Creationism - National Center for Science Education

A remarkable point in Biblical references to nature, is that we find no definite explanation anywhere of
natural things. The writers of the Bible do not go beyond the description of what they actually see around
them, and the correct way in which they describe what they do see is beyond praise. [1932]
Facts are just facts; they are not theory-laden.
In Many Infallible Proofs: The Evidences of Christianity (1886), Arthur Pierson
declared that science should be unbiased, and not based on preconceived theories which
hinder impartial investigation. He earnestly warned against relying on appeals to feelings
—to conviction rather than to logical persuasion. Advocating a Common Sense approach
to science and truth, Pierson insisted that rational investigation and logic would triumph,
and prove biblical Christianity true: the “one and only Divine Religion.”
God—asks of us no blind faith. We should know what we believe and why we believe it. Nothing is to be
accepted unless based on good evidence; to believe hastily may be to blindly embrace error and untruth.
Equally certain it is, inasmuch as God gives the Bible for the guidance of all men, that the proofs that this is
his Word will neither be hard to find nor hard to see; they will be plain,—to be found and understood by
the common average man. [1886:11]
Marsden (1984:107) quotes a passage from another work by Pierson in which he defends
the Baconian Common Sense approach to science and theology:
I like Biblical theology that does not start with the superficial Aristotelian method of reason, that does not
begin with an hypothesis, and then wrap the facts and the philosophy to fit the crook of our dogma, but a
Baconian system, which first gathers the teachings of the word of God, and, then seeks to deduce some
general law upon which the facts can be arranged.
All facts must be be based on direct evidence, said Curtis. Mauro asserted (1922)
that evolution is “not scientific, for science has to do only with facts. Evolution belongs
wholly in the realm of speculative philosophy.” According to Maynard Shipley in The
War on Modern Science (1927:249), a fundamentalist antievolutionist organization was
formed in Los Angeles called the “Defenders of Science versus Speculation.”
Arnold Guyot, an eminent Swiss-born geology and geography professor at the
College of New Jersey (Princeton) who introduced the study of scientific geography to
this country (“guyots”—flat-topped volcanic seamounts—are named after him), wrote, in
Creation; or The Biblical Cosmology in the Light of Modern Science (1884):
The Bible narrative, by its simplicity, is chaste, positive, historical character, is in perfect contrast with the
fanciful, allegorical, intricate cosmologies of all heathen religions. By its sublime grandeur, by its
symmetrical plan, by the profoundly philosophical disposition of its parts, and, perhaps, quite so much by
its wonderful caution in the statement of facts, which leaves room for all scientific discoveries, it betrays
the supreme guidance which directed the pen of the writer, and kept it throughout within the limits of truth.
In a book called Plain Facts in Plain Words (1881; later editions are titled Moses
and the Philosophers), Stephen Alexander Hodgman said that “Moses wrote the true and
philosophical account of the origin of things,” and that the facts of science now confirm
the truth of Moses’s account. The absurd fictions of false science will disappear, despite
the current prevalence of the teachings of Darwin, Huxley and Spencer (quoted in
Cavanaugh 1983:153).
George McCready Price continued to insist on the difference between facts and
theories in his many books, such as his textbook magnum opus The New Geology (1923).