This momentous event took place 14 years
later, in a delivery room on the maternity floor of Yale-New Haven Hospital.
Our first daughter had been born about an hour earlier. Everything went according
to plan, and the doctor and nurses had just finished their post-delivery
duties. My wife and I made a couple of phone calls to let family members know
the good news, and then finally it was time to sit back and relax after a very
stressful previous 10 hours. (OK, I admit: one of us did a whole lot more work
during that time than the other, and it wasn’t me!)
I sat in a chair next to the bed, while
my wife held the baby in her arms. I took a deep breath and basked in the
euphoria of that moment. Suddenly, my sense of elation disappeared. It occurred
to me that what I had just witnessed could not possibly be the result of an
unplanned, purposeless, random swirl of molecules.
It was as if I had been whacked in the
head with a two-by-four. I suddenly realized the lessons I had learned in
biology class many years earlier—that life on earth was nothing more than the
unplanned result of matter plus energy, shaped by blind, random chance—could
not possibly be true.
What I had just witnessed, the birth of
a healthy new baby, was biologically so intricate and so complex, it could not
have happened “by accident.” For a baby to be conceived and develop in the
womb, and then for the birth process to occur, requires hundreds of complicated
systems to work in precise unison. It is incredibly complex.
At that moment, I knew the story I was
told in biology class was wrong. The odds of life occurring on this planet
without any outside guidance were not simply remote; the odds were zero. What I
had just witnessed was a marvel of design and engineering. And if that’s the
case, then there must be a Designer, with a capital “D”.
At that moment, it started to dawn on me
that there must be some kind of Being that designed and created life. At that
moment, I stopped being an atheist. It was the absolute last thing I expected
to happen.
You see, I really enjoyed being an
atheist. As Dostoyevsky wrote, “If there is no God, then everything is
permissible.” If there is no God, then there is no transcendent, absolute moral
code. All values and ethics are relative, based on personal opinion. And my
opinion was this: being selfish and lazy and frequently drunk was perfectly
fine.
Of course, my family and my employers
weren’t too thrilled with my personal moral code, but I didn’t really care. Being
an atheist, I truly believed that life was nothing more than a cosmic accident
with no meaning or purpose. And since we’ll all be dead and gone soon enough,
we might as well crack open another bottle of vodka and dull the pain until it’s
over.
I know that sounds pretty pathetic, but
in my defense, I was a lot of fun to be around when I was drunk. There were
always plenty of laughs, especially if someone else was buying the drinks.
So, on that memorable April afternoon in
New Haven, I stopped being an atheist. I came to accept that someone or
something was out there, far more powerful than human beings. It was a far cry
from the doctrines of Christianity, but I had made the massive leap from
atheism to faith. I had taken the that first important step on the road to
faith in Christ.
If you are not sure that God exists,
just do the math. Here’s the formula I was taught in biology class: Chaos +
Chance + Time = Intricate Precision. That formula is not, and can never be,
true. The probability is zero.
(If you’d like to dig into this topic much
more deeply, check out this essay by Yale professor David Gelernter: https://www.claremont.org/crb/article/giving-up-darwin/ )
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