The Fossil Record 63In Price’s later years, his bizarre ideas about geology were generally ignored as
embarrassments by most creationists (see Numbers 1992:89–101). Most subscribed to the
“day-age” idea of Genesis, where the “days” of scripture were geologic “ages,” and did
not try to contort all the evidence of geology into a simplistic flood model. Some disciples
of Price actually tried to test his ideas and look at the rocks for themselves, which Price
apparently never bothered to do. In 1938, Price’s follower Harold W. Clark “at the invita-
tion of one of his students visited the oil fields of Oklahoma and northern Texas and saw
with his own eye why geologists believed as they did. Observations of deep drilling and
conversations with practical geologists [none of whom were trying to prove evolution, but
simply using biostratigraphy to find oil] gave him a ‘real shock’ that permanently erased
any confidence in Price’s vision of a topsy-turvy fossil record” (Numbers 1992:125). Clark
wrote to Price,
The rocks do lie in a much more definite sequence than we have ever allowed. The
statements made in the New Geology [Price’s term for flood geology] do not har-
monize with the conditions in the field. . . . All over the Middle West the rocks lie in
great sheets extending over hundreds of miles, in regular order. Thousands of well
cores prove this. In East Texas alone are 25,000 deep wells. Probably well over 100,000
wells in the Midwest give data that have been studied and correlated. The science has
become a very exact one, and millions of dollars are spent in drilling, with the pale-
ontological findings of the company geologists taken as the basis for the work. The
sequence of microscopic fossils in the strata is very remarkably uniform. . . . The same
sequence is found in America, Europe, and anywhere that detailed studies have been
made. This oil geology has opened up the depths of the earth in a way that we never
dreamed of twenty years ago. (quoted in Numbers 1992:125)Clark’s statement is a classic example of a reality check shattering the fantasy world of the
flood geologists. Unfortunately, most creationists do not seek scientific reality. They prefer
to speculate from their armchairs and read simplified popular books about fossils and rocks
rather than go out in the field and do the research themselves or do the hard work of getting
the necessary advanced training in geology and paleontology.
In the 1950s, the young seminarian John C. Whitcomb tried to revive Price’s ideas
yet again. When Douglas Block, a devout and sympathetic friend with geologic training,
reviewed Whitcomb’s manuscript, he “found Price’s recycled arguments almost more than
he could stomach. ‘It would seem,’ wrote the upset geologist, ‘that somewhere along the line
there would have been a genuinely well-trained geologist who would have seen the implica-
tions of flood geology, and, if tenable, would have worked them into a reasonable system
that was positive rather than negative in character.’ He assured Whitcomb that he and his
colleagues at Wheaton [College, an evangelical school] were not ignoring Price. In fact, they
required every geology student to read at least one of his books, and they repeatedly tested
his ideas in seminars and in the field. By the time Block finished Whitcomb’s manuscript,
he had grown so agitated he offered to drive down to instruct Whitcomb on the basics of
historical geology” (Numbers 1992:190).
In 1961, Whitcomb and hydraulic engineer Henry Morris published The Genesis Flood,
where they rehashed Price’s notions with a twist or two of their own. Their main contribution
was the idea of hydraulic sorting by Noah’s flood, where the flood would bury the heavier