Re: [asa] Polkinghorne quote on time required for the evolutionary process

Thanks Paul ... THAT is the quote I remembered. It shows that my memory
isn't as fuzzy as I feared but that my skimming skills need some work - the
first book I started with was "Science & Christian Belief" (same book as "The
Faith of a Physicist" but different title here in Canada).

I'm glad I didn't find it though and had to ask on this list ... now that
I've seen Polkinghorne's quote in the "National Review" (referred to by
Stephen above), I think I like it even better.

On 11/11/07, Mountainwoman <hrc54@alltel.net> wrote:
>
> Steve,
>
> Is this the Polkinghorne quote you are looking for?
> "Three or four billion years may seem like a pretty long time for the
> coming to be of life and the formation of its evolved complexity, but
> incredibly intricate developments have to be fitted into that period.
> Someone like Richard Dawkins can present persuasive pictures of how the
> sifting and accumulation of small differences can produce large-scale
> developments, but, instinctively, a physical scientist would like to see an
> estimate, however rough, of how many small steps take us from a slightly
> light-sensitive cell to a fully formed insect eye, and of approximately the
> number of generations required for the necessary mutations to occur. One is
> only looking for an order of magnitude answer, comparable in crudity to the
> back-of-the-envelope calculations of early cosmologists, but our biological
> friends tell us, without any apparent anxiety, that it just can't be done.
> So much of evolutionary argument seems to be that 'it's happened and so it
> must have happened this way".
>
> It is from "The Faith of a Physicist: Reflections of a Bottom-Up Thinker
> (The Gifford Lectures for 1993-4)," Princeton University Press, 1994, p. 16.
>

-- 
Steve Martin (CSCA)
http://evanevodialogue.blogspot.com
To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@calvin.edu with
"unsubscribe asa" (no quotes) as the body of the message.