The Case for a Creator - Lee Strobel [149]
Years later, I would understand exactly how the prosecutor felt that day. I was once full of confidence that Darwinism justified my atheism. I felt I had investigated the issue sufficiently, having studied biology, chemistry, geology, anthropology, and other sciences in school and having read books that reenforced my beliefs. No doubt about it—natural selection acting on random variation had put God out of a job.
When Christians approached me about the evidence for their faith, I was as defiant as the combative prosecutor on the courthouse steps. The Origin of Species trumped the Bible. The critical thinking of scientists overpowered the wishful thinking of theists. To me, the case was closed.
But then, prompted by the positive changes in my wife after she became a follower of Jesus, I began to go beyond the obvious, to set aside my prejudices, to ask questions I had never posed before, and to pursue the clues of science and history wherever they led. Instead of letting naturalism limit my search, I opened myself to the full range of possibilities. And, frankly, I wasn’t prepared for what would happen.
Like the negative evidence that undermined the van’s driver in the Pinto case, the facts of science systematically eroded the foundation of Darwinism until it could no longer support the weight of my atheistic conclusions. Suddenly, the intellectual basis for my skepticism was collapsing.
That was disconcerting enough. But then—like the surprise witnesses who suddenly shifted the momentum at the Indiana trial—my wide-ranging research was building an unexpected affirmative case for the existence of a Creator.
Yes, I was stunned; yes, I felt like the wind was being knocked out of me; yes, it was unnerving to wrestle with the implications. But I had vowed to follow the facts regardless of the cost—even at the cost of my own smug self-sufficiency.
A FRESH EXAMINATION OF THE EVIDENCE
I was reminded of the Pinto trial as I sat in my home office and glanced over at a shelf where my eye caught the book I had written on the case. As I started reminiscing about the unanticipated turnaround in that courtroom drama, my thoughts drifted to the emotions I felt on November 8, 1981.
It was on that day, after nearly two years of intensive research, that I sat alone in my room and wrote down the key evidence I had discovered during my original investigation into the credibility of Christianity. Much of it concerned the facts regarding the life, teachings, miracles, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, as I described in my book The Case for Christ, and the answers to the “Big Eight” objections to Christianity, as I recounted in The Case for Faith.
But also very important at the time were the corroborating scientific facts. Even though there was less evidence than is readily available today, there was still plenty upon which to reach a verdict. I can remember analyzing the scientific research and coming to the startling conclusion that the data of the physical world point powerfully toward the existence of a Creator.
What seemed impossible two years earlier now seemed not just possible, not just likely—but obvious. Like the Pinto prosecutor, I was dismayed and disoriented—and yet at the same time I felt confident and even strangely comforted by the conclusion.
Now, more than two decades later, having spent over a year reevaluating and updating the case for a Creator by interviewing experts on the latest scientific discoveries, I sat at my desk once more and mentally reviewed the most current evidence I had encountered.
I was amazed at how new findings in physics, astronomy, biochemistry, and other disciplines have added so much to the pool of scientific knowledge. As I considered