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completely outlaw the teaching of evolution. This movement
culminated in the Scopes trial in 1925 in which a high school biology
teacher, John Scopes, was convicted of teaching evolution. Bryan
was called in to assist with the prosecution and in anticipation of
arguments on the scientific merits of evolution, he sought the best
scientific minds in the creationist camp to serve as expert witnesses.
However,
>Howard Kelly, a physician at Johns Hopkins, who contributed
to the section on creation in the "Fundamentals" pamphlets,
declined Bryan's invitation and confessed that, except for Adam
and Eve, he believed in evolution.
>Louis T. More, a physicist who wrote a book entitled THE
DOGMA OF EVOLUTION also declined, replying that he
accepted evolution as a reasonable hypothesis.
>Alfred W. McCann, author of GOD--OR GORILLA, lectured
Bryan for trying "to bottle up the tendencies of men to think for
themselves"
>and Henry Rimmer, a self-proclaimed geologist and ardent
creationist in the Seventh Day Adventist Church was in England
and not available; how-ever, he advised Bryan to stay away
from issues of science.
The Scopes trial itself generated a great deal of negative publicity
and the budding anti-evolution movement lost influence among
Christians for the next 30 yrs. At this point in time, Creationism had
yet to become a central doctrine of Christian belief.
Still, an ember of the creationist movement remained among certain
individuals and organizations such as the World's Christian
Fundamentals Association, a pre-millenialist body founded by William
Bell Riley, pastor of the First Baptist Church in Minneapolis. One
creationist from this group, T.T. Martin, wrote that the German
soldiers who, in WWI, killed Belgian and French children with
poisoned candy were angels compared with teachers and textbook
writers who, as he believed, corrupted the souls of children with false
teaching, thereby sentencing them to eternal death.
Other leaders of what historian Ronald Numbers termed the
"underground anti-evolution movement" included Seventh Day
Adventists, Henry Rimmer, and George McReady Price, both of
whom had little formal science education, but who billed themselves
as scientists and published self-described REAL scientific texts of
geology. There was also Helen G. White, a self-declared prophetess
from the Seventh Day Adventist Church who claimed divine
inspiration for her revolutionary view that a world-wide Noahchian
flood accounted for the geologic column and the fossil record, a belief
currently held by scientific creationists.
In the 1950s, a young theologian, John Whitcomb, attempted, with
little success to publish a book on Genesis and geology that
incorporated the so-called "flood geology" that was initially
propounded by Helen White. In 1953, Whitcomb met Henry Morris
who was working on a degree in hydraulic engineering and was,
therefore, able to lend some scientific credibility to Whitcomb's
viewpoints. In 1961, they published THE GENESIS FLOOD.
Although the book did not present much that was conceptually
different from what had been written previously by Rimmer and Price,
the success of the book, according to Ronald Numbers, was due to
the fact that it was produced in a scholarly fashion, complete with
technical terminology, figures, diagrams and annotations similar to
what is found in most scientific texts.
The GENESIS FLOOD had an enormous impact on the conservative
church and ushered in a renaissance of flood geology among
conservative Christians. Creationism grew from being a
predominately Seventh Day Advantist doctrine to a doctrine widely
held among fundamental and evangelical Christians. This led to the
formation of the Creation Research Society which catered to
scientists who were creationists. Also formed at this time was the
Bible-Science Association, a predominately lay organization that
published the "Bible-Science Newsletter" that vigorously promoted
the White-Morris-Whitcomb flood-geology/creationist viewpoint. The
Association also provided a forum for some in the creationist
movement who did not believe that the sun was the center of the
solar system, and who believed that Einstein's theory of relativity "was
invented in order to circumvent the evidence that earth is at rest".
Eventually, Henry Morris from the CRS, and two housewives from the
Bible Science Association, in affiliation with Heritage College in San
Diego, formed the Creation-Science Research Center. After a couple
of years, a difference in personalities and objectives caused the
group to split and Henry Morris founded the Institute for Creation
Research in 1972, which exists and thrives today.
During this period, a major shift in the tactics of the antievolution
campaign came about. Rather than trying to have evolution outlawed
in the public schools as attempted prior to the Scopes trial, the
antievolution movement began efforts to legitimize creation science
and to down play the Genesis story. Thus, scientific creationism was
born. As I mentioned in the beginning of this talk, the legitimization of
scientific creationism proceeded on two fronts. On one hand, they
attempted to attack the scientific merits of evolution science and at
the same time, to elevate scientific creationism to a status of
legitimacy.
By this time, creationism had taken hold within the conservative
church and came to be treated as the orthodox Christian doctrine of
creation. However, there has not been an unbroken historical
"deliverance of faith" regarding the viewpoint of the discontinuity of
the universe in Christian creation doctrine. Augustine and Basil left
us with a vitalistic concept of the creation that was somehow
overturned in favor of a view of creation as a discontinuous process
that required God's special intervention at certain critical junctures.
But the creation doctrine is with us now in different forms such as the
so-called young-earth creationism, progressive creationism, and
"theistic realism". These various creationist positions basically differ
in the way that they view the literalness of the six day creation
account in Genesis, yet they attack evolution science from similar
philosophical grounds.
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9. On the history of creationist belief in the U.S., I draw from the
following works by Ronald Numbers; "Creationism in 20th-Century
America," published in the journal, Science, 1982, 218:538-544; "The
Creationists" in GOD AND NATURE (loc cit); and from his book, THE
CREATIONISTS: The Evolution of Scientific Creationism, Alfred A.
Knopf, 1992.
____________________________________________________________
Steven S. Clark, Ph.D . Phone: 608/263-9137
Associate Professor FAX: 608/263-4226
Dept. of Human Oncology and Email: ssclark@facstaff.wisc.edu
UW Comprehensive Cancer Center
CSC K4-432
600 Highland Ave.
Madison, WI 53792
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