By Gordon Cameron
My background story…
I’m a son of the manse. My father was a Church of Scotland minister and from 1958 (when I was 4 years old) until I went to Glasgow University we lived in one of the 10 most deprived villages in Scotland – Kirkconnel, a mining village which became even more depressing when the pit closed in the mid-1960s. Being an “in-comer” to the village and the minister’s son made growing up in Kirkconnel “challenging” to put it mildly.
Obviously religion played a large part in my early life – I had to attend all the church services, but my real passion, interest and time was spent on anything scientific – I loved science and maths. The sad thing is that I have no recollection of my father’s sermons, but he worked tirelessly among the miners’ families in Kirkconnel dealing with their social problems. I have memories of miners’ wives arriving at the manse door at midnight having been thrown out of the house by their drunken husband, seeking help from my father. My father died suddenly in 1969, when I was 16, I believe as a result of the pressure of the work he was doing.
My mission in life as a teenager was to get out of Kirkconnel as soon as possible and study science and mathematics at university. I succeeded, and in 1970 went to Glasgow University. Finally I was free to reject completely my “religious” past and start a new life. I became an atheist (at least I thought I was) – rejecting completely the relevance of God and Christianity. I believed that science was all that mattered and it had the answers to everything. I had absolutely no interest in religion and saw it at a crutch for weak, stupid people.
Then in my final year I met Brenda Miller – she was in my Honours Statistics class and was a bit of a “looker”. I never really spoke much to her in lectures and labs but after our final exams I asked her out. That evening in the QM Union bar was life changing. She told me she was a Christian and believed in the Bible. I was utterly astonished that any intelligent person could believe the Bible and decided to set about proving to her that it was all a load of myths, lies and fairy stories!
Over the next few months I read the Bible and other religious book, talked to religious people of every type, visited churches, listened to sermons and argued violently with Brenda and other Christians. However, not only were my attempts to disprove the Bible failing but I was beginning to think there was actually some truth in it.
After graduating, I took a job as a statistician in the Scottish Office in Edinburgh. I detested it! I had to work within Civil Service protocols which were contained in 4 large red ring binders. This was the time of the SNP’s campaign “Scotland’s Oil” and I got into all kinds of trouble, being an SNP supporter, working for the UK Civil Service. One of my jobs was to collate statistics on North Sea oil production and fishing landings. My calling them “Scottish assets” in an official government publication was not acceptable!! After 6 weeks I could stand it no longer and resigned and went to Jordanhill to study to become a science and maths teacher – that is what I had always wanted to do anyway.
I continued to meet with Christians during this time and while in Edinburgh I had an epiphany. While sitting in my room in Edinburgh one evening, thinking over things, I came to the sudden realisation that I did believe in God! However this then caused me a big problem – having accepted that God exists, what was my relationship with him?
The concept of being a sinner had never bothered me before, but now it did – big time! If the Bible was correct and I was rapidly coming to the conclusion that it was, if I died without getting myself right with God, I would fall into the hands of a righteous God who would condemn me to hell for my sin. This was not good news. The old fashioned term “conviction of sin” was what I was experiencing. I had to get this sorted out one way or another. Either I reject the whole thing and got on with my life or I find out how to fix it.
No longer was I trying to disprove the Bible, I was looking for the truth of this thing called the Gospel. Of course I didn’t admit this to anyone! Then one Sunday evening at the start of November 1975 after I had attended a service at Harper Memorial Baptist Church I was sitting in my flat in Partick. I opened my Bible and started reading the book of Romans. I got as far as Romans 3 and read this:
“…for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement, through the shedding of his blood —to be received by faith.”
Romans 3:23-35
I read it over and over again till eventually it made sense. That night I repented and put my faith in Jesus. At once I had peace with God. I had been born again, converted, become a Christian.
My 46 year journey as a Christian is another story…….
One point I would like to make is that it was not until I had been a Christian for many years that I became a creationist. It was as a result of talking to other creationists and studying the topic I became convinced that the Genesis record was the true explanation for “life the universe and everything” (apologies to HHGTTG). As time has gone on I am even more convinced that Darwinian evolution cannot explain the origins of life or the complexity of life on Earth today. The only rational explanation is that God created.
Oh, and one other thing – Brenda Miller became Brenda Cameron!
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