Honestly, I was looking for patterns.
I was a programmer. That is what we do. We find patterns, we break problems down, we run tests, and we look for results. And in late 2001, sitting in Brisbane watching the world change on a television screen, I thought I was just running another test.
I had no idea the test would change everything.
Here is something nobody tells you when you start investigating faith.
Most people approach it from the wrong direction.
They start with belief and work backwards. They already decided what they think, and then they look for confirmation. Believers do it. Sceptics do it. I did it too.
I started with a hypothesis: the Bible is a product of human imagination, religion is a social construct, and the world’s problems would largely disappear if we could just get rid of it all.
That was my working theory.
So I decided to test it.
Here is what I found that stopped me cold.
In the book of Isaiah, written about 2,700 years ago, there is a claim so audacious that when I first read it as an atheist, I actually laughed out loud.
It says this:
“Remember the former things of old, for I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like Me, declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times things that are not yet done, saying, My counsel shall stand, and I will do all My pleasure.” Isaiah 46:9 to 10 (NKJV)
Let that land for a second.
The claim is not just that God exists. The claim is that He can tell you the future before it happens. And that the future He describes will happen exactly as He said, because no one and nothing can stop it.
Now, as a programmer and an engineer, that is not a claim I can just ignore. That is a testable claim.
Because either it happened the way He said, or it did not.
That is what a Faith Experiment actually is.
It is not blind faith. It is not crossing your fingers and hoping the universe is on your side.
It is taking a claim seriously enough to actually investigate it.
Think about it this way. If someone tells you they are a billionaire, you say prove it. If someone tells you they can predict the future, you say prove it. The Bible does not ask you to skip that question. It invites it. It practically dares you to test the claim.
I have spent the last two decades doing exactly that.
And here is what I can tell you from the other side of that journey: the evidence is not thin. It is extraordinary.
There are 1,817 prophecies in the biblical text.
1,817 testable predictions about specific nations, specific cities, specific kings, specific events.
Not vague fortune cookie generalities. Specific details about what will rise and what will fall, who will come and when, what will be built and what will be destroyed.
I started testing them expecting to find cracks.
What I found instead changed the entire trajectory of my life.
Now here is what I want you to notice.
The God of the Bible does not ask you to accept Him on someone else’s say so. He does not say just trust the tradition. He does not say just do what your parents did.
He says test Me.
He says look at the evidence. Look at what I said before it happened. Look at whether My track record is dependable.
That is not the language of a con artist. That is the language of someone who knows exactly what the results of the investigation will be.
I get it if you are sceptical.
I was the most sceptical person in any room I walked into. I had a black belt in martial arts and a degree in engineering and a philosophy built on the certainty that there was nothing beyond what you could measure, touch, and prove.
And then I started measuring.
And touching.
And proving.
And what I found on the other side of that honest investigation was not religion. It was a relationship. Not a system of rules. Not a membership to a club. A living, breathing encounter with a God who was never intimidated by my questions, because He already knew where the questions were going to take me.
Here is your Faith Experiment for today.
Pick one prophecy. Just one.
Read Daniel chapter 2. It is the story of a dream that a Babylonian king had about four world empires, written over 500 years before the events happened.
Then look up the history.
Babylon. Persia. Greece. Rome.
Check the sequence. Check the timeline. Check the details.
Do not take my word for it. Test it yourself.
Because that is the whole point.
Faith is not the absence of evidence. Faith is what happens when you follow the evidence all the way to the end, and what you find there is bigger than anything you expected.
I stepped into that investigation as an atheist looking to close a case.
I came out the other side as a Faith Experimenter.
Maybe you will too.
Let’s find out.
Robbie Berghan
Faith Experimenter
