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 God’s 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 Noah’s flood. Eventually he settled on the latter—and 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 Price’s 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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