The Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and Its Scientific Implications

The Genesis Flood

Author	John C. Whitcomb and Henry M. Morris
Publisher	Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing
Publication date	1961
Media type	Print (Hardcover)
ISBN
OCLC	9199761

The Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and its Scientific Implications is a 1961 book by young earth creationists John C. Whitcomb and Henry M. Morris that, according to Ronald Numbers, elevated young earth creationism "to a position of fundamentalist orthodoxy."

By the late nineteenth century, geologists, physicists and biologists agreed that the age of the earth was well over 20 million years. Prior to the use of radiometric dating, scientific estimates before 1900 ranged between 20 million and 3 billion years old. Most Christians "readily conceded that the Bible allowed for an ancient earth and pre-Edenic life." With very few exceptions they accommodated the new geological theories either with Day-Age creationism, the belief that the six days of Genesis represented vast ages, or by separating the original creation from a later Edenic creation: the so-called gap theory. The primary promoter of "flood geology" during the early twentieth century was George McCready Price, but he had comparatively little influence among evangelicals because he was a Seventh-day Adventist, a church treated warily by many conservative Protestants.

By the 1950s, most evangelical scientists scorned flood geology, and those who accepted the theory were increasingly marginalized within the American Scientific Affiliation (founded 1941), an evangelical organization that gradually shifted from strict creationism to progressive creationism and theistic evolution. In 1954, Bernard Ramm, an evangelical apologist and theologian closely associated with the ASA, published The Christian View of Science and Scripture, which attacked the notion that "biblical inspiration implied that the Bible was a reliable source of scientific data." Ramm ridiculed both flood geology and the gap theory, and one ASA member credited Ramm with providing a way for a majority of Christian biologists to accept evolution.