Who I am is not important, but how I learned the truth about my Creator is. I hope that you find my experience interesting, logical, and important to you. When I turned 40, about 30 years ago, my twenty-three year career as a naval aviator was winding up. The F4U Corsair, above left, and the F8U Crusader, above right, were the first and the last of many fighter aircraft that I flew. The end of my flying career around my 40th birthday was very depressing to me and I felt that the best half of my life was over. I found no joy in looking forward to aging, infirmity and death. Life after death was not something I could meaningfully believe in. I soon discovered that happiness consists of a pleasant expectation of the future, not looking back at a very pleasant past. I felt that the future looked grim and was haunted by the thought that ultimately death would end everything that I held dear in this life.
Prior to my joining the Navy at age 17, I had been raised in a Christian family and was active in church. Nevertheless, after joining up, I stopped going to church and discovered that it meant very little to me. For the next 20 years, I was an agnostic with no convictions about God except that there were many forms of belief about Him. I was interested in forming a factual, rational understanding about God but I never found a cogent reason for believing one of the many, contradictory concepts of Him. I believed He was unknowable and that I would inherit eternal life, if it existed, providing I was a "good person." (HOW WRONG I WAS!) As an honor graduate from a leading engineering school, I wanted a logical reason to believe and felt that blind faith was the reason that there were so many forms of belief and opinions about God. It seemed that many believed what their family, country, or their region believed in, or their belief was a result of an admired person's persuasion. I also felt that only God could tell me about Himself and His plan for this universe, but I knew that there were conflicting "divine books" claiming to be revelations from Him such as the Hebrew Bible, the Christian Bible, the Book of Mormon, Science and Health, the Koran, and others. Down deep, I felt that it was important to learn about my Creator, but what should I believe and why should I believe it?
Some time later, while employed by Hewlett-Packard, I sold a computer system to a nuclear physicist at the Oak Ridge National Lab complete with a real time Basic Interpreter that he could program to control his experiment. This was a small, ferrite core memory computer using Basic "call" program statements to control switches, A/D's, D/A's, and to print out data and a report for each iteration of his experiment. He wanted to use this easily programmed setup to write his program and bypass the lengthy and bureaucratic process of having the main programming dept. write his program. Perhaps some of you computer buffs remember the first HP computers-Models 2114, 2115, & 2116-using switch registers and paper tape Fortran Compilers and Basic Interpreters. While selling and helping him to get his system running, I spent quite a few hours with this high power Ph.D., including a few meals at the Holiday Inn at Oak Ridge. He openly professed his religious beliefs, which I thought to be inconsistent with his scientific and logical approach to his work, little of which I understood. I asked how he could blindly accept these beliefs in view of his background, and I will never forget his answer!
He stated that he had also been an agnostic and needed evidence to believe anything about God. His search started while he was reading an anecdote about Frederick the Great, the King of Prussia from 1740 to 1786. It seems that the king challenged his court preacher and asked him for an incontestable proof for the inspiration of the Bible. The preacher quickly answered-"The Jew, your Majesty." This anecdote aroused my friend's interest and he soon found that the Bible, and only the Bible, shows how to test or prove a prophet or anyone who claims that he is speaking, writing, or quoting anything directly from God, including the Bible itself! In my journey, I have found that only the Hebrew and the Christian Scriptures (Old and New Testaments) show how to verify God's Words to His creation. I have completely or partially read the English versions of the other available books claiming divine authority and have never found anything in them to prove that they are from God.
My friend outlined the Bible's method of proving God's revelations. To read this logical and rational method, please click here: provegodprovebible.htm