The Dark Side

It was the fall of 1980 when Robert “Bobby” Shafran arrived on the campus of Sullivan County Community College in New York as a newly enrolled student. Almost immediately, Bobby was repeatedly mistaken by other students, all strangers to him, as a guy named Eddy. Before his first day on campus came to a close, he found himself in a car with Eddy’s best friend from the prior year on their way to Eddy’s house to meet the identical twin neither brother knew they had.

The boys were born on July 12, 1961, and immediately placed for adoption. The chance reunion between Bobby and Eddy gained media attention, and it wasn’t long before they received word from another young man, David Kellman, proclaiming he had to be a third brother, that in fact it could not be twins who had been separated, but triplets. This was, indeed, the truth. All three of the boys were placed in separate homes at around six months old, with the adoptive families having never been told that the child they had taken home to love and raise had just been severed from identical siblings.

Louise Wise Services was the premier adoption agency among the Jewish community of New York post WWII. At the time, the state’s law required that adoptive children be placed with families of like religious affiliation as the birth parents. As Bobby, Eddy, and David’s parents processed the harsh reality of what had been done through this trusted adoption agency, they met together and compared their experiences. Oddly, they all had been obliged through the adoption agency’s terms to subject their children to studies and tests periodically throughout their childhood. The center claimed it was a measure of oversight to ensure the adopted children were thriving. In reality, the years of testing and analyzing the children were about something else entirely.

Viola Bernard was a Columbia University psychiatrist who served as a board member for Louise Wise Services for half a century. She believed separating multiple births promoted more robust personal development. She partnered with another distinguished professional, New York University psychiatrist Peter Neubauer, who had ambitions of his own. Together, they arranged a lengthy study on unwitting subjects to examine the nature versus nurture proposition. To enable their research, they systematically separated babies of multiple births as an undisclosed science experiment. This resulted in the adoption agency intentionally placing the three triplets in homes with distinctly different economic circumstances, education, parenting styles, and careers. Neubauer, a great subscriber to the notions of Sigmund Freud, constructed his intrusive studies of the children around the working atheistic premises of his Freudian beliefs. This was the justification for separating three identical boys from each other at six months old and intentionally burying that truth deep into the dark side of their minds.

Freud referred to religion as a “universal obsessional neurosis” and a collective “illusion.” Freud’s vocal and long-reaching conclusions are destined to lead to disaster, given that he expressed, “In the long run, nothing can withstand reason and experience, and the contradiction of religion offers to both is palpable.” Believers can conclude that if Freud viewed practices of faith and obedience to a Divine Creator as contradictory to reason, then pursuing Freud’s version of reason is a fateful enterprise. This would be the foundation of study, Dr. Neubauer thought so worthy an initiative that he would do it at great cost to the children and families in his wake. The conclusions of nature versus nurture would be presented devoid of the work of the Spirit and the power of God within us. It would be devoid of the promises and assurances God has made to us, as God knows we are thrust continuously in a fallen world toward failure, even while He sees our hearts pine to please Him. We are made in God’s image and equipped through the Spirit to overcome the matters of this world, alas, even death by God’s omnipotent will and by way of our Redeemer.

We are a wholly created creature by an Eternal uncreated God. “Through Him all things were made; without Him nothing was made that has been made” (John 1:3, NIV used throughout). The apostle Paul addressed how we are different than the immortal uncreated God when he said, “They exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator who is forever praised” (Romans 1:25). In his first letter to Timothy, Paul referred to God as He “who alone is immortal and who lives in unapproachable light” (6:16). If we are to rely on the truth of Scripture regarding the nature of humankind, then we know we are finite, we are flawed, and our ability to comprehensively understand most things throughout this universe is wildly insufficient. While this is true, we are not left to toil perpetually on the dark side. Even though we are fragile and finite, our purpose is about eternal things.

A.J. Higgins, Medical Doctor and conservative Christian writer, practiced medicine and his faith in a progressive world where understanding science and humanness were at the center of his work. Such things as the development of DNA tracking and its applications or genetic studies, unto themselves, while useful, have evolved within a society accommodating its hunger to find any kind of way to justify depraved conduct. Higgins writes that genetics is “the means by which men discover the code which God has placed in His creation. We should, however, hope that they will put the knowledge to use for the benefit of humanity and not to justify sin.”[1]

After the triplets, Bobby, Eddy, and David, found each other, for the next fifteen years, they were inseparable. They were guests on every talk show and on the front page of dozens of magazines. People were enraptured by their similarities and learning how many of their preferences were alike, or how they moved in the same manner, or how they finished each other’s sentences. When Dr. Neubauer’s personal assistant, Natasha Josefowitz, was interviewed in 2018, she admitted surprise at how much the triplets had in common despite being separated. Dr. Josefewitz said, “Wouldn’t you rather know that you have some control over this? So finding out, ‘Never mind. It doesn’t matter what you do… I think it’s upsetting to people to find out how little influence they have, how little control they have. We fight that.”

This, Dear Ones, is a perspective from the dark side. The Scripture is loaded with information about our human nature, and we are doomed without the indwelling. However, in a world where belief is folly, a delusion, there could only be darkness. Within that darkness, fifteen years after the reunion, brother Eddy, the most gregarious of them all, took his own life. Their amazing story of being reunited comes to a hard stop. Dr. Neubauer died in February 2008, having never published the results of his study. In fact, the content of all that was amassed into documented form during the study was placed by Neubauer in the hands of Yale University, sealed for decades. There will be nothing good for humankind to come from it.

In April 2026, people around the world were captivated by the space mission of Artemis II. The crewed NASA craft journeyed into deep space, taking four astronauts farther from Earth than any human being had yet to travel. The ten-day mission was piloted by Naval Officer Victor J. Glover, a man whose passionate love for Jesus cannot be quelled. As Glover travelled the 695,000 miles that took him from earth and around the moon and back to earth alongside his three fellow astronauts, they experienced together indescribable moments and sights that have left them weeks later continuing to search for words to adequately express their experience. They traveled to the dark side of the moon where, for forty minutes, they were in a communications blackout, separated from all of fellow man, in the company of only each other and the Master Designer of it all.

After splashing down in the Pacific Ocean on April 10, 2026, the crew was taken to Naval ship USS John P. Murtha for wellness evaluations. Reid Wiseman, Commander of the Artemis II mission, shared in a soon-thereafter interview, “I’m not really a religious person, but there was just no other avenue for me to … to explain anything or to experience anything. So, I asked the chaplain on the Navy ship to just come and visit us for a minute. And when that man walked in, I’d never met him before in my life, but I saw the cross on his collar, and I broke down in tears. It’s very hard to fully grasp what we just went through.”[2]

I would have to think that when one is in deep space, experiencing a complete separation from this world and left only to behold the incomprehensible works of God, you can encounter Him even on the dark side. The dark side of the moon, or life or circumstance. We know why Commander Wiseman was confused if, to now, he hasn’t taken seriously the existence of a Divine Creator of all things who loves him so. “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:5).