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.’

None of this is to be taken as saying that Hoyle is thinking of the God of the Bible, but he does see that behind the universe and the earth and life on it, there must be a tremendous supernatural intelligence. While he does say that “‘God’ is a forbidden word in science,” he allows that we might “define an intelligence superior to ourselves as a deity.” He speculates that “through our own minds’ pre-​programmed condition,” there might be “a connecting chain of intelligence, extending downward . . . to humans upon the Earth.”

“There are plenty of indications,” he says, “that this might be so. The restlessness within us is one such hint. It is as if we have an instinctive perception that there is something important for us to carry out. The restlessness comes because we have not been able to discover as yet exactly what its nature is.” Elsewhere he says: “The religious impulse appears to be unique to man . . . Stripped of the many fanciful adornments with which religion has become traditionally surrounded, does it not amount to an instruction within us that expressed rather simply might read as follows: You are derived from something ‘out there’ in the sky. Seek it, and you will find much more than you expect.”

Fred Hoyle feels an ominous foreboding in all of this: “Another point nagging me is a conviction that the window of opportunity for the human species may be very narrow in time. High technology is necessary to open the window, but high technology on its own, without establishing a relation between our species to the world outside the Earth, may well be a path to self-​destruction. If on occasions in this book my opposition to the Darwinian theory has seemed fierce, it is because of my feeling that a society oriented by that theory is very likely set upon a self-​destruct course.”