Calvin Smith, was ’n ateïs op skool en was aanvanklik baie bestand teen die Evangelie omdat hy geglo het dat evolusie alles kan verklaar. Vandag is hy ’n Christen en tans voltyds werksaam by Creation Ministries International, omdat hy besef dat die skepping-evolusie-kwessie nie ’n randkwessie is nie. Hier volg sy getuienis:

Calvin Smith’s testimony

Calvin Smith: “I never grew up in a Christian home, Christian church, never went to a youth group, didn’t go to a Bible study. I didn’t know anything about it. So when I went to school, they gave me an answer to question number 1[1]: where did we come from? We evolved. And they had charts and graphs and books… It was funny, because when I had bumped into Christians who tried to invite me to youth group, asked me if I went to church, I was fairly immunised against the gospel, because they were trying to give me a different history and a different idea of where we came from, which I already had an answer: I already knew we evolved. That was the history that I believed and so I didn’t really see any value in what they were talking about. And I have been equipped, very early on, to hit them with hard questions. So if someone would bump into me and invite me to youth group I would be very cynical, like: ‘Youth group? Church?’

‘O yeah.’

‘O, you believe the Bible?’

‘O yeah.’

‘So you think that some guy got two of every kind of animal on a big boat, and there are millions of animals in the world. How would you possibly do that?’

And most of the time they would just turn around and squeak, squeak, squeak, kind of run away. No answer. And it re-enforced what I had actually been taught, kind of a caricature of what the Christians were: they didn’t have answers for their faith; they just had a blind faith. People would say to me: ‘You have got to have more faith in evolution that to believe in God’. I’d laugh. I’d say that I have got my biology book and my geology book, I have got Discovery Channel, I have got PBS. I thought there were all these facts for evolution and [then I realise that there were] no facts.”

Richard Fangrad: “So specifically, what were some of those facts that you were taught?”

Calvin: “I can remember being taugh things like vestigial organs that things like your appendix are just an evolutionary throwback…”

[Uit Creation Magazine LIVE! – Episode 01-Creation/evolution (part 1)-What’s it all about? – Part 4/4]

En:

“Compromise doesn’t win people over. I was never impressed with the Christian who … you want me to believe this part [of the Bible], but what about this part over here. They would try to talk to me about Jesus, and I wanted to talk about Moses.”

[Uit What the Bible says about the Age of the Earth (Creation Magazine LIVE! 1-06), 49:30]

Voetnotas

[1] Daar is die sogenaamde drie vrae van die lewe:

1. Waar kom ons vandaan?
2. Wat maak ons hier?
3. Waarheen gaan ons? / Wat gebeur hierna?