220 life
doubting that God had created the world within the past six or seven thousand
years or that virtually all of the fossil-bearing rocks had been deposited during
the year of Noah’s flood. The first serious book I remember buying with my
own money wasStudies in Creationism, a defense of young-earth creationism
by one of Price’s disciples, Frank Lewis Marsh. For years I felt nothing but
sorrow for evolutionists, theistic and otherwise, who failed to recognize the
“truth” about the history of life on earth.
Then, in the mid-1960s, I found myself at Berkeley studying for a doctor-
ate in the history of science. No godless professors challenged my beliefs,
which I kept pretty much to myself. But learning to read and think critically
proved my spiritual undoing. One night a friend of mine, Joe Willey, an Ad-
ventist graduate student in neurophysiology, and I attended a slide presentation
on the famous fossil forests of Yellowstone National Park, where some two
dozen layers are stacked one on top of the other. The speaker argued that even
using the most rapid rates of volcanic decomposition and tree-growing, the
sequence of forests could not be explained in under thirty thousand years. It
seems like a miniscule number today, but then it was huge. For me, it chal-
lenged the divine authority of both Moses and Mrs. White. My friend, Joe, and
I wrestled with the implications of this knowledge for hours that night follow-
ing the talk. By early in the morning, we had decided to trade in the teachings
of inspired writers for the authority of science. We knew we were making a
momentous decision, but we had no idea where it would lead, intellectually or
otherwise. Despite repeated prayers for divine guidance, I quickly moved from
young-earth creationism to old-earth creationism and then on to theistic evo-
lutionism and finally to agnosticism. The journey proved to be mostly liber-
ating, but punctuated at times by episodes of fear, pain, and isolation. Hopes
of eternal life faded, and relationships with many Adventist friends and family
members became frayed.^48
I soon learned that I was not alone. I discovered that a number of other
conservative Christians had passed through equally trying circumstances. One
was J. Frank Cassel, a leader in the evangelical American Scientific Affiliation
(ASA), who had graduated from a conservative Christian college, earned a
Ph.D. in biology, and gone on to a successful academic career. His autobio-
graphical testimony poignantly captured some of the emotional turmoil he and
his friends in the ASA experienced coming to grips with the evidence for
evolution in the 1950s:
First to be overcome was the onus of dealing with a “verboten” term
and in a “non-existent” area. Then, as each made an honest and ob-
jective consideration of the data, he was struck with the validity and
undeniability of datum after datum. As he strove to incorporate each
of these facts into his Biblico-scientific frame of reference, he found
that—while the frame became more complete and satisfying—he