How Dr. Walter Bradley helped me keep my faith at university and in the workplace

My close friends know that Walter Bradley is the Christian scholar I admire the most. I’ve mentioned Dr. Bradley on the Knight and Rose Show several times, and plugged the book about his life “For a Greater Purpose: The Life and Legacy of Walter Bradley“. Dr. William Dembski, one of early proponents of intelligent design, wrote an article about his life that I think you might like.

My good friend Kevin, who is an amazing Christian man and a real hero to me, mentioned an article about Dr. Bradley by Dr. William Dembski. Kevin asked me to write something of my own. Work has just been draining all my fuel lately, so this is the best I can do. I am not a perfectionist, and I try to write these posts in under 1-2 hours each day, so there is a lot more to say than what you will find here.

I first encountered Dr. Bradley shortly after I arrived in America by  ordering some of his campus lectures from Veritas Forum. These lectures had a huge impact on me, even causing me to have a plan to do a PhD in computer science and go into teaching. I figured out by listening to all of Dr. Bradley’s lectures that this is what he was always urging Christian graduate students to do. Well, my plans got derailed because it took me 16 years to get a permanent residency, and another 5 years to get my citizenship. Even if I got the PhD then, I would have much less time for research and teaching.

Still, I thought it might be fun to list out the lectures that I ordered from Veritas Forum that featured Walter Bradley:

• Dr. Walter Bradley – Giants In The Land – Georgia – 1997
• Dr. Walter Bradley – Scientific Evidence for an Intelligent Designer – Georgia – 1997
• Dr. Walter Bradley – Scientific Evidence for an Intelligent Designer – Penn State – 1997
• Dr. Walter Bradley – A Scientist’s Quest For Success – Penn State – 1997
• Dr. Walter Bradley – Truth In Religion – Georgia – 1997
• Dr. Walter Bradley – Truth In Religion – Penn State – 1997

If you want to listen to some of these lectures, I uploaded them as MP3s here, from the original audio cassettes, which are unavailable now, and not online anywhere. The key ones are the “Testimony”, and the 3 versions of “Giants in the Land”. The sound quality is not the best, and there is a pause in the recording from when I flipped the cassettes. If you listen to those, and read “Cyrano de Bergerac” in the original French, then you’ll know a lot about me.

The Walter Bradley lectures I remember the most were Testimony and different versions of Giants in the Land. He talked about how he grew up. His Dad committed suicide when he was young, and he was always poor. He worked a lot of jobs to make ends meet, and was excellent in his academic studies and sports. He wanted so badly to be a success, but found achieving success very empty and unfulfilling. What was fulfilling for him was his relationship with God, and serving God. It’s lessons like this that allowed me to persist all this time, even without the traditional home and church community that most Christians have. I was trained by these two lectures to operate alone in a harsh environment, like a secular university or workplace.

One part that stood out to me was his explanation of how he stopped viewing Christianity as a set of rules, instead of as a relationship. He explained this by telling how his affection for his girlfriend and eventual wife Ann caused him to finally understand that Christianity was not about stopping the things that you most liked doing, and starting the things that you least liked doing. Even though he didn’t have a lot of money for dating, he liked to take Ann on dates, because he loved her. And that’s how Christians ought to feel about the how the Boss wants them to act. Prioritizing Boss in your conduct and life-planning is easy when you are in a relationship with a Boss who leads from the front. For me, a valuable lesson was that you don’t have to care about your reputation if you are excellent in things like education, career, marriage and finances.

He also talked a lot about how to be a Christian in academia, and the importance of professors being a resource for their students. He was very familiar with the law, and threatened to sue whenever he had to “butt heads” with the Dean. But he also had a lot of amazing adventures by being willing to be identified as a Christian. He explains in “Giants in the Land” how he would feel about identifying as a Christian to his secular colleagues. If only every Christian son and daughter could have heard this lecture before going to college, we would never have lost any of them. Listening to Dr. Bradley talk about the struggles of being a Christian on a secular university campus was just magical. I think a lot of them just feel ashamed of moral rules and truth claims that they were never prepared to answer in university or in the workplace. They were never taught to see the life of an evidence-wielding secret agent as more fun than getting drunk and having hook-up sex.

Walter Bradley’s thoughts about being a Christian in a hostile environment formed my character and prepared me for the secular workplace. Unlike many Christian leaders who started out conservative and then caved to the secular left for prestige, I never expected non-Christians co-workers to like me. Walter Bradley had already warned me not to expect that. I built my castle with scientific evidence, up on the hill of analytical philosophy from William Lane Craig. Later on, I added a moat around the castle, with the economics of Hayek and Sowell. I never did get to be a Christian professor like Dr. Bradley. I used to cry about how long it was taking for me to make progress on my “become a Christian professor” plan. Maybe some day… I have had offers to teach introductory computer science courses at Christian universities.

I wish more of our Christian leaders were evidence-based like Dr. Bradley – then then we’d avoid the issues plaguing many denominations. Whenever you look at someone like Russell Moore, David French, Brent Leatherwood, Ed Stetzer, David Platt, etc., you are looking at someone who expected that Christianity would make them feel good and be liked in non-Christian environments. Walter Bradley killed that expectation dead for me. I think that’s why people who knew him, like William Dembski and Robert Marks, have been so faithful to the Boss with their research and writing. By the way, I have met Dembski, Marks and Bradley in real life! I’ve also met Kelly Monroe Kullberg, founder of the Veritas Forum. Those are the type of Christian that I look up to. Who are your role models?

Finally, I have to mention the website “Leadership University“, which was my lifeblood during my undergraduate years. Not only did they have all the transcripts of William Lane Craig’s debates, but they also had many articles by Walter Bradley, and other scholars I loved: J. P. Moreland, Henry Schaefer, Phillip E. Johnson, etc. There were tons of articles there, including articles on controversial topics, like homosexuality. You could find anything that you were being challenged about. And then I also got a lot out of Access Research Network, which had amazing videos that I would watch dozens and dozens of times until I could remember every word.

Many of the same videos I used to watch over and over are now available free, including one with Dr. Walter Bradley.

• On the Origin of Life – An Interview with Dr. Dean Kenyon
• Focus on the Origin of Life – An Interview with Dr. Charles Thaxton
• Darwinism on Trial – Phillip E. Johnson
• Blind Watchmaker? A Skeptical Look at Darwinism – Phillip E. Johnson
• Can Science Know the Mind of God? – Phillip E. Johson
• A Critique of Darwinist Icons – Dr. Johnathan Wells
• Doubting Darwin: An Interview with Dr. Scott Minnich
• Intelligent Design: From the Big Bang to Irreducible Complexity – Dr. Michael Behe
• Creation of the Cosmos – Dr. Walter Bradley
• Scientifically Testable Consequences of Fine-tuning Related Arguments & Hypotheses – Dr. Robin Collins
• On the Origin of the Cosmos – An Interview with Dr. Michael Strauss

Anyway, if you haven’t checked out the book about Bradley’s life, get it. And if you want to know what makes me tick, check out the lectures I mentioned. There are other things that had a huge effect on me, but those lectures are my heart and soul. I would say that my resilience over my time at the university and in the secular workplace comes from people like Walter Bradley.

I am also grateful for Art Battson of ARN, who worked on those videos so that I could buy them and watch to them when I was still young. I never met a single non-Christian in the workplace who could defeat these arguments.

By the way, these campus lectures are still going on today – if you want to donate to a great cause, check out my friend Eric Chabot who organizes campus events at THE Ohio State University. He blogs here. I support his work. The lectures that he organizes may be bullet-proofing the worldviews of the next Wintery Knights!