I watched helplessly as my father died a Muslim. Though he and I would argue about my conversion to Christianity, he never embraced the truth of my Christian faith.

As a graduate student studying biochemistry, I was captivated by the cell’s complexity, elegance, and sophistication. The inadequacy of evolutionary scenarios to account for life’s origin compelled me to conclude that life must come from a Creator. Reading through the Sermon on the Mount convinced me that Jesus really was who Christians claimed him to be: Lord and Savior. Still, encouraging others to join me in following Christ wasn’t important to me—until my father died. His death changed that.

In 1999, I left my position in research and development at a Fortune 500 company to join Reasons to Believe. I felt the most important thing I could do as a scientist was to show Christians and non-Christians alike the powerful scientific evidence for God’s existence and for the reliability of the Bible.