Creationism - National Center for Science Education

(1856-57). At Princeton, Arnold Guyot, the Swiss-born geologist and geographer,
advocated Day-Age creationism in Creation; or The Biblical Cosmology in the Light of
Modern Science (1884).
Alexander Winchell was an influential geologist and paleontologist who did much
to popularize geology in this country and help organize it into a scientific discipline. He
held important posts at the University of Michigan and Syracuse University. Later, in
1878, he was ousted by fundamentalist Southern Methodists from Vanderbilt University
“for holding questionable views on Genesis”: he refuted Flood Geology and emphasized
the earth’s immense age, the many changes it has undergone by various agencies, and the
succession and extinction of life-forms. (Winchell returned to the University of
Michigan after this notorious action.) In his Sketches of Creation: A Popular View of
Some of the Grand Conclusions of the Sciences in Reference to the History of Matter and
of Life (1870), he takes the reader on a tour of the geological ages. He describes the four
basic animal plans (radial, mollusc, articulated, and vertebrate), and the succession of the
various life-forms as the manifestions of the “dominant ideas” of each age: a “series of
divine conceptions.” “They constitute a distinct succession of ideas recognizable in a
fixed order as the mind glances over the series of organic beings” (1870:324).
Though Winchell emphasized the evolution of the solar system and of earth, and
the progressive development of life-forms, he denied naturalistic evolution, insisting that
this long development, which he interpreted in terms of Day-Age creationism, was God’s
preordained Plan. Winchell’s approach to science and the Bible was concordistic
throughout. “Science interpreted is theology,” he wrote (1870:vii); “Science prosecuted
to its conclusions leads to God.” Though he accepted some evolution—he later endorsed
Edward Cope’s quasi-Lamarckian Christian evolutionism in his Reconciliation of
Science and Religion (1877)—he consistently maintained that all development
demonstrated the workings of supernatural intelligence and planning. An earlier (1858)
book was titled Creation the Work of One Intelligence.
We have seen the procession of living forms pass by, and discovered them marshaled by a single leading
Intelligence. We have witnessed the progressive development of the physical world—its successive
adaptations to its successive populations, and its completion and special preparation for the occupancy of
man, and have learned that the whole creation is the product of one eternal, intelligent master purpose—the
coherent result of ONE MIND. [1870:16]
Nature “anticipated the coming of man” (1870:336): the earth was gradually prepared for
man, who was the final product of its divinely-guided evolution.
In a chapter on “Primeval Man,” Winchell argued that man had first appeared at
the end of the Ice Age. Man’s embryological development recapitulates the “dominant
ideas” of previous life-forms, but this proves—contra Chambers’ Vestiges—God’s
overseeing Intelligence (1870:324-325). “Primeval man...was a barbarian, but he was by
no means the stepping-stone between the apes and modern man” (1870:363). In
Preadamites, or a Demonstration of the Existence of Man Before Adam (1880), Winchell
presents “an anthropological account of the evolution of the human family without, in his
view, contravening the Scriptures” (Gillispie, ed. 1980: 439).
Arthur Custance (1977:238-239) cites two other, little-known early works which
suppose a Day-Age view and the existence of pre-Adamite human-like beings: Pre-
Adamite Man: Or the Story of Our Planet and Its Inhabitants Told by Scripture and