George Greenstein acknowledges all this intelligence involved in the earth’s structure. In his book The Symbiotic Universe, he speaks of the mysterious and incredible series of coincidences that are beyond explaining, coincidences without which life on earth would be impossible. The following statements, appearing throughout pages 21-8, reflect his agonizing over conditions that bespeak the need for an intelligent and purposeful God:

“I believe that we are faced with a mystery​—a great and profound mystery, and one of immense significance: the mystery of the habitability of the cosmos, of the fitness of the environment.” He sets out “to detail what can only seem to be an astonishing sequence of stupendous and unlikely accidents that paved the way for life’s emergence.b There is a list of coincidences, all of them essential to our existence.” Yet “the list kept getting longer . . . So many coincidences! The more I read, the more I became convinced that such ‘coincidences’ could hardly have happened by chance.” A shattering fact for an evolutionist to face up to, as he next acknowledges:

“But as this conviction grew, something else grew as well. Even now it is difficult to express this ‘something’ in words. It was an intense revulsion, and at times it was almost physical in nature. I would positively squirm with discomfort. The very thought that the fitness of the cosmos for life might be a mystery requiring solution struck me as ludicrous, absurd. I found it difficult to entertain the notion without grimacing in disgust . . . Nor has this reaction faded over the years: I have had to struggle against it incessantly during the writing of this book. I am sure that the same reaction is at work within every other scientist, and that it is this which accounts for the widespread indifference accorded the idea at present. And more than that: I now believe that what appears as indifference in fact masks an intense antagonism.”

What antagonism? Antagonism to the thought that the explanation might lie in a purposeful Creator. As Greenstein expresses it: “As we survey all the evidence, the thought insistently arises that some supernatural agency​—or, rather, Agency—​must be involved. Is it possible that suddenly, without intending to, we have stumbled upon scientific proof of the existence of a Supreme Being? Was it God who stepped in and so providentially drafted the cosmos for our benefit?” But Greenstein recovers from such heretical thinking and reasserts his orthodoxy to the evolutionary religion, reciting one of their creedal dogmas: “God is not an explanation.”

Astrophysicist Fred Hoyle in his book The Intelligent Universe, on page 9, talks about those, like Greenstein, who fear God’s entering the picture: “Orthodox scientists are more concerned with preventing a return to the religious excesses of the past than in looking forward to the truth [and this concern] has dominated scientific thought throughout the past century.”

In his book he then discusses these same mysterious features that trouble Greenstein. “Such properties,” he says, “seem to run through the fabric of the natural world like a thread of happy accidents. But there are so many of these odd coincidences essential to life that some explanation seems required to account for them.” Both Hoyle and Greenstein say chance cannot explain these many “accidental coincidences.” Hoyle then says that to account for them, ‘the origin of the universe requires an intelligence,’ an ‘intelligence on a higher plane,’ ‘an intelligence that preceded us and that led to a deliberate act of creation of structures suitable for life.’