Don Feidner

Last Update:   24 June 2018

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While I was working for the US Government in Atlanta, Georgia, I was honored to be able to meet several scientists and corporate executives that were Christians. In fact, nearly every person I met – including a few CEOs who were rich beyond imagination – believed in God.

One day Peter, a scientist that I met in Alabama, said to me, “No one alive could possibly be honest with himself and believe that this earth and the laws of science could have just evolved – that they could be a mistake”. Peter was an astrophysicist and inventor in a support organization for NASA – a man with an extremely high IQ. He continued, “There must have been ‘Someone’ out there who designed all this.” I had to agree. The laws of science and nature are complete, and they are perfectly and logically ordered. The only thing we haven’t been able to harness is the social behavior of man. By the way, Peter was an agnostic, who absolutely did not want to believe in God, but he also admitted that there is no way that this planet earth and its complexity could all just.... HAPPEN.

I’m sure you will find this interesting. Here is a list of leading scientists, who all had one thing in common – a solid faith in a living God:

  • Sir Francis Bacon (Lord Chancellor of England)
  • Johann Kepler (laws of planetary motion)
  • Blaise Pascal (mathematician, philosopher, hydrodynamics)
  • Robert Boyle (father of modern chemistry)
  • Sir Isaac Newton (law of gravitation)
  • Michael Faraday (electricity and magnetism)
  • Samuel Morse (Morse code)
  • James Joule (thermodynamics)
  • Louis Pasteur (germ theory and pasteurization)
  • William Thompson and Lord Kelvin (famous physicists)
  • Joseph Lister (antiseptic surgery)
  • George Washington Carver (agricultural scientist)
  • Werner von Braun (father of US space program)

There are many more, so I won’t list them all. Check this link: http://www.unmaskingevolution.com/29-100_scientists.htm

Here’s a quote from Dr. Werner von Braun: “In this modern world of ours, many people seem to think that science has somehow made such religious ideas as immortality untimely or old fashioned. I think science has a real surprise for the skeptics. Science, for instance, tells us that nothing in nature, not even the tiniest particle, can disappear without a trace. Nature does not know extinction. All it knows is transformation. If God applies this fundamental principle to the most minute and insignificant parts of His universe, doesn’t it make sense to assume that He applies it to the masterpiece of His creation, the human soul?”

Even Albert Camus, atheist and author of The Plague, The Stranger and other existential works, initially believed that the world was senseless and without meaning. Towards the end of his life, Camus made a commitment to faith in God.

CIMG1594_Walter_Haussermann

Dr. Walter Häussermann - September 2010

This picture was taken when Walter was 96, only 2 months before he passed away. I was on a bicycle trip from Indiana to Florida and wanted to visit him one last time.

Last but not least is Walter Häussermann, Director of Astrionics for NASA, who helped to develop the guidance system for the first V2 rocket at Peenemünde during WWII. Later he became a member of Werner von Braun’s team working on spherical geometry (used to guide our rockets into space) in the US Space program. While I was working in Atlanta, I counted it an honor to meet and talk with Dr. Häussermann -- not only once, but several times. He also met my wife and invited us to dinner with his wife, Ruth. I admired him, not only because of his scientific achievements, but because he was a true gentleman that genuinely cared about other people. I remember one comical occasion in a dry county in Alabama, when we were dining together at a small restaurant. He pulled out a paper bag and – with a wink and a big smile on his face – opened a bottle inside the bag and poured a beer into our glasses. There was no law against that. He was solid as a rock in the faith, but never without his beer – just like Martin Luther and John Wesley.

Knowing Dr. Häussermann was one of the greatest highlights of my life. Several times, he and I sat in his home in Huntsville, Alabama, together with his wife Ruth, and chatted about God and the universe. When I was in Huntsville on Sundays, I attended church services with them. He once took me to the Marshall Space Flight Center where he worked and showed me a lightweight moon buggy his team had developed. He took me to a special building at the center, where I carefully examined the space shuttle Challenger and ran my hands over it – dreaming of going to the stars someday. (If you remember, the Challenger exploded on Jan 28, 1986, killing all aboard, including a school teacher from Illinois. I still remember the tears in my eyes when Angela and I heard that terrible news in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, where we lived at the time.) Dr. Häussermann showed me the 30-foot high fish tank where the astronauts learned to deal with the feeling of weightlessness and helplessness and to do complicated tasks under water in a space suit with little flexibility of movement. All this was only a job for him – a means to an end. He said that his faith in God was a “matter of fact” for him. “Without it, life would be meaningless.”

One Like a Brother

The person who most influenced my understanding of Christianity and caused me to begin to really think about God (rather than accept everything I heard) was not a scientist, but I would place him right up there with all the great thinkers I’ve read about or met. His name is Mike.

My wife, Angela, and I met Mike and his lovely wife, Ann, in Hawaii in 1986. Mike was pastoring a small non-denominational church in a rented room on the north end of Pearl Harbor. Many people who attended his meetings have said that his preaching was somewhat unconventional -- and it was. If I read my bible correctly, Jesus himself was extremely unconventional in his day as well. For the first time in my life I heard someone who was not afraid to tell the truth about what we humans are really like -- often using his own shortcomings as examples. In most churches I had attended where pastors were attempting expository teaching, they were whizzing through the bible so fast, I had no time to think about what was going on. Mike sometimes spent several weeks examining a single chapter in the bible, taking his listeners back into history to talk about how the people lived when a particular passage was written, and explaining all the possible nuances of meaning that the Greek language could have meant in that particular situation. Most importantly, I never left a meeting of his feeling like I had heard it all before. Unconventional, who cares? I was learning how to live!

It was also the first time I was able to go to a church where no one was interested in what kind of clothes anyone else was wearing -- and many attending his church were wearing T-shirts and shorts. (The apostle Paul was much the same way when he wrote a letter to the Galations 1:10:

“Am I now trying to win the approval of men, or of God? Or am I trying to please men? If I were still trying to please men, I would not be a servant of Christ.”

What was important to Mike, and to the members in that church, was learning more about Jesus Christ and demonstrating God’s love to each other. In that group, we lived as a family -- eating together, swimming together, learning how to hula dance together, helping each other in our homes, surfing together, hiking together, laughing together, singing together, praising God together, and praying together. Togetherness was commonplace, and even when there were disagreements, we were able to work them out quickly. If I’ve ever known anyone in my life who was being used by God to teach His children, it was Mike. Mike was never fatherly to his members, but more like a brother -- to all of us -- and he was learning right along with the rest of us. Today, Mike and Ann live on the coast of Oregon.

The moral of this story: If people would just begin to think about the world they are living in, they would come to the same conclusion that all of the intelligent people mentioned above have come to -- that God not only exists, but that they need to be doing something about it -- before it’s too late.

Famous Last Words

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