In a previous essay, I defined a young-age creationist as one who accepts the first eleven chapters of Genesis as a straightforward account of events that really happened. Creation in six days, the Fall into sin from a perfect world, the curse of death, the worldwide Flood, and the tower of Babel are not mere stories to young-age creationists; they’re history. While those are common things creationists believe, people usually think of young-age creationists as opponents of evolution.  

In a previous essay, I defined a young-age creationist as one who accepts the first eleven chapters of Genesis as a straightforward account of events that really happened. Creation in six days, the Fall into sin from a perfect world, the curse of death, the worldwide Flood, and the tower of Babel are not mere stories to young-age creationists; they’re history. While those are common things creationists believe, people usually think of young-age creationists as opponents of evolution. Personally, I like to look at young-age creationism and anti-evolutionism as two ends of one possible spectrum of opinion. Anti-evolutionists are defined entirely by their opposition to evolution. They’re not really concerned with a correct understanding of the origin of life, the earth, and the universe, as long as it isn’t evolution. Young-age creationists, on the other hand, actually have a stake in what the correct answer really is. It’s the young-age creationists who gave us Flood geology, “created kinds,” and the “white hole” cosmology. Anti-evolutionists gave us the Scopes trial.

Do you think I’m splitting hairs? Consider George McCready Price’s reaction to the Scopes trial. Price, a self-styled “geologist” and Seventh-day Adventist science teacher, was the leading young-age creationist of his day. Price is the guy who gave us modern Flood geology, the idea that the rock layers of the earth could be explained by the Flood described in Genesis 6-8. You might imagine as a young-age creationist, he’d be front and center at the famous showdown between creation and evolution in Dayton, Tennessee. Not so. In fact, Price was teaching at an Adventist school in England at the time and could not return to the United States for the trial. In Price’s personal papers and correspondence, it is clear that he had little patience for “scientifically uninformed” opponents of evolution. Later in life, Price would describe Bryan as “perfectly ridiculous when attempting to handle the scientific problems of evolution” (These Times, Feb. 1960, p. 4).

That’s not to say that Price was uninterested in opposing evolution. Quite the contrary, Price was a passionate antievolutionist, but he still had that young-age creationist streak in him that drove him to try to re-interpret geology in the context of the Flood. This is by no means a new idea. In fact, looking into the history of science, we see that early modern scholars tried to do the very same thing centuries earlier. Thomas Burnet’s famous Sacred Theory of the Earth (1681) also attempted to construct an understanding of the Flood that would explain the geological features of the earth. Recall that Burnet is living nearly two hundred years before Darwin made evolutionary ideas popular, and at least a century before even radical scientists seriously proposed evolution as an explanation for the origin of living things. So Burnet was a creationist, but by definition, he could not be an anti-evolutionist, since the idea of evolution didn’t exist in his day.

Still not convinced? In my next essay, I will discuss how evolutionary biology has influenced a lot of modern young-age creationist thinking about the origin of living things. I hope to show that young-age creationism as a broader Christian response to evolutionary theories is much bigger than the simplistic anti-evolutionism of the 1920s.