Harry Rimmer

Harry Rimmer (1890–1952) was an American evangelist and creationist. He is most prominent as a defender of creationism in the United States, a fundamentalist leader and writer of anti-evolution publications.

He was the founder and President of the Science Research Bureau, Incorporated, a corporation set in Los Angeles, California, whose purpose he established as to prove the veracity of the Bible through studies of biology, paleontology and anthropology. He later became a field secretary of the World Christian Fundamentals Association in the 1920s. He said to be a fellow member of the American Geographical Society.

Rimmer grew up in poverty in mining and lumber camps in northern California. He was forced to quit school before completion of the third grade, and thereafter worked in a range of manual labouring roles, whilst receiving some informal education from a mining engineer, heavily slanted towards the sciences. At 19, he joined the US Army, serving in the artillery and gaining some fame as a boxer. After the military, he spent two terms at a small homeopathic medical school, supporting himself as a prizefighter, before being forced to drop out before completing the third term (and gaining a qualification), due to lack of financial resources. It was here that he obtained much of his understanding of science, of which he bragged that he had accumulated a vocabulary of "double jointed, twelve cylinder, knee-action words".

Prior to this point, Rimmer had shown little interest in religion. However, while returning from a prizefight he was converted to Christianity by a street preacher, and retreated to the Lake County woods with a Bible to master the tenets of his new faith. Thereafter Rimmer went to the Bible College of San Francisco (where he met his wife), and then in 1915, to southern California, where he studied briefly at Whittier College and at the Bible College of Los Angeles (now Biola University) and served as pastor of a Quaker church. In the early 1920s, Rimmer abandoned the Quakers for Presbyterianism and worked as an itinerant speaker for the YMCA. He took advantage of this contact with young men to evangelize and proselytize. He often spoke at churches, secular and religious colleges, military installations and Bible conferences.

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