on “space stuff,” and I loved everything about that. He and my mom woke us kids up at 3:00 a.m. to see a rare view of five planets. After we moved to Alabama, Dad administered the team that created the electrical system of the Saturn V moon rocket. When the rocket engines were tested, Dad said, the bedrock melted for a mile below the surface because of the powerful engine’s heat. Thirty miles from the testing area, our house shook and the windows rattled, and we kids shrugged and said with secret pride, “Oh, they’re testing another rocket.” I loved every bit of my “space” experience.
The first wedge that began to pry away my faith in God came when I was nine years old and read books about the universe. I expected the science books to reinforce the childlike joy I had in the stars. But what I read darkened my heart. The books said that the universe was created by a big bang. The early universe exploded outward, with all its swirling matter and energy and somehow formed all the stars and planets. Also, the science books said that the sun would eventually run out of fuel and go supernova, destroying the Earth … Wow! The human race had better venture far into space and colonize planets if it wanted to continue! But … was there really any hope in the long run? For, the science book indicated, the big bang would repeat. The universe would shrink and explode again, drawn into itself by gravity. When the universe contracted to start another big bang, all life would be extinguished. Because the book presented the eventual demise of the universe as fact, I accepted the fate of the human race as depressing, but true.
I wondered, like many people, “If the universe came about by means of a big bang, where did life come from?” The books said that life formed by evolution in pure chance over billions of years; amino acids combined in water and somehow formed DNA. According to school biology, evolution added features to the original cell—or “protus,” as it is called—and more complex life forms developed. Along came the dinosaurs. Then the birds. Then monkeys. Finally, humans evolved! Whoopee!
But, I wondered, why won’t humans take care of the Earth—and each other? Aren’t humans good?
The last wedge that destroyed my faith was the introduction of human evil into my childhood. Just as I started my double-digit years, my grandmother moved into our home. Mom told me, “We’ll all make room for her, and we’ll be a bigger happy family.” But it didn’t work that way. No one realized that the grandmother was addicted to drugs. Quickly, the family assumed the alcoholic behavior structure. If you’ve had an alcoholic or drug addict in your family, you probably know what I’m talking about.
These three triggers: the Big Bang Theory, the Theory of Evolution, and my family problems played in my subconscious. I felt miserable and afraid, and I didn’t know why. Logic told me that if the science I was taught in school and in the adult encyclopedias and books is true, then the passage, “He made the stars also,” is a myth—along with the rest of the Bible. And, so I said one evening, staring upward at that deep blue starry sky, “I don’t believe in God.” What followed were years of teenage anger, depression, and hopelessness. Sounds like a similar problem in our world!
While the whirlpool of my adolescent soul roiled on, I thought I was smarter than the Christians who accept old, fusty doctrines based on an outdated book of myths. I even disrupted Christian youth meetings by arguing my atheism to unprepared leaders and teens!
What kept smacking against my proud ideas was the reality of evil. How the drug addict behaved in our family was evil. The would-be rapist I encountered in the store basement was evil. The kids who sniffed glue behind the school may not have been evil, but their threats to the other kids were evil. By the time I was near college-age, I knew beyond any doubt that evil is real.
Because I was afraid of evil, I wanted protection. I reasoned, “If Evil is real, perhaps Good is real, too! Perhaps the Good is stronger than Evil, and can protect me!” With that small comfort that left God out of the picture, I excelled in school, made lasting friendships, had many adventures, and started world-building for my science fiction stories with a theme of good versus evil. But I remained antagonistic toward the God that self-righteous Christians believe in.
My jolt into Christianity came suddenly, after I entered college. I met people just as intelligent as Rosemary Althoff. These people read the Bible, talked about God with each other and me, and accepted all kinds of other people and loved them. I changed my faith status from “atheist” to “agnostic.”
One night, a friend asked if I would like to pray with her, and to my huge surprise, I said, “Yes.” During my prayer, I saw myself at the edge of a dark abyss. My side was not good. The Good Place—God’s place—was on the other side. I could not reach it, but I wanted to go there. Instantly, somehow God carried me to His side. It didn’t look significantly brighter or more colorful, but I knew it was the Good Place. I started walking with God along the rim of the abyss.
After our prayer, my friend commented, “Isn’t it cool that you believe in the ‘resurrection of the body?’”
“Huh?”
“You know,” she said, “like the Apostle’s Creed says, ‘I believe in the resurrection of the body and the life of the world to come.’”
“Huh?” I hadn’t reckoned trusting Jesus meant that I could have eternal life in a healthy body on a beautiful, restored Earth. However, that promise is part of the Christian package. It’s a great deal!
Now that I’ve told how I moved beyond atheism into faith, I want to tell how I moved from believing in the Big Bang Theory and evolution science to a stand on creation science.
First, I learned that the Scriptures written through centuries and the three Christian Creeds (The Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the Anathasian Creed) based on them are the source of what we believe about God. The method of translation I used for interpretation was the “historical grammatical method,” which asks, “What did the author of this text intend to say?” For instance, if the Old Testament book Jonah’s author presented being swallowed by a giant fish as history, not fiction or a myth, I as a reader can assume that the story is presented as “true.” Likewise, in the New Testament, the miracles are presented by the authors as history. I could doubt the history; I could wonder if they were all fools or ignorant, superstitious people, but I had to assume that the authors proclaimed the “stories” as true.
Plus, there wasn’t just one crazy story in the Scriptures describing miracles or God. There were many, many accounts written by prophets and historians and eyewitnesses. Yet, as a practical person who accepted modern science as truth, what was I going to do with the book of Genesis? The author recounts the creation of the universe by the word of God as happening in a mere six days, with a seventh day to rest. Did that author intend the description of creation as myth? I tried to assume it was myth and that a day “represents” millions of years so that I could balance my belief in creation with the belief in the big bang and evolution.
Unfortunately, while researching that balance and trying to mix creationism and the Big Bang Theory, I ran into the scientific method of content analysis. I learned that the Hebrew word for “day” never means “millions of years,” despite the metaphor in the New Testament that “A day with the Lord is like a thousand years, and a thousand years as a day.” The Hebrew word means, simply, a regular twenty-four-hour day, a statement of science.
My masters’ degree in communication theory and research taught me the principles of content analysis. The more I learned, the more I saw that the creation account in Genesis, like the resurrection of Jesus and the Exodus history are written with words meant to be taken literally. Therefore, I was faced with a hard choice. I could trust the scientific method of content analysis of the creation in Genesis and call a “day” a day, or I trust the idea that God evolved the universe in billions of years.
Where did that idea of billions of years come from? Evolution maintains that if there is enough time, the miniscule probabilities that life could develop and evolve into complex forms could account for all life on the earth. However, my masters’ studies taught me that 51 percent is the minimum probability that a scientific experiment might test “true.” Even with deistic evolution, can plants and animals and humans come to be? The probability of complex life forming by chance is nil. Surely God “helped” evolution along? No, not if the scientific method is valid.
In high school, as an atheist, I had asked the question: “If the DNA molecule could be any shape at all, why would it take on the double helix shape?” The science project won an award at the state level in Alabama, and forced me to ask the question: “Could human, animal, and plant DNA come about and sustain life by sheer chance?” The answer was a resounding, “No!” The DNA double helix, a combination of four amino acids structured in a long, long “strip,” is joined by only one electron at each juncture! That delicate structure cannot accidentally lead to protean life, no matter how many amino acids may be found in a puddle!
Scientific content analysis and experimental probabilities brought me to the conclusion that God created the universe just as Moses wrote: in six days. Now, I realized that I might be labelled as a “fundamentalist” or a fool. Should I renege on science to pretend to be smart?
Using science to analyze the prevailing theories of the Big Bang Theory and Evolution, I learned that God is not constrained by people’s views of creation. If science does not validate the huge time “needed” to justify evolution, then I must stand on the six-day creation account by Moses in Genesis.
So what do I want you, the listener or writer, to do? Imagine that you are a wholesome being of whatever template of creation, doing your sustainable thing in the place where you are, Earth, Lanthra, or wherever. Then, by all means ask your questions, hypothesize, test, come to conclusions. Explore Earth and space, create amazing tools—and include God in your plans. God will guide you, move you toward the good side of the abyss. By including God in your mind and work, you are creating a healthy oasis in a world full of problems.
(Rosemary Althoff is the author of the sci-fi Soul’s Warfare series. Her books are sold on Amazon.com or wherever books may be ordered.)
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