[3] The primary promoter of "flood geology" during the early twentieth century was George McCready Price, but he had comparatively little influence among evangelicals because he was a Seventh-day Adventist, a church treated warily by many conservative Protestants.

[5] In 1954, Bernard Ramm, an evangelical apologist and theologian closely associated with the ASA, published The Christian View of Science and Scripture, which attacked the notion that "biblical inspiration implied that the Bible was a reliable source of scientific data.

[8] Berated almost from the beginning of his project by influential evangelicals such as Edward John Carnell, the newly installed president of Fuller Theological Seminary,[9] Whitcomb completed his dissertation in 1957 and began condensing it for publication.

Despite his heavy teaching load and administrative duties at Virginia Tech, where he had just become head of a large civil-engineering program, Morris made steady progress on his section of the book, eventually contributing more than twice as much material as Whitcomb.

[18] Morris introduces his section on geology with the frank statement that Bible-believing Christians face "a serious dilemma" because contemporary geologists present "an almost unanimous verdict" against the biblical account of creation and the Flood.

[23] Several dozen Christian magazines reviewed the book and generally praised its defense of the scriptural account of the Flood, although few seemed to understand that accepting Whitcomb and Morris meant rejecting the day-age and gap theories.

Christianity Today, the most important evangelical magazine of the period, published a tepid review that did not address issues raised by the book but instead criticized the authors for using secondary sources and taking arguments out of context.

[24] The American Scientific Affiliation featured two hostile reviews, and in 1969, the ASA Journal published a highly critical commentary by J. R. van de Fliert, a Dutch Reformed geologist at the Free University of Amsterdam, who called Whitcomb and Morris "pseudo-scientific" pretenders.

[31] Whitcomb and Morris "attributed the impasse between themselves and their critics to competing cosmologies"[32] and argued that the term science could refer only to "present and reproducible phenomena", not to observations made about past events.

[32] Morris filled out his own cosmology a bit further in The Remarkable Birth of Planet Earth (1972), saying that the craters of the moon were probably caused by a cosmic battle between the forces of Satan and the armies of the archangel Michael.

[33] In defense of their work, Whitcomb and Morris noted that the founders of modern geological science were, like them, non-specialists: Charles Lyell (a lawyer), William Smith (a surveyor), James Hutton (a doctor and gentleman farmer), John Playfair (a mathematician), as well as a number of clergymen.

[42] An International Conference on Creationism, held every fifth year in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, produces papers of "considerable scientific and mathematical sophistication", and the movement attracts younger scholars with PhDs in the sciences, including even a few in geology.

[43] Ken Ham, perhaps the best known young-earth creationist of the early twenty-first century, the founder of Answers in Genesis and the Creation Museum near Cincinnati, called Morris "one of my heroes of the faith.