Creationism - National Center for Science Education

explanation of these wonders.” This popular book was reissued in a condensed edition
titled Wonderfully Made (undated).
Byron Nelson wrote several classic scientific creationist works in this period,
though they are little known outside of fundamentalist circles. After Its Kind (1927)
demonstrates the impossibility of biological evolution, and includes most of the standard
arguments used by today’s creation-scientists. The Deluge Story in Stone: A History of
the Flood Theory of Geology (1931) concerns geology. Nelson, who was influenced by
Price, insists on strict young-earth creationism and calls for a return to Flood Geology.
Before Abraham: Prehistoric Man in Biblical Light focuses on anthropology—refuting
the fossil evidence of the alleged descent of man from pre-human creatures. As an
indication of the respect in which Nelson’s works were held, After Its Kind appeared in a
revised edition in 1952 with a Foreword by John Whitcomb, and The Deluge Story in
Stone was reprinted in 1968 with a foreword by Henry Morris.
Nelson, a Lutheran pastor, was strongly and explicitly biblical in his approach.
He suggested that “dislike of the idea of creation is in fact the underlying reason for
belief in evolution by many leading evolutionists.” His books are, however, filled with
scientific references and scientific arguments as well. The Deluge Story in Stone is a rich
source of information on the theories and opinions of ancient commentators, pre-
Darwinian Flood Geologists, and more recent critics of evolutionary geology. Nelson
claims that the early Church Fathers endorsed Flood Geology, and openly praises the
early Flood Geologists. According to Nelson, Cuvier’s theory of multiple catastrophes
started the unfortunate trend away from Flood Geology by minimizing the effect of
Noah’s Flood. Nelson laments this trend, continued by Buckland, Penn, and other
compromisers. He describes the complete eclipse of Flood Geology following the rise of
uniformitarian geology and evolution, but calls attention to various heroic scholars who
continued to uphold it in its dark days, before its twentieth-century resurrection by Price.
The Flood theory has not been abandoned because it does not satisfy actual geological conditions. There is
nothing known about the earth’s geological state today which makes the Deluge theory any less satisfactory
an explanation of the fossiliferous strata than in the days when the leading scholars of the world accepted
it... It is a disregard for God and the sacred record of his acts, and nothing else, which has caused the
discard of the Flood theory to take place.
Included in Nelson’s presentation of the arguments of the older Flood Geology
proponents were many of the same “creation-science” arguments later used by Henry
Morris in The Genesis Flood and later works. Nelson, for instance, devoted most of one
chapter to a presentation of the Flood Geology of John Woodward. Woodward was a
professor of physic (i.e. medicine) at Cambridge University, where he established the
first chair in geology, and the Woodwardian Museum; he is buried next to Newton in
Westminster Abbey. His 1695 book An Essay Towards a Natural History of the Earth...
with an Account of the Universal Deluge: and of the Effects It Had Upon the Earth
described how the Flood submerged the whole earth and deposited the rock layers and
fossils we see today. Woodward postulated the sorting of sedimentary deposits and
fossils by specific gravity, a means which was later employed by Morris (“hydrodynamic
sorting”) to account for the ordered strata. Woodward advanced the following
propositions (quoted in Nelson 1968:28-30):