This posting is in response to parts of two posts by Don.

In his first post on this thread, on 2 May 2005, about inerrancy, Section 10 is headed

Don:

10. The Reformers understood it as history.

Ken:

The first paragraph of this refers to Calvin and the second to Luther. I may respond to these later after I have looked at some primary sources.

The third paragraph refers in disparaging terms to Ronald Numbers highly acclaimed “The Creationists” (Alfred A. Knopf, 1982) and reads:

Of course opponents of the historicity of Genesis love to cite Ronald Numbers’ book, ‘The Creationists’. Numbers is cited as supposedly showing that young-earth creationism was invented by a Seventh Day Adventist, George McCready Price, in the 1920s. This has to be one of the most incredible examples of historical revisionism I have seen; on par with the flat earth myth (totally demolished by Jeffrey Burton Russell at http://id-www.ucsb.edu/fscf/library/RUSSELL/FlatEarth.html). It is as if Numbers, an apostate SDA, knows nothing of history before Price or Ellen White. The above material on the church fathers and reformers is sufficient to show the error of Numbers’ work. But there is much more that refutes it. See the research of the earth science historian Dr Terry Mortenson on the geologists of the early 1800s who defended the biblical age of the earth and the global flood of Genesis: http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/bios/t_mortenson.asp (papers listed under ‘The 19th Century Scriptural Geologists’). For a comprehensive and accurate history of what happened see Dr Mortenson’s definitive book, ‘The Great Turning Point’ (http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs2004/0828turning_point.asp)

And his response, on 18 May 2005, to one of my postings started

Ken Smith wrote:

I have read through Don’s initial posting to a.r.c several times. The issue of “inerrancy” has come up a number of times in the past here, and the participants have (usuallly) agreed to differ. Might I make a plea for a bit of civility in the language to be used in this debate? Don’s posting uses the same sort of language which can be found in other creationist writings, and it gives the impression, perhaps unintended, of belligerence towards anyone who disagrees. In particular, the adjective “apostate” which Don used both of the highly respected historian Ronald Numbers, and of Chris Ho-Stuart who is greatly respected by the regulars on a.r.c, is unnecesary, and adds nothing to the content of the post.

D:

Ken, for someone who throws so much mud you are incredibly imaginative at finding incivility in what I have written. Just about everything you write against creationists in that christophobic rag, ‘The Skeptic’, is dripping with ridicule (not to mention on the JMM website). It’s unfortunately typical to find in anticreationists the tactics of the schoolyard bully-happy to dish it out, but not the converse. You yourself are happy to cite Ho-Stuart to call my colleague Dr Sarfati “a liar and an idiot” -leaving aside the incongruity of an atheist lecturing a Christian on whether evolution and Christianity are compatible! And when your atheistic compatriot Plimer was happy to label a leading US creationist a pederast, you and the other Skeptics refused to repudiate it. But then you complain when a creationist shows the tiniest imagined sign of aggression. But then, you deny biblical inerrancy, so perhaps you regard the commands against hypocrisy to be one of the alleged errors in the Bible?

Fact is, both gentlemen say that they once were Christians and are now no longer. An apostate is simply one who abandons religious faith, vows or principles. And it is relevant to the discussion, because such abandonment of faith indicates that they cannot be regarded as neutral, unbiased observers in the issues pertaining to this debate.

And by whom is Numbers “highly respected”? His assertions about ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ the origins of YEC are crassly ignorant of the history of the interpretations of the Church Fathers and Reformers, as well as the Scriptural Geologists. Yet anticreationists quote him as virtually verbally inspired when he claims that YEC began with Ellen White or George McCready Price. Only those who have never bothered to check his claims could respect his ‘scholarship’ in this area (Skeptics can be very selective in their scepticism).

K:

Let me reverse the order of my responses, and take up Don’s challenge in the second of the posts I have quoted above.

People will note that Don doesn’t actually quote any of the articles I have written to justify his claim of “dripping with ridicule”, nor does he cite specific items from the John Mark Ministry website. I’ll let other people decide whether Don’s comments are an appropriate response to my suggestion for a bit of civil language.

But I want to concentrate here on Don’s question `And by whom is Numbers “highly respected”?’

I leave the dust-jacket on any books I buy until it starts to fall apart from wear. That on my copy of “The Creationists” is somewhat tattered, but still on the book. When it starts to fall apart I’ll preserve the back of it in some way, because it has the usual commendations from a range of people who endorse and support the book. In this case there are six people quoted. Five of them are:

* Martin Gardner, author of “Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science”;

* Walter R. Hearn, American Scientific Affiliation;

* James R, Moore, co-author of “Darwin” [biography written with Adrian Desmond]

* Frank M. Turner, Yale University;

* Robert Wuthnow, Center for the Study of American Religion, Princeton University.

One would have thought that support from such people would be sufficient for Don and other people at Answers in Genesis to accept what Numbers writes about creationists and creationism.

But in case further a testimonial is required, I’ve saved the sixth one for the last, though it is listed between Moore and Turner.

* Henry M. Morris, Institute for Creation Research.

I won’t quote the others, but Morris writes:

For those interested in the background of the modern revival of creationism, whether evolutionists or creationists, this book is a rich mine of information and historical insights.

So the most prominent creationist around endorses Numbers.

Don appears to think that Numbers is in error when he traces the modern creationist movement back to George McCready Price. However Henry M. Morris, whose book “The Genesis Flood”, co-authored with John Whitcomb, started off, and was mainly responsible for the fast growth of, modern creationism, claims much the same thing. Going to the primary sources, as is my custom, in his own historical work “A History of Modern Creationism” (Master Book Publishers, 1984) Morris writes on page 80

As a Baptist, I obviously disagree with Adventist eschatology, as well as Adventist concepts of revelation and soteriology; but I have learned to have sincere respect for their integrity, intelligence, scholarship, and strong commitment to the inerrancy of Scripture and many of the basic doctrines of Christianity. At the very least, they are closer to the truth than the “liberals” among the “mainline” denominations. Although I never met George McCready Price, his tremendous breadth of knowledge in science and Scripture, his careful logic, and his beautiful writing style made a profound impression on me when I first began studying these great themes, back in the early 1940s.

I first encountered his name in one of Harry Rimmer’s books (see the discussion of Rimmer later in this chapter) and thereupon looked up his book _The New Geology_ in the library at Rice Institute, where I was teaching at the time. This was in early 1943, and it was a life-changing experience for me. I eventually acquired and read most of his other books as well.

The tremendous influence Price had on Morris is borne out by the Index in Morris’s book. Price is cited more frequently than any other person, with the sole exception of Duane Gish.

So if the originator of modern creationism, Henry M. Morris, says favourable things about Numbers’ book, and himself owes so much to Price, I think the rest of us can safely assume that Price’s book “The New Geology” was indeed largely responsible for the modern creationist movement, notwithstanding anything on the Answers in Genesis website.

Let me at this point issue a rather strong caveat. As far as I can remember the above quotations from Morris are the first time I have actually quoted Morris on a.r.c I expect to quote other creationists in this thread.

Any such quotations are NOT to be taken as endorsement, acceptance, agreement or approval by me of any of the content of the quotation. They are provided purely so that people can be informed about what creationists actually say and write.

Now to return to the first of the posts I quoted above.

Contrary to Don’s claim, Numbers does not claim anywhere in his book that creationism was “invented” by George McCready Price. But his book indisputably shows that for much of the twentieth century creationism, in its modern form, was only supported to any significant extent by Seventh-day Adventists. And two of the leading lights here are those quoted by Henry Morris in the brief extract cited above: George McCready Price and Harry Rimmer.

This is quite obvious to anyone who reads Numbers’ Introduction. On page x Numbers quotes the definition of “creation science” as it is found in the 1981 Arkansas law, and then writes:

Advocates of this view — essentially biblical creationism stripped of explicit references to God, Adam and Noah — read the first chapters of Genesis in a way that allows for no life on earth before Eden and no death before the Fall.

Until the last few decades most creationists would have regarded such notions as unnecessarily extreme. By the late nineteenth century even the most conservative Christian apologists readily conceded that the Bible allowed for an ancient earth and pre-Edenic life. With few exceptions, they accommodated the findings of historical geology either by interpreting the days of Genesis 1 to represent vast ages in the history of the earth (the so-called day-age theory) or by separating a creation “in the beginning” from a much later Edenic creation in six literal days (the gap theory). Either way, they could defend the accuracy of the Bible while simultaneously embracing the latest geological and paleontological discoveries. William Jennings Bryan, the much misunderstood leader of the post-World War I antievolution crusade, not only read the Mosaic “days” as geological “ages” but allowed for the possibility of organic evolution — so long as it did not impinge on the supernatural origin of Adam and Eve. Harry Rimmer, the flamboyant evangelist who occupied center stage on the creationist platform between the great wars, squeezed millions of years into the presumed gap in the Genesis narrative and drained the deluge story of all but local significance.

The creation scientists, by contrast, compress the history of life on earth into less than ten thousand years. To accomplish this, they attribute most of the fossil record to the brief period of the flood and its aftermath. They believe that the majority of plants and animals buried sequentially in the stratified rocks once lived together in the antediluvian world; thus these relics do not represent successive populations of flora and fauna spanning millions of years, as evolutionists and most other creationists would assert. In such classics of creation science as George McCready Price’s _The New Geology_ (1923) and John C. Whitcomb, Jr., and Henry M. Morris’s _Genesis Flood_ (1961), geological issues push biological ones to the periphery, and the Noachian deluge tends to eclipse the Adamic creation in importance. “The Genesis Flood is the real crux of the conflict between the evolutionist and creationist cosmologies,” declares the text _Scientific Creationism_ (1974).

If the system of flood geology can be established on a sound scientific basis, and be effectively promoted and publicized, then the entire evolutionary cosmology, at least in its present neo-Darwinian form, will collapse. This, in turn, would mean that every anti-Christian system and movement (communism, racism, humanism, libertinism, behaviourism, and all the rest) would be deprived of their pseudo-intellectual foundation.

The chief architect of flood geology, a term virtually synonymous with creation science and scientific creationism, was the self-described geologist George McCready Price, who during the early decades of the twentieth century stood virtually alone in insisting on the recent appearance of life and on a flood that rearranged the features of the earth. Although his “new catastrophism” received nearly universal acclaim from fellow creationists, he won few true converts to flood geology outside his own small Seventh-day Adventist sect. It was not until the creationist renaissance of the 1960s, marked by the publication of Whitcomb and Morris’s _Genesis Flood_ and the subsequent birth of the Creation Research Society, that fundamentalists in large numbers began to read Genesis in a Pricean manner and to equate his views with the intended message of Moses. By the 1980s the flood geologists had virtually co-opted the name creationism to describe the once marginal views of Price. This remarkable shift in the prevailing meaning of creationism — from the theologically orthodox day-age and gap theories that allowed the history of life on earth to span millions of years to a doctrine of suspect provenance (because of its Adventist origins) that serves as the focus of my study.

The quotation from “Scientific Creationism” can be found on page 252.

It is clear from these words that there is no small amount of confusion over the meaning of “creationism”. Anyone who takes the trouble to talk to a few scientists, particularly soem who are engaged in teaching undergraduate students at universities, about what they understand by the word, will soon discover that almost invariably they come up with something like “creation of everything in six twenty-four hour days, a few thousand years ago, and all the fossils were formed in a one year flood”.

I’ll save posting the adjectives/nouns some of my scientific colleagues have used to describe creationists for a later post, if I think it appropriate to post their words.

So Numbers is quite correct in attributing the prevalence of this idea to the writings of George McCready Price.

However creationists, in this sense of the word, are incorrect when they describe various eminent scientists of the past as “creationists”. I have read through quite a number of the collected writings and biographies of scientists, and have yet to come across even one which mentions Noah’s flood (I haven’t read all Newton’s letters yet).

I make no claim to have read all the biographies which exist. If Don can come up with one which does mention the flood I would be pleased to hear about it, and do my best to get hold of it and read it.

Salaam Ken Smith

— Dr Ken Smith – Christian, husband, unpaid mathematician, skeptic, … `The argument from design tries to prove God’s reality by examining the universe. In the form given to it today by those naming themselves “creation scientists” it earns the fury of genuine scientists.’ John Leslie