Creationism - National Center for Science Education

educes his bigoted evolutionist professor to stammering idiocy by confronting him with
creation-science arguments, is one of the most widely-distributed pieces of creationist
literature ever. Chick’s creationist comic books The Ark (1976) and Primal Man? (1976)
are found in many Christian bookstores, though Chick is often criticized for his savagely
anti-Catholic literature.
Of the televangelists who have campaigned against evolution, Jimmy Swaggart
has had the biggest audience. Jerry Falwell hosted Henry Morris on his Old-Time Gospel
Hour several times in 1981 when he was campaigning for the teaching of creationism in
public schools, hosted and moderated the televised debate between Gish and Russell
Doolittle of UC San Diego the same year, and distributed one of Morris’s books free. Pat
Robertson has had many creation-science guests on his 700 Club.
D. James Kennedy of Coral Ridge Ministries in Florida, whose degrees include a
Ph.D. from NYU, is now one of the most effective advocates of creationism. He has
devoted several of his national telecasts to attacking evolution, which he claims “flies in
the face of established scientific laws.” Evolution is itself “more religious than creation”:
it is actually a deliberate attempt to suppress Christian belief. Evolution, Kennedy
preaches, is the “pseudo scientific foundation” of “every single anti-Christian” system—
especially of Nazism, communism, and secular humanism. Yet, “The whole of evolution
is in absolute chaos today and the public does not know it. Students are still being taught
the same old lies” (1983:2).
Kennedy, whose anti-evolution sermons are filled with inaccuracies and
distortions 22 , claims that “one of the disheartening things about the advent of Darwinism
is that it introduced into science an element of dishonesty which had not been seen
before” (1986:1). Kennedy delivered the keynote address at the 1986 International
Creation Conference in Pittsburgh, “Origins: Creation or Evolution.” This lecture was
later telecast on his show. All his telecasts are also distributed free as audiocassettes and
pamphlets (“New Evidences for Creation,” 1977; “The Collapse of Evolution,” 1981;
“The Crumbling of Evolution,” 1983; “Evolution’s Bloopers and Blunders,” 1986 [also
reprinted in Bible-Science Newsletter 1987:25(3)]; “Creationism: Science or Religion?”
1987). More recently, he has made a creation-science movie, The Case for Creation
(1988; see McIver 1988i).
Kennedy was recently (1987) featured in a six-part series promoting creationism
on the John Ankerberg show (Thomas Wheeler has written a detailed refutation of
22 I have mentioned several in different articles. Two examples: Kennedy states that Darrow bullied Bryan
with alleged evidence for “Nebraska Man” at the Scopes Trial, when in fact “Nebraska Man” was not even
mentioned at the trial H.F. Osborn, who had indeed taunted Bryan with this proposed hominid from
Bryan’s home state, had by the time of the trial realized that the evidence, a single tooth, had likely been
misinterpreted). Kennedy simply repeats a story told by Rimmer in 1935 which has become entrenched in
creationist folklore (Kennedy 1986:6; Rimmer 1951:118-122).
Another entrenched piece of folklore that Kennedy is also perpetuating is the extremely widely-repeated
claim that Darrow, at the Scopes Trial, said that it was “bigotry for public schools to teach only one theory
of origins” (e.g. Kennedy 1987:10, and in many other places). This apocryphal quote was popularized and
legitimized by Bird in his Yale Law Review article (Bird 1978:561), but it originated with a creationist in
Ventura, California, who claims to have heard it from a deceased preacher, and mentioned it casually in a
journal article published by CRSC. The complete trial record (National Book 1925) contains no such
quote. I wrote entire article about the quote (McIver 1988f), which, though spurious, has become enshrined
as a potent argument for the “two-model” approach. Kennedy and many other creationists (notably
Maranatha’s SCS) continue to rely on it.