Creationism - National Center for Science Education
Creationism - National Center for Science Education
Creationism - National Center for Science Education
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Whitehead is founder and president of the Ruther<strong>for</strong>d Institute, which is active in many<br />
important religious rights cases, including creationism cases. The Institute is named after<br />
Samuel Ruther<strong>for</strong>d (eulogized by D.James Kennedy) who, in his 1644 Lex Rex, argued<br />
against the “divine right” of kings, declaring that the law—God’s sovereign Law—was<br />
king, and not vice-versa (not ‘Rex Lex’). Rushdoony’s Chalcedon Foundation was<br />
“instrumental in establishing the Ruther<strong>for</strong>d Institute,” according to Ruther<strong>for</strong>d<br />
promotional literature. In a 1977 book, The Separation Illusion, heavily influenced by<br />
Rushdoony (who wrote the Foreword), Whitehead dismissed democracy as mob rule, and<br />
explained that religion was never intended to be separated from government. Whitehead,<br />
as already noted, defended the Calvinist South against the Northern Unitarian-Statist<br />
aggressors in the Civil War.<br />
David Hoggan, who has a Harvard history Ph.D., was another follower of<br />
Rushdoony’s. He wrote sections of Rushdoony’s books (e.g. Rushdoony 1963), and<br />
dedicated his own book The Myth of the ‘New History’ to Rushdoony, who he cites<br />
frequently. In that book, which justifies Germany’s role in the World Wars, Hoggan<br />
argued that evolutionist, anti-biblical propagandists have rewritten history (the “New<br />
History”) to serve their ideological purposes, a distortion he and other “revisionist”<br />
historians seek to correct. He advocates Christian values, and also argues that since<br />
blacks were not worse off under slavery, the Civil War was a needless conflict. His<br />
book, originally published by Craig Press, was reprinted by the Institute <strong>for</strong> Historical<br />
Review of Torrance (now Costa Mesa), Cali<strong>for</strong>nia, the group that denies that the Nazis<br />
systematically killed Jews. 47 The last IHR conference was dedicated to Hoggan, and IHR<br />
has just published Hoggan’s major work, The Forced War (1989), an apologetic <strong>for</strong><br />
Germany’s role in WWII, originally published in 1961 in German.<br />
The best-known creation-science leaders are not racist (at last not in the most<br />
direct sense). 48 But the views of the creationist Reconstructionists are easily adopted by<br />
racists. All men are not equal. Christian is “radically anti-democratic”; democracy is a<br />
great heresy; there is a “spiritual aristocracy.” North, in an article on the “Basic<br />
Implications of the Six-Day Creation” in the debut J. of Christian Reconstruction issue<br />
(North 1974:24), writes that:<br />
There are there<strong>for</strong>e two distinct brotherhoods, <strong>for</strong> there are two fatherhoods: God the Father-Creator of all<br />
men and God the Father-Redeemer of some men...Not all men are brothers ethically; the brotherhood of the<br />
promise of grace is limited to God’s predestined elect.<br />
47 The dedication to Rushdoony is omitted in the IHR edition, though many revisionist supporters are also<br />
fundamentalist creationists—notably Herman Otten, who was a featured speaker at the last IHR conference.<br />
In response to an inquiry of mine about Hoggan, Rushdoony denied that Hoggan was a Reconstructionist,<br />
and said that he and Hoggan hadn’t had any contact since working together in the sixties at an unnamed<br />
conservative foundation. Rushdoony also claimed to know nothing about Hoggan’s IHR ties.<br />
48 Creationists such as Morris and Custance maintain that human races—descendants of Noah’s three sons<br />
—have different and distinctive capacities and talents: Shemites (Semites) as spiritual leaders, Japhethites<br />
(whites) as intellectual and political leaders, and Hamites (blacks, Mongoloids) as concentrating on<br />
material and physical aspects of life. Morris condemns all extra-biblical genocide, but condones genocidal<br />
acts described in the Old Testament, which of course he interprets literally. Many other creationists have<br />
been flagrantly racist (e.g. Hasskarl 1898, Carroll 1900), and some still are today. See entries listed under<br />
“racism” in subject index of McIver 1988a.