How I Became a Creationist

Somebody started a thread to find out who had known about creationism when so I'll chime in.

I never had a clue about creationism until a couple years after I'd become a Christian in my forties. I was thoroughly indoctrinated in evolution. Of course I knew about the Scopes trial, but I don't think I knew anything about what creationists actually believed and taught. Some idea that they didn't like being descended from apes and that was about it.

I went to church as a child and it was a fairly liberal Presbyterian church though as far as I recall I never heard a word about the age of the earth or how life began or evolved. I did hear the Adam and Eve story but my Sunday School teacher was very open to the question who their children could marry since you aren't supposed to marry a sibling, which already put some doubts about the story in my mind.

I went to live with relatives when I was fifteen and that meant going to a big city school for the first time and there I met people who scorned religion, including a math teacher who spent most of every class performing some kind of antics at the expense of religion. He was considered a great intellect and comedian. My best friend and I worshipped him. Those were the Sputnik years and America was feverishly engaged in promoting science in high schools so we could catch up with Russia. All other areas of study were treated as not worth a bright teenager's time. I wasn't geared to science so I accepted my inferiority, while my best friend went on to get post-graduate degrees in biological science. I did, however, give up whatever I'd acquired of religion to that point, and I first became aware of the theory of evolution in those years, and of course accepted it completely.

Years later I subscribed to Skeptical Inquirer magazine, hoping to find ammunition for my anti-religious and evolutionist beliefs but instead I found that although they covered all the right subjects I couldn't get a grasp of the lines of evidence from what they presented. It left me intellectually suspended. All I could do was take it on faith. Not that I put it in those terms. But the point was that I wanted to be able to muster the evidence for what I believed and it always eluded me.

In my forties I read my way to Christ. I was surrounded by believers in a lot of weird stuff, so it seemed to me, eastern religions, astrology, bizarre cults like Urantia, even pyramid power. I still considered myself to be a rational atheist and it seemed to me the world was coming apart. I thought Western Civilization was the height of human achievement and the political movements that attacked it through the sixties, and the eastern religions and other irrationalisms that rushed in to fill the void, were deeply depressing to me.

A series of events got me looking up something in the New Age bookstore, and some statements by a couple of Hindu gurus I found there got me suddenly believing in God, the God of my childhood though (what little I could remember about all that), not their God. I figured it was all the same. I had no idea who Jesus Christ was or what He had done until much later -- somehow the gospel hadn't really penetrated my head during those years in church. But from then on I read voraciously about religion. I no longer thought all the weird stuff was weird, anything could be true it seemed to me at that point -- and by then I'd had some "supernatural" experiences to help make the case. Occultic or demonic experiences really, through eastern oracles for instance.

It took at least a year to get through the eastern religions to Catholicism, and I thought that's where I was going to stay, but I kept reading and ended up, yes, a Bible-believing Christian. A --*gasp*-- fundamentalist. It wasn't easy with my history to come to that conclusion, not only because of my own ingrained prejudices but those of my acquaintances who were horrified as my reading seemed to be veering in that direction. I was given some books to head me back toward sanity as they saw it, but eventually I overcame all the objections and went thoroughly joyfully "insane." So I lost friends. Well, that's what Jesus said happens when you take up with Him.

And a couple years after that I found some books on creationism, probably in the Christian book store, and began reading in that area. Morris and Whitcomb's Genesis Flood was an eye-opener for me. I laughed when it hit me that the earth really IS only 6000 years old. What an amazing discovery after a lifetime of thinking in terms of billions of years.