Henry M. Morris, widely regarded as the founder of the modern creationist movement, died February 25, 2006, at the age of eighty-seven. His 1961 book The Genesis Flood, subtitled, The Biblical Record and Its Scientific Implications, was a cornerstone of the movement. Many more books followed, including Scientific Creationism; What Is Creation Science?; Men of Science; Men of God; History of Modern Creationism; The Long War Against God; and Biblical Creationism. In 1970 he founded the Institute for Creation Research, which continues to be a leading creationist force, now headed by his sons, John and Henry III. In 1982 I debated the subject with him at the Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale in front of a sellout crowd of several thousand. He had emphasized in our initial contacts that the debate would be based on science, not religion, but when he opened his remarks with this same statement and the audience responded with loud cries of “Amen!” and “Praise Jesus!” I knew I was in for a long night. Both of us steered away from the biological arguments, I because I’m not a biologist and he presumably because the Biblical side of that is so evidently silly—if he had tried to describe how Noah brought two mosquitoes or two fleas aboard he might have got away with it, but the whole panoply of billions of species of submicroscopic creatures was obviously a problem. Instead he concentrated on the physical side, in particular on the age of the earth, and that was fine with me. As noted in the previous chapters, the earth’s age is central to Darwin’s argument. A strict interpretation of the Bible gives a limit of thousands of years, which is clearly not enough time for evolution to take place. Radioactive dating, on the other hand, gives Darwin his needed time span of billions of years, and so a cornerstone of the creationist argument is its necessary destruction. Morris was a wonderful motivational speaker, and spent a long introduction wandering through the Bible to show how wonderfully reasonable it is.
Revisiting the Scopes Trial: Young-Earth Creationism, Creation Science, and the Evangelical Denial of Climate Change
