Sometime between May, 2000 and August, 2001, I went from being a lifelong feminist, atheist copywriter specializing in technical and scientific subjects to becoming a born-again follower of Jesus Christ.

If you're interested, you'll find the details in Heaven Without Her, as well as in the radio interviews I've done and resources I recommend. In the meantime, here are a few of my investigation's highlights.

If you're a believer, I hope this page will provide you with some fodder for sharing the truth with your beloved unbelievers. If you're not, perhaps it will convince you that it's a topic worth investigating.
 
Is there a God?

That was my starting point. Much to my surprise, it was an astoundingly easy question to answer.

That was largely because of the writings of the Intelligent Design (ID) movement, represented by a group of independent professionals, including many Ph.D. scientists. They have amassed evidence proving there's an intelligent designer, without saying exactly who that might be.

In this phase of my quest, I was stunned to learn, for starters, that there are really only two options: the universe came into existence via this intelligent designer, or through random chance over vast eons of time.

Of all the evidence they presented to demonstrate the truth of the former and the nonsense of the latter, a list of the most impressive would have to include:

• The anthropic principle, which says that all the supposedly random and unrelated values in the physics of the universe have this strange thing in common: they're precisely the values needed to support life.

• The fact of irreducible complexity, which points to the countless biological systems that are too complex and mutually dependent to have been formed through the bunches of tiny, independent modifications that evolution says must have happened.

• The lack of any mechanism through which evolution could unfold -- "natural selection" being nothing more than a Quality Control capability, and mutations being almost universally neutral or negative.

Before I looked into any of this, I'd been convinced that of course evolution is true. After just a month or two of weighing the evidence for and against evolution and ID, I could see clearly that I'd been wrong. There had to have been a creator - an intelligent designer that many people call God.

Which God's the real deal?

Early in my quest, I came across a great book on worldviews called The Universe Next Door. I learned that of those worldviews acknowledging both a god and an afterlife, there are essentially two kinds:

• Christianity, which says that the ticket into the afterlife is repenting from our sins and trusting in Jesus Christ to have paid the penalty for them all on the cross. 

• Everything else, from Islam to Hinduism, all of which say that the ticket into the afterlife is being a good person - doing more good than evil, although no one seems to have a clue about how much good is good enough.

Other than my very cool mother, I thought Christians were pretty boring. I didn't want to become one. So I began my search for the real God by investigating Everything Else.

I spent months on this phase, digging deeply for evidence of truth. And came up empty. "Because we have a holy book" is not proof. Nor is "Because there are so many of us" or "Because it works."

Finally, after months of sifting through piles of not-really-evidence, I turned to the Bible - and was blown away by what I found.

First, I could see that it presents in passing dozens of scientific facts that ancient writers could not possibly have known apart from divine inspiration - facts from the earth being round (mentioned by the prophet Isaiah two centuries before it was suggested by Pythagorus, the guy who normally gets the credit) to the sun having its own orbit (proven by modern science in about 1999).

This was the stuff of epiphany. It took me 90% of the way to certainty that the Bible is true, and that it tells us what we need to know about both God and man's past, present and future.
 
But the Lord wasn't finished with me yet. He sealed the deal by introducing me to the Bible's uncanny prophetic accuracy. A history minor in college who'd focused on the modern 20th century era, I was most immediately impressed by the Bible's detailed predictions about the restoration of the nation of Israel. It happened in May of 1948, just as the Bible had said it would in books written 2000 to 3000 years ago.

And then there were the prophecies about the Messiah Himself.

In the end, I was convinced: There is a God, and He is the God of the Bible. And if we have any concern about where we'll spend eternity, we'd best pay close attention to the only book He has ever written.