62 Evolution and the Fossil Record
The Surreal World of “Flood Geology”
If the system of “flood geology” can be established on a sound scientific basis, and be
effectively promoted and publicized, then the entire evolutionary cosmology, at least in
its present neo-Darwinian form, will collapse. This, in turn, would mean that every anti-
Christian system and movement (communism, racism, humanism, libertinism, behav-
iorism, and all the rest) would be deprived of their pseudo-intellectual foundation.
—Henry Morris, Scientific CreationismCreationists like to dismiss evolution as only a theory. My favorite rejoinder is that
creationism isn’t even a theory. When examined in the light of well-known and thor-
oughly researched scientific phenomena, creationist “flood geology” fails the most
basic and simple test known to forensic science: bodies don’t pile up the way cre-
ationists insist they must.
—Walter F. Rowe, “Bobbing for Dinosaurs: A Forensic Scientist Looks at the Genesis Flood”If the creationists cannot claim that the fossil record has been fraudulently shuffled by geolo-
gists to prove evolution, then they must acknowledge that it shows changing fossil faunas
through time, not instantaneous creation. As we saw with the early fundamentalists of the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (chapter 2), most had come to terms with the
idea that the change in fossil faunas through time did support the idea of evolution, even if
they were unhappy with that notion. But we must never underestimate the wild imagina-
tions of religious fanatics who will bend the truth in whatever way they need to win their
battles. If the fossil record does show a sequence of faunas through time, then they believe
that there must be a biblical explanation for it.
The first detailed attempt at such an explanation came from a Seventh-Day Adventist
schoolteacher named George Macready Price, who published a series of books starting in
- Price had no formal training or experience in geology or paleontology and in fact
attended only a few college classes at a tiny Adventist college. But inspired by Ellen G.
White, the prophetess and founder of the Seventh-Day Adventist movement, he dreamed
up an explanation called flood geology and aggressively promoted it for more than 60 years
until his death in 1963. According to Price, the flood accounted for all of the fossil record,
with the helpless invertebrates being buried first, and the larger land animals floating to the
top to be buried in higher strata, or fleeing the floodwaters to higher ground. Price also orig-
inated the lie we just debunked about geologists dating rocks by their fossil content while
simultaneously determining the age of fossils by their position in the geologic column.
Ignorant of history or geology, Price was unaware of the fact that religious geologists had
believed in a Noachian deluge explanation of the fossil record in the seventeenth and eigh-
teenth centuries but abandoned it when their own work showed it to be impossible—long
before evolution came on the scene. The most famous geologic treatise of the seventeenth
century, The Sacred Theory of the Earth, by Reverend Thomas Burnet, dealt with the problem
of the Noachian deluge explaining the rock record. Burnet, unlike the modern creationists,
did not fall back on the supernatural. Although others urged him to resort to miracles, Bur-
net declared, “They say in short that God Almighty created waters on purpose to make the
Deluge. . .. And this, in a few words, in the whole account of the business. This is to cut the
knot when we cannot loose it.”