The Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and Its Scientific Implications - Importance

Importance

The Genesis Flood "became a best-seller in the Fundamentalist world and polarized Evangelical opinion." In 25 years, The Genesis Flood went through 29 printings and sold more than 200,000 copies. An old-earth creationist book, written specifically to challenge young-earth geological theories, called the late twentieth-century revival of interest in flood geology "astonishing and perplexing," especially "in the face of increasing geologic and astronomical evidence for the vast antiquity of the Earth and the universe." Again, in the words of a critic, Arthur McCalla, the growth in young-earth creationism occurred not only because modern fundamantalists were more ignorant than in previous generations, but also because young-earth creationism "better defended a plain-sense reading of the inerrant Bible than did the old-Earth creationism of Ramm and the earlier Fundamentalists....Legions of Bible believers responded gratefully to Whitcomb and Morris because their system eliminated once and for all the need for interpretative contortions that twist and bend the words of the Bible in order to reconcile them with the findings of modern science."

Publication changed the lives of both the authors. Morris especially was deluged with speaking invitations, and his notoriety became an embarrassment to Virginia Tech. In 1963, Morris became a founder of the Creation Research Society and then, in 1970, the Institute for Creation Research. He wrote many more books devoted to young-earth creationism.

During the late twentieth century, young-earth creationism sparked by The Genesis Flood was regularly featured on Christian radio and became a staple of the home-school movement. An International Conference on Creationism, held every fifth year in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, produces papers of "considerable scientific and mathematical sophistication," and the movement attracts younger scholars with PhDs in the sciences, including even a few in geology. Ken Ham, perhaps the best known young-earth creationist of the early twenty-first century, the founder of Answers in Genesis and the Creation Museum near Cincinnati, called Morris “one of my heroes of the faith. He is the man the Lord raised up as the father of the modern creationist movement. The famous book The Genesis Flood...was the book the Lord used to really launch the modern creationist movement around the world.”