experiencing evolution 219lution gave direction to his life and served as the foundation of a rewarding
career.
Fleeing Fundamentalism
Over a quarter-century ago, the well-known science writer and skeptic Martin
Gardner published a wonderfully evocative, quasi-autobiographical novel called
The Flight of Peter Fromm(1973). It tells the story of a young creationist from
Oklahoma who fell hard for Price’s flood geology. In the late 1930s, he packed
up his copy ofThe New Geologyand went to Chicago to attend divinity school.
As a dyed-in-the-wool fundamentalist, he joined the Moody Memorial Church
and hung out with friends in the Chicago Christian Fellowship. During his
second year at the University of Chicago “his fundamentalism was dealt a
mighty death blow”—not from any of his seminars in the divinity school, but
from a course he had decided to audit on historical geology. When Fromm
asked the professor, named Blitz, if all of the sedimentary rock could have been
deposited during Noah’s flood, the geologist was “dumbfounded.” He “didn’t
want to embarrass the kid by arguing with him in front of the class,” but,
nevertheless, he devoted “the rest of the hour going over all the evidence [he]
could think of that proves sedimentation has been going on for hundreds of
millions of years.” In so doing, he
had driven the point of a geological hammer into the rock of Peter’s
fundamentalism. He had opened the first tiny fissure through which
the waters of modern science could begin their slow erosion. Now
the metaphor breaks down. It may take a million years for a boulder
to crumble. A religion can crumble in a few centuries. A man’s faith
can crumble in less than a year....Peter threw away his copy ofThe
New Geology.
Despite his growing distrust of biblical science and history, Peter contin-
ued to believe in the Bible as God’s inspired word. But he began sliding down
the path of unbelief: from fundamentalism to Roman Catholicism and even-
tually to a vague theism. Finally, after the war, while preaching an Easter ser-
mon at the liberal Midway Community Church in Hyde Park, he suffered a
psychotic break and had to be taken from the pulpit to a nearby hospital—
which is where the novel begins.^47
My own experience (minus the mental breakdown) closely paralleled
Fromm’s. Growing up as the son and grandson of Seventh-day Adventist min-
isters, I attended church schools from first grade through college and unques-
tioningly accepted the authority of both the biblical prophets and the Adventist
prophetess, Ellen G. White. Although I majored in physics and mathematics
at Southern Missionary College, an Adventist institution, I do not recall ever