George Frederick Wright

George Frederick Wright (January 22, 1838 – April 20, 1921) was an American geologist and a professor at Oberlin Theological Seminary, first of New Testament language and literature (1881 – 1892), and then of "harmony of science and revelation" (until retirement in 1907).

His geology interests took him all over the world — Alaska, Greenland, China, Mongolia, Manchuria, Siberia, Turkestan, and the Caucasus and Lebanon mountains — gathering original information for the books he published.

During his time pastoring in Andover, Wright developed a friendship with Christian Darwinist Asa Gray, and encouraged him to publish more openly on his views harmonizing their common evangelical Calvinist faith with the new biology and geology.

However, after a crisis of faith in the 1890s brought on by Charles Augustus Briggs' higher criticism, he readjusted his views on origins to line up more closely with a literalist reading of the biblical creation stories.

In his later writings, including the chapter he wrote for The Fundamentals, he accepted geologic time, but argued that human origins required divine intervention, and that biological variation extending to form new species would be evidence of design.

Indeed, if it should be proved that species have developed from others of a lower order, as varieties are supposed to have done, it would strengthen rather than weaken the standard argument from design."