Creationism - National Center for Science Education

society. In The Universe: Plan or Accident? (1949), Clark expresses his preference for
old-earth creationism in a scientifically knowledgeable manner.
Herbert W. Armstrong is the only major creationist who began his anti-evolution
activities in the 1920s and remained active up to the present decade (he was campaigning
against evolution until his death in 1986). Through his Worldwide Church of God
(founded in 1931), his journal The Plain Truth (founded in 1934), and his Ambassador
College in Pasadena (founded in 1947), Armstrong has been attacking evolution for over
fifty years. His son Garner Ted Armstrong, who became the voice of the Worldwide
Church of God on radio and TV, also proselytized widely for creationism.
A book very influential among creationists appeared in 1951: The Flood: In the
Light of the Bible, Geology, and Archeology, by Alfred M. Rehwinkel. It has undergone
seventeen printings up to 1978. Rehwinkel was a theology professor at Concordia
Theological Seminary in St. Louis, a Missouri Synod Lutheran institution. 13 The Flood
firmly endorses strict young-earth creationism and Flood Geology. Rehwinkel, who
apparently had some university training in geology, was strongly influenced by Price.
The book contains many scientific references and arguments, though each chapter ending
is heavily and explicitly biblical.
The Flood, says Rehwinkel, is the greatest single event in earth history since the
Creation.
Nothing comparable with it has happened since nor will happen until the final destruction of this universe
in the fire of Judgment Day. The Flood marks the end of a world of transcendent beauty, created by God as
a perfect abode for man, and the beginning of a new world, a mere shadowy replica of its original. In all
recorded history there is no other event except the Fall which has had such a revolutionary effect upon the
topography and conditions of this earth... No geologist, biologist, or student of history can afford to ignore
this great catastrophe. [1951:xv]
To deny the worldwide Flood “means to question the infallibility of the Bible and that of
Christ Himself.
Rehwinkel helped develop the creation-science model of the antediluvian earth.
He did not invent this idea, but he tried to make it scientifically respectable; modern
creation-scientists, led by Morris, have further added to it. Before the Flood, says
Rehwinkel, the entire earth was uniformly mild, pleasant, and luxuriant, with shallow
oceans only a fraction of their present size. The human population was large, widely
distributed, and highly advanced. But the primary lesson of the Flood is moral and
religious, not scientific. Rehwinkel presents the Flood as the “Prototype of the Final
Judgment,” and concludes with the warning that the world today is as evil as in the days
preceding the Flood catastrophe and that this Final Judgment is indeed imminent. The
cause of the Flood was “not geological or cosmic, but ethical and moral.”
13 Rehwinkel was also a fervent anti-communist who considered Roosevelt and Churchill “contemptible
warmongers, deceivers and fools.” .Herman Otten, who knew Rehwinkel at Concordia, praises him (“‘Rip’
Rehwinkel—One of the First Revisionists”) in his address to the 1989 Institute for Historical Review
Conference (Otten 1989:7). Otten, author of Baal or God and editor of the fundamentalist Christian News
(formerly Lutheran News), has come out strongly in favor of “historical revisionism.” He denies that the
Nazis systematically executed millions of Jews, calling the Holocaust one of the great “hoaxes” of our
time, along with evolutionism.