Personal Testimonies
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Ed Taraba
Dear Kolbe Center, The theory of evolution is a topic of great concern to me because it figured highly in my return to Christianity about sixteen years ago and helped solidify my eventual conversion to Roman Catholicism about six years ago. I was taught as a child in the Lutheran church that the story of Adam and Eve was a myth used to teach about morality and the relationship between man and God. The word "Adam," I was told, means "mankind". This never made sense to me since the bible itself does not portray it that way. Adam is a person and there is an unbroken time line in biblical history. If Adam and Eve were myths where do you draw the line between the myth and the real history? That always bothered me. I left the church at about age 17. Many years later as an adult when I began learning of the mounting scientific data opposing the theory of evolution, it opened the door to the scriptures for me and I began reading the Bible daily. Eventually I converted to Roman Catholicism. During my RCIA classes the true teaching of the Church on this subject was not offered.…
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Chris Knight
Dear Mr. Owen, Thank you for all your work with the Kolbe Center. My wife and I are recent converts to the Catholic Church and we both believe strongly in the Traditional Catholic Doctrine of Creation, the inerrancy and inspiration of the Bible, and the true literal meaning of Scripture. Please allow me to share my testimony with you. I was raised in a very secular home, with very practical and down-to-earth parents. However, I always had a feeling that there was more to life than the mundane. Because my parents didn't believe in any one organized religion, they allowed me to look into almost any religion, as long as it wasn't "weird" or "occult." I remember that one time my stepmother took my sister and me to a Sunday school class at an evangelical covenant church. Since I had already, by the age of ten become so indoctrinated with the old age of the earth and how the dinosaurs lived millions of years before man, I dismissed Christianity as a whole as superstitious myth. In seventh grade biology, I learned about the various species depicted on one of the infamous "tree of life" illustrations in my science textbook. It…
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Alison Buman
Dear Mr. Owen, At the age of 31, after being a confessed atheist for some ten years or more, I experienced a life-changing conversion to Christianity. My parents had both been members of the Australian Communist Party and I had been indoctrinated at home with atheistic teaching. After I had received my initial conversion and was hungry for the Bible and further teaching, I remember reading a book called The Seal of God by F.C. Payne. At the time I was struggling with many questions as I had been much affected by evolutionary teaching, having received this in my History lessons at High School. I remember that when I finished reading The Seal of God, that I was not only absolutely certain of the existence of God, but I also believed that He was the Creator and that the Bible was in fact the inerrant Word of God and that I should accept and obey all it asked of me. I had had a great struggle with the question of who determines truth and that there must be absolutes in truth and this question was now settled for me for once and for all; the Bible was the absolute truth…
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George Ayer
Dear Mr. Owen, It is amazing how much miraculous work I have seen God do. I came back to a relationship with Christ just over five years ago, in March 2001, at 23 years old — I will be 29 this July 27th. Before this I was heavily into drinking and other addictions, and quite depressed, but I never convinced myself to be an atheist, and I knew that something supernatural was going on because I never got into as much trouble as I should have done!! After my conversion, over time, and after jumping from one evangelical community to another, I wondered if any church could ever be my true home. It was at this time that I began to investigate the Catholic Church. I was working at Teletech in my city of Sudbury at the time, (I am now in university) and a Catholic coworker of mine supported me in my new relationship with the Lord. He invited me to the Catholic charismatic prayer group where he played the keyboard, and while I was going to this group I began to notice differences between Protestant belief and the Catholic Faith, especially in regard to the Holy Eucharist and…
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Hannah Holden
Dear Mr. Owen, I'm a seventeen year old home-schooler, I live in Wichita, Kansas, with my father, mother, brother, and two sisters. My family became Catholic in 1994, and I happily attended our church's school from kindergarten upward, digesting books on biology and paleontology. On Sundays over lunch I would eagerly listen to my Dad reason aloud on the silliness of animals evolving into other kinds, and the way that all of the differently colored nations could stem from Adam and Eve. These topics were fascinating, so I naturally wanted to discuss them with my teachers, in whose classes I earned good grades, and who were my leaders and friends. The first time I raised my hand and questioned my science teacher, that perhaps archaeopteryx was not a missing link between reptiles and birds (as he was saying), but was a fully formed animal, he looked at me like I was insane and said that the evidence for evolution was obvious, but was too complicated to be discussed in a sixth grade classroom. It was disappointing to have him sidestep my questions, but it was heart-wrenching when I asked my religion teacher how six days of creation could possibly fit…
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Rick Mudd
Dear Mr. Owen; I left the Catholic Church in my late teens. I was doing things that made me feel guilty and going to Mass made it worse so instead of repenting, seeking God's forgiveness and the Grace to change, I went my own way. (The song we used at my 8th grade Catholic school graduation was Sinatra's "I Did it My Way"!) During my 20+ years away from the Church I became enamored of the Eastern philosophies of Chuang Tzu, Lao Tzu, Buddhism, Baghwan Shree Rashneesh. To recover from a serious compulsive drinking problem I joined a twelve-step program and began to seek God more systematically in 1988. I read a fair amount of Buddhist literature but also attended Unity church services, First Metaphysical Church of Flint services, read all kinds of pop-psych and new age literature, read some Catholic materials sent by my sister Linda, investigated alternative healing methods, trained in a TM offshoot called Silent Sharing, and studied massage therapy. I went to a Church of the Nazarene service once and attended Mass for a few months while dating a Catholic woman. No conversion yet. In 1998, while working with my sister Linda in a network marketing…
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Steve Fontana
Dear Mr. Owen My conversion to the true wonder of God's creation: About eight or nine years ago my sister called from Florida and asked for prayer for my nephew. She, my brother-in-law and their two children had accepted the truth that God created everything just as Genesis describes. They routinely listened to Protestant Christian Radio and received information from a Protestant Ministry called Answers In Genesis. My nephew, then about 10 years old, defended his creation beliefs when he was confronted with evolution in his Florida public class room. He was well received there and his opinion was given respect. Subsequently, he defended his faith again in his Catholic CCD class where they were openly teaching evolution. In his religion class he was ridiculed by both the instructor and the other students. He was heartbroken, and this is what prompted my sister to call and ask for prayer. My friend Ed Razz had been feeding me tidbits of information about God's Act of Creation, but I didn't think it was a big issue. "After all," I said, "Genesis says that God created Adam from the dust of the earth, and evolution says Adam was created from the dust of…
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Edward Razz
Dear Hugh; I wanted to take this opportunity to share with you the importance of believing the book of Genesis for faith in a personal God. I was born and raised a Catholic, but later in my teen years began to drift away from the faith. I had gradually lost faith in the personal God of the Bible - but never considered myself an atheist. I generally tied evolution and God together in my personal faith journey. After marriage and children - I began to critically re-think the faith. I visited my brother and his family in California and witnessed their strong faith in a personal God. I thought that perhaps I had missed something in my Catholic education that needed revisiting. Upon my return, two close friends offered to come to my house to teach a Bible study on the book of John. I accepted their invitation and just loved it. I was so impressed by the words of Jesus and the message he taught. Having said this - I still did not accept Jesus or the events of the Bible as true. I knew that the Bible recorded many supernatural events - things that just could not be…
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