I was weaned from Darwinian evolution completely by surprise.
Converted my first weekend at university back in 1956 I found I had an immediate love of the Bible and a thirst to read more. At the same time I remained sceptical about origins. ‘Yes’ I said to my friend, ‘I do believe the Bible to be true, but don’t think I’m going to accept the Genesis myths uncritically!’ Like practically everyone today I had been raised to think that evolution was unquestionable — hence my problems about Adam and Eve.
Imagine my surprise some months later, while browsing in a library, to find an eminent scientist, W.R. Thompson, taking issue with Darwinism root and branch. He had been invited to write the introduction for the 1956 ‘Everyman’ edition of the Origin of Species. I took it off the shelf and began reading. There, within the inner sanctum of the Origin, a Fellow of the Royal Society was saying that evolution theory had been bad for science and for society. Astonishing! Later I came across K.A. Kerkut’s Implications of Evolution (Pergamon, 1960), in which the author gently lampoons his new undergraduates for accepting Darwin on authority, ‘by faith’ — ‘much as Christians do the Bible’.1 Clearly there was more to all this than met the eye.
