A fundamentalist exposition of how the cosmos was created based on a 'literalistic' reading of Gen 1. Its basic tenets include 1) the earth is young, about 6000 years old (though some would allow for up to 10 thousand years), and 2) the earth and all things on it was created in six 24-hour days. Closely associated with these two tenets is the belief that Earth's geological record can be accounted for by the effect of a universal flood during Noah's time i.e., Flood Geology. The classical exposition of YEC remains that offered by John Whitcomb, Jr., and Henry Morris in The Genesis Flood, first published in 1961, and remains in print. YEC has attracted a large following among fundamentalist Christians, esp., in the US, so much so that when the popular press refers to 'creationism' it almost always means YEC (which is unfortunate because it drags into the same net other more credible expositions of biblical creation).
Historical Background
At the heart of YEC is the fear of the impact of the theory of evolution on the Christian faith, just as the fear of the impact of modern scientific teachings on life as a whole lies at the heart of fundamentalism. North American Christian fundamentalism received a bad public threshing in the so-called "Monkey Trial" in 1925. In the following decades the fundamentalists groped around between the Gap Theory and a version of the YEC taught by Ellen White, the charismatic 'prophet' of the Seventh Day Adventists (SDA) who, in one of a series of trance-like visions, she was "carried back to the creation and was shown that the first week, in which God performed the work of creation in six days and rested on the seventh day, was just like every other week." Her proclamations from these visions were recorded in a book which is granted reverence on a par with the Bible by SDA. She further endorsed an exposition of the flood geology that had long lost its appeal. Based on her pronouncements, however, George McCready Price (1870-1963), an SDA teacher, revived flood geology—hitching it to a literistic seven-'twenty-four'-hour-days reading of Gen 1—in a series of publications, including a 726-page college textbook, The New Geology in 1923. The mounting evidence for evolution, however, has led many committed Christians to ask how they might make sense of all these with their Christian faith. In 1954, Bernard Ramm published The Christian View of Science and Scripture, in which he proposed the idea of progressive creationism which did away with the necessity of a young earth and flood geology. Ramm called for Christians to do away with the fundamentalists' "ignoble tradition . . . [with their] most unwholesome attitude towards science, and used arguments and procedures not in the better traditions of established scholarship."
The Genesis Flood by John Whitcomb, Jr., and Henry Morris was essentially a response to Ramm's challenge. First intended to be published by Moody Press (the publishing arm of the fundamentalist Bible-school, Moody Institite), it was instead published by Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company when Moody began to question the book's insistence on the literal days of creation.
Further Reading & Resources:
Ronald L. Numbers, The Creationists. The Evolution of Scientific Creationism, Rev. ed., (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 200
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