Chapter I

Isaac Asimov once observed the solar system consisted of “Jupiter plus debris.” In the cosmos of professional creationism, Henry Morris performed the Jovian role. Of eleven main creationist associations listed by Toumey (1994, ix), five were Morris’ handiwork—besides the comprehensive account in Numbers (1992), see Eve & Harrold (1991, 120-135) for clear passage through the forest of creationist organizations, in and out of the Morris preserve. Morris was one of the seminal “Team of Ten” who founded the Creation-Research Society (CRS) in 1966. With Rev. Tim LaHaye (an End Times preacher known for his Left Behind apocalypse book series, filmed starring Kirk “Crocoduck” Cameron) Morris established the Christian Heritage College, and with Kelly Segraves these three set up the Creation-Science Research Center there in 1970. Morris also had a long, though unofficial, link with the Center for Creation Studies at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University. Finally, after a schism with Segraves over denominational neutrality and political activism (Morris favored retaining church affiliation and focusing on educational efforts), he established the influential Institute for Creation Research (ICR) in 1972, which served as base of operations for the indefatigable Duane Gish and remains a major creationist player.

Parenthetically, Christopher Cagan (2003) waved off Morris’ association with Falwell with some sprightly legalistic hairsplitting: “Although Jerry Falwell and Henry Morris (the leader of the Institute for Creation Research) may have met, they had no organic connection, they are not members of the same church or denomination, and they certainly are not working together in a dangerous monolithic movement to crush all opposition under their feet.” Well that is fine, isn’t it? Nobody need fret over the ICR claims being channeled by Falwell among his conservative compatriots over several decades or the creationist viewpoints presented at Liberty University or on Falwell’s radio broadcasts, because there was no “organic connection” between them—like what, an umbilical cord, or a contract signed in blood?

An interesting illustration of the mindset at Liberty University concerns Purdue-trained geneticist Lane Lester, an “alumnus of the BSCS textbook project, who had been rescued from evolution by Gish,” Numbers (1992, 290). Having worked for many years as a research scientist for Morris, Lester became director of Liberty University’s Center for Creation Studies in the 1980s, and set up its “Museum of Earth and Life History,” which Susan Harding (2000, 219-226) explored during her research on Jerry Falwell. One display offered “evidence of the Flood: a bird’s nest containing a fragment of Noah’s diary (Birdis Nestialis Noahinsis); a piece of Indian Corn extracted from the mouth of a woolly mammoth (Acornis Copi); and a black frame case with a dozen small animal bones sticking out of a bed of unadorned plaster of paris,” Harding (2000, 223). When Harding questioned Lester about this “overtly preposterous” exhibit he acknowledged it was a student joke. The problem was nothing on the display indicated that to the unwary observer. Eventually the exhibit was removed—and the museum itself was closed in the mid-1990s (ostensibly for budgetary reasons).

Although the Southern Baptist Henry Morris was open and generous in acknowledging to historian Ronald Numbers the intellectual debt he owed to Price’s work, as well as the criticism of radiometric dating by Price’s disciple Clifford Burdick (1894-1992), Numbers (1992, 194-195, 399n), that information has atrophied in the creationist community. Angela Hunt (1987) did not allude to the role of Price’s work in the genesis of Henry Morris’ Flood Geology in her paean at the Fundamentalist Journal, for example, and when I mentioned the history of YEC at Mike Riddle’s Answers in Genesis presentation at a local Spokane, Washington church in March 2010, Riddle steadfastly insisted there was no such connection. One of the church members at Riddle’s 2010 presentation (who prided himself on his direct contact with Morris and Gish) likewise declared how Morris derived his Flood Geology arguments simply by “reading the Bible.” Georgia Purdom & Mark Looy (2011) summarily reject Numbers’ account at the AiG website, which causes the SABBSA (2011f) to stand out from the pack for at least acknowledging The New Geology as “inspiration and basis” for The Genesis Flood in what was for them a better than average summary of the history of the creation-evolution controversy.

Perhaps more amazingly, the pleasant young pastor of a local Spokane Adventist church I spoke with after some antievolution presentations in 2012 was totally unaware that Young Earth Creationism derived from his own denomination’s White and Price, and a young ex-Adventist I met at a meeting of the Eastern Washington University Atheists club in 2013 also had never heard of the Adventist-YEC historical link in her own understanding of the faith. The propensity for historical revisionism among Tortucan-driven institutions will be seen to play as critical a role in the dynamics of modern Kulturkampf creationism as does their wanton disregard of the formal scientific literature.

Stepping back for the bigger picture, just as the rise of Bryan’s creationism was spurred on by the Brave New World of the 1920s, all it took for Scientific Creationism to crystallize was the customary social crisis, this time after another World War had brought on even more upheaval, Toumey (1994, 23-24). Though we tend to view the 1950s with “Leave It To Beaver” nostalgia, beyond the surface conformity of the suburban tract lots lurked the grimy paranoia of Joe McCarthy. Add to that the traditional “What Is the World Coming To?” mentality, where with one well-aimed pelvic wiggle Elvis Presley could send fundamentalist preachers into paroxysms over modern “degeneracy” as pessimistic as their 1920s predecessors. And of course there was even more Communism afoot, a genuinely dangerous ideology that could also play the role of expedient boogeyman.

When the Soviet Union was first into space with Sputnik, America’s political leaders had to deal with the unsettling prospect of perhaps being fatally behind on the Cold War learning curve, and amid the furious effort to revamp the high school science curricula that ensued, the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study (BSCS) duly reinstated all the evolutionary work that had piled up since Scopes’ day—and still active, as noted by Witham (2002b, 74-79). With that stimulus the somnolent creationist movement perked up in a hurry.

That 1920s fundamentalism might stem from a profound dissatisfaction with modern life was understandable. What was to prove so unexpected for secular science half a century later was how these same processes acted along entirely new demographic lines, accompanying the growth of large metropolitan and suburban areas. Scientific Creationism was no longer a rural southern eccentricity, but this realization had yet to invade the cultural and scientific establishments. Indeed, when arch-skeptic Martin Gardner (1957, 123-139) dissected Price and Rimmer in Fads & Fallacies in the Name of Science, he did so as one might have extinct life forms (coming himself from a deeply religious background, Gardner was impressed by Price, but that youthful dalliance failed to survive a strong dose of college level geology). Relegating creationism as Gardner did to somewhere between “monkey gland” medical quackery and Salem witchcraft did not prepare readers for the prospect of an active Creation Science that was about to flex its muscles.

Some of this misperception was ironically reinforced by the evocative 1955 hit play inspired by the Scopes Trial, Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee’s Inherit the Wind, brilliantly filmed in 1960 by the leading issues director of the day, Stanley Kramer (1913-2001), just as the seeds of the new creationism were being sown. With “creationism” as something nobody supposedly believed in any more, the play and film were concerned with different issues: the Cold War anxiety over freedom of expression and opposition to McCarthyist mob assaults on academic integrity. Inherit the Wind also appeared just as the civil rights movement was heating up, which would have given its picture of rural Southern bigotry a far from stereotypical cast. In that context the fierce townspeople of the fictional Hillsboro represented a lot that was genuinely unattractive and dangerous about fundamentalist ideologies then and now.

Moreover, by the time Creation Science was getting into full swing the Scopes Trial had slipped into a dim historical limbo—for example, Ravitch & Finn (1987, 66) noted that a disconcerting 62.8% of students surveyed didn’t even know what the trial was about. So for many people the film became the trial. Although many of the play and movie’s strongest moments were taken directly from the trial transcript (such as Darrow’s powerful peroration about how making a crime of teaching evolution in the schools today was just the first step in “marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth century when bigots” were busy burning enlightened people), a great many liberties were nonetheless taken in setting up the fictional confrontation, as covered by Randy Moore (1999e) or Benen (2000b). Even as a kid, though, I wasn’t thrown by this, as I couldn’t help noticing that everybody’s names were different: Brady for Bryan, Drummond for Darrow, Hornbeck for Mencken and Cates for Scopes.

There was a real Henry Drummond (1851-1897), by the way, a Scottish evangelist and theistic evolutionist whose Social Darwinist opinion of the poor as biologically parasitical is criticized by C. Zimmer (2000e, 17-19). A parenthetical note on chronological precision here: antievolutionary biophysicist Cornelius Hunter (2003, 114) referred to “The eighteenth-century theologian Henry Drummond.” Of course he might have got him confused with the Henry Drummond (1786-1860) who was an MP and founder of the Catholic Apostolic Church, but his dates would have him more properly belonging to the 19th century too.

Creationist lawyer Wendell Bird (1989, Vol. 2, 334-335) showed a far broader disinterest in the finer points of chronology in his astonishingly repetitive tome The Origin of Species Revisited when he touched on the topic of Old Earth creationism, listing Harry Rimmer (1890-1952), Douglas Dewar (1875-1957) and George McCready Price (1870-1963) as coming from “the early nineteenth century.” Bird may never have realized his own mistake because he didn’t stop to put dates to these folk, but see Numbers (1992, 60, 73, 94, 141) for their particulars. Price, of course, was a prickly defender of Young Earth creationism through most of his career. Evidently caught in his own temporal backwash, Bird went on to drag William “Lord Kelvin” Thomson (1824-1907) and Philip Henry Gosse (1810-1888) into the eighteenth century.

While we’re on the subject of getting the historical base straight, I must give a nod to the Reverend D. James Kennedy (1930-2007), whose Coral Ridge Ministry radio and television broadcasts from Florida promoted both YEC and ID advocates with great enthusiasm for many years. In his apologetic book, Skeptics Answered: Handling Tough Questions About the Christian Faith, Kennedy (1997, 95) referred to “one of the most famous historians, writers, and skeptics of the first half of this century—H. G. Wells, who wrote the famous Outlines of History. Probably best known for his science fiction and movie directing, he was, by profession, a historian as well as a very outspoken skeptic of Christianity.”

While Herbert George Wells (1866-1946) did supply a penetrating screenplay for the 1935 science fiction classic Things to Come (directed by William Cameron Menzies), it was Orson Welles (1915-1985) who was the one actually known for film directing. Kennedy may have slipped a name association cog here (as Cleone Weigand did when morphing Jack Parr into Jack Carson in section 1.3 above) because of Welles’ famous radio broadcast of the other Wells’ The War of the Worlds that scared the pants off Depression-era Americans in 1938. Kennedy’s memory glitch reminded me of the creationist children’s book that Stephen Jay Gould (2002a, 988) commented on, where a picture of robber baron Jay Gould (no relation) had been used to illustrate him!