Creationism - National Center for Science Education

in the series did. Rev. Henry Beach insisted that Darwinism contradicts the Bible, and
thus that if it is taught as scientific truth, it will inevitably undermine the religious
authority of the Bible.
We cannot depend on the Bible to show us ‘how to go to heaven’ if it misleads us as to ‘how the heavens
go’ regarding the origin, nature, descent and destiny of brutes and man. Darwinists have been digging at
the foundations of society and souls... [Beach 1912:37]
This is a shift in attitude from that of the concordists and harmonizers who were willing
to modify their interpretation of the Bible in order to accommodate science. These new
fundamentalists demanded that science must conform to the Bible, and not the Bible to
science.
FUNDAMENTALIST REJECTION OF COMPROMISE HARMONIZATIONS
In Back to the Bible (1931; originally published in 1916 as a pamphlet), George
McCready Price urged a return to primitive” Christianity, calling for a second Protestant
Reformation. He declared that Christians had tried, and failed, to make Christianity
harmonize with biology by various compromises, and that it was now time to insist that
biology conform to Christianity.
The problem confronting the Reformers of the sixteenth century was to vindicate the Bible as against
ecclesiastical tradition; the problem for the Reformers of the twentieth century is to vindicate a despised
and discarded Bible against so-called science already grown arrogant and dogmatic...
It would seem as if every possible method of compromise has been tried, with invariable failure and
confusion. Why not take the Mosaic account of Creation and the Deluge at their face value, and examine
the claims of the popular Evolution Philosophy in the light of primitive Christian principles, without any
compromise whatever? [1920:5]
Price rejoiced that the truths of science were now proving he Bible true and
demonstrating the harmony between God’s two books. Were it not for the beclouding
influence of sin, he explained, God’s Book of Nature could be read as clearly s His later
written revelation in the Bible. As a result of the Fall, the lessons from science were
harder to interpret, but science properly read still resoundingly vindicated Genesis.
“There can be no real scientific understanding of origins,” however. Science
does, though, rule out evolution and support the biblical account. In Q.E.D.: Or New
Light on the Doctrine of Creation (1917), Price confidently asserts that although science
can tell us nothing about the supernatural processes used during Creation, modern
scientific discoveries have established the doctrine of Creation like “a mathematical
Q.E.D.” Price stressed that, contrary to what uniformitarian evolution assumes, matter
and life
must have come into existence at the beginning by laws and methods not now operating anywhere on earth.
Not Uniformitarianism and Evolution, but Creation, is what modern science is teaching us by facts so large
and fixed that there is no prospect of their ever being overthrown by any fresh discoveries. For every
additional law in the realms of the physical and the biological sciences only renders more secure these
cumulative proofs that the beginnings of things must have been different, not merely in degree, but in kind,
from those “natural” processes by which the order of nature is now sustained. [1931:153]