Creationism - National Center for Science Education

nurture their young, and sent them forth to propagate their kind! It begins to look as though, in origin and
animus, it is another anarchistic, socialist propaganda. [1923:124-125]
Fill a nation with the German conceit that “We are the superior race, and all the women of weaker nations
are our natural prey, and the men of such nations our legitimate servants”, and you turn the world into a
slaughter house, and, as one has said, “There is no logic to show why such a code of international
ruffianism is wrong or at all blame-worthy if the evolution theory be true.” Its premises granted, an
Armageddon is the result. ... The triumph of Darwinism would introduce the day of the Great Tribulation!
[1923:47]
Harry Rimmer, a Presbyterian minister, attended Whittier College and the Bible
Institute of Los Angeles (now Biola University), and was at one time field secretary of
Riley’s World’s Christian Fundamentals Association. He was a delightfully flamboyant
lecturer and debater as well as a popular writer; debating against evolutionists was child’s
play for him. 10 Rimmer founded the Research Science Bureau in Los Angeles to promote
Bible-science and creationism, and promoted himself as a research scientist. Beginning
in the mid-1920s, the Research Science Bureau (it seems to have been a one-man
operation) published a series of anti-evolution pamphlets by Rimmer; these were later
incorporated into Rimmer’s book The Theory of Evolution and the Facts of Science (1966
[1935]). Rimmer’s confident, breezy style was quite effective and popular. He appealed
to scientific evidence and arguments (but gives no specific references), and threw in a lot
of impressive scientific terms and references, managing to sound quite authoritative and
knowledgeable. His prose is simple to understand and sprinkled with homespun
analogies, anecdotes and folksy humor.
Rimmer followed this book with The Harmony of Science and Scripture (1936),
also originally issued as a pamphlet series. He boasts that he learned “double-jointed,
twelve cylinder, knee-action” scientific vocabulary at medical college (he spent one term
at a homeopathic school, according to Numbers 1982:539) and that he could out-argue
any evolutionist. More seriously, he argues aggressively for the scientific inerrancy of
the Bible and for the proven superiority of Bible-science.
In 1939 Rimmer offered $1000 for proof of any scientific error in the Bible. One
William Floyd, 11 believing he could demonstrate a number of errors, sued to collect the
money. That Lawsuit Against the Bible (1956 [1940]) is Rimmer’s account of the
ensuing trial in New York, which “ended in legally establishing the position of all who
hold that the Word of God is inerrant.” Judge Shalleck ruled in favor of Rimmer.
Interestingly, Rimmer defended the Bible’s inerrancy against one of Floyd’s claims—that
the earth is extremely old, contrary to the biblical account of creation in six days—by
arguing that the original creation occurred long ages before the six-day creation of
Genesis: in other words, Gap Theory creationism. Rimmer’s lawyer, James E. Bennet,
wrote his own account of the trial titled The Bible Defeats Atheism (1941).
OTHER EARLY CREATIONISTS
10 Morris (1984b:92n) says: “Dr. Rimmer debated many leading evolutionists of his day, always before great crowds
and always clearly winning each debate. Reading these accounts in Mrs. Rimmer’s biography makes it obvious that
present-day debates are amazingly similar to those of his time.”
11 Apparently the same William Floyd who donated prize money for a contest sponsored by Shipley’s
Science League of America for the best essay on the topic “Why Evolution Should Be Taught in Our
Schools Instead of the Book of Genesis.” According to Shipley (1927:67), rabid anti-evolutionist T.T.
Martin (this was soon after after his Hell in the High Schools) sent in an essay under a phony name.