Dinosaurs in Paradise - The Rocks Don't Lie - page 150

ist topics door-to-door across Canada. A few years later, in 1891, Price enrolled in Battle
Creek College, an Adventist school in Michigan, but fell back to selling topics two years
later when his money ran out.
Around the turn of the century, when serving as a high school principal in eastern
Canada, Price nearly succumbed to the local physician's views on evolution after borrow-
ing volumes from his friend's library. Price concluded that a solid geological foundation
would make evolution appear to be reasonable. He came close to accepting that there really
must be something to the idea of vast geological ages and worlds lost to the depths of
time. But how could he reconcile geologic time with White's teachings? Guided by prayer,
he decided that geologists were fooling themselves. Fossils were really all the same age.
Shocked by how he almost yielded to temptation, Price vowed to promote White's vision
of how Noah's Flood accounted for the fossil record. He had at last found his calling.
Several years later Price had ample time to ponder how to refute geological theories
while working as a handyman at an Adventist sanitarium in southern California. In 1906,
his self-published and aptly named Illogical Geology attacked the geological foundations
of evolution and claimed there was no proof that any fossil was older than any other. The
succession of organisms that geologists found in the rocks was really a mixed-up sampling
of communities that lived in different parts of the world before the Flood. What really
happened was that a sudden shifting of Earth's axis had released great subterranean reser-
voirs and drowned the world. Then a miraculous cosmic storm buried all the drowned bod-
ies and kept the atmosphere from going putrid. Afterwards, the receding waters carved nat-
ural wonders like Niagara Falls and the Grand Canyon. His geological story reheated Bur-
net's and Woodward's stale theories.
Price sent copies of his topic to eminent geologists seeking their reaction. Among the
few who bothered to respond was David Starr Jordan, president of Stanford University and
an expert on fossil fishes. In a letter to Price, Jordan warned him not to expect geologists
to take him seriously because his argument was based on “mistakes, omissions and excep-
tions” that rendered his case “as convincing [as] if one should take the facts of European
history and attempt to show that all the various events were simultaneous.” 2 Equally im-
pressed by Price's obvious intelligence and ignorance of geology, Jordan tried for over two