By Lexi Donnel | Reporter
Homicide detective who works to solve cold cases, devout Christian, former atheist and apologist, Jim Warner Wallace, came to Baylor as a guest speaker for Oso Logos, a Christian apologetics organization on Thursday evening.
Warner appeared on NBC’s Dateline to discuss cases he solved and how the evidence helped him find murderers who almost got away with their crimes. He also became a Christian apologist after analyzing how the universe was created and was invited to summarize his beliefs for the movie God’s not Dead 2. In fact, he was a former atheist, who came to the conclusion that the universe was the product of intelligent design by applying the methods he used to solve cases.
At the event, he explained what he called Death Investigations 101, where detectives look at all of the evidence in the room where the body is found. He said there are four ways people die: natural death, accidental death, suicide and homicide. Warner uses the evidence found in the room to determine the cause of death and to indentify if the death is a murder or not.
“If you can explain everything that is in the room, by staying in the room for an explanation, it is not a murder,” Warner said.
To make sure that the audience understood, he said to put the body in a metaphorical box and look at everything that is in it. If there is a gun that is owned by the deceased person in the box then that explains the origin of the gun. But if the gun does not belong to the deceased person and there is bloody footprints are leading out of the box, there was an intruder and a homicide. He used this method to examine the universe.
“Instead of looking at the idea of a death scene in a room, we are going to move toward the entire known universe. I think it would actually help us to determine if in fact we have an intruder,” Warner said.
Warner concluded that God must be the intruder outside the box of the universe. He looked at the evidence in the room: the beginning of the universe, the fine tuning of the universe, the origin of life in the universe, the appearance of design in biology, existence of consciousness, existence of free will, transcendent moral truth and presence of evil and injustice. The two explanatory possibilities Warner concluded were the unguided natural forces and a supernatural force. He realized that some of things in the box like physics and chemistry cannot explain how the universe came into existence, nor can it explain the intricacies of DNA, which led him to the conclusion that there was an intruder who created the universe.
Wildwood, Mo. senior, Madeline Seabaugh, attended the presentation because she is fascinated by apologetics. Seabaugh said she appreciated his unique point of view as a detective.
“I really like the way that he described God in a way that wasn’t theological. I think that it was very applicable to the everyday reasonable person,” Seabaugh said.
The apologetics organization meets on Tuesdays at 7 p.m. in Rogers School of Engineering and Computer Science. The live stream of the event can be found in three parts on Facebook.
