A Personal Account

I can't remember a time when I didn't believe in God's existence. And I never doubted that somehow Jesus and the Bible were at the centre of the mystery. But it was all still a puzzle to me, because I certainly had no assurance that I was in right relationship with this God I believed existed. I knew something was definitely askew and I can remember going on a search that began in earnest at the age of 12, when three events coincided - first, my father's death from a stroke at the age of 59, then the arrival at my front door two months later of two Baptist young people on a Summer Missionary trip from the U.S. They chatted with me on my doorstep for about 90 minutes, with them standing under an umbrella in the Irish summer rain - and left a lasting impression. I was raised a Catholic and felt I couldn't ask them in, partly because of that and also I guessed because my mum might not have appreciated it! Finally, a couple of months after that, my sister brought home a comic book gospel tract called "This Was Your Life" by Chick Publications that somebody had handed her which blew me away. I kept it for a long time, puzzling over what I needed to do about it.

Five years later, at the age of 17, having finished secondary school, I came across my next Christian, at work, and after a number of weeks chatting at lunch breaks, they invited me to a large Catholic Charismatic meeting held at the time in Dublin city centre, that took place each Friday night. There were about 500 people there and a couple of things immediately impressed me : firstly, that these people were at church, voluntarily, on a Friday evening and seemed to be enjoying it - and secondly, that there was a sense of the presence of God in the meeting when they sang and worshipped. It was the first time in my life that I'd felt God's presence in a church service. To cut a long story short, soon after that someone explained the gospel to me and how I could invite Christ into my life. I did exactly that and so began my Christian journey. I had ups and downs, but one thing I always had from that point on was that I knew, that I knew, that I knew that I belonged to God, that "the mystery" search was over. As you can imagine, this was a great relief.

About eight years afterwards in the mid-1980s, I began to realize that there was a debate "out there" between evolutionists and creationists. So, I started reading up on the arguments. I was not from a scientific background and I had never attended university at that point. On one hand, I kind of wish I had done, but I guess that having a degree in Economics or Psychology would not particularly have benefited me in grasping arguments concerning Biology or Geology in any event.

In the spring of 1988, I was taking a night course in Trinity College Dublin. Trinity is one of the oldest of the Irish Universities. Two of the big Student Societies in Trinity are the Hist and the Phil. Both ran a monthly Debate among the Students, chaired by one of the Lecturers. I saw a poster one evening in the college advertising that months debate, "That Science has killed God". There was a sign up section for anyone who wanted to take part as a debater. I signed up against the motion and had a week or so to get my thoughts together. When the night came, there were three speakers for the motion and two against. The chairman of the debate turned out to be Professor Ernest Walton, who as well as being a College Lecturer had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1951 for his work on what later became known as "splitting the atom". There were around 120 students present.

I was second last to speak and it turned out the other person speaking "against" only did it as a dare and in fact spoke for the motion as well. What was readily apparent was that none of the other speakers expected that anyone might make a serious attempt to speak against the motion from a scientific point of view. That is what I did. After the five of us spoke, there was a question time from the floor, where points could be put to any of the debaters. Those speaking "for" were quite unprepared for either creationist arguments or even for seriously trying to field questions from those listening to the debate.

At the end of the closing statements, Professor Walton asked for a vote on the debate as they had heard it from those attending. The result was that the students voted 110-10 against the motion and, if I'm not mistaken, Professor Walton seemed to me to smile with a degree of satisfaction when the count was announced. All this to say that the scientific argument for creationism, whilst not having all the answers, has a lot more to offer than evolutionists care to admit. It concerns me that there is a lack of debate twenty five years on and that the pro-evolutionary lobbies among the scientific community are so deeply invested in backing up one side of the argument that there to this day remains a virtual monopoly on what public schools teach today on Origins. This is particularly true in Europe where there are few, if any, Christian Third Level colleges apart from actual Bible colleges and generation after generation of science students hear only a one-sided view on the subject, perpetuating the imbalance.

Entrance to TCD, Dublin