Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
Creationists changed tactics and turned on librarians and teachers, harassing them to
keep textbooks that fundamentalists considered objectionable out of classrooms. Creation-
ists who had made front-page headlines in the 1920s were all but forgotten a decade later.
Shut out of the popular press, they turned to building their own institutional base, starting
their own organizations, journals, and schools. Fundamentalists of this era varied greatly in
terms of what to believe about geological ages and the biblical flood. Some, like Price, held
to the strict literal interpretation of six days of creation followed by a global flood. Others
promoted the gap theory or the idea that each day in the week of creation represented a
whole geological age. Leading fundamentalists began to wonder how evangelical Christi-
ans could convert the world to their views if they didn't even agree among themselves.
Of course, when Price first claimed that all the organisms preserved as fossils died in
a sudden catastrophe, there was no way to date their deaths and directly test his claim.
Steno's approach could reveal the relative age of the geological formations containing
fossils by determining their order of deposition, but there wasn't yet any way to directly
measure the age of fossil-bearing rocks or fossils themselves.
