CREATIONISM 383 young; Archbishop Ussher’s calculations of a 6000year-old Earth were endorsed in the margins of commonly used Bibles However, believing that the Book of Nature and the Book of God must be telling the same story, Christian geologists worked to find ways to interpret the geological data in a framework that allowed them to retain at least some of the Genesis story of Creation, whilst accepting the empirical evidence of their new science One accommodation was that of the English clergyman, Thomas Chalmers, who attempted to harmonize geology with the Bible through the ‘gap theory’ In his 1815 book, Evidence and Authority of the Christian Revelation, Chalmers argued that there was a temporal gap between Chapters and of Genesis This preserved a literal 6-day Creation, but placed it after a long pre-Adamite creation The evidence of the rocks that the Earth was ancient was thus acknowledged without the wholesale abandonment of Genesis The gap or ‘ruin and restoration’ compromise also had the advantage of allowing for a relatively recent Creation, which pleased religious conservatives The gap theory remained popular through the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth Another compromise between the Bible and science was offered by Scottish stonemason Hugh Miller In his popular 1847 book, Footprints of the Creator, he proposed the ‘day-age theory’, in which the days of Genesis were not 24-h days, but long periods of time This compromise was even more scientifically flexible than Chalmers’ gap theory: it allowed for the acceptance of virtually all the geological data by requiring that Genesis be taken more figuratively Other religious views were more concerned with Darwinian evolution than geology ‘Progressive creationism’ accepted the sequence of fossils in the geological column: God was believed to have created increasingly more advanced forms through time The doctrine of ‘theistic evolution’, in which God was thought to use evolution and natural selection to bring about the current variety of living things, similarly had little impact on geology During the early- and mid-nineteenth century, Christian geologists worked to harmonize the ‘two books’ and, working with professional clergy, eased the worries of Christians that modifications in Ussher’s view of a 6000-year-old Earth would create irreparable rents in the fabric of Christianity Not all Christians agreed, however Some felt that these compromises were unacceptable because they required the Bible to be ‘interpreted’ rather than being read at face value What came to be called ‘Scriptural Geology’ took the position that, when the ‘two books’ were in apparent conflict, the book of God’s word was to be given priority The proponents of Scriptural Geology tended to be neither trained geologists nor university-educated clergy; rather, they were self-taught, educated laymen Most of them promoted a young Earth and a historical Flood At best Scriptural Geology was a rearguard movement that had little effect on the views of professional science As will be discussed later, however, some of the same challenges to evolution promoted by the Scriptural Geologists reappeared in the twentieth century in the guise of ‘creation science’ By the end of the nineteenth century, practising scientists and professional clergy in both the USA and on the continent accepted an ancient age of the Earth and rejected the Flood of Noah as a universal historical event that shaped the planet’s landforms Virtually all scientists likewise accepted biological evolution, although not necessarily Darwin’s mechanism of natural selection In the USA, however, evolution was about to be attacked with the emergence of a religious position called ‘Fundamentalism’ and, even more importantly, by the efforts of a dedicated amateur geologist and, later, a hydraulic engineer Young Earth Creationism and Flood Geology The Fundamentalist movement in American Protestantism began with a series of small booklets, collectively called The Fundamentals, published between 1910 and 1915 Fundamentalism was partly a reaction to a theological movement called Modernism that began in Germany in the 1880s Modernism included viewing the Bible in its cultural, historical, and even literary contexts; biblical Creation and Flood stories, for example, were shown by comparison of ancient texts to have been influenced by similar stories from earlier non-Hebrew religions With such interpretations, the Bible could be viewed as a product of human agency – with all that that suggests for the possibilities of error, misunderstanding, and contradiction – as well as a product of divine inspiration Fundamentalists in response stressed divine inspiration and absolute accuracy of scripture, including Biblical miracles such as Noah’s Flood Millions of copies of The Fundamentals booklets were printed and distributed Most of the authors of The Fundamentals were day-age creationists, allowing for an old Earth, but insisting on a recent appearance of humans Although not all The Fundamentals booklets were anti-evolutionary, the Fundamentalist position hardened against evolution fairly quickly Fundamentalists were motivated by religious sentiments – if evolution were true, then what of the accuracy of the Bible? – and also a concern that evolution was the source of many corrosive