Creationism - National Center for Science Education

Therefore it becomes painfully necessary to organize a National Anti-Evolution Society as a defensive
organization to combat the erroneous doctrines and theories which are being taught, and which false
doctrines are being driven into unsettled minds, through a campaign of misleading assertions and
vituperative insinuations and epithets never before equalled in the history of the country. [Quoted in
Shipley 1927:380]
Gerald Winrod, author of Science, Christ and the Bible (1929), founded the
Defenders of the Christian Faith in order to combat modernism and evolution, and was
editor of Defender magazine, which published articles by W.B. Riley and other antievolutionists.
Besides being fiercely opposed to evolution, Winrod was an outspoken
anti-communist and anti-Semite, and was decidedly pro-Nazi.
Shipley quotes Billy Sunday, the former baseball player who became a star
evangelist, as saying (in Los Angeles) that “if a minister believes and teaches evolution,
he is a stinking skunk and a liar” (1927:251; see also quote in Bull. Tychonian Soc. 1988:
(48):43 by Sunday describing evolution as “poppycock”). Aimee Semple McPherson,
the sensational, flamboyant (and alluring) Pentecostalist preacher of Angelus Temple in
Los Angeles, conducted ritual hangings of “monkey teachers.” In 1926 McPherson
disappeared from a local beach, re-emerging later with a wild tale of having been
abducted by agents of her deadly enemies: dope dealers, gamblers, and evolutionists. She
hinted that her abductors “might be found among the evolutionists connected with…
Stanford and the University of California” (Shipley 1927:252; de Camp 1969:21). It
soon became apparent that she had actually enjoyed a clandestine and amorous liason
with her radio technician. 8
Alexander Hardie wrote Evolution: Is It Philosophical, Scientific or Scriptural?,
published by Times-Mirror Press of Los Angeles, to “save our dear school children and
students from the mental and moral defilements of the “Mud Philosophy” (1924:v-vi).
Evolution, said Hardie, which deifies mud and monkeys, is “proof of the mental and
moral insanity of man,” and of “the unregenerate wish to avoid the Divine Presence...”
(1924:232).
Thus, it is seen that this disgraceful craze for an animal ancestry is built upon nothing but suppositions.
Consequently, it requires very little learning or courage to defy the animalizing evolutionists—these
agnostics, infidels and atheists; these benighted materialists—to give philosophical data for evolution... It
is amazing that this intellectual inanity has had such a rage in our country and has so sorely afflicted our
schools. All unbelievers are making frantic efforts to propagate this man-dishonoring and God-denying,
Satanic explanation of the Cosmos, to the mental and moral debasement of the rising generation.
Slanderers of our divine humanity! [1924:41]
When we consider that evolution has always had its origin among agnostics and the more benighted
heathen; that it is utterly without any philosophical foundation; that it is absolutely unscientific, and
infernally unscriptural; and that its influence not only upon the rising generation, but also upon its
propagators, is degrading and demoralizing, it becomes the imperative duty of all good citizens to renounce
and denounce this crying abomination, and as Christ drove clean animals out of the temple, how much
more should Satan’s unclean hairy beasts be driven out of our Christian Churches and schools!
8 I jog along the stretch of beach from which McPherson claims to have been kidnapped. Bhaktivedanta
Swami Prabhupada, head of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (the “Hare Krishnas”)
used to go for long walks along this same stretch of beach in the 1970s. On these walks he dictated many
of his anti-evolution teachings to disciples, such as contained in Life Comes from Life (1979) and Origins—
Higher Dimensions in Science (Bhaktivedanta Institute, 1984).