In this series, U.S. Navy Commander Mike Beidler shares his own personal journey from accepting young-earth creationism to embracing evolutionary creationism.

I’ve loved science for as long as I can remember, and from an early age I imagined my future career as a scientist. I also grew up immersed within Christian Fundamenatalism.

In this series, Dennis Venema describes his personal journey that took him away from the Intelligent Design arguments toward the evolutionary creation worldview. Through careful and honest research, he discovered ID scientific reasoning to be analogy-based, in sharp contrast to evolutionary science, which was supported by concrete data. After accepting this view, God’s presence ever strengthened him as he explored the compatibility between the Bible and God’s creative mechanism.

By all accounts, my faith should have perished the moment I started asking questions about faith and science. All my life I’d been taught that I had to choose—between believing the Bible and believing my science book, between honoring God and embracing evolution.

In the 1980s, I picked up the book The Genesis Flood by Whitcomb and Morris. It was the first book I was aware of that seemed to maintain respect for the Bible as God’s Word yet also produced legitimate scientific arguments for its viewpoint. I was hooked.

I’m a conservative evangelical. When I became a Christian fourteen years ago, I not only embraced profound new spiritual perspectives, but inherited a host of new scientific views: the earth was young, macro-evolution was false, and to affirm the contrary was to discredit the Bible and even the Gospel.

Ten years ago I knelt at the side of my bed and prayed, “Dear Jesus, please help Nana not to believe in evolution anymore.”

As he endeavored to learn more, David was intrigued by Francis Collins book The Language of God because Francis did not present evolution as a rival theory to Christian faith, but as something that described God's method of creation.