He Was There With Me In the Furnace: Remembering a Crisis of Faith

I had the great benefit of growing up in a deeply religious family. This meant that we were in church every Sunday, said grace before meal times, and regularly had spiritual conversations. My parents gave me a Bible for my seventh birthday. I read it through from cover to cover by the time that I was ten. It was only natural that I should decide to attend Bible college and prepare for ministry as a preacher and missionary. So, when I experienced a crisis of faith years later, it was a truly excruciating experience.

In my church and Bible college there were certain assumptions about the parameters of biblical research. There was a simple logic behind it all that went something like this. We can recognize that there is a God because of the world around us. We can perceive that this God is wise, all-powerful and that He is good from the same testaments of creation. If God is wise and good, then surely He would communicate with us.

The Bible is the record of that communication. If the Bible is the message from the all-good, all-wise, and all-powerful God, then surely He has preserved it from errors of every kind. Consequently, anyone who is trying to provide an alternative to the history and scientific information in the Bible is actually attempting to undermine the Bible’s credibility. We portrayed the people doing this as having a well-thought out agenda. We also labeled them “liberals.”

My Fundamentalist Upbringing

I learned that the world is only about 6000 years old, in accord with a strictly literal acceptance of the biblical chronology. The scientific establishment manufactured their so-called evidence for evolution as part of a vast conspiracy. Moses wrote the Pentateuch. Isaiah wrote Isaiah. David wrote the Psalms ascribed to him. Anyone who suggested otherwise was a liberal, chipping away at the foundation of faith in the Bible as God’s Word.

This is what I learned, taught and preached up until I was nearly thirty years old. This was an extremely chaotic period in my life. We were living overseas. Exposure to Judaism, the ancient churches of the Holy Land, and the Church Fathers had caused my wife and me to begin the difficult journey into the Catholic Church. And then, late one night, I decided to investigate a developing suspicion that kept niggling at me. So began my crisis of faith.

How I Met Nyū Nesshii

When I was very young, I attended a Creation Science seminar. It was quite sensational. In one of the slideshows, there were pictures of human footprints alongside of dinosaur footprints from Glen Rose, Texas. The speaker regaled us with amazing eyewitness testimonies of cowboys encountering pteranodons in the Old West. And then he showed us this:

Nyū Nesshii: A Plesiosaur?

That is a picture of a cryptid that the Japanese call Nyū Nesshii, i.e., “New Nessie.” The Japanese fishing trawler, the Zuiyō-Maru, hoisted it up off the coast of New Zealand in 1977. Unfortunately, after the crew took a small sample of its corpse, they tossed Nyū Nesshi back into the ocean because it smelled so terrible. But this photo created a minor sensation, because based on appearances alone, it really does look like a plesiosaur.

The speaker acknowledged that the scientific community had determined that the Zuiyō-Maru carcass was a basking shark, not a plesiosaur. He did not tell us how they had determined this. (More on that in a bit). But who were we going to trust, after all? These scientists were obviously in cahoots with the other scientists driving the evolution narrative. We could not trust these ideologues. I mean, look at that picture of the rotting corpse. Does that look like a basking shark to you?

I loved this sort of thing when I was a kid. The idea that dinosaurs could still be living in the ocean depths filled me with wonder. I thrilled to the pictures of baby brontosauruses on Noah’s Ark. And of course, it was comforting to be able to read the Bible and accept everything I read uncritically and at face value, especially as I grew older and life became more and more confusing.

I Research Nyū Nesshii As an Adult

For some reason or other, when I was about thirty years old, I dredged up all of this stuff about the Zuiyō-Maru carcass again. (Did you see what I did there?). I don’t remember if it was something I came across on the Internet late at night, or if it came up in conversation with a fellow that I drank coffee with back in those days. But someone somewhere challenged my easy-going belief that the the Zuiyō-Maru had pulled up a plesiosaur from the ocean in 1977. I was heading for a crisis of faith.

It was time to do some research. I googled “plesiosaur, Japanese fishing boat” and began to sift through the information. I wanted to reassure myself that the evidence for this being a basking shark was questionable, at best. What I found was something quite different.

Nyū Nesshii: Not a Plesiosaur

It turns out that the research done on the Zuiyō-Maru carcass extended well beyond “hunches” that it was a basking shark. Scientists extensively examined the tissue sample that the fishing boat took from the carcass.

There have been several publications that have dealt with this. The most complete and accessible one that I know of is an article by Glen Kuban, “Sea-monster or Shark? An Analysis of a Supposed Plesiosaur Carcass Netted in 1977,” published in Reports of the National Center for Science Education , May/June 1997, Vol. 17, No. 3, pp. 16-28.

There is a whole lot in that article, but two things really convinced me that this was a basking shark, and not a plesiosaur. First of all, the cell structure of the flesh was in the form of “horny fibers” that were “rigid, needle-like structures that tapered toward both ends and had a translucent light-brown color.”

This structure is exactly what researchers find in the cartilage of basking sharks. Secondly, scientists conducted a gross amino acid analysis of the samples from the carcass, and discovered that they were full of elastoidin, “a collagenous protein known only from sharks and rays (not reptiles or even other fish).”

What Young Earth Creationists Have Done with this Research

These studies were conducted in the late seventies, immediately after the discovery of the Zuiyō-Maru carcass. They seem to have conclusively proven that what those fishermen hauled up was a basking shark, not a plesiosaur. And yet, the speaker at that seminar, and numerous other sources that I encountered later, assured me that the claim that the carcass was a basking shark was really only a clumsy guess, motivated by the incredulity of scientists that this was indeed a plesiosaur.

To this day, creationists continue to gloss over the compelling evidence that the Zuiyō-Maru carcass is actually a basking shark. This site is just one example. This is unconscionable and deceitful. The Ten Commandments command us, “You shall not bear false witness” (Exodus 20:17). That some Christians continue to bear false witness in regards to the Zuiyō-Maru carcass is a cause of scandal.

Bearing False Witness

That some Christians continued to bear false witness in regards to the Zuiyō-Maru carcass was a cause of scandal to me, personally. It instigated a crisis of faith. When I discovered that there was more to the story of the plesiosaur, information that seemed to have been intentionally withheld in those seminars, books, courses, Sunday School classes, etc., I felt betrayed. I was extremely angry.

But a terrible thought generated in the back of my brain, and grew in intensity until it screamed in my mind day and night: if people that I knew, loved and trusted had lied to me about a stupid, fake plesiosaur, what hadn’t they lied to me about? If this wasn’t true, what was? Was anything that I had believed true? Now my crisis of faith was edging into doubt.

Cast Into the Furnace: My Crisis of Faith

As I mentioned at the beginning of this piece, a whole lot was going on at this time in my life to contribute to this crisis of faith. We were living overseas. We were considering becoming Catholic. I was working on a graduate degree in Hebrew Bible. Studying Church history and the writings of the Church Fathers brought up all kinds of other questions about things that I had heard about the Catholic Church, things that I was finding out were just not true. And studying the Hebrew Bible was convincing me that the old, traditional claims for authorship of many books of the Bible were extremely problematic.

All of this underlined my deepening suspicions that for much of my religious education, my teachers had given me a carefully constructed version of reality. As this version of reality began to crumble, I began to feel paranoid and alone.

Trying to remember this experience is difficult now. My crisis of faith comes to me in images. I see myself falling through space, as though the bottom has been pulled out of everything. I picture myself in a dark cave, unaware of a way out.

For a few days, the terrifying possibility that I was going to become an atheist loomed large before me.

The Burning Furnace of Doubt

This was absolutely excruciating. Since faith was such an intrinsic part of my personal identity, I didn’t know how I would carry on. What would my life look like without it? I was tempted to retreat into an easy and assured Fundamentalism, and abandon my no-holds-barred search for truth. But the incongruence of ignoring certain truths for the sake of religious Truth stared me in the face, and so I carried on through my crisis of faith.

I took stock of what I did and did not know for sure. Had any of my religious teachers been completely honest with me? I was in the middle of considering a transition to a new set of teachers in the Catholic Church. There was no assurance that they were any more worthy of my trust.

And now the possibility emerged that even the Bible, up till that moment the foundation of my faith, might not provide an exit from my doubt. The human authorship of the Bible was becoming more and more apparent, and the old proofs for its divine authorship that I had learned in church and college now appeared tattered and thin.

The Burning Furnace of Doubt Begins to Swallow Up Everything

For all that, I wasn’t ready to trust other human authorities, like the scientific establishment, either. If people in the church could lie, people in lab coats could, too. And I had audited a course in the philosophy of science. I knew that scientists had their own blind spots. Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions played an important role in that regard.

And I certainly wasn’t prepared to go relativist. I trusted my own instincts and perception least of all. As much as the Zuiyō-Maru carcass had eroded my confidence in my creationist instructors, it had made me aware of my own incapabilities to discern what was true.

I was adrift in a sea of doubt, sinking into despair.

The Familiar Presence in the Furnace of Doubt

And that’s when I was enveloped in a familiar grace. In the midst of this ocean of skepticism, as I was desperately attempting to tread water, there was one reality that imposed itself so strongly on my mind and emotions that I simply could not cast it aside with everything else. Any rational arguments for belief in God seemed hollow now in contrast with my indisputable experience of His presence and work in my life. And that presence and work was especially palpable in the person of Jesus.

Existentially, I simply could not apply the same radical skepticism to Him that everything else was just crumbling under. With Him it would not work. Past experience of miraculous intervention was compelling enough on its own terms. (Perhaps I will share a few of those stories here). But at this moment in my life, what I found most indisputable was the undeniable sense of His presence.

So, together, we started to make our way back to solid ground. Beginning not with any teachers, or a particular church, or even the Bible, but with Jesus Himself, I was able to recover my faith. My faith was different. It had been stripped down, and built back up. Lots of things that I would have regarded as essential to my faith before the crisis were gone. But there was also continuity.

Jesus is the Foundation of My Faith

One of the things that I had learned in my Young Earth Creationist days was that modern scientific theories were an attack on the very foundation of our faith. This image, from Ken Ham’s “Answers in Genesis,” is illustrative.

This particular image is from a 2004 publication. But I remember an almost identical one from materials that I saw in the 80s and in my Creation Science course in the 90s.

In the gradually accumulating peace that followed my crisis of faith, I thought about this image many times. I realized that folks like Ken Ham would now perceive me as one of the foolish Christians firing away at the foundation of the Christian faith. And then I realized what a terrible lie this piece of propaganda is. No single theory of human origins or cosmology could ever be the foundation of our faith, no matter how biblical it was. Jesus is the foundation of our faith. In fact, St. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 3:11, “For no other foundation can any one lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ.”

The Freedom of Making Jesus My Foundation

Making a determined effort to live with Jesus as the foundation of my faith, and, really, every other aspect of my life, has proven to be remarkably freeing. I don’t have to force science to fit a preconceived notion of what I think the Bible is saying about it. I can be more flexible with different possibilities proposed by biblical scholarship. Since my faith is not founded on the Bible, but on Jesus, I don’t have to be threatened by ideas that challenge what I have thought the Bible was saying. I’m not attempting to force the Bible to bear a burden that it was never intended to carry. The result has been that I now believe more than ever that the Bible is a faithful testament to Jesus.

I realize that my own interpretations of the Scriptures are prone to error. As a Catholic, I am thankful for the guidance the Holy Spirit provides through His Church, but even so, there is room for doubt. The only thing that I know for absolute certain is that Jesus has personally intervened time and time again in my life to envelope me in His grace. To date, the most dramatic evidence that I have for Jesus’ faithfulness is His presence during those horrifying few days when I wondered whether or not I actually believed anything.