Creationism - National Center for Science Education

created: Smith is an old-earth creationist who advocates Day-Age creationism and is also
favorable to Gap Theory creationism.
Dudley Whitney, a California farmer with a UC Berkeley degree in agricultural
chemistry who edited and contributed to several agricultural journals, was also deacon of
a charismatic church and contributed to several creationist journals. In 1946 he wrote
The Case for Creation, published as a booklet series. In 1955 he published The Face of
the Deep: A Defense of Divine Creation, and in 1961 Genesis versus Evolution: The
Problem of Creation and Atheistic Science, the latter with a foreword by Harold Slusher
of ICR (though this was more than a decade before the founding of ICR). Whitney
argued strongly that science affirms a literal and recent creation. He dismisses descent
from common ancestral forms as an absurdity. The fossil evidence shows that a single
event—the Flood—restructured the earth’s surface; and if the Flood is true, then recent
divine creation must be also. “Reason positively demands a decision in favor of divine
creation, which is only another way of saying that common-sense science positively
proves the fact of God.” Whitney argued that the Flood resulted in uplift of the
continents; the fresh water runoff gradually accumulated and froze in the Arctic,
eventually producing a sudden temperature drop about 2500 years ago—the Ice Age.
Wayne Frair, a creation-scientist who testified in the Arkansas trial, once
admiringly described Frank Lewis Marsh to me as a key figure in the development of
modern creationscience. Marsh, however, is little known outside creation-science circles.
He earned a Ph.D. in botany from the University of Nebraska, then taught at Seventh-day
Adventist colleges. He was one of the founders of the Creation Research Society in
1963, and the first chairman of the Geoscience Research Institute, the Adventist
creationscience institute now located at Loma Linda University. Marsh’s Fundamentals
of Biology (1941) includes a statement of the tenets of special creation, which he says
require less faith for belief than does evolution.
Marsh carried on a long correspondence with Theodosius Dobzhansky, a leading
figure in the development of Neo-Darwinism and a theistic evolutionist. He later
objected to a statement by Dobzhansky that Marsh was virtually the only scientist who
still rejected evolution; Marsh claimed that all members of the American Scientific
Affiliation did (see above), and that there were many creationists in universities who
were forced to conceal their belief because of evolutionst intolerance. Knowledgeable
about biology, he avoids many of the more egregrious creationist mistakes and the sillier
arguments.
Marsh stresses that variation has occurred within the originally-created Genesis
“kinds.” Nature is not static; the medieval doctrine of special creation of each species,
unfortunately retained by Agassiz, is mistaken. Man, though, is of course a separate
creation, and is not descended from non-human primates—though human races have
degenerated considerably since creation. Marsh coined the term “baramin” as the
scientific equivalent of the originally created “kind” of Genesis (Hebrew: ‘bara’ =create;
‘min’ =kind).
In Evolution, Creation and Science (1944), Marsh continued his attempt to correct
the obsolete version of creationism inherited from the medieval scholastics and to replace
it with a modern scientific version. Darwinism triumphed, he feels, because
contemporary critics had only a distorted and scientifically inaccurate version of
creationism with which to oppose it. “The only authority that the scientist can accept as a