Transformed

by the Evidence

Compilation Editors
Doug Sharp
Dr. Jerry Bergman

Table of Contents
Abstracts of Chapters

Introduction: Douglas B. Sharp

One of the reasons why there is an increase in skepticism about the Bible is the fact that the world seldom observes any difference between those who attend church and those who do not believe. But the apostle Paul challenges us in Romans 12:1-2:

¹I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service. ²And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect will of God.

Consider what the unbelieving world sees: a church whose leadership and members are just as skeptical of the straightforward reading of Genesis as any atheist. There is much at stake. Unfortunately, many of those who seek the living God do not find Him. The foundational teachings of Genesis are too often dismissed in our churches or presented as myth. And without this foundation, His good, acceptable, and perfect will remains a mystery to far too many seekers.

In this volume, Dr. Jerry Bergman and I are pleased to present the testimonies of those who encountered the tough questions concerning science and the Bible head-on, conducting investigations to see if the scientific evidence really leads away from a straightforward reading of the Bible. As a result, God transformed their lives. Thanks to their interest in science and the clear evidence that the Creator has left for us, they are indeed new creatures in Christ.

Some of these testimonies involve events that caused intensive personal sacrifice, pain, and despair. But not one of these authors would return to a life of unbelief, doubt and fear. In tough times the knowledge of scientific evidence for a Creator who loves us keeps us vitalized and encouraged.

There are many people who are strong believers in Jesus Christ and the Bible, but because they do not have any interest in science, they base their faith in Christ upon other facets of His word and their personal experiences. They may never have encountered situations where they were tested in this area, and God bless them. But for those who recount their story in this book, challenges presented by the theory of evolution and the notion that the earth is millions of years old became a stumbling block that was difficult to overcome At the very least, this created a major test of their faith; and in some cases, it was a stumbling block that actually prevented them from believing at all.

Transformation is not Without a Test

As you read about their struggles with this issue and how those struggles were resolved, I invite you to examine your own beliefs concerning the Bible and test them for yourself. Has your life been transformed by the renewing of your mind to the point where the good, acceptable and perfect will of God in your life is evident to those around you?

In our contribution to this book, Rich Geer and I talk about the tragic event that struck at the very heart of our beliefs and challenged the faith of our family, our group of friends and many churches that were involved. Not only we were faced with choices that were severe and difficult to make, but also these challenges continue to raise questions that we can’t answer. The comfort we have is that we know enough of the tough questions were answered for us long before, and though we do not like going through this difficult time, we can praise God for many things. We cannot have a testimony without a test.

We have found that God, who prepared our hearts over the years by giving us a factually based foundation both in the Bible and scientific evidence, provides a deep, overflowing well from which we draw crystal pure living water that refreshes us when we traverse the barren deserts in our life. The experiences He has brought us through may be subjective and meaningful only to us, but when they are coupled with the rock-solid scientific evidence that is testable, repeatable and observable; they intertwine to create a dynamic cord that cannot be broken even with the most difficult test of our faith.

This is the difference I believe the world is thirsting for, but because some churches offer little more than dust or mud, the thirsty are turned away. We are supposed to offer answers to the tough questions, believing in a God who works miracles and offers both abundant life here on earth and everlasting life.

Our main objective in this book is for each of the contributors to reveal the scientific evidence that transformed their perspective concerning science to have it become bound with faith in God. We believe that God has revealed himself and His nature through His creation. But the skeptics have a dilemma. In order for a person to be skeptical of God being creator, he must become a true believer in something else, and that is why evolution for them is a virtual religious faith.

There is a vacuous argument that claims that belief in creation is not scientific, and that argument is made by definition, not by examination of scientific facts. But the stories in this book show that if one allows for the possibility of a creator God and his word the Bible being true, that not only can answers be found for the tough questions, but also a fully transformed life.

Why do we Resist Transformation?

Even if you’re already a solid believer in Jesus Christ, you are likely to find this book personally transformational. We all live in a hostile, dangerous world full of traps, many of which seem quite innocent on the surface, but underneath lie trouble. As I edited the testimonies, the Lord has been severe with me, opening my eyes to all the areas of my life where I have stubbornly resisted His transforming power.

What the Lord is dealing with me now are the long-term habits that on the surface may seem to be acceptable, moral, or even virtuous to others, yet are not the best for me, especially time-wasters or distractions from his perfect will. It is these ingrained habits and gray areas that are the most difficult to deal with and extract from our lives. They are like neutral mutations that accumulate and take up space, worn-out toys, trash, garbage, dust, and broken dishes. I have been blind to many of these for years. The Lord pointed out to me once: “When I use your wife as a mouthpiece, why do you get annoyed?”

One of the reasons evolution is appealing is that it does not make any such demands. Evolutionary change is random, and unspecific. But since God created us for His purpose, He wants the best for us, and that normally means we must be willing to release the things that do not meet His ideal. If we spend a lot of time, study, and money in that area, that is hard to do. If a person writes an opinion or publishes a book based upon an incorrect premise, it leads to repentance resistance, a condition that is difficult to eradicate. The accounts in this book are about those who have counted all of their evolutionary scientific training as loss in favor of receiving the transforming power of Jesus Christ.

How about you? Perhaps there are just one or two nagging questions you haven’t been able to answer that cause you to stumble in your faith. Perhaps you are not ready to receive all that God has available for you because you cannot get past these questions. Our hope is that our experiences in seeking the answers for ourselves will not only encourage you in your faith, but will also transform your life.

Chapter 1: Dr. Jerry Bergman

Dr. Jerry Bergman gives an overview of the testimonies in this book and examines the reasons why intelligent people reject the Darwinian worldview.

Chapter 2: Dr. Richard Lumsden

Biography by Tom DeRosa


	Chapter 3: Dr. D. Russell Humphreys The physical science part of evolutionism has been dominated by the Big Bang theory. Dr. Humphreys examined the evidence and compiled a long list of processes that favor an age for the earth much less than billions of years. Though he did not grow up in a Christian home and was taught evolution as fact, Dr. Humphreys changed his mind when he uncovered this evidence.
	Chapter 4: Dr. Royal Truman “I want to know what is true, about God, the Bible and evolution, even if it means all I have learned and cherish turns out to be wrong”. When Royal made this scary decision at the age of thirteen, his parents feared he might bitterly regret it later. Living in several countries exposed him to many plausible sounding viewpoints in many areas, which were nevertheless contradictory. So he learned that a worldview must be more than just plausible and should be analyzed in depth. He spent many years examining the naturalist claims, for the origin of life, of complex biological novelty, the workings of the mind and belief in God. He ended up soundly rejecting these naturalist claims. The reasons were primarily scientific, and secondarily theological. Admittedly, this is not how most mature Christians think such decisions should be made.
(James Wight is a pen name)	Chapter 5: James Wight In youth, James Wight inhaled the world like a suffocating man, one hurried draft after another. James questioned nothing, just took it all in, as much as he could get. He even accepted his biology teacher’s glib explanation of human origins without question. When James researched it himself, however, his mind and life was changed forever.
	Chapter 6: Steve Miller Steve Miller’s fascination for astronomy led him to investigate the claims of the Big Bang theory and stellar evolution, but he had always had nagging doubts about their explaining power.
	Chapter 7: Dr. Robert A. Herrmann At the age of forty-two, Dr. Herrmann was a transformed “fire-breathing” atheist who accepted Jesus Christ as his Lord and Saviour as well as theistic evolution. Two years later, the science of mathematical modeling transformed him into a creationist who accepted a literally interpreted Genesis account as historical fact.
	Chapter 8: Tom Hennigan Growing up in the public school system, Tom was inundated with the evolutionary belief that we could explain all life without God. He despised religion and the hypocrisy in his religious and dysfunctional family was palpable. Through high school and into his early years of college he was satisfied, at least on the outside, that no Creator was needed to explain life. However, through a series of amazing circumstances that included sleepless nights, answered prayer, miraculous intervention, and deep soul searching he gave his life to Jesus Christ. The transformation brought peace of mind and purpose to a lost soul.Tom is now an associate professor of organism biology at Truett-McConnell College.
	Chapter 9: Kitty Foth-Regner Kitty was a 47-year-old feminist atheist when her beloved Christian mother died. Shattered by her loss, she responded with an intensive, 15-month search for the truth about eternity — and emerged a radically different person, with radically different priorities, lifestyle, and views of life and death. Chapter 10: Dr. Wayne Frair Many arguments trumpeted during the latter 19^th and early 20^th Century and used to support large scale evolution (macroevolution) have been refuted. These include embryological recapitulation, similarity of blood and sea water, structure and function of vertebrate hearts, and homology. Small modifications (microevolution) can be caused by environmental conditions, but these adaptions do not lead to macroevolution. When Wayne realized this, his thinking was transformed.
	Chapter 11: Doug Sharp Doug Sharp and Rich Geer are brothers-in-law and convinced creationists, but their faith was severely challenged when Doug’s sister, Rich’s wife was afflicted with brain damage in a hospital accident. The answers they received while investigating God’s creation prepared them with answers that dealt with this challenging situation.
	Chapter 12: Joshua Gilbert Joshua is the founder of the Creation Science Information Service in South Africa, supplying creation programs on the radio.
	Chapter 13: Guy Forsythe Guy was raised by a pantheist mother. His father was a Christian but never spoke to Guy about Christ before he died when Guy was ten. Though he never heard either parent speak directly about religion, by the time Guy was in college, he was a committed new age pantheist. After he married a Christian woman, Guy was convicted of his need for Christ while studying the book of Romans in the Bible. Challenged by a church deacon to investigate the first chapter of Genesis, Guy quickly realized that scientific data actually points away from naturalistic causes and toward creation. 30 years of creation science study later, Guy has a creation science ministry and is on offense in proclaiming the creative power of God, who, in the person of Christ Jesus, is the creator of the universe and all that is in it. His web site is http://www.cryingrocks.org.
	Chapter 14: Michael Bailey Michael Bailey is an inmate in a correctional facility in Ohio, and recounts his journey from being a murderer to a convinced creationist.
	Chapter 15: Jean Lightner, DVM Jean was astounded when her evolutionist professor told her that the fossil record didn’t really support the concept of gradual evolution of life. It was at this point that she realized that belief in evolution had nothing to do with the evidence. Jean has contributed much to the understanding of the differences in chromosomes between created kinds.
	Chapter 16: Jaap Kies Coming from a Christian home where the Bible was taught as truth, Jaap tried to reconcile scientific statements with the Genesis record. At the University of Stellenbosch he majored in geology, mathematics and physics, and was taught to believe that the earth was at least 2 billion years old. After settling on the gap theory compromise as taught by Harry Rimmer, a series of meetings on the campus of the University of the Western Cape brought end to his frustration when they talked about flood geology.
	Chapter 17: Rudolf Steinberg Rudolf was an engineering officer in the German navy during World War II. The Nazi ideology was based upon Darwinism, and he was fully aware of the contradictions between what he knew about what the Bible said about the origin of the world and what he learned in school about the evolution of man, culture and the universe. But the writings of professors A. E. Wilder-Smith and Werner Gitt caused him to abandon theistic evolution.
	Chapter 18: Mark Stewart Mark Stewart’s older brothers who believed in evolution instilled in him the desire to pursue science and truth, but these truths led him to believe in a recent creation. Though Mark quit attending church, he never doubted the Lord’s existence, and felt sure the Bible meant what it said when taken in its proper context and in its entirety. Although he didn’t always have the answers to the questions he was challenged with by his older brothers, his faith remained intact. As Mark grew older he was influenced by some Biblical radio programs and witnesses that visited him from time to time. It was a small pamphlet titled ‘Have You Been Brainwashed?’ by Dr. Duane Gish that led him to Dr. Henry Morris and Dr. John Whitcomb’s ‘The Genesis Flood’ which solidified and answered many of the questions he grew up with. That book was foundational to his worldview and transformed his life. He discusses briefly what some of the evidences are that helped to transform his life. From that point onward and to this day, Mark reads, writes, and continues to do background research for creation science. He maintains a data base of Darwin Doubters along with their educational background, their academic experience, honors and awards they have achieved, the professional organizations they are members to, a listing of their publications, contact information, and a data base of evolution/creation subject matter and the periodicals they appear in.
	Chapter 19: Larry Kisner Larry’s biology teacher told him that he did not need to believe in God because we evolved, were only animals related to monkeys, and were not created. The next year in his chemistry class, the teacher taught him that life had been created in the laboratory. A classmate of his even won a National Merit scholarship for duplicating part of the Miller-Urey experiment. This continued into college, planting seeds of doubt in Larry’s mind. But meeting Dr. Wehrner Von Braun, whose testimony of Christ caused Larry to begin a search for truth.
	Chapter 20: Lee McCracken At one time, Lee was faced with a very tough decision. Does he trust the preacher who seems to have no evidence? Or, will he trust scientists who have lots of evidence? He made the obvious choice: he trusted what he thought was fact over faith. He removed God from his life and embraced the godless theory of evolution. This appealed to him as a prideful and independent teenager. But it was the laws of physics, in particular thermodynamics, that convinced him that evolution could not be true.
	Chapter 21: Karl Priest Karl’s life as a new Christian had very little power until he began reading literature produced by the Institute for Creation Research. As a junior high school math teacher, he recounts how he confronted the evolutionary science curriculum that was being adopted.
	Chapter 22: Tom Vail In 1980, Tom was managing the corporate computer center for a Fortune 500 company when he took a vacation that would transform his life. His rafting trip through the Grand Canyon changed his life, but in two phases, first to take him out of the corporate world, and then 15 years later, to bring him to the Lord. He now runs Canyon Ministries (www.CanyonMinistries.com), leading Christ-centered rafting trips through the Grand Canyon, and is also a contributing author to the True North Series of guidebooks, which provide a biblical understanding to our National Parks.
	Chapter 23: Kerby Rials Kerby found church boring, and wasn’t interested. He was amazed when a Sunday school teacher told him that the theory of evolution was wrong. But a part-time pastor and professor at the university challenged him to read several classic Christian books, and he could not get around their implications for his life. He came to realize the great Achilles heel of evolutionary theory — its need for millions of positive mutations in sequential order, all of which had to happen just by lucky chance. And yet no one has ever been able to make even one positive mutation in the laboratory. This proved to him that atheistic evolution was not just unlikely, but was impossible. Kerby is now a missionary to Belgium and has also served in Russia.
	Chapter 24: Paul Humber Paul G. Humber taught mathematics for over 30 years—most of them being with the college preparatory Haverford School — just outside of Philadelphia. In this chapter, he points to the simple, mathematical concept known as “The Number Line.” It is more profound than many realize. He also touches on such topics as the Swanscombe Skull, the Chapelle aux Saints Skull, Jehovah Jesus, Reasons to Affirm a Young Earth, and “The LORD Our Righteousness” (Jeremiah 23:6). See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FRT660MRSk .
	Chapter 25: Jonathan Bartlett Though he gave his life to Christ in seventh grade, Jonathan didn’t pay a lot of attention to the first few chapters of Genesis, and evolution was simply not an issue for him. He came from a family of engineers, and the idea of life arising by chance seemed absurd. But he never questioned the evolutionary time scale until evidence from the geology of the Grand Canyon caused him to consider flood geology. His view of earth history based upon creation and the flood of Noah had a transforming effect upon his faith.
	Chapter 26: Dr. Richard Bliss This interview took place in September 1994 with the Revolution Against Evolution TV show, just two months before Dr. Bliss went to heaven. Dr. Bliss was the founder of the Good Science program at the Institute for Creation Research, and during this interview, he recounts the steps he took from being an agnostic evolutionist to become a Bible believing creationist.
	Chapter 27: Jonathan Henry As a child Jonathan loved science, and made up his mind to read a science book every day. His childhood interest in science conflicted with his Christian upbringing, but without clear answers from either side, he began to accept evolutionary concepts and concluded that the Bible and evolution must both be true. Finally his father challenged him to consider that the Flood formed most of the fossils. This idea transformed his thinking, and the science he learned throughout his education is now being used as a tool to present the gospel.
	Chapter 28: Russ Miller After Russ saw that real science doesn’t support Darwinism or old-earth beliefs, he realized that these false teachings are undermining the world’s faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. Armed with the knowledge that kinds will only being forth after their own kind, and that a global flood destroyed the old-earth belief, he knew that something needed to change in his life.