Road to Certainty

By David Griffith

A questioning, searching philosopher wanting to know God. Raised to love the mountains in Colorado, representing a generation passing from pioneer to modern life. Beginning in a steel mill, discovering education, and practicing law for forty years. Midway in his career, he fell in love and married his court reporter. Children raised, they purchased a mountain getaway and fell into ranching. In two busy worlds, love for each other and hunger to know God grows. Retiring turned searching to science, but proof of God was not knowing God. Moving to Eastern Sierras, drawn to a loving congregation. Simple faith brought answers and personally knowing God. With understanding, the author looks ahead to what God says about where history is taking us. Questioning resolved with certainty, a future full of hope overcoming tribulation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Covenant Books, Inc.
• Release date: Dec 27, 2022
• ISBN: 9781685267346

Book preview

Table of Contents

Title

Copyright

Introduction

My Welsh Strand

My German Strand

Swedish Strand Meets Pop

David the Doer

David Doing More

Doing the Army

Doer Learns Law

Working, Doing, and Despair

Despair Replaced by Love

Doers Marry

Jesus Calling

Change Doubles Doing

Cowman and Goat Lady Do

Seaside Doing

Doing and Discovering Sierras

What If Earth Had No Moon?

Earth: The Sweet Spot

Universe in a Bang

Building Blocks for Life

Let There Be Light

Water of Life

Unit of Life

Seeing Believing

Stones Cry Out

Prophecy Fulfilled Authenticates

What's Ahead Revealed

Concluding with Certainty

About the Author

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Road to Certainty

David Griffith

ISBN 978-1-68526-733-9 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-68526-734-6 (Digital)

Copyright © 2022 David Griffith

All rights reserved

First Edition

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Covenant Books

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Murrells Inlet, SC 29576

www.covenantbooks.com

Introduction

Knowing Truth

It is not automatic. Being born into a Christian home, being a living representative of a long line of dedicated Christians does not make you a Christian. It is the decision to trust and follow Christ that makes a Christian. One of the forces motivating me to write down these thoughts I've heard summarized this way: God has put enough into this world to make faith in Him a reasonable thing, but He has left enough out to make it impossible to acquire such faith by reason alone. So we all start with questioning.

If God exists, who in his right mind would not want to know Him? That is automatic. If there is a God, there is built-in longing for relationship with Him. For some, this means lifelong searching to know what is the truth. Being born in a Christian home adds fuel to searching, but answers are not automatic. Perhaps for me finding truth was more difficult because every positive answer was accompanied by the feeling that I was just believing what I wanted to believe or giving in to what I had been taught to believe. I wanted truth, not wish fulfillment.

Is there a God?

My mind developed at a waning moment in Western culture. We were about to stop asking real questions: Is there a God? What is true? How do I know? Where is history taking us? Is civilization on the verge of collapse? Has God revealed any answers? Are there individual truths? Can no one think falsely? Can you find the right answer if you don't ask the right question? Our culture stopped asking those questions. Education and media, especially electronic media, have repackaged, marketed, and reshaped the quest for truth with visual images taken at face value. I know it. I saw it. Never mind that an originator sorted through ten camera angles to find the right frame for photoshopping. He presented truth as he wanted it. Are there multiple truths answering one fundamental question? Is there one truth?

The generation following mine finds it difficult to ask the right questions and to continue questioning until they know the truth. Now, the more perverse the story, the greater the attracted audience. We want drama and excitement. We are tempted to judge outcomes on what feels right, not on fundamental principles of what is right. Asking fundamental questions is becoming irrelevant. Our culture wants excitement that resolves into good feelings. I could rewrite history to make a good story with an ending that feels satisfying. What about truth?

Finding truth, standing on truth, gaining strength in that stand are pursuits that required determination I want to describe. To evaluate a witness's testimony, it is best to know about him and why he is a witness. Before I tell you where I stand, I must tell you where I came from and how I got to where I stand. History puts questioning in context. A great part of my history was romance and adventure followed only later by personal analysis—I mean, intellectual searching for truth. I want to relate my history, before describing my analysis and offering answers. The questions I address are fundamental. What is true? Is there a God? Where is history taking us? Has God revealed an answer?

History first. I learned the stories and histories of my predecessors by listening. I envisioned adventure laced with humor. The people were real, but learning about their lives was abstracted, maybe even subtracted. I could laugh at humor and enjoy the thrill of adventure, but their struggles and suffering did not come alive in my mind. Life for all of my predecessors was uncertain, survival, and freedom in constant danger of being lost to forces seeking control or to untamed forces of nature. As a young listener I didn't focus on their suffering. A narrow escape relived as a story is exciting for the listener. Looking back at some tidbits of life I absorbed with childhood ears, I now see trials, uncertainty, and suffering they endured in the light of the faith that supported them. Now I see myself as a living product of their faith overcoming the hardships and suffering they endured.

Being raised, I was spoon-fed faith, but from early in life, I became preoccupied with doing. I listened to Bible stories as abstract adventures of good versus evil. I could see blinded Sampson in chains pushing over the pillars of a pagan temple to crush the forces of evil. I never really saw God. I focused my energy on do and do and to do and next do. With elevated energy, I became a successful doer. Why question when you can do and dream of what to do next? But with age, doing had diminished satisfaction. A gap remained. Questions I avoided kept creeping in and getting in the way. I look back over much of my life and see a scramble of unresolved questions. I now regret many of the things I have done. Once I answered fundamental questions, much of my doing appeared as wasteful preoccupation. If I had been raised in today's generation, with prepackaged media supplying ready-made answers, I would have never done anything but what was next. I would have lived without questions and therefore with no answers. Had I focused on fundamental questions until I had answers, I would have done less, but what I did would have been aimed at a different target. Is there a God? It is my wasted doing I look back and see.

Later, when I focused on fundamental questions, selective and distorted science became a pitfall that interfered with positive answers. I accepted what was being dished up. I was unaware that sources may have a concealed agenda. All men at no time are neutral observers, but I thought they were reporting what science concluded, not selectively reporting to direct conclusions. Shortly after I retired as a professional doer, Francis Collins was appointed director of the National Institutes of Health. How could the world's leading geneticist support devout faith in God? How could an outspoken Christian believing in miracles hold the nation's most visible job in science? Debate within the scientific world became public. Evolution was central to that debate. Pew Research conducted a survey to examine the facts underlying the controversy. While 83 percent of Americans believed in God, more than half of all scientists shared that commitment to a Higher Power. Scientists were more skeptical than the common man, but the gap was narrower than I believed. Among astrophysicists and chemists I routinely encountered in my work, the gap was narrower yet. The men of science I had known were believers. When my doing slowed, I examined for myself areas of science. Looking at scientific evidence, while blind men were working to persuade that God was a product of imagination, my understanding changed.

The next fundamental question was unavoidable. If there is a God, had He revealed Himself to people? Were my ancestors correct that God had entered human history and identified Himself to us? Were they right in saying the Bible was the record of that revealing and statement of His purposes, plans, and expectations for us? Was the Bible God's word? I opened my Bible with new questioning.

I could focus on how that changed my life, but that's difficult to put in words. If you could see change and live with change, perhaps that would be compelling testimony. But to say there is a new me does not add much weight. An area I found convincing was prophecy. No mortal sees the future. We can make statistical models to assist in guessing about the future, but we are bound by time. We live in the present, but as I say in a chapter, if the universe had a beginning, that beginning had to be preceded by a cause, and that cause has to be unbound by time because time began when the universe began. If the Bible contains detailed descriptions of events clearly shown to have been written before the events happened, is the Bible self-authenticating? If details and outcomes are described before they occur, then there must be an infinite power unbound by time that knows the future before it happens.

Must there be a God? Must He be the God that has testified that He wants relationship with each of us? My conclusion I will strive to communicate to you as I review details of my family and personal history, the topics of science I investigated as a questioning layman, and some prophecies recorded in God's Word. Stay with me. I want to affect your answers to questions that matter. The questions the world around you is forgetting to ask. The questions I have fought hard to answer. Is there a God? If so, is He the One standing at the door to your heart, knocking? Doesn't everyone sense His presence? Is it true all He wants is to be invited in? Is my gratitude that He never stopped knocking until I opened the door only based on my fantasy?

My Welsh Strand

My lineage is a twisted three-strand rope. My mother was Swedish, my father equal parts German and Welsh. The strands had much in common before I entered the world. All three left Europe seeking freedom from oppression, control, and continuous war when wind was a source of energy for traversing the Atlantic. All abandoned the land and cultures of many generations to seek freedom, opportunity, and the right to worship from their own hearts. All gave up the security of the life they knew to lie in the dark hull of uncertainty to start life over, to find a new beginning. I cherish their sacrifices. Their endurance ultimately brought me into the world and gave to me the abundance they dreamed of.

I know the history of these sacrificing strands only from testimony. Some are more filled with detail than others. The Swedish strand was forward-looking; hardly talked about the past, let alone the life their progenitors sailed away from. The German and Welsh strands were filled with storytellers, and I was a pleasure-filled listener. I begin with some of my grandfather's Welsh historical story. I carry his name. And because from age seven to age fifteen, I spent three weeks each summer with him at his mining cabin five miles from the highway. Our beds were three feet apart, and we went to bed each night before dark. My evening entertainment was not radio or television, but his reliving of history. He was well-read for a pioneer. He knew the Bible. He prayed before each meal and after his last story before we closed our eyes at night. Every prayer ended: Father, forgive us our sins, direct us from temptation, feed us on the bread of life, and finally unite us in Thy heavenly kingdom. I became an eager participant in my Welsh history.

Before the Revolutionary War, three brothers named Griffith living in Wales responded to a pamphlet advertising an island for sale in Virginia. The church had vast political and economic control in Wales and throughout the English Empire, but the Reformation had brought to this family the conviction that an individual's faith in God was the only path. They rejected ceremony and control. They were destined to be seekers of religious freedom in the new world. The brothers came from an industrious family heritage but sold every inheritance and possession to bring their wives and children to a new beginning, to a land promising freedom, to an island of their own, with no established controlling power structure.

Buying a distant island sight unseen at the cost of all worldly possessions is the apex of family risk-taking when contemplated from my position of aging security. They didn't know they were buying an island occupied by three families of Blacks that had been brought to America as slaves. This was a blessing in disguise. Those somehow-freed slaves were at work on the land and caring for themselves when the brothers arrived. All pitched in, and the Griffith family expanded by three more hardworking men and their families. Somewhere in America today, you may find Blacks with our last name that shared some of our heritage and fought by our side during the war for American independence. The Griffith family had doubled in size overnight. The details of daily life on the island are lost history, but over generations that followed, the families expanded, and the wilderness was tamed. Our branch of that Welsh tree remained on the island until about the second decade of the eighteen hundreds.

The debate over the morality of slavery heated up, and the Griffith family became increasingly aware that slavery elsewhere was a staggering corruption. Free land was available for homestead in Illinois and the possibility of escaping the coming inevitable conflict motivated another escape. The part of the family that had come as a surprise with the island was given formal certificates of freedom and ownership of the island. Once again, the Griffith family had found itself under the control of a power structure that held the reins of power and used that power in ways conflicting with their beliefs. Generations of industry and work were again left behind for the dream of freedom without conflict.

Finding new land for the work of their hands was this time not sight unseen. Two men of the family had gone ahead, located, and filed on land before the rest of the family was sent for. Advances in travel technology made this journeying much less of a survival struggle. It was still pioneering but of a lower order of magnitude than the dreams of an island had required.

After a generation of farming in Illinois, the real dreamer of the Griffith family was brought into creation. Before that, the family had been torn again by another fight for survival and freedom, the Civil War. I have no knowledge of the details of their contributions except some of our family were volunteers for the Union Brigade from Illinois and economic and political supporters of Abraham Lincoln. The family needed a dreamer. My grandfather, Fred Griffith, was born too late to have been lured by the rush for gold in California, but when gold was discovered in Colorado, he was a teenager.

The rush took him to Leadville. He found work quickly, underground working with pick and shovel to uncover someone else's gold instead of his own. Dance halls and strong drink were of no interest. To his training, forbidden fruit. Work was so demanding he had no time to search for his treasure. Summer evenings, after all day working underground, were consumed finding food, cooking over a campfire, writing home, and resting for the next day. Winter in Colorado at ten thousand feet is never a picnic. The snow was so deep that winter, the stumps of trees that had been cut for mine props the next spring seemed to be nearly ten feet high. The thought of giving thanks for crusted snow you could walk on to get to work was beyond a treasure seeking teenager's mental capacity. When spring arrived, so did a younger brother to work by his side. They dreamed and talked of their treasure while looking into the campfire at night after spending the days digging for others. They saved every penny they could to honor my grandfather's pledge that he would never spend another winter above ten thousand feet.

Fall arrived, and they walked down the Arkansas River to Pueblo and waited for the next train with an open box car. They found one and headed down a new line of rails for California. The dreamers had new treasure in mind. The first day of travel was rest and sleep; the next was hunger and thirst. The train it seems never stopped until it reached Gallop, New Mexico. Then shortly, after the wheels stopped rolling, their presence in the box car was discovered. They were ejected with only their clothes, Grandpa's 30/30, and one bullet to their ownership. They were traveling light. At that time, Gallop was a hundred or more miles from anywhere.

The resourceful teens found the train station master to seek advice. Farmington was only ninety miles away, as the crow flies, and if they traveled up the valleys, maybe only a three-day walk, traversing the Navaho Nation.

The first night out that last bullet brought down a jackrabbit, and they feasted. The following day they turned up at a beautiful red rock canyon, and after nearly a full day of walking, it dead-ended in sheer cliffs. Back down to explore the next promising canyon until, two days after the jackrabbit feast, they emerged onto a higher flat plateau covered in sagebrush and punctuated by towers of red rock. From behind one rocky stand emerged a young Indian boy who loped off after signaling for them to follow. He led them to a cottonwood tree standing near a spring, an isolated hogan with a fire burning out front, and an old Indian sitting straight before the fire. The old Indian, to their relief, spoke perfect English. He told them that the government had paid the costs of sending him to Harvard for an education, but when his education was completed, he still preferred the life he knew and the peacefulness of his people. He asked if they were hungry and called to women from the hogan to prepare a meal for his guests. His whole family spoke English of which he was proud. The older woman poured corn from a leather bag into a grinding stone, then took the ground, powdered cornmeal mixed with a little water into her mouth and chewed it. The Indian explained that this was the standard way they cooked. Her saliva made the corn sweet. After she had patted a ball of chewed cornmeal into a flat tortilla, she dragged a hot rock from the fire and covered its round surface with the tortilla she had chewed. Then she returned the rock to face the fire. When several tortillas were ready, she dipped into a pot of steaming meat, poured it into the tortillas, and, with smiles, handed them to Grandpa and his brother for dinner. A memorable meal and good company with peace-loving Indians.

More than a week after the jackrabbit feast, they reached Farmington. They found subsistence work on a newly homesteaded ranch and lived the winter through labor exchanged for food and a place to sleep. Farmington had a lovely winter climate, and fruit orchards were being planted up and down the peaceful valley. Grandpa located his own special place and planned to return after he had money in reserve. When spring arrived, the two brothers returned to Colorado to resume their search for treasure. I believe their return was eased by horseback, but I don't remember the story of how horses were acquired. Late May found them in Silver Cliff, Colorado, in a deep mine, living off the land and saving every cent. This was a blessing not dreamed of. Silver Cliff was located at the very north end of the Wet Mountain Valley, cupped between Colorado's Wet Mountains on the east and the Sangria de Christo Mountains on the west. The Moeller family homestead was about twenty miles down the Wet Mountain Valley above the small settlement of Gardner.

The German strand of my linage was about to be discovered by my Welsh strand of treasure-seeking adventures. God's hand was working to bring two happy and gentle people together.

My German Strand

I have many early memories of Griffith family gatherings. Three times a year Grandpa and Grandma Griffith assembled all connected family members in their home in Pueblo. Every summer they held an all-day family picnic on the west side of La Veta Pass. An assembly of ten