Chapter I

Many sources are available to navigate the creationist subculture. Numbers (1992) still provides the most thorough coverage of the history of traditional Biblical creationism, expanding on the survey Numbers (1982) supplied for Science. Eve & Harrold (1991) explored its sociological features, noting how only the radical animal rights movement has been so successful in challenging the presumptive authority of the scientific establishment (I would include anti-nuclear advocates as a third such group, peaking during the 20th century Cold War angst years). Toumey (1994) examined creationism as cultural anthropology, showing how the caricature of creationists as ill-educated Bible-thumping louts was both inaccurate and misleading to a genuine understanding of the source for their convictions. Larson (1985) surveyed anti-evolution legislative efforts, especially as they related to science education, and Eldredge (2000, 62-89) related the issues to the creation/evolution scientific debate.

In a nutshell, like Caesar’s Gaul, 20th century American creationism may be divided into three parts. God, of course, was always in charge for them, but the details of what happened in Genesis—and most importantly when—were open to considerable interpretation. The dominant view embraced by conservative Christians circa 1920 was what would eventually be known as the “Day-Age” theory. It accepted the basic outlines of conventional geology, and allowed fossils (including ancient man) to belong to past creation “days” of unspecified duration. For these Day-Agers, the “facts of science” were not much of a problem.

But down in the trenches, significant changes were brewing regarding the finer points of creation chronology. Presbyterian minister Harry Rimmer (1890-1952) promoted the more specific requirement that the history of human life not exceed the confines of traditional Biblical teaching, though non-human fossils could still be ascribed to a Pre-Adamic age of indeterminate length. Referred to variously as the “Gap” or “Restoration” theory, this second side of creationist doctrine has enjoyed broad denominational appeal. Believers as disparate as C. I. Scofield (1843-1921) of the influential Scofield’s Reference Bible, as did those “bad boys” of modern televangelism, Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker. The Worldwide Church of God of Herbert W. Armstrong (1892-1986) favored Gap thinking, though his son Garner Ted Armstrong (1930-2003) supported Flood Geology creationism, Armstrong (2001). The Jehovah’s Witnesses have embraced support for both the Day-Age and Gap theories, while Rimmer’s forays into paleontology impressed DeRemer (1984) at Jerry Falwell’s otherwise YEC-friendly Fundamentalist Journal: “Discovering and studying human and animal remains furnished firsthand evidence to illustrate many lectures and refute evolutionists.”

The distinctive third form of creationism, the full-blown Young Earth Creationism that would become the dominant breed of modern biblical antievolutionism, sprang from the brow of Ellen White (1827-1915), founder of the Seventh-day Adventists—though Toumey (1993, 33) noted the church would also embrace Gap Theory. Instead of passively accepting the standard geological framework, White declared God had arranged for to be taken on a guided tour of the Creation itself, allowing her to see how fossil life was actually the recent detritus of Noah’s Flood (an event which the nasty “higher criticism” had supposedly banished to the moribund basement of mythological fantasy). With that the entire geological picture could be stuffed back into a Bishop Ussher-sized chronological box (where the 17th century theologian had pegged the world and universe as having been created roundabout 4004 BC), Branch (2014aq).

By thus reinterpreting the context of the fossil record, in one bold stroke White simultaneously resuscitated the theologically momentous Deluge as a verifiable hydrologic event, and deftly pulled the rug from under evolution, which depended so heavily on the fossil sequence arrayed in the regular geological framework. Adventists run their own international network of schools to this day, and remain very touchy about maintaining doctrinal purity in the face of secular science information, as surveyed by the creationist Pitman (2010b) and the secular Willey (2012a-b).

In 1923, self-taught “geologist” and Adventist convert George McCready Price (1870-1963) tidied up White’s Flood Geology for a more secular clientele in his book, The New Geology (Creation Scientists would be doing the same thing half a century later, as we’ll see shortly). Price, incidentally, was the lone “scientist” the Scopes prosecution could scrape up in 1925, but as he was away in Europe at the time, he had to decline his spot in legal history. Devout Flat Earth believer Wilbur Voliva (1870-1942) also offered to testify against evolution at the Scopes trial, Branch (2014al) drawing on the chronicle in Garwood (2007, 188-218) of Voliva’s authoritarian utopian cult and the pancake planet he espoused. Had Price or Voliva been grilled by Clarence Darrow, that potential fireworks might well have eclipsed Bryan’s celebrity in the matter.

As for The New Geology, though Price is still venerated in Adventist circles, such as Dean Harris (2004), mainstream geology was far from impressed, including those evangelical scientists who founded the American Scientific Affiliation (ASA) in 1941 when the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) began to seem too evolutionary for them. But as they thoroughly accepted the findings of modern geology, the ASA dismissed Flood Geology as rank pseudoscience.

An intriguing exception was one of the ASA’s founders, William Tinkle, noted above apropos eugenics, whose Christian catastrophism distanced him from the ASA trajectory fairly early on. Creationism of any stripe was such a minority position by the time the ASA began publishing their Journal in 1949 (eventually renamed Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith) they didn’t even bother presenting any Flood Geology papers to rebut, and sufficed with Kulp (1950) summarizing the evidence against it. Tinkle’s contrarian views were relegated to occasional letters and editorial caveats, such as to the conventional geological position presented by Erdman (1953).

For those who wanted their Bible straight up, though, Flood Geology might have seemed ideal but for its Adventist associations. Flood Geologists also tended to regard full Day-Agers as hopelessly spineless compromisers with standard geology (much as doctrinal Intelligent Design believers feel today about Theistic Evolutionists). So for many years sectarian squabbling kept the three branches of creationism either at each other’s throats, or at least glowering at each other over their stout denominational fences.

The disdain YEC believers have for their OEC brethren’s biblical interpretations remains steadfast and absolutely uncompromising, as evidenced by Bert Thompson (1994a-b), Bill Morgan (2005c,z) or Terry Mortenson (2009b). Theistic evolutionists are even further off the biblical map, of course, where the placid acceptance of evolution by the American Scientific Affiliation’s Keith Miller (2001) may be contrasted with the succinct Bill Morgan (2005q): “science does not show it and the Bible does not teach it,” and Morgan (2005e) warning that theistic evolution is a “cancer” killing any church embracing it. Because millions of years of evolution is littered with pre-Adamic sin death, Hank Hanegraaff (2005d) concluded “theistic evolutionists only wind up perverting God’s Good News into no news, as we remain dead in our sins.” Nutting & Nutting (1985) are less flashy than Hanegraaff but field similar reasoning, and Bob Ellis (2013d) was equally firm that the Bible and evolution cannot be reconciled. The distinctly Kulturkampf theological conservatism of the rejection of theistic evolution was explicitly reflected by Sam Petitfils (2014) of the Bibletruth website, affirming that “Bibletruth believes theistic evolution runs contrary to the creation account in Genesis and thus does not count it among the conservative views.”

William Dembski (2006d, 100-101) referred obliquely to creationist disdain for theistic evolution while keeping his own predilections mum, but others have been more upfront about connecting the dots.

Hanegraaff (2005d) recommended Phillip Johnson’s Darwin on Trial and Morris & Parker’s What is Creation Science? for further study on the apostasy of theistic evolution, and Hanegraaff (2005h) cited Darwin on Trial again for an “intermediate level” assessment of “evolutionism and creationism” issues. The presence of Darwin on Trial in Hanegraaff’s apologetic toolkit heralded that, though seldom so blunt as Morgan, Intelligent Design’s objections to Theistic Evolution run just as deep, and likewise turn on theology more than science. This attitude even extended to the quirky sociologist Steve Fuller (2008, 95) pompously declaring “ID theory is much less pseudoscience than theistic evolution is pseudo-religion—religion with all the heart but none of the brain engaged.”

When ID defender Hartwig (1995) highlighted the Evangelical or Catholic affiliations of the ID researchers for Moody Magazine (such as Dembski and Behe respectively) he readily tagged their collective efforts as a conflict of creationists versus evolutionists. And critics of Intelligent Design from Lenny Flank (2006b) to Barbara Forrest (2008c, 190; 2010a, 171) who have culled through the ID paper trail haven’t had to dig too far before spotting just how little wiggle room there is between the “new” supposedly religion-free ID and the “old” scripture-obsessed Christian creationism.

While William Dembski has been quoted in Hall (2002) that the designer “could be space aliens” and Phillip Johnson was similarly disingenuous for Freedberg (2002) that “in principle it could be space aliens of high intelligence who did the designing,” these public concessions did not reflect what either of them actually believe. Casey Luskin (2008h) dug himself into the deepest hole on this point, triumphantly accusing Richard Dawkins (2008a) of misrepresenting ID for claiming their theorists “often use the alien scenario to distance themselves from old-style creationists” when they were upfront about their personal belief in God. Luskin conducted a Google search for the phrase “for all we know, the designer might be an alien from outer space” which Dawkins had put in quotation marks. That turned “up only one hit: his article.” Dawkins was thus guilty of paraphrasing and Luskin of disingenuousness, since not only had Luskin’s Google quest missed Dembski and Johnson expressing exactly that position (even though not using the precise wording Dawkins trotted out) but so did Michael Behe in a passage Luskin went out of his way to quote.

While the “space alien” dodge Dawkins was complaining about has faded from the ID apologetic quiver in the years since Luskin’s harrumph, the issue remained as to how far-ranging the theoretical options are in practice for the purportedly unidentified (or unidentifiable?) ID designer (and only just the one?) apart from the personal convictions of the many design advocates who (by just happenstance?) were theologically conservative Christians. No non-Christian alternative was recognized as persuasive by Phillip Johnson (2002d), for instance, but compared to the legalistically precise Berkeley law professor, Dembski has been revealingly candid on several occasions. Dembski (1999b, 84) declared ID was simply “the Logos theology of John’s Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory,” which put Design theory exclusively on the block of sectarian Christian creationism (the Gospel of John being neither particularly Jewish nor Islamic).

The years since have further clarified Dembski’s position on the YEC-ID-Theistic Evolution scale. In an interview with Devon Williams (2007) at Focus on the Family’s Citizen Magazine to promote his new book with Jonathan Wells (The Design of Life, one of two replacements for the creationist Of Pandas and People) Dembski acknowledged that “The Designer of intelligent design is, ultimately, the Christian God.” And when blogger Johnny Helms (2009) decided “William Dembski is a practicing ’theistic evolutionist’,” based on Dembski (2009c), The End of Christianity, Dembski was quick to clarify: “I don’t endorse evolutionary theory.” Indeed, no apostate evolutionist he: “I’m an old-earth creationist” who accepts the Southern Baptist Convention position on Biblical inerrancy, and “I believe Adam and Eve were literal historical persons specially created by God,” comments quoted with eye-widening interest by skeptic Josh Rosenau (2010a).

No wonder then that ID advocates get a sour face when Theistic Evolution comes up: it is no small trick to figure out how any “literal” Adam and Eve can be shoehorned into the known history of early humans and their hominid precursors, but the issue can never go away for ID followers any more than it can for overt creationists precisely because of its theological underpinning. As Daniel Akin (1994) President of the Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary put it in his take on the creation/evolution issue: “A historical Adam & Eve is a must and not negotiable.”

So when Joshua Swamidass (2012) in the Wall Street Journal took to task rising Republican star Marco Rubio’s waffling on how old the Earth might be as a surrogate for uninformed evolution denial, Evolution News & Views (2012aa) responded not with an examination of the physical verity of Rubio’s “less-than-thoughtful, unrehearsed comments” about geochronology but with a criticism of theistic evolutionists for insufficiently keeping the theistic aspect properly in focus: that if they allow for more than just billions of years and common descent, but insist on “Life emerging from unguided, unplanned, purposeless churning, with random variation and natural selection as the primary mechanisms underlying the process,” then this “poses obvious problems in reconciling it with a traditional theistic framework, Christian or Jewish.” But it was precisely the point of the geology example that Christian scientific thinking had been able to incorporate all those billions of years into a refreshed theological framework, so why not unguided secondary causes for living systems too? Well, not if the “traditional theistic framework” was in fact what the Evolution News & Views advocates are not about to modify in any meaningful ways, come what may down the scientific evidence chute.

Likewise, and in striking contrast to his spin on Abraham Lincoln’s putative theistic evolution (noted in section 1.4 earlier), the Discovery Institute’s John West (2012d) let the doctrinal cat out of the bag by expressly assailing the conflicts theistic evolution purportedly had with “traditional Christian teaching about the original goodness of creation and its subsequent ’Fall’,” for their Parent’s Guide to Intelligent Design. So much for ID being intrinsically separate from a particular religious perspective (a unique pair of people in Eden falling into original sin sounds pretty much the way Henry Morris’ creationists conceive of it)—for only that Christian theological point was touched on as a source of conflict in the DI parental guide.

An interesting case study concerns Francis Collins’ BioLogos Foundation. Given his prominence with the Human Genome Project, Collins got an early sympathetic Adventist take from Clausen (2000), but as Collins’ BioLogos unapologetically pressed on to defend theistic evolution the welcome mat was pulled in. SABBSA (2010i) pegged their support of evolution as “Satan’s Newest Attack!” and Answers in Genesis weighed in all frowny face with jesus.org editor John UpChurch (2011b) decrying “The Danger of BioLogos” while a Ken Ham video assaulted “The Anti-biblical Teachings of BioLogos”—eliciting a remarkably measured retort by Christian biologist Darrell Falk (2011) at the BioLogos website.

Falk was no stranger to contention by this time: some years before, accusations that his embrace of theistic evolution at the conventionally creationist Point Loma Nazarene College was destroying his students’ faith drew the intervention of Point Loma alumnus James Dobson of Focus on the Family, stemmed after a block of Falk’s students affirmed their faith had not been compromised, Stafford (2012). Falk (2010c-d) garnered a further sideswipe from the ID camp when he attended “The Vibrant Dance of Faith and Science” conference organized by Andy Crouch, senior editor of Christianity Today. This turned into a “bait and switch” rumble, with the ID participants using Falk’s presence for a “showdown” of worldviews on how far evolutionary evidence would be given credence, variously covered by Hoppe (2010ah), Matheson (2010u) and Anika Smith (2010b).

When expedient, though, ID advocates have been willing to disingenuously shanghai theistic evolutionism for apologetic purposes, as when the Discovery Institute’s Jonathan Witt (2005a) claimed a poll of doctors showed 60% rejected “Neo-Darwinism”—never mind that the poll indicated over 77% accepted evolution (whether guided by a deity or not) and over 57% deemed Intelligent Design “religiously inspired pseudo-science,” Jewish Theological Seminary (2005). Witt (2006) similarly spun another survey of doctors by HCD Research (2005), which the design-friendly Access Research Network subsequently absorbed secondarily, ARN (2006).

Such tactics only underscore the peculiar position ID plays on the modern creationist landscape, as we’ll be seeing recurrently as we explore the antievolutionary landscape. Because there is too much naturalism in Theistic Evolution to wrap their heads around, their hearts are left to gravitate to the simpler God-dominated worldview represented by rigid creationists, provided they can avoid coming to blows over how many zeroes there are in the age of the Earth or whether tyrannosaurs were vegetarians before the Flood.

That ID advocates have to tread so carefully here may be credited to the unflagging enthusiasm of Henry Morris, a civil engineer whose study of Rimmer in the early 1940s led him to Price’s book. Cleaving off any remaining Adventist connotations, Morris is the fellow who mutated Price’s minority Flood Geology position into the formidable doctrine of today’s Scientific Creationism.