Voices of Science

Well that was also very interesting and was actually a very formative phase in my life because I came to university, and I was already started to think that creationism was probably wrong, but you know, my first term there I did quite a lot of reading. Well one thing which was just absolutely clear to me was that – I mean my father was a young earth creationist, which these people believe that the earth was created in 4000BC and that’s because if you go back in the genealogy in the Bible then you get back to about 4000BC. And so it was clear to me as a physicist, you know, with carbon dating, that carbon dating can’t be that wrong basically [laughs] and so the earth really is very old. And so this young earth creationism just could not be right. And so I then sort of lost my Christian faith because of this, but it so happened that both these other people went to church and were Christians. And so I went along with them and just because it’s, you know, what we done on a Sunday evening and also the girls were quite attractive, I think that was the main attraction right. So there was attractive girls at church and we went along, I started, you know, at church. The minister at the church was a good guy and he had a group of students back to his house after the Sunday evening service and we had discussions there. I gradually started rethinking my Christian faith, you know, with evolution replacing creationism [laughs]. And there was this event which still is in my mind very strongly, so I was walking with others in a group away from his house, you know, on Sunday evening probably about ten o’clock at night and a person not at university, an accountant in the group and we just for some reason sort of got separated a bit and we’re talking together and he said to me, ‘You’re obviously a Christian, I want to become a Christian, can you tell me how I do this?’ and I thought, what am I going to say? I thought, because if I say to him, ‘Well actually I’m not sure about Christianity anymore,’ [laughs] then you know, I shouldn’t really destroy his sort of potential faith, on the other hand I could tell him how to become a Christian because I knew but it wouldn’t have much conviction. So I sort of chickened out in a way and I said, ‘Oh you should go and see the minister about this,’ which he did so that was a good answer in a sense. But I then thought I couldn’t sit on the fence anymore and so I decided then I, you know, I would actually become a Christian again as it were, because I believed it to be true. And before I’d been saying I sort of believe it’s true but I want to have a good time, you know, and [laughs] so I sort of became a Christian again towards the end of my first year in university when this happened, but firmly believing in evolution then but that was – yeah, that’s a big step in my life in a sense.