The Science of God - how a lover of physics found the truth in Christianity

Chapter 1

The first time I remember praying was January 9th, 1977. That was the day my brother, Jeffrey, finally succumbed to the defective brain and body he'd received at birth. After five years of living as an infant, he gave up the struggle in the early hours of that Sunday morning. I know it was Sunday because the Superbowl came on later that day. My beloved Oakland Raiders were going to trounce the Minnesota Vikings.

I had just turned 10 a couple weeks before. As my parents dealt with the loss of their second child and rustled up their third, my sister Angela, only 8 months old, I dropped to my knees next to our couch and prayed for Jeffrey. I have no idea what I prayed. Jeffrey was clearly gone. The ambulance drivers weren't even in a hurry to wheel is feather-light body out the door of our Navy housing unit in Bremerton, Washington.

But pray I did. Whether or not God heard me, I don't know. We were not a church-going family and my father had announced his atheism in recent months. My mother came from a line of southern Baptists, but as far as I know, gave little thought to returning to the church of her youth. If there was a house where God might feel like an unwelcome guest, it would be ours. 

After that day, I didn't pray again until Christmas Eve of 1987. I was stationed aboard the USS Okinawa and we were anchored off of Bahrain in the Persian Gulf. I had duty, but slipped off on one of the large taxi-like launches to the pier, where a massive line of pay phones stood. I called my grandmother's house, knowing that my parents would be there, too. My mother answered the phone, in tears, and informed me that my grandmother had passed away.

That night we held midnight mass on the flight deck of the Okinawa (she was a helicopter carrier). I was not Catholic, but felt the need to attend, if nothing more than to pray for my grandmother. Ted Kennedy spoke to our small gathering, along with a couple other dignitaries. But what I remember is staring up at the stars spilled across the galaxy and wondering if my grandmother was watching me.

After my enlistment was up in 1988, I returned home to Waterford, Michigan. I call it home even though I never really lived there. I was a Navy brat to a lifer and served my own four years as soon as I graduated high school. So home was wherever my parents settled down. During my departure, they became Catholics. I'm not entirely sure how that happened. My father said something about my grandmother, his mother-in-law, and he believed "all that love had to go somewhere."

Being a good son, I attended Catechism for their sake. I was 21 then and would often leave my night class at St. Perpetua and head straight to Freddy's bar a mile down the road. There were no girls my age at Catechism. There were lots at Freddy's.    

After dropping out of Catechism, I met my wife, Kelly (not at Freddy's), and married her in 1990. We never really discussed religion, but when a Baptist minister knocked on my door one day, I allowed him to "save" me and we attended his church the following Sunday. It was across the street from St. Perpetua, where my parents were enjoying their Sunday mass. 

Thus branded a Baptist and a traitor, even though we wouldn't attend another church service for many years, not until I felt the pull of a Promise Keepers conference in 1997. During that time, I completed my engineering degree at Lawrence Technological University, where I came close to changing my major to physics, witnessed the birth of my two children, bought our first and second house, and began my career as a manufacturing engineer in the Detroit auto industry. 

I say all this to immediately dispel the myth that Christians are simply living out the desires of their parents, that we are somehow brainwashed during our impressionable years. As you can see, I was as far from a Christian household as any kid could be. It simply was not a topic of discussion. Church was a foreign place to me. As foreign as a Hindu temple would be to me today. Maybe even more so.

It would not be until my 31st year on this Earth that I seriously considered the possibility that God was real, that Jesus was more than a reason for a tree in our living room, and that any of this could fit into my understanding of physics and the universe.

To my surprise, and to my great joy, I found that the more thought I put into the subjects of science and religion, the more seamlessly they bonded. Thus would begin the greatest journey of my life, one I am nowhere near completing.