Henry Morris: R.I.P.

Henry Morris passed away yesterday at the age of 87. He was the founding father of modern creationism.

Before the publication of The Genesis Flood in 1961, by a Reformed publishing house, Evangelicalism has settled into a cozy détente with the scientific establishment. Over at Princeton seminary, once the intellectual flagship of American Evangelicalism, William Henry Green made room for the New Geology while Warfield was a theistic evolutionist. When the torch passed to Westminster, E. J. Young was a day/age man.

The concordist position received its classic exposition in The Christian View of Science & Scripture, by Bernard Ramm.

We nowadays regard young-earth creationism as a defining feature of fundamentalism, but if you thumb through editions of the Scofield Bible you will see that this was not always so.

The Genesis Flood was coauthored by Morris and Whitcomb. It was a natural collaboration. If you’re going to write a book in defense of the flood, it makes sense to have a hydrologist as well as an OT scholar on board.

Even so, the exegesis was sometimes precarious while the science was pretty rickety.

The impact of the book was primarily psychological. It marked a confrontational rather than conciliatory approach.

Depending on your outlook, this was either a refreshing change or else a PR disaster. Many professing Christians find creationism to be a ball-and-chain. They try so hard to garner the respect of the scientific community and forge a rapprochement between faith and science, only to have their diplomatic efforts scuttled by guilty associations.

Yet in some ways, concordism was always a holding action, waiting to fall apart. For there is, hermeneutically speaking, a fundamental tension between the grammatico-historical method and modern science.

In concordism, you reinterpret Scripture consistent with the very latest scientific theorizing. But according to the grammatico-historical method, you interpret Scripture consistent with original intent.

The better credentialed the OT scholar, the less likely he will be to harmonize Scripture with modern science. For the OT must be allowed to speak in its own voice, and not dub the latest scientific fad.

So this isn’t a conflict between untutored literalists and the educated classes. Sending a nice fundamentalist boy to the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago is actually a rather good recipe if you with to intensify the tension between the prescientific outlook of Scripture and the scientific worldview.

Moreover, higher education in the sciences can, ironically enough, result in a concordist reversal. For if you study the philosophy of science, that will acquaint you with the antirealist tradition, stretching all the way back to Platonic distinction between the natural and the mathematical sciences—wherein the latter merely “save the phenomena.”

Furthermore, it’s been fifteen years since Alvin Plantinga had the impertinence to say that this is ultimately a conflict between competing worldviews, a genuine rather than a merely apparent conflict, over methodological naturalism.

So a collision course, one more than one level, was always in the offing. It patiently awaited a tipping point to trigger the current process of realignment.

I receive a monthly update from ICR, and to judge by that, creationism seems to have stalled. At least, I don’t see any significant original research coming out of ICR.

One reason may be that creationism is a very interdisciplinary field with a very limited talent pool to draw upon.

It may also be that there are severe limitations on our ability to reconstruct the past in any detail with any degree of certainty.

At the moment, the future fortunes of the creationist movement primarily rest upon the sturdy, but lonely shoulders of Kurt Wise.

In the meantime, the intellectual momentum has shifted decisively to the Intelligent Design movement.

There are several reasons for this:

i) It is less ambitious than creationism.

ii) It is less sectarian than creationism.

iii) It has more intellectual talent.

It remains to be seen how far this will go. At the moment it seems to suffer from conflicting demands on its time: the need to do original research while getting the message out. In terms of time-management, it’s hard to be both a researcher and a popularizer.

In a way, ID is the new concordism, displacing the old concordism. It strikes a mediating position between creationism and secularism. With creationism, it generally opposes evolutionary biology; with secularism, it generally supports modern cosmology.

Ironically, its bitterest enemies issue, not from the secular science establishment, but from the old guard of theistic evolution.