Creationism - National Center for Science Education

If you possess a scientific turn of. mind, I suggest that you go through the book of Job, 3 looking only for
scientific statements. You will be amazed at the wealth of scientific material that you will find. [1929:101]
Winrod devoted a chapter to explaining how Lot’s wife became encrusted with salt
(turning into the biblical “pillar of salt”) due to a Dead Sea volcanic eruption.
Harry Rimmer devoted an entire book (Lot’s Wife and the Science of Physics,
1947) to this, and similar, Bible-science questions. (He also explained it as petrification
from volcanic emissions.) In The Harmony of Science and Scripture (1936), Rimmer
argued aggressively for the scientific inerrancy of the Bible and the superiority of Biblescience,
brandishing many scientific arguments. The Bible, although it does not use
scientific language, contains no scientific error whatsoever, and in scores of cases it has
“anticipated the discoveries of modern science.” Rimmer in fact includes a whole chapter
“Modern Science in an Ancient Book,” as well as chapters such as “Modern Science,
Jonah, and the Whale” (Rimmer avers that the sea monster which swallowed Jonah was
supernatural, but relates cases from modern times in which huge fish have swallowed
humans), “Modern Science and the Deluge” (Rimmer is a Gap Theory believer, but he
also insists on the literal truth of the worldwide Flood, citing Woolley’s excavations as
proof), and a chapter on the “Long Day of Joshua.”
Creation’s Amazing Architect (1955), by Walter Beasley, the first volume in the
“Modern Science and the Bible Series,” professes to show “How the Modern Science of
Geology was Anticipated by Nearly 3,500 Years.” Like Pierson, Beasley applies a Day-
Age creationist interpretation to Genesis.
The field of genetics has attracted much Bible-science attention. “The modern
law of heredity,” wrote Winrod (1929:49), “was revealed to a human scribe when God
said that the sins of the parents are visited upon the children until the third and fourth
generations, and again, where it is written that the parents had eaten sour grapes and the
children’s teeth are set on edge.” The same law, he continued, explained how Jacob got
plain goats to conceive spotted and speckled offspring.
William Tinkle, who has a zoology Ph.D. from Ohio State University, and was a
founding member of the Creation Research Society, wrote a textbook Heredity: A Study
in Science and the Bible (1970). It is largely a straightforward presentation of Mendelian
genetics, but Tinkle denies that genetics is a vehicle for evolution. 4 Tinkle concedes that
life has undergone certain changes (the development of parasites being a notable
3 Bible-Science Association founder Walter Lang has been lecturing on writing on science in the Book of
Job for decades; see also Henry Morris’s The Remarkable Record of Job (1988).
4 Creationists have used the perceived conflict between Darwinian evolution and Mendelian inheritance—a
feature of much scientific (evolutionist) as well as fundamentalist opposition to Darwinism in the first
decades of this century prior to the neo-Darwinian synthesis—as an example of the contrast between
“facts” (the scientifically proven laws of Mendel, which show that each organism reproduces “after its own
kind”) and mere “theories” (the unproven theory that one type of organism can produce a different type).
“The rediscovery of Mendel’s Law of Heredity was a crushing blow to the arguments for evolution,” says
A.I. Brown (n.d.:43) in Evolution and the Bible; this claim was and is widely repeated by creationists.
Darwin was a scientific pretender; Mendel was the true genius, declares George O’Toole (1925), a
professor of both biology and theology. Mendelian genetics, according to O’Toole (and also many
noncreationist scientists in the first quarter of the century), forbids natural selection, which he sees as the
only original aspect of Darwin’s theory—the only difference between it and Lamarck’s. Hence
Lamarckism and Darwinian transformism prove each other wrong: “no modern biologist attaches very
much importance to natural selection,” and variations are now known not to be hereditary.