Surprised by Intelligence

A Religion Professor Discovers the Deficits in Evolutionary Theory

Robert Shedinger had been teaching religion for almost twenty years when he was invited to take over a Science and Religion course from a retiring professor. Given his undergraduate background in science and engineering, he welcomed the opportunity, but since he hadn't been following the literature in the field for some time, academic responsibility called for some preparation.

At the outset, "I fully accepted the idea that Charles Darwin had essentially solved the problem of the origin of species," he wrote, "and that modern evolutionary theory was simply a more complex extension of Darwin's basic insight and stood as one of the most successful and empirically verified scientific theories ever...