Creation Science - Henry M. Morris
From the early 1960s through the 1990s the most influential
voice in creationist circles was that of Henry M. Morris (b. 1918),
a Baptist civil engineer from Texas. As a religiously indifferent
youth Morris accepted theistic evolution, but shortly after graduating
from the Rice Institute in Houston, he came to accept the Bible
as Gods infallible word, from Genesis through Revelation.
At first, he remained undecided about whether to attribute the
fossil record to pre-Edenic activities or, following Price, to
Noahs flood. Eventually he settled on the latterand
devoted the rest of his life to promoting flood geology, which
about 1970 he renamed creation science.
In 1961, after earning
a Ph.D. in hydraulic engineering at the University of Minnesota,
he and an Old Testament scholar, John C. Whitcomb, Jr., brought
out The Genesis Flood, an enormously influential book that
did more than anything else to popularize Prices model of
earth history among evangelical Christians. In contrast to Price,
who at times allowed for the presence of a lifeless earth before
Eden, Morris believed that the entire universe was no older than
10,000 years and that some physical laws, such as the second law
of thermodynamics, did not exist until Adam and Eve sinned.
Two
years after the appearance of The Genesis Flood Morris
joined nine other like-minded scientists in forming the Creation
Research Society, dedicated to the propagation of young-earth
creationism and the elimination of the day-age and gap interpretations
of Genesis 1. In 1970 Morris gave up a professorship in civil
engineering at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and moved to San
Diego to help establish a creationist center, which in 1972 became
the Institute for Creation Research (ICR). During the last quarter
of the twentieth century the Morris-led ICR served as the epicenter
of creation science.
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| Contributed by: Dr. Ron Numbers
|