Creationism - National Center for Science Education

were hidden underground. The Flood buried immense forests which formed today’s coal
and oil deposits. White stressed that the Flood catastrophe is a warning of the coming
destruction of the world prior to the imminent second Advent or Coming of Christ.
Price attended Battle Creek College, the Seventh-day Adventist institution in
Michigan, then taught school in his native Canada. He taught himself geology in order to
refute evolution and prove literal creation, and became a science professor at various
Adventist colleges in Nebraska and Washington, and at the College of Medical
Evangelists in California (now Loma Linda University, famed for its medical school).
In his Outline of Modern Science and Modern Christianity, published by “Modern
Heretic Co.” in 1902 (Modern Heretic happens to have the same address as Price’s home
in Los Angeles), Price first presented his major Flood Geology arguments, including the
central claim that the geological record does not prove a succession of ages, but rather
shows a “taxonomic” series representing different but contemporaneous zones of
antediluvian life. He continued to campaign for creationism in dozens of books into the
second half of the century. In his 1902 work he discussed:
The Evolution Theory in its whole range, from the Nebulous Cloud, the Cooling Earth, and the Origin of
Life, through Geology and Biology up to the Moral Nature of Man, Carefully discussed in a Popular Style.
No one, after reading it, could for a moment suppose that the Evolution Theory had been proved by sound
scientific arguments, while the moral and religious tendencies of the doctrine are shown to be anti-Christian
to the last degree.
Price urged a return to “primitive” Christianity, including belief in the plain interpretation
of the Creation narrative:
No believer in the Sabbath as the divine memorial of creation’s week will hesitate to give as the distinct,
positive teaching of Genesis that life has been on our globe only some six or seven thousand years; and that
the earth as we know it, with its teeming animal and vegetable life, was brought into existence in six literal
days.
Price enthusiastically expanded on his refutation of modern geology and advocacy
of Flood Geology in a 1906 booklet Illogical Geology: The Weakest Point in the
Evolution Theory, also published at home by Modern Heretic. In it he offered $1000 for
proof of any difference in the age of fossils. His major thesis is a denial of the Wernerian
“onion-skin” hypothesis 9 of rock strata: the assumption of worldwide orderly
superposition of successive strata. Arguing instead that the different fossil assemblages
represent different (but contemporaneous) ecological zones, he insisted that geological
strata can and do appear in any order whatsoever—that the alleged “geological column”
is a myth. “Illogical Geology” was the title of an 1890 essay by Herbert Spencer.
Spencer, though an evolutionist, also rejected the assumption of Werner’s Neptunian
onion-coat theory that the same type of rock was deposited worldwide for each era. Price
complained that modern geologists had abandoned Werner’s Neptunian version, only to
substitute for it a modern biological version in which worldwide successive layers as
defined by index fossils are still assumed without warrant.)
“Inductive geology can never prove creation,” Price conceded. But, he
proclaimed, it “removes forever the succession-of-life idea,” thus clearing the way for
9 Price, defending true science against speculative theories, says of Werner (1923:592): “In all this
speculation, he was, of course, wandering far from true inductive methods. Quite likely he never heard of Bacon’s
Novum Organum or Newton’s Principia.”