My testimony, part 2<\/p>\n
Part 1 TLDR: I was raised christian, later joined the LDS church and felt true conversion. After joining the LDS church, I quit two horrible dead end jobs I hated, moved, went back to school and got my BS in IT. I started going to church in my new town and even went to the temple to be baptized for the dead (an interesting experience, but kind of disappointing too). After about three months I got a new job, which requires me to work graveyard shifts on the weekends. And after trying to still go to church, I finally quit going. But I still had faith, read my scriptures, and prayed most nights.<\/p>\n Later, I had to move to finish my degree (I had been traveling to another city 80 miles away, but now all my classes were an additional 50 miles away. So I moved to be closer. My new job was also graves, but I tried to make it work this time. It was fun. Eventually I got a new job which required tons of driving and moved again.<\/p>\n At this point I had been not attending church for a while and I started listening to podcasts about science and the is a church from former member (who now were atheists). It took me a while to really get engaged with the atheist podcast since I really didn’t like their bluntness, tone, and irrelevant attitudes. But their topics were interesting. The other podcast was about astronomy and science. It was really interesting and it helped me to begin to develop critical thinking skills and learn more about scientific methods. I began to be more critical towards YEC sites as I began to see their hidden problems.<\/p>\n Finally in 2013 finally watched the debate. While I think Nye won the debate, nothing he said really resonated with me (until the end of Q&A) and I really think he was the wrong person to debate Ham. But the last question asked by an audience member about what would their their minds towards their opponents viewpoint really hit home. Nye said “evidence” and Ham said “Nothing”. I saw pure arrogance in that statement. He was so sure of being right, that nothing could change his mind. And in my mind, I thought, what if God Himself told you you were wrong, would he still not change it?<\/p>\n During the debate I had taken notes, so I decided to fact check claims. Nye really didn’t make too many points that I felt were new to me, but Ham made several. So I fact checked him. I read for several months about Lenskis experiment on e coli. I read both his papers, blog posts, watched his dissertation video online, read up on terms….all of this for several months. Turns out, Ham misrepresented what really happened. Now in my opinion, Ham had a strong case of he had only said it wasn’t evolution to another kind, but I think he wanted to make a stronger case and maybe stretch the truth, somewhat, maybe to avoid any doubt in his followers minds. Nevertheless, his statement wasn’t true.<\/p>\n But, I didn’t just take that one example. I had to be fair. So I researched c14 dating for about 6 months to a year. I read up on terms, ideas, concepts, and theories. I asked questions on forums and read other debates on forums. This is how I discovered that Andrew Snellings and Steve Austin lied too. (to see why I think so, checkout my blog post on blog.philibytes.com<\/a>). I was devastated. I’ve read other stuff and continued to listen to podcasts and debates but the more I looked, the less convinced I became that YEC was indeed true.<\/p>\n At some point in early 2015, I reached a point, where I knew enough to say YEC was false.
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\nPart 2 TLDR: I watched Ken hams debate, fact check ham, left YEC, decided to research my early Christian faith, and am still searching, but consider myself an agnostic theist with strongly held atheistic leanings<\/p>\n
\nAnd at that point I had realized that my new beliefs challenged my thoughts about the bible. I had read some stuff by Hugh Ross, and other old earth creationists, and while their ideas seemed to be extremely convoluted attempts to make scripture fit evidence, I wanted to know if I could find a way to reconcile my beliefs. I knew there was a danger I would unravel my beliefs completely. I considered stopping before, before but I had to know if what I believed was true.<\/p>\n