By the late nineteenth century, geologists, physicists and biologists agreed that the age of the Earth was well over 20 million years. Prior to the use of radiometric dating, scientific estimates before 1900 ranged between 20 million and 3 billion years old. Most Christians "readily conceded that the Bible allowed for an ancient earth and pre-Edenic life."[2] With very few exceptions they accommodated the new geological theories either with day-age creationism, the belief that the six days of Genesis represented vast ages, or by separating the original creation from a later Edenic creation: the so-called gap theory.[3] The primary promoter of "flood geology" during the early twentieth century was George McCready Price, but he had comparatively little influence among evangelicals because he was a Seventh-day Adventist, a church treated warily by many conservative Protestants.[4]
Origins
By the 1950s, most evangelical scientists scorned flood geology, and those who accepted the theory were increasingly marginalized within the American Scientific Affiliation (founded 1941), an evangelical organization that gradually shifted from strict creationism to progressive creationism and theistic evolution.[5] In 1954, Bernard Ramm, an evangelical apologist and theologian closely associated with the ASA, published The Christian View of Science and Scripture, which attacked the notion that "biblical inspiration implied that the Bible was a reliable source of scientific data."[6] Ramm ridiculed both flood geology and the gap theory, and one ASA member credited Ramm with providing a way for a majority of Christian biologists to accept evolution.[7]
Ramm's book sparked a young Bible teacher and seminarian, John C. Whitcomb, Jr., to challenge what he considered its "absurdities". Whitcomb had earlier studied geology and paleontology at Princeton University, but by the 1950s, he was teaching the Bible at Grace Theological Seminary. At the 1953 ASA meeting, Whitcomb had been impressed by a presentation of Henry M. Morris—a hydraulic engineer with a PhD from the University of Minnesota—called "The Biblical Evidence for Recent Creation and Universal Deluge". Following publication of Ramm's book, Whitcomb decided to devote his Th.D. dissertation to defending flood geology.[8]
Berated almost from the beginning of his project by influential evangelicals such as Edward John Carnell, the newly installed president of Fuller Theological Seminary,[9] Whitcomb completed his dissertation in 1957 and began condensing it for publication. With no illusions about his scientific expertise, Whitcomb sought a collaborator who had a PhD in science. He could find no geologists who took Genesis seriously, and even teachers at evangelical schools at best expressed distaste for flood geology.[10] Eventually, Henry Morris agreed to become Whitcomb's collaborator for the scientific portions of the book. Despite his heavy teaching load and administrative duties at Virginia Tech, where he had just become head of a large civil-engineering program, Morris made steady progress on his section of the book, eventually contributing more than twice as much material as Whitcomb.[11]
As the manuscript neared completion, Moody Press, which had expressed initial interest, now hesitated. The proposed book was a long work that insisted on six literal days of creation and was certain to be criticized by segments of Moody's constituency.[12] Whitcomb and Morris instead published with the smaller Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, whose owner Charles H. Craig had long wanted to acquire a manuscript that supported catastrophism.[13]
Contents
After opening with the declaration that "the Bible is the infallible Word of God",[14] Whitcomb's section provides biblical arguments for a universal flood[15] as well as attempting to refute non-geological difficulties with the biblical account.[16] Whitcomb specifically addresses the local flood theories of Bernard Ramm—who has far more entries in the index than anyone else.[17] Whitcomb concludes his section of the work with a review of how geological theories had influenced Christian views of the Flood since the beginning of the nineteenth century and draws the "one vitally important lesson", that the biblical doctrine of the Flood cannot be harmonized with "uniformitarian theories".[18]
Morris introduces his section on geology with the frank statement that Bible-believing Christians face "a serious dilemma" because contemporary geologists present "an almost unanimous verdict" against the biblical account of creation and the Flood. Nevertheless, Morris assures believers that "evidences of full divine inspiration of Scripture are far weightier than the evidences for any fact of science."[19] Morris then argues that "fossil-bearing strata were apparently laid down in large measure during the Flood, with the apparent sequences attributed not to evolution but rather to hydrodynamic selectivity, ecologic habitats, and differential mobility and strength of the various creatures."[20] He also dismisses the theory of "thrust faults", the mainstream geological theory by which "old" rocks were presumed to have come to rest on "young" rocks.[21] Morris argues that commonly accepted geological theories do not truly depend on scientific data but are rather a "moral and emotional decision", in which evolutionists seek "intellectual justification for escape from personal responsibility to his Creator and escape from the 'way of the Cross' as the necessary and sufficient means of his personal redemption."[22] Finally, in the longest chapter of the book, Morris addresses "problems in biblical geology", which include commonly used dating methods (such as carbon-14 measurements) as well as geological formations, such as coral reefs, petrified forests, and varves, all of which imply great age for the earth.[23]
Reception
Several dozen Christian magazines reviewed the book and generally praised its defense of the scriptural account of the Flood, although few seemed to understand that accepting Whitcomb and Morris meant rejecting the day-age and gap theories. Christianity Today, the most important evangelical magazine of the period, published a tepid review that did not address issues raised by the book but instead criticized the authors for using secondary sources and taking arguments out of context.[24] The American Scientific Affiliation featured two hostile reviews, and in 1969, the ASA Journal published a highly critical commentary by J. R. van der Fliert, a Dutch Reformed geologist at the Free University of Amsterdam, who called Whitcomb and Morris "pseudo-scientific" pretenders. "To ensure that no readers missed his point," the journal "ran boldfaced sidebars by evangelical geologists applauding van de Fliert's bare-knuckled approach."[25]
Outside fundamentalist circles The Genesis Flood created "hardly a ripple of recognition".[26] Its release went unnoted by professional geology journals and periodicals covered by Book Review Digest. In a talk given to the large Houston Geological Society, Morris received a whimsical introduction by the president that fell well short of praise for his work. His call for questions at the conclusion of his talk produced none; one member said the audience was "too stunned to speak".[27]
Scientists generally regard the book as a religious apologetic rather than a research document. The Geology Department of Baptist-affiliated Baylor University, in describing the known age of the earth as "4.51 to 4.55 billion years with a confidence of 1% or better", defined the key ingredient needed in methodology: "The defining characteristic of a scientific hypothesis is that it must be testable or falsifiable using reproducible observations. An idea that cannot be tested is not a scientific hypothesis. Scientific hypotheses are developed to fit data; data are not collected to fit or support hypotheses post facto."[28] Joel Cracraft, "Systematics, Comparative Biology and the Case Against Creationism", in Laurie R. Godfrey, Scientists Confront Creationism (New York: Norton, 1983) attacked the Whitcomb and Morris theory of a quick dispersal of animals from the Ark: "During the last decade biogeographers have come to realize that when the postulated phylogenetic relationships of organisms—both plants and animals—are examined relative to their distributions, many highly congruent, nonrandom patterns emerge." The National Center for Science Education and other critics have shown The Genesis Flood misquotes scientific source material and takes remarks out of context.[29][30] For example, in one instance, a source which read "the sea which vanished so many million years ago" was quoted as "the sea which vanished so many years ago."[30] Geologist John G. Solum has criticized the work for being inaccurate.[31] Solum noted "Whitcomb and Morris are mistaken about the nature of the rocks associated with thrust faults. Their claim about fossils is based on a Young Earth creationist misunderstanding of how rocks are dated relative to each other, and how the geologic column was constructed."[31] In fact, Solum noted that Morris' explanation of relative dating was not merely "somewhat oversimplified" but "entirely incorrect".[31]
Whitcomb and Morris "attributed the impasse between themselves and their critics to competing cosmologies"[32] and argued that the term science could refer only to "present and reproducible phenomena", not to observations made about past events.[32] Morris filled out his own cosmology a bit further in The Remarkable Birth of Planet Earth (1972), saying that the craters of the moon were probably caused by a cosmic battle between the forces of Satan and the armies of the archangel Michael.[33] In defense of their work, Whitcomb and Morris noted that the founders of modern geological science were, like them, non-specialists: Charles Lyell (a lawyer), William Smith (a surveyor), James Hutton (a doctor and gentleman farmer), John Playfair (a mathematician), as well as a number of clergymen.
Cultural importance
Historian of Science Michael D. Gordin has called The Genesis Flood "one of postwar America's most culturally significant works about the natural world. It was read by hundreds of thousands, spawned its own research institutes, and remains absolutely rejected by every mainstream biologist and geologist."[34]The Genesis Flood also "became a best-seller in the Fundamentalist world and polarized Evangelical opinion."[35] In 25 years, The Genesis Flood went through 29 printings and sold more than 200,000 copies.[36] An old-earth creationist book, written specifically to challenge young-earth geological theories, called the late twentieth-century revival of interest in flood geology "astonishing and perplexing", especially "in the face of increasing geologic and astronomical evidence for the vast antiquity of the Earth and the universe."[37] Again, in the words of a critic, Arthur McCalla, the growth in young-earth creationism occurred not because modern fundamentalists were more ignorant than in previous generations but because young-earth creationism "better defended a plain-sense reading of the inerrant Bible than did the old-Earth creationism of Ramm and the earlier Fundamentalists....Legions of Bible believers responded gratefully to Whitcomb and Morris because their system eliminated once and for all the need for interpretative contortions that twist and bend the words of the Bible in order to reconcile them with the findings of modern science."[38]
Publication changed the lives of both authors. Morris especially was deluged with speaking invitations,[39] and his notoriety became an embarrassment to Virginia Tech.[40] In 1963, Morris became a founder of the Creation Research Society and then, in 1970, the Institute for Creation Research. He wrote many more books devoted to young-earth creationism.[41]
During the late twentieth century, young-earth creationism sparked by The Genesis Flood was regularly featured on Christian radio and became a staple of the home-school movement.[42] An International Conference on Creationism, held every fifth year in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, produces papers of "considerable scientific and mathematical sophistication", and the movement attracts younger scholars with PhDs in the sciences, including even a few in geology.[43]Ken Ham, perhaps the best known young-earth creationist of the early twenty-first century, the founder of Answers in Genesis and the Creation Museum near Cincinnati, called Morris "one of my heroes of the faith. He is the man the Lord raised up as the father of the modern creationist movement. The famous book The Genesis Flood...was the book the Lord used to really launch the modern creationist movement around the world."[44]
↑ Numbers(2006), 7-8. For instance, William Jennings Bryan of Scopes Trial fame, believed that the days of Genesis were geological ages and even "allowed for the possibility of organic evolution—so long as it did not impinge on the supernatural origin of Adam and Eve." Harry Rimmer, the best-known creationist before World War II, asserted that millions of years might be accommodated in the hypothetical "gap" of Genesis 1.
↑ Numbers(2006), 8, 223, 241, 260; Barry Hankins, American Evangelicals: A Contemporary History of a Mainstream Religious Movement (Rowman & Littlefield, 2008):"the Religious and Science Association and the Deluge Geology Society were part of the bitter fundamentalist battle that took place in theological circles as well....These organizations were often top heavy with Seventh-day Adventists, and the fighting often pitted the Adventists against fundamentalists who thought Adventism was cultish with its reverence for prophet Ellen White." (72-73) To Seventh-day Adventists, "the saints who greeted Christ as his Second Coming would be observing the seventh-day Sabbath in harmony with the Fourth Commandment....The Sabbath doctrine seemed to demand a literal creation week, for as Price cogently argued, if a person does not believe that there ever was a real Creation at some definite time in the past, how can we expect him to observe the Sabbath as a memorial of that event, which in his view never occurred?'" Numbers (2006), 104.
↑ Numbers(2006), 208-09. The book was considered a model of new evangelical thought, and in 1954—just as the split between evangelicals and fundamentalists was taking place—evangelist Billy Graham called for a view of biblical inspiration "along the line of the recent book by Bernard Ramm." (209)
↑ Numbers(2006), 211. The same ASA member found it curious though that Ramm "stopped short of going through that door himself."
↑ Numbers(2006), 213. Carnell denounced even the notion of asking evangelical leaders about their beliefs concerning creation and the Flood.
↑ Numbers(2006), 215. The eccentric creationist and fruit farmer Dudley Joseph Whitney complained, "Why, why, why, should the saints be so prone to take positions which discredit the Bible?"
↑ Numbers(2006), 224-25. Craig had majored in geology at Princeton, but he "had always preferred catastrophism to uniformitarianism." By the following year, a second printing had been issued by the much larger Baker Book House.
↑ These included arguments that the Flood covered the highest mountains, that Noah was unable to disembark for a year, that there would be no purpose for building a gigantic ark and collecting animals if the Flood were local, that Jesus Christ said that all men were destroyed by the Flood, and 2 Peter 3.3-7 uses the Flood as a "basis for refuting uniformitarian skeptics in the last days." Whitcomb and Morris, 33-34.
↑ These included the possibility of taking the Bible metaphorically, the argument that the Ark was too small to contain examples of all the world's animals, and that the animals could not have distributed themselves over the earth so quickly after the Flood. Whitcomb and Morris, 86-88.
↑ Numbers(2006), 226. There are forty references to Ramm in the index.
↑ Numbers(2006), 227. In the first two editions Whitcomb and Morris also claimed evidence for dinosaur and human footprints side-by-side in the Paluxy River bed, some examples of which were produced by a Depression-era hoaxer. In the third printing, "they silently revised the text."(228) The Institute for Creation Research, though admitting the problems, has not quite given up on the Paluxy footprints. "The Paluxy River Tracks", (1976) Institute for Creation Research, (accessed January 05, 2009).
↑ Numbers(2006), 230; Donald C. Boardman, "Review," Christianity Today (September 11, 1961), 39-40
↑ Numbers(2006), 231-33; J. R. van de Fliert, "Fundamentalism and the Fundamentals of Geology," Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation, 21 (September 1969): 69-81. Archived 2003-08-16 at the Wayback Machine
↑ Henry M. Morris, The Remarkable Birth of Planet Earth (San Diego, CA: Creation Life Publishers, 1972 and 1978), 66-67.
↑ Michael D. Gordin, The PseudoScience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 135.
↑ Arthur McCalla, The Creationist Debate: The Encounter Between the Bible and the Historical Mind (London: Continuum International, 2006), 172.
↑ Numbers(2006), 234. By 2011, the book had sold 300,000 copies in 48 printings and had been translated into German, Korean, Serbian and Spanish. Paul J. Scharf, "The Genesis Flood, Tidal Wave of Change,"Archived 2010-11-30 at the Wayback MachineBaptist Bulletin (July 2010).
↑ Davis A. Young & Ralph F. Stearley, The Bible, Rocks and Time (Downers Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity Press, 2008), 157-58.
↑ Numbers (2006), 234-35. Numbers calls this section of his chapter on The Genesis Flood, "The Fruits of Fame."
↑ John D. Morris, "The Creation Movement's First Foundation," Acts & Facts [Institute for Creation Research], (February 2011), 9. Morris' son recalled that when Morris resigned to form the Institute for Creation Research, "his faculty colleagues held a cocktail party to celebrate."
↑ Numbers(2006), 234-38. Morris was also shown the door by his liberal Southern Baptist minister in Blacksburg, Virginia and was virtually forced out of his teaching position at Virginia Tech.
↑ Young & Stearley, 160-61. Young and Stearley nevertheless consider the claims of these young-earth creationists to be without "scientific credibility" and a blight on the church, which "ought to be committed to truth and reality."
Creation science or scientific creationism is a pseudoscientific form of Young Earth creationism which claims to offer scientific arguments for certain literalist and inerrantist interpretations of the Bible. It is often presented without overt faith-based language, but instead relies on reinterpreting scientific results to argue that various myths in the Book of Genesis and other select biblical passages are scientifically valid. The most commonly advanced ideas of creation science include special creation based on the Genesis creation narrative and flood geology based on the Genesis flood narrative. Creationists also claim they can disprove or reexplain a variety of scientific facts, theories and paradigms of geology, cosmology, biological evolution, archaeology, history, and linguistics using creation science. Creation science was foundational to intelligent design.
Young Earth creationism (YEC) is a form of creationism which holds as a central tenet that the Earth and its lifeforms were created by supernatural acts of the Abrahamic God between about 6,000 and 10,000 years ago. In its most widespread version, YEC is based on the religious belief in the inerrancy of certain literal interpretations of the Book of Genesis. Its primary adherents are Christians and Jews who believe that God created the Earth in six literal days.
Old Earth Creationism (OEC) is an umbrella of theological views encompassing certain varieties of creationism which may or can include day-age creationism, gap creationism, progressive creationism, and sometimes theistic evolution.
The antediluvian period is the time period chronicled in the Bible between the fall of man and the Genesis flood narrative in biblical cosmology. The term was coined by Thomas Browne. The narrative takes up chapters 1–6 of the Book of Genesis. The term found its way into early geology and science until the late Victorian era. Colloquially, the term is used to refer to any ancient and murky period.
Day-age creationism, a type of old Earth creationism, is an interpretation of the creation accounts in Genesis. It holds that the six days referred to in the Genesis account of creation are not literal 24-hour days, but are much longer periods. The Genesis account is then reconciled with the age of the Earth. Proponents of the day-age theory can be found among both theistic evolutionists, who accept the scientific consensus on evolution, and progressive creationists, who reject it. The theories are said to be built on the understanding that the Hebrew word yom is also used to refer to a time period, with a beginning and an end and not necessarily that of a 24-hour day.
Flood geology is a pseudoscientific attempt to interpret and reconcile geological features of the Earth in accordance with a literal belief in the Genesis flood narrative, the flood myth in the Hebrew Bible. In the early 19th century, diluvial geologists hypothesized that specific surface features provided evidence of a worldwide flood which had followed earlier geological eras; after further investigation they agreed that these features resulted from local floods or from glaciers. In the 20th century, young-Earth creationists revived flood geology as an overarching concept in their opposition to evolution, assuming a recent six-day Creation and cataclysmic geological changes during the biblical flood, and incorporating creationist explanations of the sequences of rock strata.
Gap creationism is a form of old Earth creationism that posits that the six-yom creation period, as described in the Book of Genesis, involved six literal 24-hour days, but that there was a gap of time between two distinct creations in the first and the second verses of Genesis, which the theory states explains many scientific observations, including the age of the Earth. It differs from day-age creationism, which posits that the 'days' of creation were much longer periods, and from young Earth creationism, which although it agrees concerning the six literal 24-hour days of creation, does not posit any gap of time.
Progressive creationism is the religious belief that God created new forms of life gradually over a period of hundreds of millions of years. As a form of old Earth creationism, it accepts mainstream geological and cosmological estimates for the age of the Earth, some tenets of biology such as microevolution as well as archaeology to make its case. In this view creation occurred in rapid bursts in which all "kinds" of plants and animals appear in stages lasting millions of years. The bursts are followed by periods of stasis or equilibrium to accommodate new arrivals. These bursts represent instances of God creating new types of organisms by divine intervention. As viewed from the archaeological record, progressive creationism holds that "species do not gradually appear by the steady transformation of its ancestors; [but] appear all at once and "fully formed."
The history of creationism relates to the history of thought based on the premise that the natural universe had a beginning, and came into being supernaturally. The term creationism in its broad sense covers a wide range of views and interpretations, and was not in common use before the late 19th century. Throughout recorded history, many people have viewed the universe as a created entity. Many ancient historical accounts from around the world refer to or imply a creation of the earth and universe. Although specific historical understandings of creationism have used varying degrees of empirical, spiritual and/or philosophical investigations, they are all based on the view that the universe was created. The Genesis creation narrative has provided a basic framework for Jewish and Christian epistemological understandings of how the universe came into being – through the divine intervention of the god, Yahweh. Historically, literal interpretations of this narrative were more dominant than allegorical ones.
The Creation Research Society (CRS) is a Christian fundamentalist group that requires of its members belief that the Bible is historically and scientifically true in the original autographs, belief that "original created kinds" of all living things were created during the Creation week described in Genesis, and belief in flood geology.
George McCready Price was a Canadian creationist. He produced several anti-evolution and creationist works, particularly on the subject of flood geology. His views did not become common among creationists until after his death, particularly with the modern creation science movement starting in the 1960s.
Henry Madison Morris was an American young Earth creationist, Christian apologist and engineer. He was one of the founders of the Creation Research Society and the Institute for Creation Research. He is considered by many to be "the father of modern creation science". He coauthored The Genesis Flood with John C. Whitcomb in 1961.
John Clement Whitcomb Jr. was an American theologian and young Earth creationist. Along with Henry M. Morris, he wrote The Genesis Flood, which influenced many conservative American Christians to adopt flood geology.
The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design is a history of the origins of anti-evolutionism by Ronald Numbers. First published in 1992 as The Creationists: The Evolution of Scientific Creationism, a revised and expanded edition was published under the current title in 2006.
The Biblical Creation Society (BCS) is a United Kingdom-based creationist organisation founded in 1977 by Scottish minister Nigel M. de S. Cameron (now President of the Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies and a group of evangelical students, who were concerned about the popularity of theistic evolution among conservative Christians, but were repelled by the "wholly negative" attitude of the Evolution Protest Movement. Although inspired by the scientific creationism of John C. Whitcomb and Henry M. Morris, it refused to limit its membership to only Young Earth creationists, and in its name rejected American attempts to separate scientific creationism from its Biblical roots. The organisation is based in Rugby, Warwickshire.
Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, subtitled Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation, is the academic publication of the American Scientific Affiliation.
The International Conference on Creationism (ICC) is a conference in support of young earth creationism, sponsored by the Creation Science Fellowship (CSF). The first conference occurred in 1986 at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. Subsequent conferences have been held in 1990, 1994, 1998, 2003, 2008, 2013 and 2018.
Scriptural geologists were a heterogeneous group of writers in the early nineteenth century, who claimed "the primacy of literalistic biblical exegesis" and a short Young Earth time-scale. Their views were marginalised and ignored by the scientific community of their time. They "had much the same relationship to 'philosophical' geologists as their indirect descendants, the twentieth-century creationists." Paul Wood describes them as "mostly Anglican evangelicals" with "no institutional focus and little sense of commonality". They generally lacked any background in geology, and had little influence even in church circles.
The Genesis flood narrative is a Hebrew flood myth. It tells of God's decision to return the universe to its pre-creation state of watery chaos and remake it through the microcosm of Noah's ark.
The local flood theory is an interpretation of the Genesis flood narrative where the flood of Noah is interpreted as a local event, generally located in Mesopotamia, instead of a global event.
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