Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2002. Vol. 8. Eger Journal of American Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 28)

Studies - Donald E. Morse: The End of the World in American History and Fantasy: The Trumpet of the Last Judgement

excitement and pleasure of new discoveries made every year by biologists, no one will ever again experience the ultimate intellectual high of reconstructing all nature with the passkey of evolution

—a privilege accorded to Charles Darwin, and now closed to us. (Gould, Full House 224-25) But not everyone so reveled in these discoveries. Barely had the nineteenth century ended and a new century dawned when George McCready Price, refusing to accept either the concept of deep time or the concept of natural selection, originated "the pseudoscience known to its adherents by the oxymoron 'scientific creationism.' [...] Price wished to affirm biblical literalism by an inductive approach based strictly on fieldwork" (Gould, Arrow 23). His book, The New Geology (1923) remains a clear reaction against this new knowledge that humans were no longer at the pinnacle of creation but were a local response to local conditions—conditions created over billions and billions of years. Still in print today, Price's book is regularly cited in debates in state legislatures of the United States. More shamefully still, some of those states have mandated the study of oxymoronic "scientific creationism."

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4 In the most millenarian of nations, large numbers of people at the beginning of the twenty-first century still deny the truth of the revelations of geologic time and natural selection. Many imitate those who, at the end of the nineteenth century, fled to the safety to millenarianism and McCready's ironically titled, "new geology." Despite the seismic shocks of the Copernican, Newtonian, and Galilean revolutions, despite the discovery of "deep time" and Darwin's discovery that local adaptation to change produces new species, the popular view of time in the United States remains that of the record of human progress leading to Apocalypse.

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4 The editor-in-chief of the Scientific American thought the "creationism" enough of a real and present danger to devote several pages to an extensive article "15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense" (62-69). One of the most appalling statistics in the accompanying essay was the revelation that according to a substantial study over fifty percent of Americans actually believe that human beings have been on the earth for less than 10,000 years! This nonsensical belief is maintained at a time when serious debates attempt to decide where in a range of between three and seven million years ago humans actually did first appear. b But it might be well to recall that there is also a Flat Earth Society in the United States with official headquarters in Ann Arbor, Michigan that maintains in all seriousness that the rotundity of the earth is but an illusion. 230