Dear Self,
Looking back on my life, science was what defined me.
It was at the very core of what I did, how I thought, how I viewed the world and what I believed.
I was raised in a religious household.
Both my parents ministered in the church and most weekly evenings found us gathered at a friend’s home, praising and worshipping. I had a very strict religious upbringing but by the time I reached University, I was an atheist, believing in nothing and no one.
I saw the universe without God; God was not needed in my understanding. I didn’t want to be held accountable to some God, thousands of miles away, perched on a gold throne, judging my every move.
Science fascinated me, not God.
God was not on my radar. My worldview was based on the notion that seeing was believing- I only believed what I could see with my own eyes.
Not the supernatural. Not fantasy and most definitely not God.
But as I started diving deeper into the machinations of the universe, as I started to really see its beauty and understand the invisibility of majority of the universe because of what we call ‘dark matter’ … invisible things.
There’s a lot in the universe that science says is there but cannot really explain what exactly that is.
Seeing is believing was a big principle in my life and now all of a sudden, I was learning that 95% of the universe is invisible to me. But just because it’s invisible to me doesn’t mean that it is not there. Dark matter doesn’t become a myth simply because I cannot see it. And that was my crisis moment.
My journey towards god started with one simple question;
How did this perfectly beautiful universe come to be?
How did this amazing mostly invisible universe come to be?
Science gave me an answer- the big bang theory and it wasn’t a wrong answer- it was an intellectual answer but what existed outside science?
The next few years of my life saw me do a deep dive research into the different religions of the world.
I started exploring other world-views.
Islam. Hinduism. Judaism. Confucianism.
And then one day, as I opened the door to my small apartment, I had a scrapping sound. There was a small white envelope on the floor with my name on it.It was a Valentine’s Day card, signed by someone called Laura. There was a contact at the bottom and I pulled out my phone and dialed the number.
Laura and I turned out to have a lot in common.
I told her about my spiritual quest for answers and she asked me if I had ever read the bible.
My answer was no.
“How do you study the religions of the world and skip the bible?”
It was already very familiar to me because I had been bought up in Sunday school.
Why do a deep dive into what I already knew?
“I don’t feel like it has anything to teach me,” I answered.
She didn’t judge me. She said,
“I haven’t read the bible either. If you read it, I’ll read it with you.”
It took us almost two years to read through the entire book. But by the end of it, I chose to become a Christian. And it wasn’t a road to Damascus for me; I was a bigheaded, stubborn, intellectual who questioned everything.
It took me many many years to finally fully surrender my life.
But that encounter with the bible was my first encounter with the bible as a thinking adult; a scientist, a skeptic, a cynic and it turned my life around.
The bible teaches who created the world and why.
Science tells me all the amazing details about the world that God created.
Because of the bible, I have a deep understanding of the Creator.
Because of science, I have a deep understanding of the Creation.
Both are a blessing.
You don’t have to discard one for the other.
Talk soon,
Francis.
