...."My point of departure on this issue (evolution) was as a dyed in-the-wool Darwinist. Nine years of higher education had left me a convinced naturalist - the view that this physical universe is all there is, and that Darwin's Origin of Species explained how we got there.

Surprisingly, that conviction received its first jolt from MIT while I was teaching there. A biologist there convened a conference that generated such interest that it led to the formation of the International Association for Mathematical Biology. The problem that Association studies is whether 31/2 billion years was enough time for Darwinian mechanisms to have produced biological organisms of the complex as now exist. I had understood that 31/2 billion years was long enough for natural selection to produce almost anything we find in biology. What I learned at that conference is that even something as rudimentary as a cell is in fact incredibly complex, and that its 200 or s components would have had to have emerged independently and simultaneously for there to be a cell, for none of the components have any survival value except in relationship to the others. The probability of that happening is on the order of say, the number 26 turning up on the roulette wheel in Monte Carlo say 20 times in succession. the odds against THAT happening are of course staggering, which is what raises the question of whether there was enough time. Whether that problem has been solved is not for me to say--I am not a biologist. I mention it only to cite it as the first cloud to appear on my Darwinian horizon.

Having learned from the MIT conference that there are unsolved problems with Darwinian theory, I started reading layman's book on Darwinism, beginning with normal Macbeth's 1971 Darwin Retried (which I found even Stephen Jay Gould acknowledging that it raised "disturbing points" about Darwin's theory). Of the dozen or so that followed I found Darwinism: A Theory in Crisis (which didn't bring religion into the picture at all) I found especially startling. To give you an idea, Fred Holye, a world class astronomer who proposed the "steady state" theory of the universe as an alternative to the "big bang" because (militant atheist that he was) he thought the big bang theory gave theists too much of a loophole to ask, "who created the Big Bang?" Why not think that God did...