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