The Creationists Follow-Up: Walter Lammerts

In my last post on The Creationists, a commenter (Western Geologist) mentioned an episode concerning Walter Lammerts visiting Chief Mountain. I read that section again and thought I would elaborate on it.

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Lammerts, along with Henry Morris and others, was one of the founders of the Creation Research Society. He had very strict views on evolution.

At a time when the strictest creationists were allowing for microevolution and the natural development of some species, he held out for "the absolute fixity of species."

Morris and Whitcomb's 1961 The Genesis Flood cited Lammerts several times and contained pictures he had taken at Glacier National Park to illustrate the Lewis overthrust.

Lammerts wanted to explore the area with someone with training in geology. In 1962 he did so with two Seventh-day Adventists, Richard Ritland and P. Edgar Hare. Both had strayed from strict "flood geology" in the course of their education and ascribed little geological significance to Noah's flood. In the case of Hare, the Seventh-day Adventist Church sponsored him to obtain a doctorate in geochemistry at the California Institute of Technology.

While there he began developing a dating method based on changes in the ratios of amino acids in ancient shells, which he at first hoped would yield relatively recent ages. However, as he informed a church official, his methods gave dates virtually identical to those obtained from radiocarbon data--and as high as thirty-five thousand to forty thousand years. "Is it just a coincidence that this came out this way?" he asked suggestively.

The three hiked to view the contact line between the Precambrian and Cretaceous strata.

To Ritland and Hare, the evidence of overthrusting, especially signs of grooving and scouring , was "overwhelmingly clear." Lammerts, though appreciative of his young companions' scientific approach to the problem, found himself more confused than convinced. He thought it especially puzzling that Ritland and Hare seemed "so anxious to prove that Price was wrong and that this wrong order formation was really the result of overthrusting." As he descended the mountain, Lammerts appeared "badly shaken." Not only had he just gone on record in The Genesis Flood as discounting the evidence for overthrusting, but, as Ritland and Hare pointed out, the supporting photographs he had given Whitcomb and Morris were of rocks two hundred feet above the contact line.

Although the experience contradicted an article Lammerts had in press at Christianity Today,

he eventually decided there was sufficient ambiguity to justify publishing what he had originally written. This decision "badly disillusioned" Ritland, who felt further chagrined when he read Lammerts's description of him in the article as a Harvard-trained Ph.D. who agreed with Price that "most" of the sedimentary rocks had resulted from Noah's flood.

You can view a slideshow on the formation of the Lewis overthrust here. (Look through all of the slides--they're interesting).

(Chief Mountain)