Creationism - National Center for Science Education

creationist, and that his disagreement with Price was “merely a matter of interpretation of
details and never a question of fundamental concepts of creationism or diluvialism”
(1966). In 1966 Clark wrote a laudatory biography of Price, Crusader for Creation, in
which he downplayed the significance of Price’s accusations that he had betrayed him by
saying that Price had heard a distorted account of his views, which were merely attempts
to update Price’s model in the light of new knowledge.
EARLY DEBATES
Rimmer was not the only creationist debater in this era. W.B. Riley debated Z.P.
Metcalf, a Carolina State College scientist, in 1922, and debated Edward Cantrell of Los
Angeles before an audience of three thousand in 1925 (discussed in Shipley 1927:87,
351). John Roach Straton, pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in New York, became a
frequent and notorious opponent of evolutionist advocate Henry Fairfield Osborn of the
American Museum of Natural History. In 1924 he engaged in a celebrated series of
debates with Charles Francis Potter, the well-known liberal Unitarian minister. The
debate topics were the very principles of fundamentalism (infallibility of the Bible, the
Virgin Birth, the Divinity of Christ); the second in the series, held at Carnegie Hall, was
on creation. Straton, described by Marsden as being very close to the “ideal type” of
fundamentalist moral reformer, savagely denounced liberalism and modernism and
defended the fundamentalist doctrines. He was convinced that the Bible was “the
foundation of all that is decent and right in our civilization,” and that attacks on Scripture
would result in total lawlessness and the end of civilization (Marsden 1980:161-3).
Evolution versus Creation (1924) is the official record of the debate, but Straton also
wrote his own account, The Famous New York Fundamentalist-Modernist Debates: The
Orthodox Side (1925), in which he presented only his own arguments and not Potter’s.
Those of us who deny the theory of evolution, therefore, have no antagonism to true science. We only
object to having that which is merely an hypothesis proclaimed dogmatically as though it were really fact.
[1924:30]
Straton argues that Darwin’s Origin is based on speculation rather than
established fact, and points out that Darwin used phrases indicating uncertainty such as
“we may suppose” over 800 times (1924:51-2). This statistic has become a standard
piece of creationist evidence, finding its way into dozens of books. Straton also appeals
to “the most up-to-date voice of science itself”—in the person of George McCready
Price. Straton enthusiastically praises Price’s New Geology, “just off the press”
(1924:72).
The next year saw another sensational debate series, this time on the West Coast.
Maynard Shipley, president of the Science League of America and author of the antifundamentalist
and anti-creationist book The War on Modern Science (1927), debated
Francis Nichol and Alonzo Baker in San Francisco. Baker and Nichol were editors of the
Seventh-day Adventist journal Signs of the Times. The debates are chronicled in The San
Francisco Debates on Evolution (Shipley, Nichol and Baker 1925). The first proposition
debated concerned the evolution of the earth and of life. The topic of the second was
whether the teaching of evolution ought to be forbidden in public schools. Nichol and
Baker, members of a non-mainstream denomination, argued that both evolution as well as