Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
fathers of fundamentalism declared this doctrine one of the “five points of fundamental-
ism” at the Niagara Bible Conference where they staked out their unnegotiable beliefs. Two
decades later, the conservative Protestant academics who authored
The Fundamentals
, a
series of essays published between 1910 and 1915 that gave birth to fundamentalism, at-
tacked critical historical and literary analysis that questioned biblical authority.
At first fundamentalists did not insist on strict biblical literalism. The Bible could not be
wrong, but interpretations could adapt as needed to preserve biblical infallibility. The Bible
could be read in different ways. The original fundamentalists juggled what to read figurat-
ively and what to read literally in order to preserve biblical infallibility. Their approach was
surprisingly flexible in comparison to their counterparts today. Most accepted an old Earth
through either the day-age theory or the gap theory and were open to the idea that Noah's
Flood may have been a local affair that wiped out humanity's roots.
By the 1920s, a loose coalition of militant Protestants began to characterize liberals as
false Christians who had lost faith in traditional beliefs and doctrines. Claiming to defend
the true faith, newly militant fundamentalists combined biblical inerrancy with biblical lit-
eralism. Their zeal to combat biblical criticism lay in the conviction that admitting the
Bible had a history colored by human fallibility opened the door to doubting redemption
through Christ. A literal reading founded on biblical inerrancy formed the levee fundament-
alists built to save the Bible from the flood of modernism.
Fundamentalists became increasingly isolated as their efforts to stem the rising tide of
liberal thought failed to sway mainstream denominations in the 1930s. They then focused
on building their own network of churches and schools dedicated to teaching biblical infal-
libility. As fundamentalists began slipping into a self-contained world, the recycled argu-
ments of flood geology seemed to provide fresh ammunition for the fight to ban teaching
evolution in public schools—and its heretical foundation in an ancient Earth.
By the mid-twentieth century, conservatives militantly pushing literal biblical interpreta-
tion stopped interacting with geologists just as breakthroughs like the ability to use radio-
active decay to directly date the age of rocks and fossils began to revolutionize the earth
sciences. Paleontologists, in particular, threw cold water on the creationist idea that mam-
moths were flash-frozen or buried in a sudden environmental calamity.
