Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
ationist topics, it included footnotes and looked scholarly. Their emphasis on a plain-sense
meaning of the Bible also allowed Whitcomb and Morris to present themselves as more
faithful to the Bible than those who reconciled it with science through reinterpretations
such as the day-age and gap theories. Their flood geology did not require them to interpret
days as meaning ages or to invoke unmentioned gaps in the biblical narrative. According
to Whitcomb and Morris, the Bible simply said what it meant—simply. The way they read
the Bible appealed to fundamentalists.
They also gained supporters because after generations of self-imposed separatism their
audience was almost entirely ignorant of modern geology. And their topic appeared just as
fundamentalist outrage grew heated over the widespread introduction of high school text-
books that included accounts of evolution in the post-Sputnik attempt to modernize Amer-
ican science education.
Whitcomb and Morris drew a direct line from geology through evolution to the commun-
ism they saw threatening Christian America. A century earlier, at the funeral of Karl Marx,
Friedrich Engels invoked Darwin, crediting Marx for the discovery of the law of econom-
ic evolution. A century later, Whitcomb and Morris saw their world under threat from the
rise of what they considered an amoral scientific elite that had abandoned Christianity and
joined the effort to promote the socialist ideal of the common good. Geology and the evol-
ution it supported lay at the root of the decay of modern society. Like communists, geolo-
gists, they believed, must be stopped.
Morris went on to found the Institute for Creation Research, which promotes flood geo-
logy to a lay audience through glossy publications and public lectures. With its slick propa-
ganda machine, the Institute spearheaded the rise of young-Earth creationism and contin-
ues to influence evangelical thought.
In the mid-1960s a geologist named Davis A. Young appeared to offer Morris a ray of
hope in his campaign to upend the geological establishment. The son of an eminent Old
Testament scholar, Young studied geological engineering at Princeton in the late 1950s,
where he flirted with accepting uniformitarianism. After enrolling in a master's program in
mineralogy at Pennsylvania State University, Young read
The Genesis Flood
and became
convinced that geologists needed to, once again, seek evidence in support of the Flood.
Taking up the challenge, he started a PhD program at Brown University, but by 1969 he
