Creationism - National Center for Science Education

Convinced of the geological ages and succession of life-forms, Miller predicted
that the literalist young-earth creationism of the “anti-geologists” (discussed previously)
would become as obsolete as the Ptolemaic cosmology, and “be regarded as a sort of
curious fossils, very monstrous and bizarre, and altogether of an extinct type”
(1857:426-427). He had no doubt that the history of earth:
throughout the long geologic ages,—its strange story of successive creations, each placed in advance of that
which had gone before, and its succeeding organisms, vegetable and animal, ranged according to their
appearance in time, on principles which our profounder students of natural science have but of late
determined,—will be found in an equal degree more worthy of its Divine Author than that which would
huddle the whole into a few literal days, and convert the incalculably ancient universe which we inhabit
into a hastily run-up erection of yesterday. [1857:428]
Sir John William Dawson, the eminent Canadian geologist and paleontologist of
the second half of the nineteenth century, also advocated Day-Age creationism. Educated
in Scotland, he was brought up in a fundamentalist atmosphere (Presbyterian), and was
also trained in theology and Bible languages. Besides his geological works, he wrote
many religious articles and a dozen popular books on the relationship of science to
religion (T. Clark 1980:608). In The Story of the Earth and Man (1887; orig. 1872), he
described the geological ages and their characteristic fossils and life-forms with state-ofthe-art
geological expertise, but all the while affirming their correspondence with
Genesis. Dawson refuted evolution in the final two chapters on “Primitive Man
Considered with Reference to Modern Theories as to His Origin.”
This evolutionist philosophy is one of the strangest phenomena of humanity… [T]hat in our day a system
destitute of any shadow of proof, and supported merely by vague analogies and figures of speech, and by
the arbitrary and artifical coherence of its parts, should be accepted as a philosophy, and should find able
adherents to string upon its thread of hypotheses our vast and weighty stores of knowledge, is surpassingly
strange. [1887:317]
Emphasizing the gaps in the fossil record between various major groups, Dawson
concluded: “We see that evolution as an hypothesis has no basis in experience or in
scientific fact, and that its imagined series of transmutations has breaks which cannot be
filled” (1887:339). Evolutionists thus either suffer a “strange mental hallucination,” or
else “the higher spiritual nature has been wholly quenched within them” (1887:396).
Declaring that “religion must go hand in hand with all true and honest science,” he ended
by saying that such a religion “would speedily consign evolution to the tomb which has
already received so many superstitions and false philosophies” (1887:397).
Dawson continued to advocate this Day-Age approach in later works. In The
Origin of the World According to Revelation and Science (1893; orig. 1877), he stressed
the many parallels between Genesis and geology. Both testify to a beginning; both
exhibit the progressive character of creation; and they can be seen to agree, when
“properly understood,” as to order of this progression: ocean preceding dry land, with
hints of a state of “igneous fluidity” preceding this, and man as culmination of creation
(quoted in Ramm 1954:147-148).
Louis Agassiz, the great Swiss-American naturalist at Harvard who studied under
Cuvier, defended a form of Day-Age creationism. So did Benjamin Silliman, the
distinguished Yale geologist in the first half of the nineteenth century. So too did his
student and renowned successor at Yale, James Dwight Dana, in “Science and the Bible”