Creationism - National Center for Science Education

Price wrote that he always tried “to keep facts and theories clear and distinct.” Geologists
have yet to learn to do this, says Price.
Most of the other natural sciences have each passed through about the same stages of historical
development. Beginning as mere speculations, each passed through a period where speculative or a priori
methods struggled with the rising scientific or inductive methods. Finally these other sciences have now
reached the place where scientific methods alone are recognized by the educated world, and speculative
fancies are debarred from exercising their baleful influence over the main conceptions of these sciences.
At any rate, in all the sciences except geology, facts and theories are kept separate and distinct in all
textbooks to be used by students in academies and colleges, so that the student can judge of the value of the
theories for himself. In this way, the student has a chance for his intellectual life, his intellectual freedom.
But in geology, facts and theories are still inextricably commingled; and in the ordinary college textbook of
the science, the most absurd and fantastic speculations are still taught to the student with all the solemnity
and pompous importance which might be allowable in speaking of the facts of chemistry of physics.
(1923:587]
Proper science should be built inductively on facts—not on a priori theories such as
evolutionism. Such a true science proves Flood Geology, as he wrote a few years later in
Evolutionary Geology and the New Catastrophism:
By these methods of strict inductive science, we shall not be able to avoid the conclusion that our world has
witnessed an awful aqueous catastrophe, and that back of this lies a direct and real creation as the only
possible origin of the great families of plants and animals. In short, a strictly inductive and mature study of
the facts of geology as known to modern science confirms in a very marvelous way the literal interpretation
of the first chapters of Genesis which a pseudo-criticism and the infant lispings of science supposed they
had consigned to the realm of fable and myth. [1926:223]
Price pointed to the many examples of “wrong-order” strata and fossils as
decisive refutation of the evolutionist theory of a long and gradual deposition of the
various layers. “Every scrap of physical evidence tends to show that these rocks were
actually deposited in the order in which we find them.” It is only blind adherence to
evolutionary theory which causes geologists to ignore these plain facts. Reliance on such
a speculative hypothesis, declared Price, is a “mere travesty on the methods of Bacon and
Newton” (1926:323).
In a later book, The Geological-Ages Hoax: A Plea for Logic in Theoretical
Geology (1931), Price castigated geologists for backwards reasoning. He insisted that
proper logic demands that geological investigations “begin at the surface of the earth and
work downward, instead of beginning at a supposed bottom of the fossiliferous strata and
working upward.” Geologists begin at the bottom and speculate recklessly up to the
present. “The correct scientific method would be to begin with the present world, with
all that we know about our modern earth and its living inhabitants and the forces now
operating over the earth’s surface; then by working backwards into the past” we can
explain that past. Previous geologists were “wild dreamers and speculators; for the relics
of ancient plants and animals were used by them as mental spring-boards from which to
launch away on the wings of airy fancy about how the world was made and what
innumerable vicissitudes it had experienced in remote ages.” Price calls for an “ecdysis”
of geology: for geology to shed it old rigid shell of accumulated false facts and obsolete
theories.
Harry Rimmer titled his first major work The Theory of Evolution and the Facts
of Science (1935). In The Harmony of Science and Scripture (1936:12), he says: