The Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Creationism (2018)

evolution (Price 1911, p. 39). (2) Price (1902, pp. 113-114) believes that life was created ‘some six or seven thousand years’ ago—presumably because Price believes in a week-long Creation Week (above), and believes that the genealogies of Genesis 5 and 11 are without gaps. (3) Price (1916, p. 138) believes that organisms are currently “… obeying the divine mandate announced in the beginning to reproduce, each after its particular kind”, although he does not clarify from what specific verse or verses this conclusion is derived. (4) Based on the sanctification of the Sabbath in Gen. 2:2-3 and Ex. 20:8-11 and the ‘very good’ evaluation in Gen. 1:31, Price (1916, pp. 143-144) believes that the original creation was holy, lacking any natural evil. (5) In his 1902 (pp. 89-90, 115-119) and 1906 (pp. 92) publications, Price believed creation occurred according to natural law. By 1911 (p. 172), however, Price had come to believe that the ending of God’s creation in Gen. 2:2-3 and Ex. 20:8-11 means that God used very different processes to create than He currently uses to sustain the creation. By 1916 (pp. 128-133) Price argues that Heb. 4:3-4 and Heb. 11:3 make the same claim. This latter claim becomes the foundation for many of Price’s subsequent publications. (6) Price (1934, p. 26) believes the Euphrates and Tigris rivers of Gen. 2:11-14 are antediluvian rivers that were destroyed in the Flood. (7) Because he believes Genesis 7-9 requires that the Flood was ‘absolutely universal over the globe’, Price (1934, pp. 34-35) believes that Woolley’s Mesopotamian ‘flood layers’ post - date the Flood of Genesis. (8) Price (1916, p. 207) believes Gen. 7:11, with its reference to ‘fountains of the great deep’, indicates that a disruption of the ocean was the chief cause of the Flood. (9) Price (1916, pp. 207) believes Gen. 8:3 refers to tidal activity during the Flood, citing an unspecified William Dawson publication as a source. (10) Price (1902, p. 47) believes the ‘You preserve them all’ of Neh. 9:6 and the ‘upholding all things by the word of His power’ of Heb. 1:3 refer to God’s sustaining activity. (11) Price (1916, p. 106) believes Rom. 8:19-21 refers to the Genesis 3 curse on the creation. (12) Price (1902, p. 127; 1916 p. 24) believes II Peter 3:4 refers to uniformitarianism. (13) Price (1902, pp. 127-128) believes II Peter 3:6 refers to the Flood. 2. Price’s Philosophy of Science Price has a deep admiration for the rules of logic formalized by Aristotle, and uses those rules throughout the many publications of his long writing career. Yet, Price did not often use his logic to construct a coherent creation model. Just as Price himself admits in one of his early publications (Price 1906, p. 8), most of Price’s works are critical of non-creationist beliefs. He justifies this by explaining that “…some destructive work is necessary before a better structure can be erected in its place.” (Price 1913, p. 16). Not atypical of the philosophy of science believed in Price’s day, Price believes in the strongly inductive philosophy of science advocated by Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, and WilliamWhewell. Price believes scientists should (and do) seek truth (Price 1902, p. 31) in an unbiased fashion (Price 1920a, p. 449) according to a standard scientific method (Price 1920a, p. 430), by accumulating demonstrated, objective facts (Price 1902, p. 114), and arriving at logically necessary generalizations by syllogistic induction (Price 1911, pp. 91-93). Because the logic of true syllogistic induction should arrive at absolutely true conclusions, Price (1916, p. 13) believes science can—and does—arrive at truth. What Price does not clarify is when we can know that we have actually arrived at truth. Although syllogistic induction should in principle arrive at truth, it is only guaranteed to do so if all of the data necessary for the proper induction are available and there is truly only one possible syllogistic induction possible for that data. If a person is working with too little data and/or has not thought of the correct interpretation of the data, the inductive conclusion could be wrong. The possibility of such error becomes evident in the cases where Price makes statements of scientific certainty about things that we now believe to be false ( e.g. new elements cannot be formed, and continents have never moved with respect to the earth’s rotational pole). Deduction (reasoning from generalities to particulars) has two very different roles in Price’s philosophy of science. First, deduction can be used to discover truth in science, but only when starting with what we know to be absolutely true inductive conclusions (Price 1911, p. 91). Second, deduction can be used to test the validity of scientific theories by testing the necessary deductions from those theories against the data of Scripture and the physical world (1925a, p. 8). Thus, for Price, discordance between scientific deductions on the one hand, and the data of Scripture and the physical world on the other hand, is a falsifiability criterion for scientific theories. Or, more accurately, this is a potential falsifiability criterion for scientific theory, for this criterion only falsifies a theory if the person is actually utilizing at least some of the data that actually falsifies the theory. This means scientific theories must always be held tentatively (Price 1925a:8), and can never attain the status of absolute truth that scientific inductions can potentially enjoy. Price believes the goal of (inductive) science is to arrive at general, absolute truth claims. He also believes that the Bible contains general, absolute truth claims. It is probably because Price believes these two things, that Price believes the true scientist should start with Scripture (Price 1911, p. 73) and continually consult with Scripture (Price 1916, pp. 14-18). Yet, it is not entirely clear what Price actually means by this. First of all, in his publications, Price rarely refers to Scripture, and when he does, it’s almost always identifying a given passage of Scripture with an inductive conclusion of science. In the latter cases, the implication is that Price is using favorable comparison with Scripture as a truth criterion for scientific induction—to know when scientific induction has actually arrived at absolute truth. Rather than being invoked in the process of scientific investigation at either the beginning or along the way, Scripture seems to have no other role than determining when to stop a scientific investigation. Secondly, Price (1925b, pp. 27-28) claims that creationists and evolutionists use the same data—they differ only in their interpretation of the data. However, if Scripture functions as both a potential falsifiability criterion for Wise ◀ George McCready Price ▶ 2018 ICC 685