But it closed in December '65! Good Lord, you ARE old! 
My teachers spoke only positively of him.
Wow, you knew Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians? I married the first Methodist I met. My town was founded by Germans so back then it was still Catholic and Lutheran with a few Episcopalian newcomers to add diversity.
The problem with arguing that what some take as evidence of common descent is actually evidence of “common design” is that there is nothing that could possibly count as evidence against “common design”. Common descent makes predictions about what we will find when we look at the world - predictions that could turn out to be false, which would in turn falsify common descent. Common design on the other hand makes no predictions about what we will find when we look at the world. Nothing we could find would count as evidence against it. And if nothing can be evidence against it, nothing can be evidence for it, either. It’s an unscientific idea. That doesn’t mean it’s false - not at all. All it means is that we can’t determine its truth by examining the world. That’s not the case with common descent. There are all kinds of things we could find that would falsify common descent - if, for example, it turned out that humans share more DNA with snails than with orangutangs. It’s just that we have never, ever found any of those things. After looking into the matter for a couple centuries, we’ve never found anything that proves common descent to be false, even though every time we go looking it would be possible for the facts to do just that. That is what it is for a scientific theory to have evidence for it - when all its predictions are borne out by the observed facts.
But no amount of evidence for common descent is, or even could be, evidence against common design. Indeed there’s a large school of thought in some theological circles that takes the two ideas to be perfectly compatible, i.e., that believes the scientific evidence for common descent, and believes in addition that God’s hand is behind the process. That’s a perfectly coherent position (though not one I myself believe, being an atheist). It’s perfectly possible for there to be some omnipotent supernatural being who set up the universe in such a way that it would come out the way it has, or who has been tinkering on some inscrutable level with it to make it come out the way it has, and either option would certainly be one in which one could appropriately say that the universe and the life within it is designed. There just is no reason to think that evolution is incompatible with the religious view that God created the universe and the life within it according to some divine plan.
What all this means is that you have set up a false dichotomy between creation/design and evolution. They’re not contradictory ideas about how the world or life came to be in their present states. They’re not about the same sorts of things at all. One is a theory about (some of) the particulars of the physical history of the universe. The other is a metaphysical view about what ultimate reality might underlie the physical, tangible reality that we can see and touch. They are no more in conflict than are the two theories that one the one hand the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is covered by a wide range of pigments applied to the underlying structural material with a delicate brush in an elaborate pattern guided by the nervous system and musculature of a male specimen of Homo sapiens in the 16th century, and on the other hand that it is covered by a great work of art which is a powerful depiction of Catholic religious views of the creation of mankind.
Most scholars believe Jesus existed, Josephus, who was a famous Jewish historian and one of the only historians spoke of Jesus but wrote, “For he was a performer of paradoxical feats, a teacher of people who accept the unusual with pleasure”.
As for evolution, the laws of science deem it neccessary for it to have taken place. The world was not created in a neatly six day manner like that layed forth in Genesis.
It is also neccessary to remember that the earth is put a miniscule portion of the world. Scientists believe the world’s time is limited as it eventually will be destroyed and such a God who creates a perfect world while allowing sin wouldn’t be so smart to limit his own creation’s future.
How about the whole carlos castaneda new age spiritualism? that was based on the teachings of a yaqui indian sorcerer (don juan matus) whose existence is highly suspected of being fabricated by castaneda.
I’m pretty sure I’d reverse the order of events, there. Castaneda began writing his books to cash in on the whole converging milieus of drug experimentation and new age mysticism that were already pretty well established in the ten years prior to his publication. (Yeah, he claimed to have met Don Juan in 1960, but he didn’t get his books out until 1968, long after Timothy Leary had begun pushing LSD and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi had begun pushing Transcendental Meditation and sufficiently later than the “dawning” the Age of Aquarius, the Beatles’s Magical Mystery Tour, and similar events to make such “journeys” profitable.