EPIPHANY: Before Time Zero: The Faith of an Engineer

This book became necessary for me because my professional training, personal observations and industry experience created an awareness of the truths of the physical world. This could have put me at odds with my faith tradition and community worship. Community worship demanded a belief in the inspired, infallible and inerrant Word of God in the Holy Bible.

My community worship was, and is, as an Evangelical Protestant. Evangelical Protestantism, is a worldwide, trans-denominational movement within Protestant Christianity which maintains the belief that the essence of the Gospel consists of the doctrine of salvation by grace through faith in Jesus Christ's atonement for our sin. Evangelicals believe in the centrality of the conversion or "born again" experience in receiving salvation, in the authority of the Bible as God's revelation to humanity, and in spreading the Christian message.

In my mind, the "belief in the authority of the Bible" did not encompass worship of the Bible. My worship has been directed at the Creator of the Universe, my Creator and ultimate Redeemer, Jesus Christ. I did not have any problems with the Bible but, I did have problems with the Fundamentalist literal interpretation of its contents, in particular, that professed by the Young Earth Creation sect. In my professional career, my eyes had seen physical evidence of a much older earth and mathematical computations that supported that observation. However, this did not rule out a spiritual belief. I was not going to let the physical corrupt the spiritual or vice versa.

The older earth concept, cosmology, mathematics and scientific visualization all point to a beginning, and so does the Bible. A beginning of the cosmos raises the question: "What came before that beginning, before time began?"

Martin Capages, Jr. is a retired professional engineer and technical executive. He is an Army veteran. His technical and management experience includes aircraft design, petroleum exploration and production and structural engineering. He began writing political commentary in 2009 and completed his first book, The Moral Case for American Freedom, in July 2017. His writing is from the perspective of a Christian layman, a conservative and Constitutional originalist.