Creationism - National Center for Science Education

CHAPTER 3
THE MODERN CREATION-SCIENCE MOVEMENT
HENRY MORRIS; THE AMERICAN SCIENTIFIC AFFILIATION
After the fireworks and public campaigns of the 1920s, fundamentalism, and with
it anti-evolutionism, largely retreated from the public eye. It was, however, still there,
“underground and actively germinating” (Morris 1984b:7). Except for their initial
success with Prohibition, the major fundamentalist attempts to transform and regenerate
society by direct legislation and public action failed. Fundamentalists withdrew from
open confrontation with “the world” into their own enclaves and institutions. The antievolution
legacy lingered on, however, as science textbooks shied away from forthright
discussion (or even mention) of evolution. A study by Grabiner and Miller, “Effects of
the Scopes Trial,” published in Science (1974) concluded that evolution was downgraded
in textbooks following the trial, and did not regain its former emphasis until the 1960s.
An early turning point in the re-emergence of creationism into the larger arena,
and the starting point of the modern creation-science movement, was the publication, in
1961, of Whitcomb and Morris’s book The Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and Its
Scientific Implications. Henry M. Morris is very widely acknowledged as the founding
father and leading theoretician of modern creation-science.
Morris, born in 1918, was a theistic evolutionist in college at Rice Institute (now
University) in Texas. A Southern Baptist, he was born again, and became an active
proselytizer in the Gideons after college. In 1943 he became convinced of the truth of
creationism largely by reading Rimmer and Price, after returning to Rice to teach civil
engineering. Shortly before this, Morris was strongly influenced by hearing Irwin
Moon’s “Sermons from Science” lecture demonstration. In 1944, Morris wrote a booklet
God’s Way of Salvation.
That You Might Believe, Morris’s first book, was first published in 1946, when he
was 28, just before he returned to graduate school. Most of the book concerns biblical
and scientific creationism, and evidences for Flood Geology, as well as chapters
espousing other examples of Bible-science. But Morris was not yet totally committed to
strict young-earth creationism. The original edition allowed for Gap Theory creationism.
But even as the book was in press, Morris became convinced that the Bible
clearly taught recent creation and a world-destroying Flood, and that science could be so
interpreted. Morris credits a paper by Clifford Burdick, a Seventh-day Adventist who
studied under Price, in particular with convincing him. Burdick’s paper was a critique of
the radiometric dating methods which seemed to doom young-earth interpretations.
Morris expunged this mention of the possibility of an old earth from later editions of his
book. In ICR lectures, Morris remarks that this original edition is now—fortunately—
unavailable.
A revised and expanded version of That You Might Believe was published in 1951
with the title The Bible and Modern Science. This version was written while Morris was
working on his doctoral dissertation at the University of Minnesota (A New Concept of
Flow in Rough Conduits, 1950). Morris says his “main motivation” in returning to