Creationism - National Center for Science Education

Creation by demonstrating the falsity of evolution by demolishing its geological
foundation. Darwinism requires geology’s theory of succession of ages and succession
of life-forms. If that theory is refuted, evolution is also. Evolution, says Price,
has no more scientific value than the vagaries of the old Greeks—in short, from the standpoint of true
inductive science it is a most gigantic hoax, historically scarce second to the Ptolemaic astronomy... With
the myth of a life succession dissipated once and forever, the world stands face to face with creation as the
direct act of the Infinite God.
The Fundamentals of Geology: And Their Bearing on the Doctrine of a Literal
Creation, Price’s 1913 book which was dedicated to Bacon and Newton, is an expanded
version of Illogical Geology. The New Geology (1923), a textbook, was Price’s most
authoritative presentation of his creationist interpretation of geology. In it he elaborates
on his “great law of conformable stratigraphic seguence,...which is by all odds the most
important law ever formulated with reference to the order in which the strata occur”
(1923:637). This law is simply the assertion that: “Any kind of fossiliferous beds
whatever, ‘young’ or ‘old,’ may be found occurring conformably on any other
fossiliferous beds, ‘older’ or ‘younger”; in other words, a denial that the stratigraphic
order of rocks or of fossils can tell us anything about either their absolute or even their
relative age.
There is virtually no mention of biblical creation or the biblical Flood in The New
Geology, except for the last two chapters, “The Hypothesis of a World Catastrophe,” and
“The Origin and Antiquity of Man.” Except for these final chapters, the discussion is
strictly scientific in format and content, though Price refutes uniformitarianism and
rejects the geological column as a purely artificial construct. In the final chapters, Price
explains that the Earth before the Flood was an “ideally perfect world, of which the
present one is but the partly salvaged ruins” (1923:681). Some cosmic catastrophe
knocked the Earth off its original perpendicular axis to its present inclined position,
producing enormous tidal waves sweeping around the whole globe twice a day, traveling
1,000 miles per hour at the equator (1923:682, 684-685). Such currents, said Price,
would account for the characteristic alternation of sedimentary deposits.
W.B. RILEY AND HARRY RIMMER
While Price was constructing scientific as well as biblical arguments for strict
creationism throughout the first half of the century on the basis of White’s Adventist
teachings, the emerging Fundamentalist movement was beginning to concentrate on
evolution as one of its chief targets. Numerous fundamentalist writers and leaders
appealed to scientific as well as biblical arguments in their attacks on evolution, though
relatively few insisted, as Price did, upon a recent creation. In fact, as Numbers notes, a
serious weakness in the fundamentalist antievolution campaign was their “failure to agree
on a theory of creation” (1982:540). The two leading promoters of creationist “science”
in the 1920s, besides Price, were William B. Riley and Harry Rimmer. Neither were
young-earth creationists. Riley advocated Day-Age creationism, assigning a long
geological age to each creation ‘day,’ while Rimmer favored Gap Theory creationism,
retaining belief in a literal six-day creation but arguing that this was preceded by vast
geological ages and previous life-forms. Thus three major theories competed against