A personal interview with one of the most influential authors Fundamentalism has produced.
BERTHA M. HANGER
WE WERE sitting in his book-lined study facing each other across his workbench. A profusion of papers, a typewriter, and the manuscript of his latest book lay between us. As we chatted of his life and work as a scientist and author, Professor Price spoke modestly of his accomplishments.
George McCready Price is internationally known by his books, lectures, and contributions to magazines. He has written a dozen books on geology and evolution, is contributing editor to the Bible Champion magazine, and his articles have appeared in the Princeton Theological Review, the Review of Reviews (English), and other widely circulated periodicals. He is a member of the Victoria Institute, a London society in defense of the Bible, and won a medal from the society for an article—“Evolution and Revelation, Can They Be Harmonized?” While a resident of London, he also represented the Fundamentalists in public debates with Joseph McCabe, the noted rationalist. He has traveled widely in America and Europe, visiting all the noted museums and studying geological conditions. His latest book, “A History of Some Scientific Blunders,” is just off the press.
In answer to my query concerning how he became interested in the subject of evolution, he smilingly said:
“I was driven to a study of evolution by being confronted with its problem some thirty-five years ago, while I was principal of a high school in Eastern Canada. It is a long story. I had had a general scientific background, including chemistry, physics, botany, zoology, and also some mineralogy, before this time; though I had never studied geology until after I had spent some two years and a half of intensive consideration of evolutionary evidence and theory. During this time I read many books on the subject. In those days there were no books attempting to refute the evolutionist's arguments in the field of geology. As a result, I was convinced on two points—that geology was the key to the evolutionary problem, and that the methods of evolutionary geology were unscientific.”
GEOLOGY THE KEY
“In what way is geology the key to the evolutionary problem, professor?” I asked.
“The old Greeks believed in spontaneous generation, and they believed in a naturalistic development of animals and men without a real creation. But it is wrong to say that they were evolutionists because they had no knowledge of the fossil world; and, as Prof. Louis T. More has so clearly pointed out, there never could be a scheme of evolution until something like a geological background of supposedly real history has been constituted for it. Geology as ordinarily taught is supposed to give this real historical outline of successive groups of animals and plants. This is the last stronghold of the evolutionary theory. I have made it the business of a lifetime to examine this geological scheme, and have found that its alleged distinctions between different ages are absolutely unreliable and unscientific. If the various plants and animals found as fossils in the earth really lived contemporaneously in an older state of our world, then the whole scheme of organic evolution falls to pieces. And if all this is true, the evolutionary theory is a blunder, because it is founded upon a blundering interpretation of geology.”
George McCready Price, eminent Fundamentalist, who has in a series of books shown up the fallacies of the purported geologic evidences for evolution. Some of these volumes are advertised on page fifteen of this issue.
“But,” I reminded him, “the textbooks and later discussions of evolution no longer call it a theory; they declare it to be a scientific fact. Why do evolutionary scientists speak of their theory as a fact instead of as a mere theory?”
THEORY COMES FIRST
“Advocates of evolution are theorists first, and scientists afterwards. Many of them are antireligious fanatics. They have built up an evolutionary interpretation of geology, and with this as a base they prove the ‘fact’ of development from lower forms of life.”
“Granting that evolution is an error, why is it such a pertinent question in the Christian world? Why not leave its discussion to the scientific world? Why need we be concerned with it?” I continued.
“In all ages unbelievers have always tried to bring up what they claimed were facts against Christianity. Our age is an age of scientific discovery and progress, and unbelievers have seized on certain scientific discoveries which they think are against Christianity and for the evolutionary theory. Christians must face these facts, and must meet them intelligently, if they hope to do anything in influencing modern educated people for Christianity.
“Revelation 14:7 is a prophecy indicating that just before the coming of the Lord the worship of the Creator of the heaven and the earth would be one of the test questions. All modern scientific discoveries help us to understand the Creator. The question of how the world was made is certainly one of the live issues of to-day.
“The philosophical situation of the last days is pictured in the prophecy of 2 Peter 3. The text says that in the last days scoffers, or mockers, will come, saying, ‘Where is the promise of His coming?’ They scoff at the idea of any destruction of the world in the future, at the second coming of Christ, because they deny that any great calamity has overtaken the world in the past. Their language is, ‘Since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation.’ This is exactly the type of reasoning used by our modern evolutionists. They deny that a universal deluge ever occurred; they say that the present is the measure of the past, and the measure of all the past; and they declare that natural law, as we now know it, has always prevailed. Hence they say there never was any real creation in the beginning.
“The apostle Peter goes on to show that these modern uniformitarians have got into this frame of mind because they have grown accustomed to denying that there ever was a universal flood. This absolute denial of a universal deluge, in the interests of their scheme of geological uniformity, has been the real cause of the entire theory of organic evolution. There never would have been any scheme of evolution, except for the evolutionary geology which preceded it.”
THE OUTLOOK
“What is the outlook for the future, Professor Price?” I ventured to question.
“True religion will never be any more popular in the future than it has been in the past,” he continued. “Evolution has become a great modern form of antichristianity. We have no assurance in Bible prophecy that it will ever be discarded by the world as a whole. God does tell us that His people in the last days will believe His word rather than any theories of man.
“I am convinced from many years of study that these questions which gather around the subject of creation and the worship due to the Creator, involving the Sabbath and its counterfeit, are the very crux of all the testing problems of the last days. And it is well for every Christian to become intelligent regarding them, and then to decide intelligently in the light of eternity.”
