Hier volg Carl Wieland se getuienis hoe hy ’n Christen geword het en hoe evolusie en miljarde jare ook ’n groot rol gespeel het. Dit is geneem uit sy boek Beyond the Shadows: making sense of personal tragedy, bl. 34-38. Kyk:

• Beyond the Shadows: making sense of personal tragedy (Boek)
• Walking Through Shadows: A Testimony DVD
• Walking Through Shadows: A Testimony (Video Download)

“Walking Through Shadows – A Testimony” Dr Carl Wieland

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Atheism Convincingly Refuted: Carl Wieland’s testimony

Strange things began to happen in our family. Without seeking to glorify the occult, let me tell you of just one event which showed me, with mathematical certainty, that my world view could not explain it. A dentistry student friend and myself, for fun, had set up a “mind-reading” stunt using a pack of cards. If I asked him, “Which card am I holding up at the moment?” the question itself constituted a code we had worked out in advance, one which told him what card it was. So for another card, the question would be different; for example, “Can you tell me what card I’m looking at right now?” which would secretly reveal the exact card, and so on. A simple party trick. We demonstrated this to my wife, who was amazed, believing that we could indeed read minds. “Can I try that?” she asked. We looked at each other and winked. “Sure, why not?” I grinned. It would be fun to let her try in vain for a while, and then reveal that she had been duped.

The first card I pulled off the top of the deck just happened to be the ace of spades. Now remember, I was not using the code, because she did not know it, anyway, so what would be the point? Her head was buried in her hands for a long time, and we were about to let her in on the secret, when she said, “Wait, I can see something floating towards me . . . a card. . . .” “Okay, what sort of card?” I asked, cynically. I remembered just then that she had never played cards in her life, and did not know the names of the cards or suits, etc. But she went on and described it as a card bearing the letter “A,” with a black object on it, and drew the shape of the spades symbol in the air. I looked at my friend, he looked at me, and I think we both decided, well, even people who don’t play cards have heard of the ace of spades. It was probably buried deep in her unconscious. That was the natural first thing for anyone to guess at – no big deal.

I pulled up the next card for my friend and me to see. There was no one else in the room, and my wife was sitting on the other side, quite a way off. I said, “Okay, how about this one?” Again, she described it correctly. The hair started to rise on the back of my neck, even more so when she got the next eight in succession exactly right. Ten in all, in unbroken succession, from a randomly shuffled deck. Her lack of knowledge of card symbols made even three in a row staggeringly improbable, but let’s assume that she did know exactly what a deck of cards was. The probability that what we had just seen with our own eyes was a random occurrence was still a mind-popping one chance in 50 million billion! A total impossibility.

I could go on about more such occurrences, which became increasingly sinister, and about the specific ways in which my mother and younger sister, who had become Christians by then, were praying when they suspected that our household was under demonic assault. And about the way that their simple, heartfelt, believing prayers, without us knowing what they were, seemed to have an obvious, incredible effect, amounting to something like total “control” over (in the sense of protection) what was going on.

Suffice it to say that no rational person in my situation could go on believing in materialism much longer. What I had seen was aching for an explanation. I had read widely enough to know that the only thing that fitted the facts was that I was witnessing the spiritual warfare between Christ and Satan, just as my mother and sisters believed it. But I had been so sure that they were deluded simpletons, closing their minds to the facts of science. It was almost as if God had taken me by the scruff of the neck and was showing me that my world view was wrong. As I have since quipped, now I had been shown that the “bad guys” were for real, it made good sense for me to join up with the “good guys” as soon as possible.

Problem – those long astronomical and geological ages, and the associated fossils, reared their heads. I wanted to become a Christian, but it all had to make sense, it had to hang together. If Christianity, and particularly the history of all things given in the Bible in “big picture” form, contradicted reality, then its claim to be a revelation from the Maker himself was fatally flawed. I had heard many feeble attempts by Christians to try to weave the millions of years into the Bible, but they had turned me away from Christianity. These notions seemed not only highly contrived and “slippery,” they glossed over huge, glaring inconsistencies with what the Bible so plainly taught.

Incidentally, all my atheist/humanist acquaintances at the time thought the same. We held such seeming deviousness in contempt. The man who coined the word “agnostic” to describe himself – Thomas Huxley, a.k.a. “Darwin’s Bulldog” – also waxed sarcastic against such similarly convenient flexibility of belief in his day. Today, prominent humanists and atheists have not changed their minds about the inconsistency of people who hold to Christianity and at the same time hold to evolution/long ages. But in their stand against “fundamentalism” (a new term of abuse), particularly creationism, they will openly side with those who compromise and distort what the Bible teaches.

Lenin is said to have invented the term “useful idiots” for those pro-Communist sympathizers in the West whom he similarly despised – for foolishly undermining their own foundation – but used.

My other, older sister, who now lived a long way away, was the first of the family to have become a Christian, many years previously, at age 14. I will be forever grateful that right at that time she sent me a copy of Morris and Whitcomb’s classic creationist book The Genesis Flood. Though now outdated in some areas, it let me see then that the issue was not so much about the facts of science but about how they were interpreted. If you started with the Bible, the same facts made a great deal of sense in a young-world, catastrophic framework. This did not imply that one would have all the answers or that all problems would be magically solved. I knew that science was all about continually solving ongoing problems and changing older ideas in the light of new information.

It was as if the scales fell from my eyes. Shortly afterward, I bowed the knee to Jesus Christ in belief for the forgiveness of my sin, my life of rebellion against Him. So it was no surprise that I would be burdened to share this incredibly powerful way of thinking with people everywhere. I wanted to ensure that God-honoring creation materials got into as many hands as possible. I particularly wanted to see good glossy periodicals to counter the ones that had so blinded me – hence my passion for what became Creation magazine. (Incidentally, once we had become Christians, all of the strange “gifts” and occurrences stopped instantly.)

Well, all of that was a long background to the way in which a thoroughly biblical world view, especially concerning death and suffering, made an enormous difference to me in my time of trial. Particularly the knowledge of the Curse. No matter what temporary ways we find to alleviate its effects, ultimately we all remain under the Curse and we all succumb to it. Like flowers we blossom for a while, then our physical bodies wither as grass, returning to the dust (raw materials) from which we were constructed in the first place (Job 14:1-2; Gen 3:19).