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I came out of a Christian Pentecostal background. As a young man I genuinely believed the doctrinal precepts with which I was raised, and planned to enter the ministry. Nevertheless, my minister parents encouraged me to explore my world. I was bright and read widely, consuming seven or eight books a week from the age of eight onward. Early on, I discovered Science Fiction, and found that I gravitated toward "hard science" books and stories. These led to real science, and I was hooked.

I was becoming saturated with everything scientific, and was beginning to modify how I believed, to accommodate what I was learning to be true. As I understood my faith, whatever humans discovered scientifically simply had to be part of God's universe, and, therefore, needed to be incorporated into a believer's faith. Since I had little contact with mentors who could guide me personally, I found my mentors within the pages of the books I continuously absorbed.

Three individuals stand out clearly: Robert Heinlein, Ayn Rand, and Philip Wylie, with a lot of help from A.E. Van Vogt, Isaac Asimov, Leon Uris, Werner von Braun, Willy Lee, George Gamov, Immanuel Velikovsky and many others.

In 1961 I left home on a scholarship to Evangel College, an Assemblies of God accredited liberal arts college in Springfield, Mo. While at Evangel I discovered Wylie's "A Generation of Vipers" followed by his seminal work, "An Essay on Morals." The first was disturbing, and I found myself getting angry with the author as he challenged nearly everything in which I believed on the religious side. Then I opened the pages of "An Essay on Morals," and I never turned back.

Wylie subtitles his small volume: "A Science of Philosophy and a Philosophy of the Sciences; a Popular Explanation of the Jungian Theory of Human Instinct; a new Bible for the Bold Mind and a way to Personal Peace by Logic; the Heretic's Handbook and Text for Honest Skeptics, including a Description of Man suitable for an Atomic Age; together with a Compendium of Means to Brotherhood in a Better World; and a Voyage beyond the Opposite Directions of Religion and Objective Truth, to Understanding."

In his Essay, Wylie summarizes much of Carl Jung's insights with Jung's subsequent blessing (and to the consternation of Wylie's critics who had panned his Essay as demonstrating no real understanding of Jung).

Humans are the current peak of the evolutionary process. Yet we retain most of the genetic material from the species that preceded us, and, in

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