My father was an atheist.
My mother was an agnostic Jew.
We were taught from my earliest memories, there is no God.
If there was a God, you can't know him.
That's the agnostic side that came from my mother.
My mother actually taught us that people
who believed in God were mentally retarded
in the sense that they didn't have the mental faculties
to face life, and so they had to have a crutch
to get them through life.
And so having learned that from an early age,
my Jewish grandmother, of course, was also an agnostic.
Her parents lived through the Holocaust,
but many of my grandmother's parents' generation
were killed in the Holocaust.
And so there was a tremendous dislike
for the God of the Bible,
who would allow such a thing as this.
So all of that fed in.
My dad's mother was an old Methodist,
and I believe very likely a saved woman.
She was forbidden to talk to us about the Bible.
She owned a Bible, and it was always
on her coffee table.
We were taught, just leave it there, don't read it.
And she was told she could not spread any religious ideas,
as my parents called them, to my brothers or me.
By seventh grade, I was pretty convinced
of what I wanted to do with my life,
and that was to go into medical research
and find the cures for diseases,
because in my mind, this is the only life we have,
and so to make that life as good as possible.
And that was in the 60s,
when cancer was becoming very prevalent,
and my Jewish grandmother was diagnosed with cancer.
And so that just prompted me.
So when I remember in seventh grade life science class,
making the decision, I want to go into this.
This is what I want to do with my life.
Our school, small school in Northern Vermont,
had a business prep and a college prep,
so you could take either set of courses.
And I took the college prep,
which got me into earth science in ninth grade
and biology in 10th grade, which I loved.
Chemistry in the 11th grade, which I loved.
These are phenomenal, and they're such proofs of God.
And yet, my science teacher was an evolutionist.
And in fact, in biology class,
we did a project about the Scopes Monkey Trial
in Dayton, Tennessee in 1925.
And our biology teacher made a public mockery
of the lawyer for creation, Clarence Darrow,
and William Jennings Bryan, I mean,
and supported the position of Clarence Darrow,
who was an infidel and an agnostic,
and who won the case, I believe,
over a silly Bible question.
Well, part of the Bible says
that Jonah was swallowed by a whale,
and part of it says he was swallowed by a big fish.
And modern science tells us that whales aren't fish,
so how do you answer that?
And he didn't have a very good answer for that question.
And the case was one,
and so here was one of the first Southern states
where evolution could be taught in the public schools,
and it was 1925.
Creationism was still taught, but evolution was allowed.
And of course, that has brought us all the way
to where today, evolution is forced on every student,
and creationism is completely banned.
It's not even allowed.
So you see how that has changed in 100 years,
and it didn't take a full 100 years.
So anyway, beginning in that seventh grade,
going all the way through high school,
until my junior year.
In my junior year, a young girl moved to our town,
one year younger than I,
and she had been saved in a bus ministry
in a church in Louisiana.
Her dad was in the Air Force.
They stationed him in upstate New York.
They settled in our town in Vermont,
and he would travel to upstate New York,
which is 50 miles, for his work.
She took me on, as it were,
and I believe it was a divine appointment,
because she was a super bright light for Christ,
but when you have no light, a dim light is a bright light.
I remember the first conversation
where I was just chatting with her
after tours one night on the phone,
and she said,
well, you need Jesus in your life,
and my immediate response was,
I thought you were smarter than that,
because in my mind, her belief in Christ
meant she was mentally retarded,
and yet, I knew she wasn't,
and so it was this dichotomy of thinking
going on in my mind immediately.
She's a normal person, but she believes this,
but I couldn't allow myself to believe that,
and for over a year,
because that would have been September
of my junior year, so September of 1973,
and I wasn't saved until the end of October of 1974,
so almost a year and two months,
that she had a continual witness,
and I tell people,
it's like watching the needle on your gas tank.
It starts out full, and it slowly moves over to empty,
and in my mind, I was full of humanism,
and totally empty of God,
and yet, the more she said,
that needle would move a little bit,
and I went from there's just no God,
this is nuts, it's evolution, it's humanism,
and then it was,
but she says there's a God,
and then it went from there to,
well, she's a happy person,
even though there's a lot of things going on in her life
that aren't very happy,
and she clearly has something that I need,
and the needle kept moving and moving.
Well, I grew up on a dairy farm, as I said,
and in the summer,
so the summer between my junior and senior year,
we were bailing hay, and filling silos with silage,
and farm work in the summers,
very, very intense, long, long days.
I didn't see her all summer,
except at the 4th of July fireworks display,
but somebody else was there,
and it was the Holy Spirit,
and I didn't even know the Holy Spirit existed.
I didn't even know who he was,
but he was working on my heart all summer long,
and you're out driving a tractor,
and there's nobody else around,
and the Spirit of God was working on me,
moving that needle, moving that needle.
And so anyway, in August, and I don't know the date,
I might be able to find the date, but I don't know it,
in August of that year,
I was out on the northeast corner of the farm
doing some work on the tractor,
and I just stopped the tractor, shut everything off,
and I just looked up to heaven,
and I said, God, I don't know who you are,
but if you're there, I want to know who you are.
So that was an admission,
it's not the moment I trusted Christ,
but it was admission to God
from what had been a completely rejecting heart.
And then as events unfolded,
I trusted the Lord on the 25th of October
in the fall there of 1974.
How do you deal with people that say
that secular humanism is true?
Well, obviously, any philosophy
is a philosophy, a system of thinking.
It is not just what you think, but it's how you think,
it's the way you think.
It is the way you draw conclusions
from the evidence you have.
And evidence is not just what is visible,
it's what you're willing to see.
So when you look at humanism as a religion,
because that's what it is, it's the outright denial of God,
and it's the outright denial that man needs God,
it's the outright denial that man is accountable to God.
But like I said, a person who holds that position
is a person who refuses to see
many things that are obvious.
And so the whole humanistic approach,
which is the evolutionary approach,
or the evolutionary approach is a humanistic approach,
it's basically that an accident,
a big explosion, or some unknown
event millions and billions of years ago
resulted in this, and the bottom line is
humanism is not common sense,
and evolution is not science.
There is no law in the scientific world
that is more widely accepted
by scientists of every belief system
than the three laws of thermodynamics,
and the first two, of course, being the most important.
The first law of thermodynamics,
basically that energy can neither be created nor destroyed,
and therefore, evolution fails the test,
because in evolution, everything is evolving
from lower life forms to higher life forms,
everything is evolving from lower complexity
to higher complexity, and that can't happen
because of the second law of thermodynamics,
which is the law of entropy,
that everything is running down.
Scientists will agree that in billions of years,
the sun is going to die.
Okay, what are they agreeing to?
They're agreeing to the second law of thermodynamics.
They're agreeing that all systems run down,
and yet they're insisting that,
but evolution, everything is winding up,
and everything is climbing, and all the complexities,
and so humanism, as I said, makes no sense,
and evolution makes no science.
They're just completely against laws.
Now, if you talk to any person who believes in evolution,
it's a theory.
It's always the theory of evolution.
Now, a theory is something that's not proven,
and yet it is taught as if it's proven,
and it is received by humanists
because it gives them a religious out
from under the accountability to God,
which their soul loathes.
The lost man despises the concept
of accountability to God.
We live in a culture that is immoral.
We live in a culture that is unethical.
We live in a culture that is wicked to its core,
and all of that comes out of this idea
that I evolved.
I'm nothing more than an animal.
If a lion can run around the jungle
and across the grassy plains of Africa
and have 20 lionesses, then I can have 20 girls,
and it's just a completely hedonistic approach,
and the whole mindset of hedonism,
which is pleasure is the ultimate,
you know, it takes us right back to Greek philosophy
and Roman philosophy and some of the other philosophies
that have been around,
but they've always proven to be disasters to culture.
For instance, the Native Americans.
Now, the current critical race theory
is founded in so many lies,
and one of those lies is that the white man came here
to obliterate the Natives.
No, the white man came here,
read their writings, read their diaries,
read the writings of some of the Native Americans
who actually trusted Christ,
read the literature of that day.
It all points to the fact
they came here to evangelize them.
They came for religious liberty,
which wasn't always perfectly realized,
but they came for religious liberty.
They came to get away from the persecution
of the Church of England.
They landed here, and they made friends with.
Now, as greed took over,
this is the 16 and early 1700s.
Now, by the time we see the white man,
the cursed white man of critical race theory,
driving the Indians into land
that is completely, cannot sustain life,
now we have a country that has already
come through the first and second Great Awakening,
and now the country is moving away from God.
The Civil War comes.
There is tragic and drastic damage
to the Christianity of many people
because of the Civil War,
and then you move on,
and you see how these Native Americans
were slowly, surely either driven to extinction
or driven to very small clans.
Now, what was really happening there?
What was really happening is that the Native Americans
were vile, wicked, evil people,
and once again, read their writings.
Go back to their traditions.
Girls that were nine and 10 and 11 years old
were given to the chiefs for their vile pleasures.
Now, that's being reintroduced in our society today.
In fact, there are states that are introducing legislation
that child molestation can no longer be considered a crime,
no longer prosecutable.
Where are we headed?
We're headed right back to the paganism,
and the paganism of those people,
they all had multiple gods.
Their gods were gods of their own imagination,
Romans chapter one, and paganism in the beginning
of the condemnation of mankind in Romans chapter one.
It doesn't begin with reprobates.
It begins with pagans, and pagans become reprobates.
Pagans become lost people
who just shut God out of their lives.
They start out just like I did,
who having the witness and testimony of the heavens
denied it all in favor of what I call Frank Sinatra living.
I did it my way, and that's where it is.
And so it's a dead-end philosophy.
Humanism doesn't have happy endings.
Humanism doesn't have miracles.
Christianity has miracles.
Christianity has at least one happy ending,
and that's heaven.
But it has many happy endings along the way.
And I think the greatest proof that Christianity works
is that in my 49 years of being a believer,
I have met harlots, wicked, evil, unclean women,
and whoremongers who are wicked, unclean men,
and I've heard their stories, and God cleaned them up.
Humanism doesn't clean anybody up.
Humanism excuses more and more sin.
Evil men wax worse and worse, the Bible says.
They don't get better and better.
So humanism, which denies the redemptive work of Christ,
takes men downward into more and more and more
and worse and worse and worse sins.
Christ, on the other hand, through his resurrection life,
when that life comes to dwell
in the heart of a child of God,
that life creates a new man,
and the life gets better and better and better
for those who walk with him.
And so humanism doesn't have any stories like that.
You know, I don't remember the name of the debater
who challenged one of the old preachers.
Here's what the preacher said.
He said, you bring with you to this debate
10 people that humanism has made better.
I will bring to that meeting 500
that Christianity has made better.
And the humanist backed out of the debate
because he knew he couldn't find 10 people
that humanism had made better.
They might have been smarter, but they weren't wiser.
They might have been more successful financially,
but they weren't more successful personally.
Where has humanism led us?
It's led us down a path of the destruction of the family,
divorce, remarriage, broken hearts, broken lives,
and our country is morally irreparable.
We're in such a state morally.
It cannot be fixed.
It's like Isaiah chapter one.
The whole head is sick, the whole heart faint.
You can't do anything about it.
Our country's ruined.
It wasn't ruined by Christianity.
It wasn't ruined by people getting saved
and growing in Christ.
It was ruined by people denying that
and living their hedonistic, narcissistic lives
and ruining people around them
and spreading that evil, and evil spreads.
Atheism would deny all the written and known evidence
about dating of the Bible books.
History is replete with proof, for instance,
that Isaiah was written in the 700s BC
and Jeremiah in the 500s and 600s BC,
and David wrote the Psalms in 1000 BC, roughly,
and the account of his life,
and if you read the Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John
there are multiple citations from the writings of Moses,
1400 BC-ish.
There are sightings from Job.
This would be 1800 BC.
There are sightings from the time of David,
which is around 1000 BC.
There are sightings from the ministries of Elijah
and Elisha, sightings from the ministry of Jonah,
sightings from several of the prophets,
and the time period in which they lived is cataloged.
So it is a denial of written history,
and of course their excuse is, well, men wrote that.
Well, men wrote the New York Times too,
but these people would believe
what's in the New York Times,
and they would believe what the New York Times wrote
about the Titanic in 1912,
even though they weren't here,
and they would believe what the New York Times wrote
about whatever other event took place in the 1800s,
or whenever the New York Times started.
I don't have dates on that.
All the news that's fit to print is their motto,
and it seems to me that it's all the news
that is unfit to print at this point,
but anyway, we would believe that.
Men wrote it.
Men saw it.
Men testified of it.
It was in the hands of men.
It was in the hands of editors.
It was in the, and so they wrote it down,
and we just accept that,
but somehow the instrument of man is unreliable
when it comes to God and the Bible,
and the reason for that is they are humanists,
and they do not want God in their lives,
and so they use a straw man to discredit
a written, witnessed record, eyewitness accounts,
accounts that are historically accurate,
accounts that are historically accepted,
even by scientists who would not claim to be Christians.
Another argument that I have against atheism
is that scientific laws are amazing.
Because they're true.
Gregor Mendel came up with the laws of genetics.
They're true to this day.
He took a bunch of peas,
and he learned about pollination
with peas in his garden outside the monastery,
but he believed in God.
He believed the Bible.
Isaac Newton believed the Bible.
Many of these, Johannes Kepler,
who without any modern scientific tools
formulated the laws of planetary motion
that are still used today.
They were used in launching space flights
to get men to the moon so we didn't have problems.
The laws of planetary motion,
but Johannes Kepler saw him as a servant,
saw himself as a servant of God first
and a student of the Bible,
and over and over and over,
you find the laws of science
were formulated by men who believed
the Bible is the word of God,
and they studied science under the Bible
instead of pushing the Bible out of the picture,
and since men have pushed God out of the picture,
we haven't come up with any new scientific laws.
We have theories.
Einstein was a rejecter of Jesus Christ
as Messiah and Savior.
He was a Jewish man.
He rejected the Messiah.
He did not believe in salvation in Jesus Christ.
E equals MC squared is not a scientific law.
It's a theory.
It's never been proven,
and it just interests me
that people who push God out of their lives
don't find the answers
even though they have technology
and all the latest gadgets and gimmicks at their disposal,
but men who had primitive microscopes
and primitive telescopes like Galileo
discovered things and proved
scientific and mathematical things
that have never been disproven
because they saw themselves
as investigating the creation of the almighty God.
They believe in science
as long as their belief in science
does not also require them to acknowledge God,
so they will say, yes, the laws of genetics,
of course they're true,
but we're going to deny those laws today
and say that if you, as a man,
desire to be a woman, you can be.
They'll allow all the biological science laws,
all the chemical science laws,
all the physical science laws.
They'll allow it all,
except where it bucks up against
their hedonistic, narcissistic views,
and there they just deny it.
The liberals are telling us today to follow the science.
Okay, we're two men having a conversation.
We have an X and a Y chromosome.
That's why we're men.
We're not men, and that creates the chromosome.
No, the chromosomes came, and that's what created men,
and it doesn't matter what we do.
We're going to be men.
That's science.
The first chapter of Isaiah, of course,
any Bible book, the introductory material
is pertinent to the entire book.
You know, Genesis one and two,
pertinent to the whole Bible,
pertinent especially to all of Genesis,
and so Isaiah chapter one,
God addresses his people as Sodom and Gomorrah.
So very clearly, the culture had decayed
to such a miserable point,
and I can't quote Isaiah chapter one,
but he said the whole head is sick,
the whole heart is faint.
It cannot be bound up or mollified with ointment.
There's nothing we can do
unless you listen and get saved,
what we would say saved,
and so after he condemns them with a condemnation
that is really pretty strong,
to call his own people Sodom and Gomorrah
is a sharp, sharp rebuke,
and it tells the state of their culture,
and just a few verses later, here's what God says.
Come now, and let us reason together,
saith the Lord.
Though your sins be as scarlet,
they should be as white as snow,
though they be red like crimson,
they shall be as wool.
If you be willing and obedient,
you shall eat the good of the land.
So what God is saying is the only answer
is an absolute denial and rejection
of the immoral culture,
the immorality and the godlessness,
and an embrace, a receiving of Jehovah,
but it starts with God saying,
come, let us reason together,
and you mentioned that some people
might call me judgmental.
It's reasoning.
It's reasonable to bank on a scientific law.
It's unreasonable to deny a scientific law.
I mean, who doesn't believe in the law of gravity?
I mean, have you ever seen a child
fall off a bicycle and go upward?
They don't, they fall down,
and people fall down the stairs,
and you know, you don't ever go into a home
where someone has fallen, and they're on the ceiling.
They're always on the floor,
and nobody argues with the law of gravity,
and people who defy the law of gravity
put themselves in peril of breaking that law.
It was Vance Havner who said,
you might as well attack Gibraltar with a pop gun
as to attack the moral law of the universe
and the god who reigns in righteousness,
and these people are not going to win.
They may win little skirmishes,
but they're not going to win the war.
All you have to do is read the last two chapters
of the Bible.
Jesus wins.
They don't win.
He does.
The answer to the humanist, it's one by one.
You go to the book of Revelation.
What does God say to the church at Laodicea?
If any man, singular, hear my voice,
and open the door, I will come into him,
and so God deals with individuals.
God very seldom deals with masses.
There are records, of course, of moves of God in the Bible
where large numbers of people responded to God,
but it comes down to every large group of people
is made up of individuals,
and they must all be persuaded,
and the only way to deal with a secular humanist
is reason with him,
and the only way for a secular humanist
to be reasoned with is for him to say,
you know what, if I'm going to believe science,
I have to believe all of it,
and I have to quit denying the obvious,
and the minute you stop denying the obvious,
evolution goes out the door
because the vast evidence of creationism is there,
and that's why I said at the beginning of this interview
that it's not just what we think.
It's how we think.
It's how we look at the evidence and draw conclusions,
and see, the creationist comes from the standpoint
there's a God,
and he draws his conclusions based upon that.
The atheist, the humanist comes at it,
the evolutionist comes at it from the standpoint
we're not going to entertain the idea of a God.
Well, that affects all of his reasoning,
and it affects all of his conclusions.
It's the same evidence.
They're both looking at the same fossil record.
So it's not the evidence
that makes the difference in their conclusions.
It's what they're thinking.
It's the way they're thinking,
and it's their method of drawing conclusions.
An atheist must draw the anti-God conclusion.
The creationist chooses to draw the God conclusion.
I believe the Bible because I have found it true.
I have found that the Savior fills the emptiness of life
that I had as a young adult,
and I have found satisfaction there
that I never found out in the evolutionary beliefs,
out in the humanistic beliefs.
I have also studied the Bible deeply.
I've read the Bible many, many, many scores of times,
and I have not found reason not to believe it.
I have not found all the promises of humanism to be true.
I have found the promises of the Bible to be true.
I have not found that humanism and atheism brings joy.
No, it brings despair.
It drives people to suicide.
It drives people to insanity,
and I'm not saying everybody ends that way,
but many of them do,
and very few are the believers in Jesus Christ
who end that way.
Very many are the atheists and the humanists
and the evolutionists that end that way.
I'm not saying everybody ends that way.