216 life
whom all the varieties of the race have sprung.” Exactly how this “special cre-
ation” happened remained a mystery.^37
Wright found his early encounter with Darwinism more exhilarating than
spiritually threatening. His modification of Darwin’s theory, especially the lim-
itations on the extent of natural selection, allowed Wright to preserve his belief
in an active Creator God—and temporarily to escape a spiritual crisis. But
when theological danger appeared in the form of higher criticism, Wright
found it theologically and psychologically soothing to abandon Christian Dar-
winism for fundamentalism.
George McCready Price (1870–1963)
George McCready Price, the founder of what in the 1970s came to be called
“scientific creationism,” was born in eastern Canada in 1870. When his wid-
owed mother joined the Seventh-day Adventist Church, he, too, at the age of
14, embraced that faith. Seventh-day Adventists not only commemorated a
literal six-day creation by celebrating sabbath on the seventh day; they accepted
as authoritative the “visions” and “testimonies” of the founder of the sect, Ellen
G. White. On one occasion she claimed to be “carried back to the creation and
was shown that the first week, in which God performed the work of creation
in six days and rested on the seventh day, was just like every other week.”
White also endorsed the largely discarded view of Noah’s flood as a worldwide
catastrophe that had buried the fossils and reshaped the earth’s surface.^38
During the early 1890s, young Price attended Battle Creek College for two
years and subsequently completed a teacher-training course at the provincial
normal school in New Brunswick, Canada. While serving as principal of a small
high school in an isolated part of the province, he read for the first time about
the paleontological evidence for evolution. To Price, the theory of evolution
seemingly “all turned on its view of geology, and that if its geology were true, the
rest would seem more or less reasonable.” On at least three occasions, he later
recalled, he nearly succumbed to the lure of evolution, or at least to what he
always considered its basic tenet: the progressive nature of the fossil record.
Each time he was saved by sessions of intense prayer—and by reading Mrs.
White’s “revealing word pictures” of earth history. As a result of this experi-
ence, he decided on a career championing what he call the “new catastroph-
ism,” in contrast to the old catastrophism of the French naturalist Georges
Cuvier.^39
Still, he puzzled over ways to interpret the evidence that apparently indi-
cated the Earth’s antiquity, which at first glance seemed “so strong and plau-
sible.” Only after poring over the standard geology texts and “almost tons of
geological documents, government reports, memoirs, and monographs on spe-
cial geological topics” did he discover “how the actual facts of the rocks and