Pretty early on in my Christian life, I acquired two books about the relationship between science and the Bible.  One was Bernard Ramm’s A Christian View of Science and Scripture (1954) and the second was The Genesis Flood, by  John Whitcomb and Henry Morris (1961).  The latter was intended, in part at least, to be a response to the first.  Ramm had argued for an old earth creation and localised flood, whereas Whitcomb and Morris attempted to make a case for a young earth creation and a worldwide flood.

Drawing on the ideas of George McCready Price (1870-1963) Whitcomb and Morris attempted to show that almost the entire geological record can be explained by Noah’s flood.

Personally, I didn’t spend much time on The Genesis Flood.  Ramm and others convinced me that it was unwise to be too dogmatic or too literal in one’s understanding of these wonderful, powerful, mysterious opening chapters of Genesis.  Good Christians can hold various opinions about the details of how the world began and how it will end, and still recognise one another as brothers and sisters in Christ.

But Whitcomb and Morris’s work was has been highly influential among evangelicals, spawning as it did a resurgence is what came to be called ‘scientific creationism’.

So, what are its main arguments?

1. Opposition to uniformitarianism.  It should not be assumed, it was argued, that the processes we observe in the cosmos today can be used to interpret the past.  A favourite Bible passage is 2 Peter 3:3-5, which represents ‘scoffers’ as complaining: ‘ever since our ancestors died, all things have continued as they were from the beginning of creation.’

2. The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics as a result of the Curse.  This law (otherwise known as entropy) states that matter tends to move from a higher to a lower energy state.  Since the world was created perfect, Whitcomb and Morris argued, there would have been no deterioration, decay or death until God cursed the earth because of Adam’s sin.

3. The canopy theory.  Gen 1:6 was understood to indicate that God had placed a vapour canopy around the earth.  This produced a favourable greenhouse effect which led to a temperate climate around the world.  It did not rain, but the canopy moistened the earth with a mist (Gen 2:5f).  The canopy protected the earth from harmful cosmic rays, and this may have led to the extraordinarily long lives of the antedeluvians.

4. Rejection of the geological column.  Rather than giving evidence of vasts periods of time the geological column was created by the worldwide flood.  Whitcomb and Morris claim that the rock strata contain frequent contradictions of the standard geological view.  They further claim that the word underwent great transformation during and immediately after the flood, leading, among other things, to the formation of the world’s mountain ranges.

5. The bending of space.  Light appears to have been travelling across the cosmos for billions of years.  How then can the cosmos be only a few thousand years old?  Whitcomb and Morris entertain two possible answers to this: one is an appeal to an ‘appearance of age’ argument, and the other the idea that light is able to take a short-cut when travelling through space, so that the light from the furthest star has only taken 15 years to reach us.

6. Dinosaur and human fossils together.  Whitcomb and Morris presented photographs, from Limestone bed of the Paluxy River in Texas, of apparent dinosaur and human prints together.

Current Young-Earth thinking

Recent Young-Earthers, such as Andrew Snelling, have made considerable modifications to the teaching of Whitcomb and Morris.  Specifically, Snelling drops the canopy theory (flood waters came from subterranean sources), drops the postulated link between the curse and the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics (normal functioning is impossible if this law is not in place), and makes no appeal to the Paluxy River fossils (most young-earthers now agree that the footprints thought to be human are not human after all).

Snelling accepts the validity of the geological column and its fossil record.  But dinosaurs and humans do not appear together in the record, because they lived in different geographical areas prior to the flood.

The global flood model has difficulty in accounting for the amount of coal and oil deposits around the earth.  To solve this problem, Snelling postulates huge floating forests which covered much of the world’s oceans prior to the flood.

Snelling further suggests that, in order to account for the geological evidence, God must have changed the laws of nature during the flood.  One effect of this is the hundreds of millions of years worth of radioisotopic decay took place during the year of the flood.

Whereas standard geological models recognise five distinct ice ages, covering millions of years, the global flood model compresses these into a single ice period of about 700 years, with occasional advances and retreats within that period.

To account for the millions of species now present around the globe, YEC thinking proposes a much smaller number of progenitors who were specimens of each ‘created kind’.  For example, all dogs, wolves, hyenas, coyotes and other canines have descended from a single pair of proto-canines that were carried on the ark.  According to this theory, the number of animals on the ark may have been as few as 2,000.  These creatures were ‘front-loaded’ with genetic traits that led to the proliferation of many different species within a few decades.  Vestigial organs are the result of the rapid evolution that took place.  (It is ironic that Youngearthers, while remaining so vehemently opposed to biological evolution, propose such a theory of ‘hyperevolution’).

Young Earth proponents accuse their opponents of presuppositional bias.  They refuse to the consider the evidence for a worldwide flood, they allege, because they have decided, a prior, to discard the authority of Scripture.  And professing Christians who reject young earth creationism exhibit spiritual weakness, as well as blindness to scientific evidence.

Fideism

In appealing to a fundamental change in the laws of nature during the worldwide flood YEC proponents are making an appeal to miracle, which cannot, in its very nature, be verified.  This puts the event beyond scientific investigation.  They therefore undermine their own claim that their theory is scientifically demonstrable.

YEC advocates may reasonably be accused of fideism, in that their theories rest on presuppositions that are not open to question or scrutiny.  Therefore, they hold that their interpretation of Genesis 1-11 is the only viable one, and that all others stem from a lack of faith.  This position is well summed up by Kurt Wise:

‘If all the evidence in the universe turned against creationism, I would be the first to admit it, but I would still be a creationist because that is what the Word of God seems to indicate. Here I must stand.’

Mature creation hypothesis

One of the thorniest problems for the YEC is that the cosmos has an appearance of great age.  In their attempt to solve this problem, most appeal to the mature creation argument.

This was first developed by Philip Henry Gosse in 1857.  In Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot, argued that God must have made a fully-formed mature creation.  Adam, for example, appears as an adult man, even though he was only a few moments old.  He would have had an umbilical cord, and this would have suggested a pre-natal existence within the womb of a woman, although he had no mother.  Similar arguments could be made from tree rings, and so on.  YEC people (such as Vern Poythress) extend this to the entire cosmos.  Starlight, which may appear to have been travelling for millions of years, was created in transit.

The Omphalos argument has a number of implication:

• Much of history becomes an illusion.  Living things carry within their bodies a past that never happened.
• The argument in unfalsifiable.  It can be neither proven nor disproven.  As Bertrand Russell remarked, I may have come into existence five minutes ago, with socks that needed darning, and hair that needed cutting, but there is no way of knowing that.
• The appeal to the appearance of age is an admission that the evidence counts against the young earth view.  It is a way, not of confronting, but of avoiding, the overwhelming evidence that points to the earth being billions of years old.
• The mature creation argument virtually denies physical reality.  Most of the history of the cosmos is an illusion.  This denial of physical reality verges on Gnosticism.
• The mature creation argument leads to the conclusion that there is no evidence for a young earth.  The attempts by Answers in Genesis and others to reconcile science with young earthism become futile.
• We arrive (or, at least, Gosse arrived) at the conclusion that we should study the earth as if it were old.  (Or, since this is such a stunning admission, we re-examine our presuppositions and accept that the cosmos is a old as it appears to be).

Kenneth Keathley (on whose essay much of the above is based) concludes that we must distinguish between creation and creationism:

‘One is a doctrine while the other is an apologetic approach. On the one hand, creation is a foundational doctrine of the Christian faith. The essential features of the doctrine of creation are unchangeable tenets. The Bible teaches that those features include the truths that God, without compulsion or necessity, freely created the universe out of nothing according to his own will and for his own good purposes. Though marred by the arrival of evil and sin, creation reflects the nature of its Creator. So creation is both great and good.

‘On the other hand, creationism is an apologetic approach which attempts to integrate the doctrine of creation with the current understandings of the natural sciences. In particular, creationism seeks to relate the first 11 chapters of Genesis to the latest findings of science.’