Choosing Science & God: A Testimony

I entered UC San Diego as a freshman, and they selected my first quarter courses and they put me in a general education biology course. It was fantastic. It was exciting and interesting and intricate. I chose my second quarter at UCSD to sign up for another biology course. And about in the middle of that course is when I just said, “this is it. I’ve got to study this field.” When I was in that second course, the professor had said, “you have to choose between evolution or religion.” I remember talking to the pastor of the church I went to at the time, and he said exactly the same thing, “you can’t accept evolution and be a person of faith.” And if everyone’s telling me I have to choose, then I’m going to choose science. I became an atheist. There is no God. There is no higher power. All there is is the science. So I graduated with my degree in biology. I’d seen an ad that said, “Do you need a life adventure? Come teach English in Japan.” After some training in Tokyo, they sent me to Niigata, which is far north. There were no books written in English in the library so I mailed myself two large boxes of books. There was a Bible at the bottom of that second box. I don’t know how the Bible got in there, because I did not own a Bible at the time. So I started reading the Bible. And I found the old testament to be quite difficult to read and very confusing. So I started writing letters to my sister asking her about this God that seemed to be killing people or putting people inside of a fish. And then at some point, I had a handful of letters from my sister, and I just realized or felt it had nothing to do with a resolution to my issue of choosing between evolution or faith. It was more this intense feeling that there is a God. It’s not just an intellectual decision. So late 90s and early 2000s, there started to be some books that I bought that talked about reconciling science with faith. And it was reading those that gave me a sense of confidence, that I could be a God loving Christ following believer and fully accept all that science has to offer.