Creationism - National Center for Science Education

Genesis should be kept out of public schools, and made an eloquent appeal to democracy.
Shipley, to his credit (this was when paleo-anthropology was still strongly influenced by
Piltdown), noted the great significance of the just-discovered Taung (australopithecine)
fossil from South Africa.
The year after this debate, Baker and Nichol came out with Creation—Not
Evolution (1926), a book with a Foreword by George McCready Price. It included the
standard creationist scientific objections to evolution, with many scientific references, but
also openly proclaimed its religious basis; chapters included “Evolution’s Unsavory
History,” “The Flood,” “Questions for Evolutionists to Answer,” “Evolution a
Philosophy and a Religion,” “The Bible, the Crux of the Controversy,” and “Back to
Creationism.” Baker and Nichol declare that the Bible “is not only not unscientific, but it
is very scientific in its allusions” (1926:150). They then demonstrate various Biblescience
propositions.
The Bible does not have to catch up with science; science must catch up with the Bible. The Bible has not
had to correct its science in thirty-five hundred years; current science finds itself wrong about every thirtyfive
days. [1926:151]
Baker and Nichol also discuss (1926:46-7) the recently discovered pictograph from Hava
Supai Canyon in Arizona which is allegedly of a dinosaur (which would refute the
evolutionist time-scale); these drawings, and others interpreted similarly, have become
widely-used creationist evidence. The authors use the probability argument in reference
to biblical prophecy, which Stoner (1958) elaborated on, and which is now a great
favorite. The probability that various “fulfilled predictions” in the Bible would all come
true by chance is calculatd to be one in a trillion (1926:164-5).
Despite this appeal to science, Baker and Nichol conclude by affirming that the
greatest proof is “The Bible’s Transforming Power”—its power to change lives:
Has anyone ever heard a one-time thief and criminal say, “I once was an inmate of the state’s prison
because of my repeated burglaries, but since reading Henry Fairfield Osborn’s ‘Men of the Old Stone Age,’
I have seen the error of my way, and all my desire for a dishonest life has been miraculously taken away”?
[1926:171]
There were debates across the Atlantic as well, though the most important were
written rather than oral exchanges. In Science and the Supernatural (Lunn and Haldane
1935), a series of 31 letters, Arnold Lunn debated J.B.S. Haldane, the famous British
geneticist (and outspoken Marxist) who played a key role in bringing genetics into
harmony with evolutionary theory in the 1930s (the neo-Darwinian Synthesis). This
correspondence largely concerned evolution.
There is “no real evidence in support of Darwinism,” claimed Lunn, who also
quoted many anti-Darwinian scientists. Haldane, for his part, observed that all people are
affected by science in their lives, but that few of them understand the nature of scientific
thought.
Lunn, author of several books on Alpine skiing, had earlier written two books,
The Revolt Against Reason (1930) and The Flight from Reason (1931) arguing against
Darwinism. In the first, he quotes a Fellow of the Royal Society as expressing gratitude
that Lunn is tackling the idol of evolution, since, he says, the professional scientists’
“hands are tied.” Those in authority, unfortunately, “regard Darwin as a Messiah’; “no