Creationism - National Center for Science Education

Russell Artist, another Church of Christ member, has a Ph.D. in biology and
headed the biology department at David Lipscomb College in Tennessee. He wrote a
chapter in J. Monsma’s 1966 Behind the Dim Unknown. Bert Thompson dedicated his
strongly creationist History of Evolutionary Thought (1981) to Artist.
R. Clyde McCone has a Ph.D. in anthropology and sociology from Michigan
State University and has long been a professor of cultural anthropology at California
State University at Long Beach. He wrote several chapters in the Symposium on
Creation volumes on the topics “The Origins of Civilization” and “Evolutionary Time: A
Moral Issue” (Morris et al. 1968; Patten, ed., 1972). A later book, Culture and
Controversy (1978) concerns “speaking in tongues”: McCone disputes the modern
Pentecostal assumption that Christ’s disciples spoke in unknown languages at Pentecost,’
arguing instead that they spoke in vernacular languages (Aramaic, Greek and Latin)
rather than in the sacred Hebrew (Christ had freed them from the Jewish traditions in
order to bear witness to Christ).
Larry Butler has a Ph.D in biochemistry from UCLA, where he also did postdoctoral
work. While at UCLA he also taught at Los Angeles Baptist College. He is
now a professor of biochemistry at Purdue, where he went in 1966.
Most of Biology: A Search for Order in Complexity is standard high school
biology material, but it is interspersed with strongly anti-evolutionist chapters and
sections. It scoffs at evolutionary explanations as inadequate, and presents creationscience
as an equally scientific and in fact superior alternative. A major unit on
“Theories of Biological Change” emphasizes the standard creation-science arguments:
evidence for a young earth, the “hypothetical” nature of the geological column, the many
“wrong-order” fossils (including the Paluxy “manprints” and the Meister trilobite-andhuman
fossil), the sudden appearance and persistence of life-forms, genetic variation
within “kinds” as opposed to unlimited evolution, sections presenting “Failures of
Darwinian Theory” and the many “Problems for Evolutionists.” The textbook suggests
that Flood Geology is “superior because it conforms to the principles of hydrodynamics,”
and says that evolutionists reject young-earth dating methods because they require long
ages for the “doctrine of evolution, which has no observable evidential basis.” It
criticizes fossil hominids as products of wishful thinking, and teaches that “mechanistic”
theories of evolutionists cannot explain our consciences or allow for moral behavior.
[T]he creation model is a framework of interpretation and correlation which is at least as satisfactory as the
evolution model. However, the two laws of thermodynamics, the apparent stability of the basic ‘kinds,’ the
existence of great gaps between the kinds, the deteriorative nature of mutations, and the catastrophic nature
of the worldwide fossil-bearing formations all may be correlated far more easily with the creation model
than with the evolution model. [1974:xxii]
The CRS textbook was approved by many state textbook committees, but was
declared unconstitutional by the Indiana Supreme Court in 1977 in Hendren v. Campbell.
The CRS Board planned a new edition which would be less overtly religious in order to
circumvent this ruling (the 1971 and 1974 editions openly endorse the Book of Genesis
and Noah’s Flood), but this proposed revision ran into trouble. Zondervan declined to
publish a new edition, so Creation-Life Publishers, the ICR affiliate, offered to take it,
and also offered Morris’s ICR staff to do the revising. But some CRS members felt that
ICR should not take the project away from CRS, and Rusch tried to get a Lutheran
committee to revise it for publication by Mott Media (Morris 1984b:199-200).