Creationism - National Center for Science Education

they can be reconciled. Miller especially praises Chalmers’ courageous and informed
efforts at reconciliation.
Miller was, relatively speaking, a liberal. One of his chapters is devoted to
refutation of those he calls the “Anti-Geologists”: those conservative religionists who
denounce geology as a satanic undermining of the authority of the Bible. The term “antigeologist”
applies to several of these reactionaries who Miller describes, but is a response
in particular to an anonymous work by an Anglican clergyman titled A Brief and
Complete Refutation of the Anti-Scriptural Theory of Geologists (1853). The author of
that work argued that God created fossils on the first day as models or archetypes “to
typify or foreshadow the living plants and animals that were to be called into existence a
few days later” (Miller 1857:397-8). The frozen mammoths were created as such under
the ice; unlike other fossils, they were not then transmuted into stone. Other, more
bizarre, fossils were “created on purpose to silence the HORRID BLASPHEMIES of
geologists.” Miller notes with evident amusement that the existence of coprolites (fossil
dung) infuriated this “anti-geologist,” who tried to blame them on Satan.
Demonstrating that the “anti-geologists” pervert both the biblical account, by their
interpretive contortions, as well as geology, he says of one:
It need not surprise us that a writer who takes such strange liberties with a book which he professes to
respect, and which he must have had many opportunites of knowing, should take still greater liberties with
a science for which he entertains no respect whatever, and of whose principles he is palpably ignorant.
[1857:414]
Miller argues forcefully for acceptance of the geological ages demonstrated by
contemporary science, and for the succession of groups of organisms through these ages,
as fully compatible with the biblical account. Though relatively liberal, he does firmly
dismiss the “development hypothesis” as “unsupported by a shadow of evidence”
(remember, however, that this was written two years before Darwin’s Origin).
Alexander Winchell, the geologist and science professor ousted by the
fundamentalists from Vanderbilt, similarly argued for a “liberal” concordist approach to
Genesis and geology. One of his books in fact is titled Reconciliation of Science and
Religion (1877). Winchell, like Miller, argued for the Day-Age interpretation of Genesis.
With his extensive knowledge of paleontology, he demonstrates that many forms have
emerged and become extinct, that the Flood could not have deposited all the earth’s
sedimentary strata, and that the earth has indeed changed considerably since Creation.
Man first appeared at the end of the Ice Age, which was late in the geological record, but
well before Adam, according to Winchell.
George Frederick Wright, the eminent Oberlin College geologist, taught both
geology and theology, and was in fact officially professor of the “harmony of science and
revelation.” In works such as Scientific Aspects of Christian Evidences (1898) and
Scientific Confirmation of Old Testament History (1906) he strove to reconcile Genesis
and geology, and prove that science supported the Bible. He argued for Day-Age
creationism and allowed for limited evolution, but argued strongly that evolution could
not explain the origin of life or of humans, which must have been the result of divine
intervention by the Creator God.
Though those authors of The Fundamentals who were trained in science,
including Wright, tended not to object strongly to evolution, other, non-scientific authors