Creationism - National Center for Science Education

enormous successive streams or currents of Flood waters. Whitcomb and Morris do not
mention Williams, though their Flood Geology uses many of the same ideas. They do,
however, pay homage to Byron Nelson, who devotes an entire chapter to Williams’s
theory.
Much of the success of The Genesis Flood can be traced to social and cultural
factors. The launching of the Soviet Sputnik in 1957 triggered alarm in this country
about the quality of American science and, consequently, the quality of science
education. New and more ambitious science curricula were a direct result. The
Biological Sciences Curriculum Study (BSCS), consisting of textbooks emphasizing
evolution (organized about the time of the Darwin Centennial in 1959), was part of a
larger National Science Foundation project begun in 1957. As Nelkin points out (1982),
these federally-funded textbooks, and others which also emphasized evolution (especially
the MACOS social science series), aroused widespread fear amongst fundamentalists in
particular about federal control of education.
THE CREATION RESEARCH SOCIETY
At any rate, The Genesis Flood sparked a revival of interest in creationism.
Creationism now seemed far more respectable and scientific, and far less easy to dismiss.
Those strict creationist ASA members who had been disappointed and alarmed at the
drift away from creationism by other ASA members and creeping evolutionism within
the organization were heartened by the appearance of Whitcomb and Morris’s book.
Walter Lammerts, William Tinkle, Frank Marsh, R.L. Harris, Edwin Monsma, Duane
Gish, John Grebe, Wilbert Rusch, John Klotz, and Morris himself formed a committee
(the “Team of Ten”) and began to plan, in 1961, for a new organization dedicated to strict
creationism, either as a distinct group within the ASA or (if ASA reaction was negative)
as an independent Society. Members of this committee met at an ASA meeting in 1963,
and reconvened after the meeting at Grebe’s house in Michigan. The Creation Research
Society was born at these meetings. (Morris, interestingly, was unable to attend these
meetings; he had gotten an NSF grant to attend a water resources conference.)
It was Walter Lammerts, the former UCLA horticulturist, who largely initiated
these moves which led to the formation of the new Society. In “The Creationist
Movement in the United States: A Personal Account” (1974), Lammerts describes his
own involvement with creationism as well as the movement in general. Lammerts
entered college at the University of California (at Berkeley—this was before UCLA was
founded) in 1923, where he was exposed to evolution for the first time. He discovered
Price’s New Geology at the university library, and began a study of scientific criticisms of
evolution. Lammerts was asked to join the ASA in 1943 by F.A. Everest, who he said
assured him that the ASA would be anti-evolutionary (Lammerts 1974:54). He was also
involved with the defunct Creation-Deluge Society. But after leaving UCLA in 1945 to
work as a plant breeder in private business, his interest in creationism waned, until
rekindled by reading Rehwinkel’s book, and later Whitcomb and Morris’s. Lammerts
was appointed the first president of the Creation Research Society as well as editor of its
journal, the Creation Research Society Quarterly.
Lammerts is a highly respected plant breeder and geneticist. His new rose breeds
have won the highest awards. (A recent article on rose breeding in Discover, for