Brook Wilensky-Lanford interviews geologist David Montgomery – whose book we discussed last week. Montgomery says creationist scientists have enhanced the study of geology:
[W]hen I read The Genesis Flood [the 1961 book by John C. Whitcomb and Henry M. Morris which sparked much of “creation science”] I was really surprised by the fact that they were offering an insightful critique of 1950s geology. You know I kind of held my nose and read the book, and then I found it fascinating that they would recycle seventeenth-century ideas about the earth. But they were noticing something legitimate that was missing… In the 1950s, geologists at the time were really struggling to put together plate tectonics. So The Genesis Flood was critiquing a “beta version” of modern geology. Morris and Whitcomb realized the shortcomings of what was out there, and they teed up off of that. They went off on an irrational tangent, but had a surprisingly rational foundation for their argument.
Montgomery nevertheless laments how creationism has polarized faith:
[C]reationists have chosen to go back to a literal interpretation of the flood story, using arguments that were recognized and rejected in the 1780s. Throughout that time, there was a whole other tradition of faith in the world around us, a belief that God didn’t create an incomprehensible universe…. [C]reationists are walking away from a long tradition of the natural world as a valid source of revelation. There were two sources of divine knowledge: what God made, and what God wrote. And places like the Creation Museum pit the two against each other.