218 life
argued that Darwinism rested “logically and historically on the succession of
life idea as taught by geology” and that “if this succession of life is not an actual
scientific fact, then Darwinism...isamost gigantic hoax.”^43
During the next fifteen years, Price taught in several Adventist schools and
authored six more books attacking evolution, particularly its geological foun-
dation. Although not unknown in fundamentalist circles before the early
1920s, he did not begin attracting widespread national attention until then.
Shortly after the fundamentalist controversy entered its antievolution phase,
Price publishedThe New Geology, the most systematic and comprehensive of
his two dozen or so books. In it, he restated his “great ‘law of conformable
stratigraphic sequences’...byallodds the most important law ever formulated
with reference to the order in which the strata occur.” According to this law,
“Any kind of fossiliferous beds whatever, ‘young’ or ‘old,’ may be found oc-
curring conformably on any other fossiliferous beds, ‘older’ or ‘younger.’ ” To
Price, so-called deceptive conformatives (where strata seem to be missing) and
thrust faults (where the strata are apparently in the wrong order) proved that
there was no natural order to the fossil-bearing rocks, all of which he attributed
to Noah’s flood.^44 Despite repeated attacks from the scientific establishment,
Price’s influence among non-Adventist fundamentalists grew rapidly. By
the mid-1920s, the editor ofSciencecould accurately describe Price as “the
principal scientific authority of the Fundamentalists,” and Price’s byline was
appearing with increasing frequency in a broad spectrum of religious period-
icals.^45
Price’s success as an internationally known spokesman for creationism
unquestionably fulfilled a craving for public recognition, though for the rest
of his life he chafed at the failure of fellow fundamentalists to abandon their
old-earth creationism for his “flood geology.” His uncompromising creation-
ism remained on the fringes of fundamentalism until 1961, when John C.
Whitcomb Jr. and Henry M. Morris brought out their landmark book,The
Genesis Flood, which launched the revival of young-earth creationism in the
late twentieth century. Designed as a defense of Price against his critics, it was,
as one perceptive reader described it, “a reissue of G. M. Price’s views brought
up to date.” Flattered by the attention he was finally receiving, Price, then in
his early nineties, uncharacteristically ignored the near absence of his name
in the book.^46
Among the four individuals we have been examining, Price seems to have
suffered the most intensely as a result of entertaining evolution, largely be-
cause, as an Adventist, he had so little room for theological compromise. For
him, unlike for LeConte, Lesley, or Wright, the acceptance of evolution would
have meant a virtually complete rejection of his religious faith, or so it seemed.
Yet his deepest psychological crisis, which prompted thoughts of suicide, ap-
parently resulted more from his failure to find a satisfying job than from fear
of succumbing to Darwinism. In the end, his thoroughgoing rejection of evo-