By Walter Veith
“Your mother’s going to hell, where she’ll be tormented forever!” my religion teacher threatened.
Right then, at eight years old, I decided, If there is a God, I hate Him. How can a loving God punish my faithful mother?
When my father married my mother, they belonged to different faiths. But they had decided to raise their children in my father’s faith, so I received daily religious instruction from that perspective.
“It’s so sad your mother will never see heaven,” my religion teacher continued to harp. One day I tore up the study sheets in anger and threw them at her, telling her exactly what she could do with her God. By age ten, I was a confirmed atheist, although I attended church with my father. When I was 12, my mother died after four painful years of terminal cancer, further alienating me from any idea of a loving God. But it was after enrolling in university that I finally discovered a belief system I could adopt as my own.
Because I was a zoology major, every class I took had an evolutionary basis. This is my answer! I rejoiced. My mother is not burning in hell! There is no hell or heaven! There is no God!
On weekends, I went home with my college roommate and eventually married his sister. I was still an atheist, but my wife had been raised differently. Her father, a news reporter, had extensively investigated occult occurrences in Africa, and strange things happened in their home. A cane went walking by itself. Dishes flew and smashed into the wall. Later, this influence would also haunt us.
I earned my doctorate in zoology and began teaching at Stellenbosch University. I completely immersed myself in evolution.
During my wife’s third pregnancy, my father-in-law moved next door. But his relationship with the occult seemed to bring problems. My wife spent her entire pregnancy in and out of the hospital. We believed she would die. Finally, she gave birth to a baby boy.
One night, after bringing our child home, I dreamed I was being strangled. I awoke at 2 am, my heart pounding. Immediately, our baby screamed in the next room. Running to his bed, we found him with a high fever, shaking violently. We rushed to the hospital, where they tried everything to bring his temperature down. Finally, the fever broke.
Over the next few months, this happened repeatedly, but the doctors could not explain it. “It took four adults to hold your baby down. He must be possessed!” one doctor suggested.
In desperation I thought of my father’s church and its claim of power over demons. I’m going to ask them for help, I determined. At a church the next day, I found a priest.
“Strange things are happening in our home,” I began, but he stopped me.
“That’s not my field. Give me your name and number. Someone will call you.”
I soon got a call from another priest. At our first meeting, before I even shared my problem, he looked at me kindly and said, “Satan is trying to kill your son.”
“How do you know?” I demanded.
“Never mind. But the problem is severe; we’ll have to say special prayers in your home.”
When he arrived, we took him through the house. As he stopped in our baby’s room, he said, “This is the worst room, but we have to exorcize your entire home. Please bring me some water.”
With his “holy water” he went through the house, making the sign of the cross above windows and doors. Before leaving, he handed me his ordination cross, stating, “I hate it when the devil destroys little children.”
“It took four adults to hold your baby down. He must be possessed!” one doctor suggested.
For the first time, our child slept through the night. And I had no more nightmares. So, how does a hard-nosed, atheistic scientist react now? My wife and I wrestled with this for months. Finally I said, “Dear, I have no choice. I’m going back to church.”
When I asked the priest about evolution and Creation, he said, “Everyone knows we exist through evolution.” Wonderful, I thought. I can believe in God and evolution. So I began attending church every Sunday.
One day I hired a carpenter to remodel our kitchen. When he arrived, he told me directly, “By the way, I walk with the Lord.”
“I just want a kitchen,” I retorted.
“Okay, but please take this.”
He handed me a pamphlet, which I just stuffed into a drawer.
As time passed, the longer I attended church, the more puzzled I became by the services and beliefs. Once, I sat alone near the back of the church. A little red light blinked on a box, meaning the host, or wafer, was inside. It hit me, They must have God locked up in that box. I tried to pray, “Where are You, God? I don’t know You. If You truly exist, You must show me.”
Returning home, I rummaged through drawers and found the pamphlet left by the carpenter. It talked about how the Roman emperor Constantine had attempted to unite his pagan and Christian citizens into one universal church and had substituted Sunday, the pagan day of worship, for God’s seventh-day Sabbath. Over time, most of the Christian world adopted this practice, despite the fact that God’s law had never changed. Intrigued, I phoned the carpenter.
“Remember you installed a kitchen for me last year? Please come over,” I requested.
Over time, we discussed many things, including how the seventh-day Sabbath was still the Bible Sabbath.
“How can you keep a commandment that says the Lord created the heavens, the earth, and the sea in only six days? It’s a fact of science that everything came into existence through evolution.”
My carpenter friend smiled, “No, not evolution. God created everything. I’ll prove it.” For the next several days he brought books on Creation, which I studied.
“What do you think?” he asked.
“They’re so unscientific,” I stated. “I can’t accept the confusing material published in your books.”
Frustrated, he finally said, “I don’t have a problem with Creation; you do. You solve it!”
I studied the Bible so hard, I wore out a copy in just two months.
One day my secretary handed me documents written against the Sabbath, although no one knew we were studying the topic. I gave the material to my wife, who studied it, then told me, “These documents convinced me the Sabbath is right!”
Wrestling with the Sabbath and Creation, I finally prayed, “Okay, God. If You exist and evolution is wrong, show me.”
Our university housed the largest evolution-based library in the Southern Hemisphere. As I signed out a book, a colleague stopped me. “There’s a brand-new edition,” he recommended.
I read both books. The old edition admitted unresolved difficulties with the theory of evolution, while the newer version never admitted a problem. One book said one thing and another the exact opposite. Day and night I thought about this. Teaching genetics at the same time, I started a list of problems to be solved if evolution were true. My list grew very fast.
As my wife and I studied, our baby, now a toddler, began having problems again. I had the same old dream, woke up at 2 am, and in the next room the child screamed. When my carpenter friend heard the situation, he asked his church to pray for us at 2 am. The problem stopped and never returned.
“I can’t sit on the fence forever,” I told my family. “I’ve discovered evolution to be an unproven theory. We’re going to keep the Sabbath and start attending a church that worships on the Bible Sabbath.”
A number of weeks later I was asked to lead a departmental discussion on evolution. My mind filled with fear. Do I go into this lecture pretending to be what I am not, or do I stand up for what I now believe? Again, my new friends prayed for me.
At this event I faced all the graduate students and faculty. I went through the whole gene system, highlighting every problem I’d discovered. At the end I stated emphatically, “Therefore, evolution is not possible!”
You could have heard a pin drop. Then all hell broke loose. One colleague turned blood red and started screaming at me. They held a special meeting and voted that the basis for all teaching must be evolution. My professional life now seemed worthless, so I resigned.
“Your father’s having terrific problems in purgatory. You’d better have special prayers said so his problems go away.”
We sold our house and purchased a farm, planning to make it a place to witness. But a huge flock of birds ate my wheat crop. Interest rates shot up, and repaying my loans became impossible. We lost both of our cars in major accidents. My wife became terribly depressed. We kept asking ourselves, Is this how God deals with those who love Him?
Then the same priest who had performed the exorcism called. “Your father’s having terrific problems in purgatory. You’d better get back to church and have special prayers said so his problem will go away.”
I had studied the state of the dead and believed what the Bible teaches about them sleeping in the grave until the resurrection. “Thank you for the information.” I put the phone down.
I considered the priest sincere but deceived. I believe that when he prayed in our home and our child got better, it was the devil trying to lead me back to a belief system that taught error and presented God as a vengeful tyrant, not a God of love. When we started studying the Bible, our boy had problems again. But after deciding to truly follow Jesus, we found that our troubled child became peaceful.
God had led us to His truth, yet we were now penniless and ready to lose our farm. We prayed, claiming every promise in the Bible. The next morning a professor from another university called.
“We have a teacher taking emergency leave. Will you take his classes?”
“What about my belief in Creation? I won’t teach evolution.”
“Who cares?” he said. “Will you come?”
“Great! When do I start?”
“Monday.”
It was Thursday.
This is how God placed me as a professor and eventually head of the zoology department in a secular university for a number of years. I taught creationism. In human terms, it’s impossible to imagine.
The Creator of the universe has shown me how to live. He died on the cross to save me from my sins. He’s coming back to take me home with Him. The Holy Spirit has led my family into God’s truth. And He wants to lead you, too.
Take your stand for Christ. Do what is right. Have faith in Him, and He will fulfill all of His promises.
Image credit: © Shutterstock.com
Adapted from Adventists Affirm, Spring 2002. Used by permission. For information on books and DVDs by Dr. Walter Veith, visit www.amazingdiscoveries.org.