Harry Rimmer
[1] He was the founder and President of the Science Research Bureau, Incorporated, a corporation set in Los Angeles, California, whose purpose he established was to prove the veracity of the Bible through studies of biology, paleontology, and anthropology.
He was forced to quit school before completion of the third grade, and thereafter worked in a range of manual labouring roles, whilst receiving some informal education from a mining engineer, heavily slanted towards the sciences.
However, while returning from a prizefight he was converted to Christianity by a street preacher and retreated to the Lake County woods with a Bible to master the tenets of his new faith.
[6] During this period he became interested in evolution and constructed a workshop, which he called his laboratory, which he used to take pictures of microscopic organisms and other objects to illustrate his lectures and books, though rarely for actual experiments.
Rimmer enrolled in a correspondence course in geology (at the University of Colorado, while on a speaking tour in the Rocky Mountains region) and started collecting fossils.
However, with the Great Depression, funding for the Bureau (and his excavations) dried up, and it went into abeyance until the early 1940s, with Rimmer's creationist efforts instead being channeled through William Bell Riley's World Christian Fundamentals Association.
When the Christian American Scientific Affiliation's publisher, Van Kampen Press, contemplated republishing them, the ASA performed an evaluation of a representative sample which was highly critical, even recommending against publication.
Edwin Y. Monsma (who would later become one of the co-founders of the Young Earth creationist Creation Research Society) gave the opinion that Rimmer's The Theory of Evolution and the Facts of Science should not have been published in the first place, contained "inaccuracies and overstatements" and relied upon ridicule.
[9] Rimmer contended in some of his writings and lectures that there might have been several million years that could be squeezed between the first and third verses of the first chapter of Genesis, a position now described as "gap creationism" and one that is rejected by adherents of the young Earth creationist view.
One of the sources he relied on was a speculative book entitled Joshua's Long Day and the Dial of Ahaz published by Charles Totten, an instructor in Military Science at Yale in 1890.
Rimmer claimed that the Bible story in which Joshua ordered the sun to stand still in the heavens had been definitely proved by a Yale Professor (Totten).
"[16] During the trial, Rimmer defended the Bible with statements such as "You could get two of every species of insect on the hides of two good-sized elephants, and they would not, therefore, occupy any additional space in the ark" and "most all present-day scientists have completely discredited the theory of the record of the rocks."
