Creationism - National Center for Science Education

Holy Scriptures to a merely human level, and challenged its direct verbal inspiration,
infallibility, and inerrancy—all doctrines which the fundamentalists came to insist upon.
In his book Collapse of Evolution (1922; originally 1905), Luther Townsend
blamed evolution as a major causative factor for the misery and damnation of the new
century. He quoted Benjamin Kidd’s The Science of Power (a book much cited by later
anti-evolutions, including W.J. Bryan) to show “that the theory of evolution as presented
by Nietzsche has a dominant tendency to paralyze everything in human life that is worth
while.”
It denounces Christianity as being a system calculated to make degenerates out of men, denies the existence
of God, overturns all standards of morality, eulogizes war as both necessary and desirable, praises hatred
because it leads to war, denies to sympathy and pity any rightful place in a manly heart and endeavors to
substitute the worship of the superman for the worship of Jehovah. [Kidd, quoted in Townsend 1922:35]
Between 1910 and 1915, a series of twelve small paperback books called The
Fundamentals was published and widely distributed. This series, aimed at setting forth
the “fundamentals” of Christianity (as did the earlier “Five Points of fundamentalism”),
did much to define and publicize the new movement. It was conceived by Los Angeles
millionaire Lyman Stewart of Union Oil, who, with the aid of his brother, distributed free
copies of the initial volumes to every pastor, missionary, evangelist, theology professor
and student, and YMCA or YWCA secretary in the English-speaking world (later
volumes were sent on request). Stewart hired A.C. Dixon of Moody Church in Chicago
to edit the series, to which many of the greatest American and British theologians
contributed.
Although several authors criticized or attacked evolution in The Fundamentals,
none insisted on recent creation or Flood Geology, and some permitted a mediating
position. Rev. James Orr of United Free Church College in Glasgow, Scotland, for
instance, writing on “Science and Christian Faith” in Vol. IV and on “The Early
Narratives of Genesis” in Vol. VI, was willing to accept considerable evolution, but
warned against equating evolution with Darwinism.
Certainly there would be contradiction if Darwinian theory had its way and we had to conceive of man as a
slow, gradual ascent from bestial stage, but I am convinced that genuine science teaches no such doctrine.
Evolution is not to be identified offhand with Darwinism. Later evolutionary theory may rather be
described as a revolt against Darwinism, and leaves the story open to a conception of man quite in harmony
with that of the Bible. [1912:(IV):96]
Orr advocated Day-Age creationism, and tried to allow for a form of non-Darwinian
evolution within this framework. Gradual evolution by natural selection is now rejected
by science, said Orr. Sudden evolution by large mutations can be seen to correspond to
Genesis. This new “evolution” is thus “but a new name for ‘creation”—the only
difference being that it acts from within instead of externally (1912:(IV)102). Orr then
affirmed that the origin of life, of consciousness, and of man’s rationality and morality
are steps which required special acts of creation by God. Man himself must be a special
creation, whose origin may be as recent and “as sudden as Genesis represents. “Man’s
origin can only be explained through an exercise of direct creative activity, whatever
subordinate factors evolution may have contributed.”
George Frederick Wright, the respected Oberlin College geologist and minister,
was selected to write on evolution from a scientific perspective. His approach was