George McCready Price

George McCready Price (1870–1963) was a Canadian creationist. He produced a string of anti-evolution, or creationist works, particularly on the subject of "flood geology". However, his views did not become common amongst creationists until after his death, particularly with the "creation science" movement starting in the 1960s.

Biography

Price was born in Havelock, New Brunswick, Canada. His father died in 1882 and his mother joined the Seventh-day Adventist Church. In 1887, he married another follower of the church. For several years thereafter the couple worked as itinerant sellers of Seventh-day Adventist co-founder Ellen G. White's books in the Maritime Provinces of Eastern Canada. Price then became a student at Battle Creek College (now Andrews University) between 1891 and 1893, before returning to selling books. In 1896, he enrolled in a one-year teacher training course at the Provincial Normal School of New Brunswick (now the University of New Brunswick), where he took " some elementary courses in some of the natural sciences, including some mineralogy", which was Price's sole formal training in science.Numbers(2006), p90-95]

Price taught at a series of small-town schools from 1897 onwards, including at a high school in Tracadie between 1899 and 1902. Here he met socially Alfred Corbett Smith (head of the medical department at a local leprosarium), who, amused by Price's fundamentalism, introduced him to literature on science. Since his faith held that the Earth was young, Price concluded that geologists had misinterpreted their data. In 1902, Price completed the manuscript "Outlines of Modern Christianity and Modern Science", before leaving Tracadie to serve brief and unsuccessful stints as an Adventist evangelist on Prince Edward Island and head of a new Adventist boarding academy in Nova Scotia before briefly returning to book-selling in 1904, and then moving to New York in an unsuccessful attempt to become a magazine and newspaper writer.

In a response to a plea from his wife, the Adventist church employed Price as a construction worker first in Maryland. He then was, for a short time, principal of a small Adventist school in Oakland, California before moving again and becoming a construction worker and handyman at a newly purchased Adventist sanatorium in Loma Linda, where he self-published "Illogical Geology: The Weakest Point in the Evolution Theory" in 1906. In "Illogical Geology", Price offered $1000 "to any one who will, in the face of the facts here presented, show me how to prove that one kind of fossil is older than another." [God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity and Science, p400, David C. Lindberg, Ronald L. Numbers]

Whilst Price liked to claim that his book-selling travels gave him invaluable "firsthand knowledge of field geology", his "familiarity with the outside world" remained rudimentary, with even his own students noting that he could "barely tell one fossil from another" on a field trip shortly before he retired. [Numbers(2006) p106-107]

His opposition to evolution

Price's most notable work, "The New Geology" (1923), a 726 page college textbook, contains numerous arguments that allegedly refute key elements of Darwin's theory of evolution. Several of these arguments remain popular in creationist circles today.

One of the most popular is the argument that evolutionary theory rests on faulty dating techniques. Price alleges that fossils are dated according to the age of the geological strata that they are found in, and that the rocks themselves are assigned probable dates based on the estimated age of the fossils found in them. In short, Price believes that all evolutionary claims based on the dates of fossils are in fact fallacious, based on a fairly straightforward circular argument. Price contends that all fossils are of the same age--that is, that the fossils were all laid down during the flood of Noah described in Genesis.

Reception of Price's ideas

David Starr Jordan, president of Stanford University, and a leading American expert on fossil fishes, wrote a review of Price's "Illogical Geology", in which he stated that Price should not expect "any geologist to take [his work] seriously." [D. S. Jordan to G. M. Price, 28 August 1906 (Price Papers, Andrews University, Berrien Springs, Mich.).] This led to a correspondence over the next twenty years in which Price once promised "to become an evolutionist within twenty-four hours" if "the foremost ichthyologist in the world" could prove that one fossil was older than another, and Jordan attempted to enlighten Price that his views were:Jordan also unsuccessfully urged Price to "undertake some constructive work in Paleontology in the field and in laboratories."

Price's 1913 book "The Fundamentals of Geology", an expanded version of "Illogical Geology", presented his "Law of Conformable Stratigraphic Sequences" which states "any kind of fossiliferous rock may occur conformably on any other kind of fossiliferous rock, old or young." This law he claimed "is by all odds the most important law ever formulated with reference to the order in which the strata occur."Numbers(2006) p 97]

Yale geologist Schuchert's review of "The New Geology" for the magazine "Science" stated that Price was "harboring a geological nightmare". [C. Schuchert, Science 59, 486 (1924)] However, the creationists welcomed the new book. Harry Rimmer claimed that it was "a masterpiece of REAL science [that] explodes in a convincing manner some of the ancient fallacies of science 'falsely so called'" [H. Rimmer, Modern Science, Noah's Ark and the Deluge (Research Science Bureau, Los Angeles, 1925), p. 28.] Within a couple of years, Price appeared prominently in several conservative religious periodicals. A "Science" editor described him as "the principal scientific authority of the Fundamentalists". [Science 63, 259 (1926)]

Price's defense of creation science (and attacks on evolution) first achieved wide notability in 1925 when his theories and arguments were utilized heavily by William Jennings Bryan in the famous Scopes Trial. Bryan had appealed to Price for assistance, but Price was busy teaching in England. Price advised Bryan to avoid science during the trial if possible. R. L. Numbers, Spectrum 9, 22 (January 1979).] During the trial, defense counsel Clarence Darrow, sneared "You mentioned Price because he is the only human being in the world so far as you know that signs his name as a geologist that believes like you do . . . every scientist in this country knows [he] is a mountebank and a pretender and not a geologist at all."

Price's ideas were borrowed again in the early 1960s by Henry M. Morris and John Whitcomb in their book "The Genesis Flood", a work that skeptic Martin Gardner calls "the most significant attack on evolution...since the Scopes trial". Morris, in his 1984 book "History of Modern Creationism", spoke glowingly of Price's logic and writing style, and referred to reading "The New Geology" as "a life-changing experience for me".

Comments on other creationists

Price was far more extreme in his views than his fellow creationists such as William Jennings Bryan, Harry Rimmer or William Bell Riley. Contrary to Bryan, Rimmer and Riley, Price rejected the idea of a local flood and insisted on a pure literal 6 day creation consisting of six 24 hour days. He felt that Riley's day-age creationist views were "the devil's counterfeit". [G. M. Price. The Story of the Fossils (Pacific Press, Mountain View. Calif., 1954), p 39.] Price was equally dismissive of Rimmer, and his strange type of gap creationism for most of his career. [G. M. Price Outlines of Modern Christianity and Modern Science (Pactfic Press. Oakland, Calif.1902), pp. 125-127.]

Notes

References

* Gardner, Martin. "George McCready Price." "The New Age: Notes of a Fringe-Watcher". Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1991.
*cite book
last = Numbers
first = Ronald
authorlink = Ronald Numbers
coauthors =
title = The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design, Expanded Edition
publisher = Harvard University Press
date=Nov 30, 2006
location =
pages = 624 pages
url =
doi =
id =
isbn = 0674023390

See also

* History of creationism
* Flood geology

Further reading

* Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation [http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/13370 Gutenberg]
* The Predicament of Evolution (1925) [http://www.creationism.org/books/price/PredicmtEvol/PredicmtAuthor.htm online]
* Clark, Harold W. (1966) Crusader for Creation, the Life and Work of George McCready Price. Pacific Press Publishing Company.

External links

*
* http://www.counterbalance.net/history/floodgeo-frame.html
* http://www.geocities.com/lclane2/geoprice.html
* [http://fax.libs.uga.edu/BS650xP945/ GOD'S TWO BOOKS] ; or, Plain facts about evolution, geology, and the Bible, by George McCready Price, 1911 (1920ed). (a searchable facsimile at the University of Georgia Libraries; DjVu & [http://fax.libs.uga.edu/BS650xP945/1f/gods_two_books.pdf layered PDF] format)