Fair enough, the book describes Price writing to Henry Morris in 1971 to “congratulate him on his enterprise”, and he mentioned that with the exception of certainty about the global flood, he agreed with the other 2 tenets in the “Statement of Belief” that Morris’ society was using at the time. I don’t know exactly what those tenets were, but I think it’s fair to guess that at least one of them involved a clear acceptance of what we’d recognise today as YECism.
Both Oren Harman and the scientist who reviewed his biography of Price, Stephen Frank, discuss this as a symptom of Price’s descent into the mental illness that led to his suicide a few years later, and it’s not too hard to see why. His sudden conversion to Christianity is a red flag as well, given that it was for one of the weakest reasons I can image - he was a series of coincidences and thought someone must be controlling his life. Here’s Harman’s account of Price’s conversion:
Later he would write that the “coincidences” that forced him to convert were on the order of 1/1030, odds so fleetingly miniscule that he simply had no choice but to “give in and admit that God existed.”3 “About the beginning of June,” he wrote to his brother, Edison, in the fall, trying to explain,
I happened to notice one surprising coincidence in my life, and this started me searching back through my calendar books and letters and other material, and noticing a long succession of other improbabilities, until the improbability level
became astronomical. I listed a long series of independent events having improbabilities of the order of 1/100 or 1/1000, that fitted together into a meaningful pattern, and when I multiplied these together the product was something like i over i followed by twenty or thirty zeros.4
What had been the initial “surprising coincidence”? It was bizarre and absurd, maniacal and eerie. But it had George entirely transfixed.
Back at Christmas, Bob and Margarite Sheffield, old Price family friends from New York City, had been visiting London with their two daughters, Anne and Sally. Almost immediately, though she was barely eighteen, George took a liking to Anne. Bob wasn’t particularly happy about it, and hinted to George to back off. But Anne was continuing with a friend on a trip through Europe, and after visiting Finland, Sweden, and Germany, wrote to George innocently that she was scheduled to return to London on May 15, this time alone. “Since your visit played a critical role in this,” he wrote to her later, explaining his conversion, “I know that you will be interested in hearing how this came about. Prepare yourself to hear some surprising things, for there are more things in heaven and earth than you, I presume, imagine.”5
This is how it happened: When George first saw Anne over Christmas, he noticed her uncanny similarities to another Anne, the old girlfriend from the Midwest who had come to New York to see him just before his meeting with Emanuel Piore, director of research, on the twenty-third floor of the IBM Building in New York, on July 16, 1957. It was at that fateful meeting that George turned down Piore’s offer to join IBM as a senior researcher, based on the draft of his Design Machine published a few months earlier in Fortune magazine. And it had been on the previous day, the fifteenth, that he met Anne and instead of offering to marry her, told her he’d think about things. When he had wanted to marry her around the time he had contracted polio, Anne had broken off their relationship for another man. Now, still jealous, he figured he could take his time.
Clearly, he came to believe, this had led to his downfall. For had he asked Anne, who was a Roman Catholic, to marry him that day, he would have been focused first and foremost on nailing down a stable job. And had he accepted Piore’s offer, he would never have found himself in the drug-infested predicament in the Village, selling himself short on technical manuals for GE and Sperry-Marine, and trying and failing to write No Easy Way. In fact, had he taken Piore’s offer, he would never have joined IBM on a lower rung, and might never have contracted thyroid cancer. If he hadn’t been sick, he’d never have come under “butcher” Ferguson’s knife, and his life might not have descended into misery.6
July 15, 1957, had been a fateful day, all right, of this he was certain. And so, meeting Anne Sheffield now, thirteen years later, couldn’t just be a “coincidence.” She not only looked just like the earlier Anne, she had the very same name, the very same inflections. It didn’t seem to matter that he was forty-seven and she was eighteen and the daughter of close family friends. He wanted her, he wrote to her, “so very very much.” On everything important to him—choosing to become a chemist, choosing to marry Julia, choosing to go to Ferguson, choosing not to marry the first Anne—he had always7taken the wrong path. This time he was determined not to make another mistake.
Innocent and spooked, Anne left London for home at the end of the week. Convinced that there must be more than just the hand of chance involved, alone again and lovestruck, George remembered a poem by Henry Constable that an old Harvard friend had once sent him. “To live in Hell, and Heaven to behold / To welcome life, and die a living death /…If this be love, if love in this be grounded…” He couldn’t quite remember the rest, and started searching for the poem in his papers. When he couldn’t find it, he ran over to the British Museum Library. Fingering through the index cards, he came upon another Henry Constable, not the sixteenth century poet but a twentieth century theologian and believer in conditional immortality whose titles—Hades: or the Intermediate State of Man; Restitution of All Things; The Duration and the Nature of Future Punishment—sent shivers down his spine. Once again—an identical name and a message!8
Walking back to his flat on Little Titchfield beneath the spire, George contemplated his phone number. It was 580-2399, the last four digits signaling a minute before midnight. Of course 2359 was technically correct, but to him 2399 was meaningful, and that’s what really mattered. Was this another message? Could someone be signaling to him that the clock of doom was about to strike, that only a moment remained to make the right choice in life, finally, once and for all?9
As he looked through his diaries and letters, he saw more and more “coincidences.” Names, numbers, dates—they aligned in such ways that a pattern couldn’t honestly be ruled out. Someone was speaking to him, of this he was sure. “It wasn’t that I wanted to believe,” he later wrote to Anne, “but there wasn’t any alternative.” Finally, forty-seven years old and a lifelong fanatical atheist, he gave in and bowed to the spire. On June 14, George Price walked out of his flat up the stairs and through the warm, honey-colored circular portico of All Souls Church.
The books goes into more detail about Price’s spiral into more and more fanatical beliefs, and his final months, but let’s just say I think we should consider Price, particularly in the latter years of his life, a highly variable source of insights. Citing Price’s work on evolutionary biology and claiming him as a creationist is rather like a megavitamin therapist discussing Linus Pauling’s work in chemistry then snidely remarking that Pauling too believed that massive doses of vitamins could cure anything.
