Creationism - National Center for Science Education

CHAPTER 2
ORIGINS OF MODERN “SCIENTIFIC” CREATIONISM: 1900-1960
GEORGE McCREADY PRICE
George McCready Price strove throughout the first half of this century to
convince the world that strict, recent creation was a fact required by both the Bible and
by science. Price, a Seventh-day Adventist, took seriously Adventist prophetess Ellen G.
White’s insistence on strict creationism. White, whose writings are considered divinely
inspired by Adventists, strongly emphasizes a recent, literal six-day Creation and the
world-wide Flood of Noah. In Patriarchs and Prophets (1958:28; originally 1890) White
wrote that the biblical account of creation:
is so clearly stated that there is no occasion for erroneous conclusions. God created man in His own image.
Here is no mystery. There is no ground for the supposition that man was evolved by slow degrees of
development from the lower forms of animal or vegetable life. Such teaching lowers the great work of the
Creator to the level of man’s narrow, earthly conceptions. Men are so intent upon excluding God from the
sovereignty of the universe that they degrade man and defraud him of the dignity of his origin.
The Creation Week consisted of seven literal days; its commemoration in our ordinary
week, and observance of the Sabbath—the Seventh Day—is of utmost concern to White.
To assume that these creation days could be long ages is to deny the Fourth
Commandment in which God gave us our week and our Sabbath directly from Creation
Week. “The sophistry in regard to the world’s being created in an indefinite period is one
of Satan’s falsehoods.”
White was implacably opposed to the teaching of evolution. Principles of True
Science: or Creation in the Light of Revelation, a collection of excerpts from her
writings, contains these warnings:
Evolution and its kindred errors are taught in schools of every grade... Thus the study of science, which
should impart a knowledge of God, is so mingled with the speculations and theories of men that it tends to
infidelity. [1986:166-167]
We need to guard continually against those books which contain sophistry in regard to geology and other
branches of science... [T]hey need to be carefully sifted from every trace of infidel suggestions… It is a
mistake to put into the hands of the youth books that perplex and confuse them. [1986:227]
White also emphasized that earth history could only be properly interpreted by
reference to the worldwide Flood of Noah. She simply rejected the findings of modern
geology, insisting instead that geological features must have been formed as a result of
the Flood. The earth was created exceedingly beautiful and bounteous, but it began to
deteriorate as a result of Adam’s Fall. It was completely devastated by the Flood, and
much remains desolate even today: “The entire surface of the earth was changed at the
flood.” The fossils found by geologists which appear to deny the Mosaic chronology are
of immense and fantastic antediluvian creatures, all buried by the Flood. Geology cannot
tell us the age of such fossils; only the Bible can. Violent winds and currents buried the
remains of the pre-Flood inhabitants; mountains were heaped up; minerals useful to man