Ben was born on September 18, 1951, in Detroit, Michigan. When he was eight years old his parents divorced. His mother only had a third grade education, but worked hard at several menial jobs to provide for Ben and his brother Curtis. A poor student, Ben was mocked by his classmates and he began to respond violently. Poor and troubled, Ben’s life was in a downward spiral.
Concerned her sons were not doing well academically, Ben’s mother Sonya restricted their TV time requiring them to do their homework first. She made the boys get library cards and read two books a week and submit a book report to her on what they read. Within the year Ben’s scholastic progress amazed his teachers and fellow students. When he won an achievement award, a white teacher ridiculed the white students for allowing a black student to best them academically.
Though he was improving in school, he still had a violent temper. Once he threatened his mother with a hammer and in another incident seriously injured a classmate by bashing his head into a locker. Then in an argument with a friend over which radio station to listen to, he tried to stab him with a knife. The knife struck his friend’s belt buckle and broke. Fearing he had hurt his friend he ran home and locked himself in the bathroom with a Bible. He asked God to help him control his anger and read Proverbs 16:32, “He who is slow to anger is better than the mighty, and he who rules his spirit, than he who captures a city.”
Ben graduated from Yale in 1973, and then attended the School of Medicine at the University of Michigan. He became a resident at John Hopkins University in 1977. Specializing in neurosurgery he made medical history when he successfully separated the craniopagus Binder twins in 1987. It was the first time siamese twins conjoined at the head had been surgically parted and lived.
Today Benjamin Solomon Carson, Sr., has been the head of pediatric neurosurgery at John Hopkins University’s Children Center for more than twenty-five years. He continues to perform three hundred surgeries a year and is a board member of numerous educational institutions and businesses. He is an internationally respected neurosurgeon and has earned recognition and awards that time and space prevent being shared here. In 2008 President Bush awarded him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor of the United States of America.
When Jim Wagner, President of Emory University, invited Carson to give the commencement address this past May 14, he said, “Few men or women have demonstrated to so inspiring a degree the transformational effect of liberal learning and the humanities. Dr. Carson has transformed lives both inside the operating room and beyond.” But four professors, one hundred sixty faculty members and a number of students protested Wagner’s choice of Carson.
Carson is a dedicated Christian and flatly rejects the theory of evolution. He has said the fossil record does not “provide evidence for the evolution of humans from a common ancestor with other apes.” Carson correctly surmises the theory of evolution is morally bankrupt, and also holds that “life is too complex to have originated by the natural process of evolution.”
His detractors claim “the theory of evolution is as strongly supported as the theory of gravity and the theory that infectious diseases are caused by microorganisms.” Gravity and germs causing disease are not theories, they are observable facts. Evolution is not even in the same ballpark, and to think it and say it is the best evidence, at least in respect to evolutionists, that they may share a simian ancestry. Carson knows what sounds good in the classroom does not always work in the operating room.
The made for television movie Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story was my introduction to the life and achievements of Ben Carson. My brother in Christ believes man is created in the image of God. I have often said and I believe Ben would agree, that “man has an image to live up to, not a lineage to live down.”
One would think that out of respect for the sheer magnitude of his accomplishments and the height of his achievements, Ben Carson’s detractors could have tolerated his remarks and presence at Emory’s graduation ceremony and remained silent. But wounded intellects seem to unerringly default to their pigheaded nature. In the end the man whose “gifted hands” could separate the shared brains of conjoined twins could not separate the professors of evolution from their own prejudices.
Leave a Reply