Personal Testimonies

  • Theodore Holthe

    I grew up in a secular and only loosely religious home. I was never taken to church by my parents, and in the first 25 years of my life I only attended a Christian Sunday service three times (and all three were Protestant services). I grew up with the usual obligatory teaching that evolution was a theory but basically true and you were silly to reject it; that the earth was very old and the universe even older; and that science was the grand arbiter of truth, being a disinterested middle man only concerned about facts. I would become a militant atheist in high school, having mostly negative experiences with Christians, and having a very short-sighted mind which was quick to judge. I embraced Communism as a good idea, being ignorant and young and knowing nothing at all about the practical effects of the ideology, nor its bloody history. After a few years of this I would “cool down” a bit, still being very much against religion but less aggressive about it.  It was around this time that God seemed to give me a small grace of insight, as I found myself unknowingly musing on aspects of St. Thomas Aquinas'…

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  • Michael Dekee

    I wanted to give my story. I'm from Belgium and I'm the author of the Dutch language book called 'The Theory of Evolution Debunked' (De evolutietheorie ontkracht) and the website http://evolutietheorie-ontkracht.com. I was raised as a Catholic, but I had become lukewarm. Since my childhood I was very much interested in nature, and by the time I went to university to study biology, I was an amateur-taxidermist with a large collection of fossils, shells, skeletons etc., and I cleaned and articulated many of the skeletons myself. I was very involved in biology, and I was a member of several biological associations. In 2011 I had a dream about Judgement Day, and I found myself unprepared. So, when I woke up, I realized I had to learn to pray again. I was in my second year at university. Then, at the end of my third year, when I had difficulties with the course 'evolution' - because of my renewed faith - I had this dream: I had an evolution exam and it didn't work out very well, suddenly I stood next to a priest who had a Bible in his hand, and he said: "God created the world; He created Adam…

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  • Eva

    I wasn't raised Catholic and viewed the Catholic Church and the notion of God and submission to the Church as any other atheist: an authoritarian, intrusive obstacle to my liberty. Raised in public school, this notion was rooted deeper throughout the years in my soul. Convinced, in my feminist pride, I even went and took a 4-year B.Sc. (called a licentiate) in Biochemistry, and was ready to use it against religion. Besides, I was close to satanism. I hated the Catholic Church. Contrast this with the fact that all this happened in Portugal, a land of Catholic roots. Nowadays most young people are atheist or at best indifferent. In Portugal, there are only two options: either you're Catholic or you're an atheist. I know very well what atheists mean when they say that "God did it" doesn't explain anything. When reason doesn't work, that's what you get - they have no clue who God is. Nor does it matter to them, because they are only interested in pleasures. Having always had an attraction for philosophy, I began to thirst for truth and realized that even though Catholicism was all around me, my family and some friends were Catholic, my country…

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  • Dr. Kevin Mark, D.M.D.

    Dear Mr. Owen, Thank you so much for you diligence in upholding the traditional Catholic and true view of the history of the Earth. I am a dentist in Killarney, Manitoba, Canada, and my wife and I and four children will be received into the Catholic Church at the Easter Vigil. The main points that forced me to convert are the Church's stances regarding the evil of contraception, the heresy of sola fide, the concept of Sacred Tradition and the testimony of the Apostolic Fathers (vs. sola scriptura), the oneness of the Church (vs. the brokenness of Protestantism), the necessity of Baptism, and the Real Presence of Our Lord Jesus Christ in the Holy Eucharist. Through your website and recordings I've watched/listened to on YouTube, you have helped me to want to continue entering the Catholic Church in spite of the huge numbers of Catholics who believe in molecules-to-man evolution. It is abundantly clear to me from a scientific perspective that the theory of evolution is false, that it is theologically contrary to the teaching of the Bible and to the true character of God. While I have been greatly dismayed by the thoughts and actions of many a Catholic…

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  • Janice Money

    As a child, I learned about evolution at school and in books.  Therefore it had the stamp of authority and I believed it.  At age 8, when I started Sunday School, I was given a Bible and first read Genesis.  I was deeply impressed.  How clever of God, I thought, to have managed to have His creation story written so that, at least in some respects, it matched the evolutionary story I already knew. Over the next 7 years I heard no hint from anyone at church that evolution might not be true.  Indeed, as an exam prize I was given a book that promotes belief in theistic evolution.  In its first 2 chapters my copy of “More Living Things for Lively Youngsters” describes the origin of the solar system and of life on earth in standard evolutionary terms.  Mention of God is restricted to noting that the Bible says man was made from the dust of the earth, as though God used the evolution of life from non-living matter to make man. Two of my high school friends were from strongly atheist families.  They argued that evolution proves that God is an unnecessary idea.  I could see the logic…

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  • Stone Robbins

    Thanks be to God, through the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, I converted to the Catholic Church three years ago at the age of 17. Coming from a secular background, I at first felt very at home with evolutionary beliefs going hand in hand with my newly found Catholic faith. It was not until I went to college that I began to recognize the serious inconsistencies with this position. I had tried to maintain a certain confidence that the teachings of the Church and "modern science" were compatible. I even tried to use evolution as a way to reach out to my atheistic professors, who would typically shoot down the notion with statements such as "evolution takes away the need of a creator God." However, I couldn't reconcile the fact that polygenism, an idea widely accepted by modern science, is regarded as heretical according to Catholic teaching. After I came to this realization, everything fell into place.  If Jesus could create enough bread and fish to feed 5,000, why couldn't God create the known universe in 6 days? Why would God allow hundreds of millions of years of death and sickness before opening the annals of salvation history? If…

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  • Kevin Heldt

    Dear Mr. Owen, I want to thank you for all your great work with the Kolbe Center and for your clear and helpful writings regarding the Catholic Church and evolution. My wife and I (and our seven children) entered full communion with the Catholic Church last fall.  Lifelong Christians, we were first drawn to the Church when we discovered the beautiful teachings underpinning Her stand against contraception.  God had brought us to a firm personal conviction against contraception early in our marriage.  Years later, when we learned what the Catholic Church taught about marital sexuality, we knew we needed to keep reading and to begin to evaluate these claims we never knew She'd made.  Did Jesus really leave behind a hierarchical Church to guide and teach us?  Is the Church really protected by the Holy Spirit from teaching error? I can say without hesitation that the single biggest hurdle for me in coming to believe these claims was the appearance, from the outside, that the Church accepts evolution.  I've known for a long time that the theory of evolution is incompatible with not only Scripture, but with science itself, so it was very unsettling to read so many Catholics making accommodations for it.  I wondered how…

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  • | May we place your testimony here? |

      Are you a former evolutionist, who has come to believe in the traditional Catholic doctrine of creation? If so, would you be willing to share an account of your conversion, in 600 words or less? Please explain briefly what you used to believe about origins, what changed your mind, and how that change has affected your life — especially your relationship with God. Please use the contact information on the web site to obtain an e-mail address for your testimony.  

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  • Marya Tipton

    Mr. Hugh Owen, Director The Kolbe Center for the Study of Creation To whom it may concern, As a Byzantine Catholic, catechist and chastity educator, I would like to express the sincerest gratitude to Hugh Owen for his presentation on the Church’s teaching on special creation and would recommend him to speak for any other parish or group. His expertise on the teachings received from the Apostles through the Early Church Fathers is a gift to the people of faith the world over. As a Byzantine Catholic, I belong to a community that most feels the pain of the separation between the Eastern and Western “lungs” of our Church, as John Paul II called them. If we are to answer the call to Christian unity and the New Evangelization, it is imperative to approach our efforts with a mind toward ressourcement, a return to earlier sources, traditions and symbols of the early Church. The work that Hugh Owen is doing through the Kolbe Center for the Study on Creation is exactly what the Church Universal needs to answer our Lord’s prayer “that they may be one.” In the early liturgy, iconography, Holy Scriptures, and writings of the Church Fathers, we…

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  • Keith Scott

    Dear. Mr. Owen, Thank you for your website. I stumbled across it at just the right time in my life. You see, I have been an ordained youth pastor in two mainline Protestant denominations for the past decade. When I was encouraged by my local church to pursue a Master of Divinity degree, I began my studies and fell in love with the Church Fathers. While I began to see the truth of the Catholic Faith through my study of Patristics, and then by reading modern Catholic apologists, I knew that the only right course for me was to enter the Catholic Church in full fellowship. As you can imagine, it has been a hard and painful road for someone with a young family, walking away from a career with a family to support. My wife and I met our real test of faith when we began our RCIA class this past fall. We found what we perceived to be a low view of Scripture and Tradition. Scripture was interpreted with what I would call a "hyper-allegorical" hermeneutical approach. The teachings of the Fathers were also reduced to a subjective experience for their time not ours. Within this framework, the…

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