Henry M. Morris

Background

Henry M. Morris (1918–2006) was an American civil engineer and, through The Genesis Flood (1961, co-authored with theologian John C. Whitcomb), the founding figure of modern young-earth creationism. In 1970 he founded the Institute for Creation Research, which became the movement's institutional hub. Morris's program — "flood geology" and a ~6,000–10,000-year timescale defended as scientifically respectable — recast a literal reading of Genesis as an empirical rival to mainstream geology and cosmology.

His primary works are not in this public-domain corpus; the position is surveyed "from the outside" via the Stanford Encyclopedia's entry on Creationism. Within this wiki the view is treated as scientifically fringe, though it is presented at full strength before the objections are stated.

Positions held in this wiki

• Origin of the Universe — young-Earth cosmochronology against the ~13.8 Gyr standard picture. The article's corpus note records that "our public-domain corpus does not contain primary young-earth literature (Henry Morris, Whitcomb, Ken Ham, etc.)," so the position is compiled from SEP 'Creationism' §2.
• Biological Evolution and Christian Thought — flood-geology denial of common descent, whose "scientific standing is fringe and whose primary literature is thin in our corpus."

Key works in our corpus

Corpus gap: The Genesis Flood (1961) is not ingested. Flood geology and its refutation are surveyed at SEP 'Creationism' §2 and §4 (the Arkansas/Louisiana rulings that "Creation Science is not science, it is religion"). See meta/ingestion-queue.md.

Principal critics

• Thomas Henry Huxley — though an unbeliever, Huxley shares Morris's wooden "natural sense of the words" hermeneutic and merely reverses the verdict; the patristic tradition (Basil, Augustine) read the days non-literally long before Darwin.
• James Orr — the conservative-Protestant accommodationist who, from within the tradition, judged evolution "extremely probable" and thus stands as the intra-Christian counter to Morris's literalism.

See also

• James Orr — the old-earth, accommodationist alternative within conservative Protestantism.