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

Reception

Several dozen Christian magazines reviewed the book and generally praised its defense of the scriptural account of the Flood, although few seemed to understand that accepting Whitcomb and Morris meant rejecting the day-age and gap theories. Christianity Today, the most important evangelical magazine of the period, published a tepid review that did not address issues raised by the book but instead criticized the authors for using secondary sources and taking arguments out of context. The American Scientific Affiliation featured two hostile reviews, and in 1969, the ASA Journal published a highly critical commentary by J. R. van der Fliert, a Dutch Reformed geologist at the Free University of Amsterdam, who called Whitcomb and Morris "pseudo-scientific" pretenders. "To ensure that no readers missed his point," the journal "ran boldfaced sidebars by evangelical geologists applauding van de Fliert's bare-knuckled approach."

Outside conservative religious circles, The Genesis Flood created "hardly a ripple of recognition." It was ignored by mainstream geology journals; less accountably, it also remained unreviewed in any of the dozens of periodicals covered by Book Review Digest. At a talk given to the large Houston Geological Society, Morris was ridiculed by the president in his introduction, and Morris's call for questions at the conclusion produced none, because as one member said, the audience was "too stunned to speak." Nevertheless, the National Center for Science Education criticized the The Genesis Flood for misquoting scientists and taking their remarks out of context.

Whitcomb and Morris "attributed the impasse between themselves and their critics to competing cosmologies." They argued that the term science could refer only to "present and reproducible phenomena" and that contemporary geologists who discussed the history of the earth were thereby operating as non-scientists.