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LOOKING TO THE BIBLE

The Challenge

In the 1970s mainstream science was once again challenged by creationists. Advocates of creationism, almost exclusively evangelical and fundamentalist Christians, as were the earlier critics of evolution, believed that the biblical version of the beginning of time in the Book of Genesis ruled out the possibility of evolution. In the strict creationist account, popularized in John Whitcomb and Henry Morris's The Genesis Flood in 1961, the earth had been formed about ten thousand years ago, and God created all plants, animals, and humans in the following six days. Humans and dinosaurs had coexisted. Fossils were the result of the mass deaths in the biblical flood. Carbon-14 dating, by which scientists had established the antiquity of many fossils, could be explained away by a vapor cloud that had covered the earth during the flood and prevented radioactivity from reaching the earth.

Skirmish in California

Initially The Genesis Flood had no impact outside extremely conservative Christian circles, and even there it was controversial. But creationism burst into public consciousness in 1972, when the California Board of Education accepted the arguments of a handful of fundamentalist Christian parents that creationism should be taught alongside theories of evolution. The parents believed that to do less was to engage in religious prejudice against fundamentalists. After all, the rest of the curriculum encouraged children to weigh alternative arguments and decide which one was best, so why not science? California was a particularly important place for such a victory. As it had the largest school system in the country, the state had a significant impact on text-book publishers.

The Battle Goes National

Most scientists in the half century since the 1920s had simply regarded creationism as a crackpot theory like the flat earth and had not been willing even to dignify it with a response. In 1972 evolutionists finally roused themselves to refute creationism. Both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science issued statements denouncing it. Momentum continued to build. In 1978 a young law student, Wendell Bird, proposed a new strategy for writing laws supporting the teaching of creationism. Creationism, he argued, was a scientific doctrine, not a religion. Teaching it, then, did not violate the freedom-of-religion clause of the Constitution (as many evolutionists argued), but not teaching it violated the rights of creationist students. This approach resulted in the immediate passage of bills in Louisiana and Arkansas, and twenty other states considered similar legislation. Not until the mid 1980s, following many court cases over creationism and the public schools, did the enthusiasm for creationism die down.