Creationism - National Center for Science Education

and creationist thought. Interestingly, Wheeler denies the popular notion that science
progresses by Baconian inductive reasoning operating upon accumulated facts. This
allows him to argue that the seeming scientific triumph of evolution may be less than it
appears—that the same data may be interpreted differently in terms of another paradigm:
creationism.
The creationist, trying to reconcile the opposing claims of Biblical revelation and current science,
seemingly finds himself in an impossible dilemma. Each discovery, each textbook or scholarly paper, and
each scientific symposium appears to make his position more impossible to defend. He begins to wonder if
perhaps after all he should discard the Bible—the source book for his entire philosophy, the framework of
his way of looking at reality.
The facts sometimes do seem to oppose him. Yet he is not as threatened as he fears, because science does
not operate as Francis Bacon and his followers believed. Science does not march steadily towards absolute
knowledge or interpretation. [1975:14-5]
Wheeler also has a chapter on the California textbook controversies and on the Flood
Geology “paradigm.”
Though strongly committed to Flood Geology and a literal six-day creation, some
Adventists—including some GRI members—allow for an old earth by a variant of the
Gap Theory. With the development of radiometric dating methods, some Adventists,
including some members of the old Creation-Deluge Society, became convinced the earth
must be far older than a few thousand years. They could not argue that fossils were
formed during the ‘gap’ between the first two verses of Genesis, as this contradicted
Ellen G. White’s teachings about the Fall and the Flood, but they felt they could allow for
pre-biotic geological ages prior to the six-day creation. Brown, a physicist trained in
radiometric dating, seems to support this interpretation.
The Geoscience Research Center moved from Andrews University to Loma Linda
University in California some years after it was founded. Loma Linda is the Seventh-day
Adventist institution perhaps best known for its state-of-the-art medical school. In 1974
GRI began publication of Origins, a creation-science journal.
The GRI scientists are much more cautious than their counterparts in ICR and
other creationist organizations. They engage in meticulous experiments designed to test
the creationist and evolutionist models. In Origin by Design, for instance, Coffin
describes his flotation experiments of vegetable matter at GRI (1983:125-7); they support
the Flood theory of the origin of coal. Zoologist Leonard Brand used live reptiles and
amphibians in his lab to see how footprints were formed in different conditions: dry,
damp, and wet sand, and when the animals were walking on sand underwater. The
underwater tracks, he concludes, resembles most closely fossil tracks such as found in the
Grand Canyon’s Coconino Sandstone. This contradicts the evolutionist assumption of
the desert origin of the sandstone, and supports the Flood model. Brand has published
these experiments both in GRI’s journal Origins (1978) as well as a standard scientific
journal (1979). The GRI scientists in fact are frequently able to publish their laboratory
findings in regular refereed journals.
GRI members also criticize other creationists fairly freely when they feel they are
not being scientifically rigorous. Thus, other creationists such as the ICR scientists tend
to feel that GRI is overly cautious and critical in evaluating creationist evidence and
claims, though they respect their strong creationist stance. The GRI scientists believe
that science will support creationism, but they maintain that this science must proceed