About the Author / How to Contact Us
Media Contact: For press inquiries and interviews, please fill out this form and Perry Marshall’s office will be in touch with you. Address: 805 Lake St #295 Oak Park, Illinois 60301 USA. Telephone (312)386-7459. Media inquiries only, please. For all other purposes, to discuss spiritual questions etc., post a comment on the blog.
Hi, my name is Perry Marshall, I’m an author, speaker and business consultant in Chicago, married with six children. I’ve been interested in theology since one evening when I was four years old, looked up at the night sky and was impacted by the beauty.
I suddenly experienced the reality of giving myself personally to the Creator of it all.
I grew up in Lincoln, Nebraska, where I was a “PK” – Pastor’s Kid. Because of the particular strand of Christianity I grew up in (a very intellectual offshoot of the Menonites) I was exposed to a lot of theology, philosophy, and rigorous thinking about God. Theology is the mother of all disciplines, and I wouldn’t trade that education for anything.
Though I have no formal theological education (my degree is in Electrical Engineering), I’ve spent three fourths of my life reading, conversing, debating, and thinking about the “Big Questions.” As you explore this website I think you’ll discover some interesting perspectives.
Some living 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 is sensible for you. Sooner or later I was forced to put Christianity on the anvil and pound on it as hard as I knew how.
This website originally came about because I wanted to know if Christianity could stand up to the rigors of reason, logic, history and analysis. During a time of significant questions and doubts, I put up this website, CoffeeHouse Theology. At the time, it only consisted of an email opt-in page, nothing else.
I wrote a 7-day email series called “7 Great Lies of Organized Religion.” 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, they would eventually find me.
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 for six months with a 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 many, many extended conversations like that.
There were times when I was seriously worried that the skeptics would end up with the upper hand. But in time, every time, I found that the skeptics had less evidence to support what they had faith in, than I had to support what I had faith in.
Having been through that now, I think the core of Christianity is philosophically, morally, intellectually and scientifically rock solid. Doesn’t mean I agree with everyone out there who is a Christian. Doesn’t mean Christianity doesn’t have its problems. 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 this 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.
I have never had any particular problem with the idea of evolution. And many Christians, especially Catholics, have no problem with it either. But a vocal minority of Darwinists came close to persuading me that evolution was driven by randomness which is a much more profound possibility.
They 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 any kind of personal God whatsoever.
The arguments were initially 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 further, I found that most of the evidence for this was paper thin. The arguments did not have the elegance and simplicity that I had come to expect from 20 years of engineering experience. I also found that most conversations about this topic were bitter and strident and laden with prejudice and anger. Much more heat than light.
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 quite 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, that talk may be the most bitterly 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 the Infidels discussion board, and no one has punched a hole in my argument so far. I don’t think they ever will, because it rests on correct scientific principles.
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 an 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. If evolution is true, then God is a far greater designer than the Young Earth Creationists ever gave Him credit for.
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
- My stirring story of visiting AIDS orphans in Nairobi, Kenya
There are 3 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:
- 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 Dr. Paul Zane Pilzer explains, this was originally a religious idea and I think this is the very foundation of business. It’s why poverty is being steadily eradicated on planet earth.
- 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.
- 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. Modern skeptics claim that faith and reason are opposed to each other; in 1931 the great mathematician Kurt Gödel proved that faith and reason are literally inseparable. More on this here. That same year, Belgian Catholic Priest & Astrophysicist Georges Lemaître postulated what would eventually become known as the Big Bang theory. Modern science today agrees: matter, energy, space and time were all created in a single instant. Just as Genesis 1:1 said 3500 years ago.
If you’re putting faith on the anvil and pounding on it hard, then delve deeply into the articles and links I’ve provided. Each is the culmination of hundreds of hours of thought and debate and they’ve been written with great care.
Don’t be afraid to ask the hard questions and reason these things through. Answers do exist and you can find them.
Enjoy your journey through the world of faith, science, reason and history.
Perry Marshall