Henry M. Morris
Morris spent the
next two
decades as a member of the civil engineering faculty of four different
universities, before taking a job as the head of the department at
Virginia
Polytechnic Institute in 1959. He taught
hydraulic engineering, and that interest, coupled with his belief that
the
Bible provided an accurate account of history, led him to ponder how
the Great
Flood reported in Genesis might be explained in scientific terms. Morris’s determination to provide support for
Genesis came from seeing “historical geology, with its evolutionary
implications,”
as the enemy. Morris believed that the
prevailing explanation profoundly influenced “nearly every aspect of
modern
life, especially in its fostering of an almost universal rejection of
historicity of Genesis and of Biblical Christianity generally.” (GF, xxvii)
In 1961, Morris and John C. Whitcomb, an Old
Testament
scholar, published The Genesis Flood, which Stephen Jay Gould
calls “the
founding document of the creationist movement.”
(C&S, 126) In April
2003, the book, which attempts to account for how an ancient deluge
might have
covered the entire planet—even covering the summit of Mount Everest—for
a full
year, had its forty-forth printing. The
book is a demonstration of Morris’s commitment to support Genesis as
“actual
historical truth, regardless of any scientific or chronologic problems
thereby
entailed.” (C&S, 56)
Morris believed that treating Genesis as
allegorical or mythical led down a slippery slope to a point where
“every man
becomes his own God.” Non-literalists,
in Morris’s opinion, fail to recognize that their approach “inevitably
undermines all the rest of Scripture. If the first Adam is not real,”
Morris
argued, “then neither is the second Adam real and there is no need of a
Savior.” (C&S, 81)
Morris’s Biblically-based assumption that the
earth was no
more than ten thousand years ago forced him to reject a concept which
had
dominated geology for more than a century. The uniformitarian position
is that
sedimentary rock, which often appear in layers thousands of feet in
thickness, have
been laid down by the gradual and steady process of deposition. Obviously, if that is the case, the earth is
a very old place—billions of years old, not thousands as Genesis
suggests.
Morris replaced uniformitarianism with what he
called
“Biblical catastrophism,” a framework that resulted in the wholesale
rejection
of everything geologists thought they knew about geology.
Even the author of the book’s forward, John
C. McCampbell, a geology professor from the University of Southwestern
Louisiana (and presumably one of the most sympathetic geology
professors that
could be found anywhere), expressed misgivings with a framework that
threw a
century’s worth of geology out the window. “I would prefer to hope that
some
other means of harmonization of religion and geology, which retains the
structure of modern historical geology, could be found,” he wrote. (GF,
xvii) Trying hard to muster a
compliment, Professor McCampbell credits Morris with “real independent
thinking,”
which he described as fast “becoming a lost art.” (GF,
xviii)
Morris took inspiration for his Great Flood
scenario from
Genesis I: 6-7. The sixth verse has God
declaring, "Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and
let
it divide the waters from the waters.” The seventh
verse is
more puzzling. In it, God “divided the
waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above
the
firmament; and it was so.” What waters
“above the firmament”? Morris rejects
the obvious answer—rain clouds—because Genesis 2:5 states “the Lord God
had not
caused it to rain upon the earth.” Morris’s solution is to imagine an
earth, in
these early years of human history, surrounded by a giant, invisible
canopy of
water vapor. How did the canopy get
there? Not my any means consistent with
natural laws operating today. Morris and
Whitcomb write, “These upper waters were therefore placed in the
position by
divine creativity, not by the normal process of the hydrological cycle
of the
present day.” Once the water canopy is
installed, another supernatural act, the puncturing of the canopy by
God, was
all it took to produce plenty of water for Noah’s Great Flood. Morris could not be more direct in conceding
that a Flood of the magnitude described in Genesis was impossible
without a
suspension of natural law: “The simple fact of the matter is that one
cannot
have any kind of a Genesis Flood without acknowledging the
presence of
supernatural elements.”
In the introduction to his book, Morris stated the
obvious. He pointed out, “If a worldwide
flood actually destroyed the entire antediluvian human population, as
well as
all land animals, except those preserved in a special ark constructed
by
Noah,…then its historical and scientific implications are tremendous.” (GF, xix)
Evolution, most significantly, could not account for the variety
of life
on earth if the Genesis Flood occurred as reported.
Morris and Whitcomb acknowledged that their
conclusions
“must unavoidably be colored by our Biblical presuppositions,” but
insisted
that modern science was no less affected “by its own presuppositions
and these
are quite as dogmatic as those of our own!” (GF, xxi)
Specifically, the authors pointed to
“historical continuity” and “scientific naturalism” as being untestable
assumptions accepted by virtually all geologists. Rejecting
the continuity of physical laws
becomes a handy device for Morris and Whitcomb to fend off the
challenges
presented by, for example, rubidium- strontium dating methods that seem
to
establish the earth’s age at something over four billion.
If we do not assume that elements decayed in
the past at the same rate they do today (and how can we prove that they
did?),
then, Morris argued, how can we trust the radiometric dating that
relies on this
assumption?
Morris concluded that the second law of
thermodynamics made
“evolution in the vertical sense (that is, from one degree of order and
complexity to a higher degree of order and complexity)…completely
impossible.”
(S&C, 10) This conclusion
represented a confusion of physical systems and living systems;
although the
universe may “run down,” life is quite capable of moving in the
opposite
direction. Interestingly, Morris argued
that the laws of thermodynamics did not apply during the days of Adam
and Eve,
but kicked in only at “the end of the creation period.” (GF, xxvi)
Fossils, needless to say, are a major thorn in the
side of
creationists. To Morris, the fossil
record, which gives the illusion of supporting evolution over hundreds
of
millions of years, was produced entirely during the 300 or so days of
Noah’s
Flood. As Morris put it in The
Genesis Flood, “The fossil-bearing strata were apparently laid down
in
large measure during the Flood, with apparent sequences attributed not
to
evolution but rather to hydrodynamic selectivity, ecological habitats,
and
differential mobility and strength of the various creatures.” (C&S, 53)
In other words, the flood sorted corpses of animals into strata,
as some
species struggled more effectively than others to stay above the rising
waters.
Morris’s scenario, featuring dinosaurs and sheep
all trying
their best to stay dry, met with widespread derision among scientists. Kenneth R. Miller describes the
“contradictions and fallacies and weaknesses of flood geology almost
too
numerous to mention,” but cannot resist a stab at Morris’s disposal of
the
fossil record. Miller wrote:
Mammals occupy
virtually every corner of this planet.
Some are very large, some are extremely small, some are quick,
some
slow, some burrow into the ground, some swim in the ocean, some climb
the
highest trees. They differ enormously,
as Henry Morris might say, in terms of their “hydrodynamic” properties
(shape
and weight), “ecological habitats,” “differential mobility and
strength.” Yet, not a single mammalian
fossil appears
until the very last strata from the creationist “flood” were laid down. And when they do appear, with incredible bad
luck, the fossils arrive in just the right sequence to piece together
imaginary
evolutionary sequences in a dozen different families.
Why is it that the first mammal to appear
happens to be the most reptile like of all subsequent mammals and
happens to
appear just after the most mammal like of all reptiles?
Shouldn’t a single family of moles near the
shore have been trapped by the rampaging waters and fossilized in the
Cambrian
period? Shouldn’t swimming mammals have
been fossilized alongside the jawless and jawed fishes in the early
stages of
the flood? (S&C, 54)
Stephen
Jay Gould also takes obvious delight in bashing Morris’s suggestion
that the
fossils of the higher strata are what they are because some species had
anatomical or functional advantages that allowed them to postpone the
inevitable longer than other species.
Gould observes:
Surely, somewhere, at
least one courageous trilobite would have paddled on valiantly (as its
colleagues succumbed) and won a place in the upper strata.
Surely, on some primordial beach, a man would
have suffered a heart attack and been washed into the lower strata
before
intelligence had a chance to plot a temporary escape….No trilobite lies
in the
upper strata because they all perished 225 million years ago. No man keep lithified company with a
dinosaur, because we were still 60 million years in the future when the
last
dinosaur perished. (S&C, 132)
In the most famous geological treatise of the
seventeenth-century, Reverend Thomas Burnet, in his The Sacred Theory
of the
Earth, addressed the same question Morris considered.
Burnet’s attempt to reconcile what he considered
to be the fact of the Great Flood with what was then understood about
science
is laughable today. (He imagined the
earth as a sort of huge pressure cooker rupturing its skin and allowing
surging
internal waters to cover the earth.) But
Burnet, unlike Morris, resisted the temptation to simply call for a
divine
assist. Although others urged him to
resort to miracles, Burnet 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.” (S&C, 133)
(Morris’s effort has not been the only—or even the
most
imaginative—effort to try to reconcile fossil data and a young earth
chronology. A creationist named Partee
Fleming wrote a book entitled Is God’s Bible the Greatest Murder
Mystery
Ever Written? in which he argued that dinosaurs and other early
species
never existed. The fossils that appear
to confirm the existence of dinosaurs, Fleming contended, were merely
planted
to test our belief and demonstrate the “wit of Jesus.” In short, the
massive
fossil evidence seemingly proving evolution represents a God-sized
prank.)
(S&C, 21)
The Genesis Flood found an appreciative
audience. More than any other work, the
book revitalized interest in a young earth cosmology among evangelical
Christians. Most seemed unconcerned with
the book’s cavalier dismissal of fossil evidence and its failure to
offer any
testable alternative theory of natural history.
They seem to agree with Morris: “God was there when it happened. We were not there….Therefore, we are
completely limited to what God has seen fit to tell us, and this
information is
in His written Word.” (S&C, 130)
The scientific community, to the extent it paid
any
attention to The Genesis Flood,
has been—to put it mildly—unimpressed. Kenneth
R. Miller is one scientist who made it his mission to tackle the
creationist
arguments head on. In one essay, Miller
accused Morris and other creationists of blowing off “a shotgun full of
mutually contradictory arguments…designed essentially to confuse and
mislead,
and even to misinform.” (S&C, 47)
Two years after The Genesis Flood hit
bookstores,
Morris and nine other like-minded scientists founded the Creation
Research
Society, dedicated to established scientific support for the Genesis
creation
story. Seven years later, Morris moved
to
The unmistakable aim of ICR is not to convert
leading
scientists to their way of thinking—an all-but-impossible task—but
rather to
influence textbook writers, school boards, and the unskeptical public. ICR scientists generally to not seek review
from “peers” in the scientific community, and rarely collaborate in any
way
with university researchers. The goal of
ICR, simply put, is to influence the way schools teach science.