It was March, 1972, on the campus of Baptist Bible College in Springfield, Missouri. I had been raised a committed deistic evolutionist, and now all of two years old in the Lord, I was still a theistic evolutionist, having been influenced in retaining old-earth, evolutionary views by the expedients of the “gap theory” and “day-age theory” which I had learned about from Scofield’s Reference Bible.
I little suspected as I entered the auditorium for chapel that day that it would prove to be a great life-transforming event. The speaker that morning was an outwardly unimpressive, soft-spoken Christian layman in his mid-fifties, who happened to be a trained and experienced scientist (Ph.D., geology) and college professor. His name: Henry M. Morris. He presented that morning the Biblical teaching of a young earth (thousands, not billions of years old) and the literal six days of creation week. And he presented strong scientific evidence that supported these plain teachings of Scripture. I recognized immediately that this man was entirely right on these matters, and I was entirely wrong. That day the whole of my false perspective was cut away, and a proper foundation of Biblical and scientific creationism was permanently laid in its place.
Born near the end of World War I into an impoverished, often troubled and eventually broken home, Henry Madison Morris, Jr. (1918-2006) grew up in scattered places in Texas: El Paso, Corpus Christi, and Houston. Though his mother was a professing Christian, most of Henry’s spiritual influences came through his grandmothers who saw that he was regularly in church. He made a profession of faith while still in grade school and was immersed on his tenth birthday, though his Christianity was tepid until his college days.
As a student in engineering at Rice University in Houston, Morris’ Christianity caught fire. He became active in campus ministries, personal Bible study and personal witnessing. Believing the Bible implicitly as God’s inerrant word, he sought for published works defending the scientific veracity of the Bible, but found very little available. In the 80-plus years following Darwin’s paradigm-changing On the Origin of Species(1859), most conservative Christian leaders had caved to the evolutionary claims of an old earth and biological evolution, and had developed a bad intellectual “inferiority complex” whenever the subject of the Bible and science came up. Morris set about to try to fill the literature gap by research and writing. And to gain credibility for his writings on scientific subjects, he determined to acquire the necessary academic credentials, which he did. For nearly three decades, he taught engineering courses at the university level, most notably at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, where he was head of the school of civil engineering and wrote a widely-used textbook.
In his early 50s, Morris gave his energies full-time to Christian ministry. Among the organizations Morris helped found were the Creation Research Society, the Institute for Creation Research, Christian Heritage College (now San Diego Christian College), and Creation-Life Publishers (now Master Books). Along with ICR colleague Duane Gish, Morris participated in dozens of on-campus debates with evolutionist scientists, and had such a consistent record of winning them that ultimately evolutionists refused to participate. Morris’ efforts and influence in vindicating the Bible’s scientific accuracy and refuting the errors of evolution helped enlist the army of literally tens of thousands of trained scientists today who openly reject for scientific reasons the bogus claims of the evolutionary paradigm. Where there was a dearth of creationist literature in the 1940s, there is a deluge today.
Of the more than sixty books Dr. Morris penned, the most monumental was the 1961 volume co-authored byJohn C. Whitcomb, The Genesis Flood, which launched the modern scientific creation movement. It is no exaggeration to say that The Genesis Floodwas the most important Christian book published in the 20thcentury. Others by Morris of especial note are Many Infallible Proofs (1974); Scientific Creationism, (1974); The Long War Against God(1989) which traces the historic consequences of the acceptance of Darwinism, including humanism, communism, militarism, Nazism, abortion and more; The Bible Has the Answer, with Martin E. Clark (1987); and History of Modern Creationism(1992). He also penned extensive commentaries on Genesis, Job, and Revelation.
Judged by the impact for good of his actions on conservative Christianity, surely Henry M. Morris was the most important American Christian of the 20thcentury. By his writing and speaking, he set afoot the modern scientific creation movement that has transformed the whole relationship of Biblical Christianity and secular humanism. We are now equipped to take the battle to them on their home turf, and emerge victorious, armed with the facts of science.
Morris’ biography was recently published: Henry M. Morris: Father of Modern Creationism(Institute for Creation Research, 2017) by daughter Rebecca Morris Barber.