Creationism - National Center for Science Education

make it conform to this straightforward interpretation, or they can twist and stretch the
biblical interpretation to make it allow for those conclusions of science which they accept
as undeniable. (In practice it always involves a mixture of both.) Mainstream strict
creationists such as Henry Morris tend to the former approach, positing fantastic
scientific hyptheses to account for recent creation and the Flood, and other events and
conditions described in Genesis, such as the pre-Flood Water Canopy. Other, usually
more independent creationists, tend more to the latter approach. They reject less of the
conclusions of standard modern science, but consequently are forced to devise strange
interpretations of certain Bible passages, and to posit extra-biblical notions and
interpretations purely as ad hoc means of preserving what they know to be scientifically
true while also preserving biblical inerrancy, in however strange a form.
Dudley Whitney, for example, proposed that there was a second creation after the
Flood to account for the similarity of organisms on widely separated continents (he
couldn’t allow for continental drift then): “if God created this world and the plants and
animals upon it in the first place, He could replace destroyed plants and animals by a
second creation, and the logical belief is that He did so, to some extent at least”
(1961:36). There is of course no suggestion of this independently in the Bible, but
Whitney feels that it is required by science and that it does not violate inerrancy. Harold
Armstrong invoked a post-Flood creation in order to account for desert animals, as did
Lammerts and Howe with reference to plants (Rice 1988:32). Creationists such as
Morris, however, reject such suggestions as contrary to the clear meaning of the Genesis
narrative.
Glenn Morton, a creationist with oil exploration experience, realizes that all the
sedimentary deposits of the geological record cannot be attributed to the Flood, as Morris
and mainline strict creationists claim. His solution is to theorize that fossiliferous
deposits were laid down primarily after the Flood during several hundred years of local
catastrophes.
While his theory is an improvement on the usual Flood geology, it provides a breathtaking amount of extrabiblical
emendation: the Bible provides genealogies and an outline of historical events from Noah to
Abraham and totally neglects to mention that Earth was still writhing and seething with local catastrophes
on a scale many hundreds of times greater than today. Morton has filled in this major component of Earth
history that the Bible writers forgot to mention. [Rice 1988:31]
Morton feels obliged to do this because he knows the Bible to be inerrant, yet he realizes
that Morris’s Flood Geology is scientifically absurd.
Bernard Northrup, a pastor in Redding, California, is also sharply critical of
standard Flood Geology as contradicted by scientific evidence. He has developed a
theory that there were many catastrophes in earth history in addition to the Flood. The
Paleozoic strata were laid down by the Flood itself, but the Mesozoic strata were
deposited during the thousand years or so in which the Floodwaters gradually subsided.
The continents were divided during this retreat of the Floodwaters (in the days of the
biblical Peleg), and the accompanying vulcanism caused the Ice Age.
All creation-scientists must distort both science and the intended meaning of the
Bible to some extent, regardless of which they distort more. As Stanley Rice expressed it
(1988:26):