Three conversations with George McCready Price: A study in historiography, (auto)biography, and creationist geology

Since the late nineteenth century, when Ellen G. White, prophet of the Seventh-day Adventist (SDA) church, began relating and documenting her visions concerning the Edenic and antediluvian environment on Earth, the SDA church has had a particular interest in the theological and scientific supports for a creationist origin narrative. During the first half of the twentieth century, George McCready Price (1870–1963), bookseller, teacher, scientific autodidact, and unofficial spokesman for the SDA church on creationist issues inspired many to embrace and promulgate his deluge geology.; Through the vehicle of the fictional interview, Mr. Price and I discuss the development of his scientific views from 1903 to 1954, with a particular focus on geology. Along the way a variety of issues are covered including: truth, historiography, (auto)biography, emplotment, authorial effacement, and conceptual binaries such as education and common sense and subject and object.; The thesis concludes that by the 1940s Price's armchair science was insufficiently sophisticated to effectively counter the rising tide of scientific evidence and theory in support of Darwinian evolution. Foreshadowed in the 1950s by a number of well-trained Christian scientists highly critical of an underdetermined science whose agenda was to support the Genesis account, Henry Morris and John Whitcomb's The Genesis Flood, published in 1961, represented the resurgence of the fundamentalist creationism propounded by Price.