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