Creationism - National Center for Science Education

Hitchcock. Their completely unfounded fear that scientific discovery will undermine
Scriptural infallibility leads them to attack geology and try to demonstrate its falsity, yet
in their ignorance of the subject they totally misrepresent the claims and theories of
geology, substituting for them their own “wild and extravagant hypotheses” (1851:16-7).
He recommends the proper teaching of geology to quiet the unfounded fear that the
lessons of geology contradict the lessons of theology.
Far from being a danger to revelation, geology is the science which most clearly
and directly demonstrates the benevolence and personal intervention of God. Hitchcock
stresses the uniformity of law and of natural processes: the “same general laws appear to
have always prevailed upon the globe, and to have controlled the changes which have
taken place upon and within it.” But he also argues that geology, more than any other
science, proves that God has intervened directly to guide and alter earth history. “No
other science presents us with such repeated examples of special miraculous intervention
in nature.” The successive sets of organisms which have inhabited the earth were
separate miraculous creations, not metamorphoses from previous species. Volcanoes,
glaciers, and other destructive phenomenona cause short-term damage but have been
necessary to render the earth productive for mankind. These beneficial long-term
processes have caused the earth to be perfectly adapted to man.
Hitchcock urges the study of geology so that Christian apologists would be better
armed against skeptical arguments. Knowledge of geology would help Christians to
refute the seemingly plausible arguments for materialism and for the “development
hypothesis” (that is, evolution). Geology shows that the truths of science and of the Bible
are one. “Soon shall the horizon, where geology and revelation meet, be cleared of every
cloud, and present only an unbroken and magnificent circle of truth” (1851:70).
In The Panorama of Creation (1908), David Holbrook also presents what he calls
a “phenomenal” interpretation of Genesis. The first chapter of Genesis is literature, not
science. It is not a narrative of origins; the beginnings it describes are of “appearance
rather than essence.” Its propositions, however, are factual rather than merely poetic, and
there is a profound harmony between science and Genesis. Genesis deals with terrestrial
matters in a pictorial fashion, portraying a panorama of creation in six divisions, like a
series of paintings of geological landscapes. It presents a plain account of the visible
progress of creation (after a general announcement of God’s initial act of creation)—the
preparation of the earth for man—as it would appear to an ordinary human observer. By
using the language of appearances, the Bible avoids dependence on particular scientific
theories. God’s successive fiats and anthropomorphic actions in the creation ‘week’ are
“rhetorical” devices employed to give vividness to the account. Holbrook advocates a
form of Day-Age creationism, but argues that his “phenomemal” interpretation avoids the
chronological difficulties posed by strict Day-Age creationism. His scheme is based on
the then-fashionable “nebular theory” of cosmic evolution; he shows that this theory, and
the geological record, is in perfect concordance with the Genesis account, and argues that
such perfect harmony is statistical proof of its truth.
Hugh Miller, the Scottish stone-mason-turned-geologist, accepts a form of
“double revelation,” as evidenced by the title of his last book, The Testimony of the
Rocks; or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies (1857). Most of the book
concerns the relationship between the “Two Records: Mosaic and Geological,” and how