Religion, Spirituality, and an Inside View of Planet Perry

I grew up a “PK” – a Pastor’s Kid.

Insiders know that Pastor’s Kids are usually rowdy, rebellious, rambunctious. I was no exception.

Not sure what it is, but people pile a lot of expectations on PK’s. PK’s live in the public spotlight to some degree and there’s a lot of pressure to preserve dad’s reputation.

Again, I was no exception. In fact there were times when I got dad in hot water with his superiors. In one particular case I was the fall guy for the outcome of a political contest that had nothing to do with me whatsoever. But I digress.

Those who’ve lived outside of Christian circles may be tempted to say, “Oh well of course Perry’s a Christian, he inherited it from his parents” but those who know PK’s know that there’s no escaping a trial by fire where you must find out if faith makes sense for you. As I shall describe below, I’ve put Christianity on the anvil and pounded on it as hard as I know how.

My faith is an integral part of who I am and what I do in business. St. James said, “Not many of you should presume to be teachers, my brothers, because you know that we who teach will be judged more strictly.” I take this very seriously. I bristle at those who recruit people to become information marketers based on the promise that it’s ‘easy’ or that it ‘has high profit margins’ or whatever else.

First and foremost, teaching people is a stewardship to be carried out with care. It is a very significant responsibility. Customers are, first and foremost, people who are made in God’s image. So they should respected and treated with care. We make mistakes here at our company, but we do try.

This page is a gateway to some of my articles and projects. On the left sidebar are links to articles in the religion section of perrymarshall.com. But there are other things I want to tell you about as well.

Putting Christianity to the Test

When I was in my late 20′s I was reaching the end of a very long road as an Amway Pink Koolaid drinker. A torrent of negative information was circulating all over the Internet and I felt like I wasn’t getting straight answers about the nature of the tools business and the way the money was handled.

I decided to put up a website that invited “qualified people” (Direct Distributors and above) to answer these questions anonymously. I received all the replies personally and to make a long story short, Amway did not survive that scrutiny. In time it became clear to me that there was only one legitimate side the the story and Amway was not really a legitimate business.

A few years later my brother’s faith hit the skids. This was very disturbing to me both because we’re very close and because he has a Master’s degree in Theology from one of the most rigorous Christian seminaries in the country. He was pressing me with deep questions but he didn’t seem interested in sticking around for the answers. Meanwhile he was dragging me with him.

I needed a punching bag.

So I did what I’d done before, with Amway – I went online. I put up a website, www.CoffeeHouseTheology.com and wrote an Autoresponder series. Since every single reply to every email went right back to me, I figured if there was anybody out there who could punch a hole in Christianity, I would eventually find them.

During the next several years I probably answered 5,000 to 10,000 emails covering seemingly every objection to Christianity that anyone could ever think of. And please understand, some of these people argued with fierce passion. I exchanged emails with one guy that eventually turned into a 100 page WORD document with all sorts of colors and fonts employed so we could tell who was talking as the doc got passed back and forth.

There were times when I was seriously worried that the skeptics would end up with the other hand. But in time, every time, I found that the skeptics had less evidence to support their {beliefs} than I had to support mine.

Having been through that now, I think Christianity is philosophically, morally, intellectually and scientifically rock solid. Doesn’t mean I agree with everyone out there who is a Christian. And it doesn’t mean I haven’t changed my views on a whole number of things based on the many conversations I’ve had.

What that means is, I think that it is perfectly reasonable to believe that the Bible is inspired by God, that God spoke through prophets like Abraham, Moses, Elijah and Samuel and that Jesus Christ is God Incarnate. And that Jesus really did physically rise from the dead 2000 years ago.

Jesus stepped into the world and split time in half, BC and AD. He is the most loved, most hated, most controversial, most studied, most reviled person in human history. Exactly what one should expect if God were to become man.

You will find numerous articles on the CoffeeHouse Theology site regarding these claims.

Another very significant project is www.CosmicFingerprints.com. This was also inspired by my brother, in a somewhat different way. It was born in an argument we had one day about evolution while we were riding around in a Chinese bus.

I have never had any particular problem with the idea of evolution. And many Christians, especially Catholics, have no problem with it either. But my brother almost succeeded in convincing me that evolution was driven by randomness which is a much more profound possibility.

He claimed that all you needed was natural selection to clean everything up and you could explain everything we see in the living world by random accident alone. No need for God.

The arguments were convincing and this was very, very disturbing to me. Wow, could we all be here purely as a result of random chance? What if this could be true?

As I researched this question, I found that most of the books and articles were just terrible. They did not have the elegance and simplicity that I had come to expect from 20 years of engineering experience.

I found the answer I was looking for in Information Theory. The result is a now-famous talk called “If You Can Read This, I Can Prove God Exists” and I am dead serious about that title. To the extent science can prove anything, the existence of the genetic code is proof that living things are designed. This is also available on video.

A few months after I published it, a debate erupted on the world’s largest Atheist website, Infidels, and as of this writing in 2009, this talk may be the longest-contested single lecture or article on the subject of the Origin of Life on the entire Internet. It’s the longest running, most viewed thread on Infidels and no one has punched a hole in my argument so far. I don’t think they ever will; I think that it is fundamentally correct.

You can read a summary of that debate, the major objections and my answers, and see all the relevant links here.

You will find many articles on the Cosmic Fingerprints Blog as well as a very active discussion with people from all over the world. You’ll find a testable hypothesis for intelligent design as well as support for evolution being an engineered process. You’ll find online debates as well as recordings of my lectures at Lucent Technologies, with 120 communication engineers in the room.

Evolution is not in any sense driven by random accident. It’s driven by intelligence.

Some other articles you may find interesting:

• Ralph Zuranski’s “In Search of Heroes” Interview with me
• 10 Tough Questions about Christianity, and Answers
• My own personal story of miraculous healings in India, and a summary of my own research into documented miracles elsewhere in Christianity
• The stirring story of visiting AIDS orphans in Nairobi, Kenya

There are three final thoughts I would like to leave you with:

I would like you to consider that the wonders and comforts of the modern world were made possible by of three things:

1. The idea that wealth is created by knowledge and wisdom, not merely fought over and divided up. That there is an unlimited supply, i.e. alchemy. As Paul Zane Pilzer explains, this was originally a religious idea and I think this is the very foundation of business.
2. The idea that all men are created equal, which originated with St. Paul 2000 years ago. It led to the eradication of slavery and the advent of citizen-driven government. More on this here.
3. The idea that the entire cosmos is orderly and measurable, which originated with Solomon 3000 years ago. This eventually led to the rise of modern science. More on this here.

Enjoy your journey through my world of faith, science, reason and history.

Perry Marshall