Harold W Clark

Biography

Clark was raised as a Seventh-day Adventist on a farm in New England, whose interest in science and religion was first evoked by George McCready Price's Back to the Bible (1916). After years of church-school teaching, he enrolled at Pacific Union College in 1920, where he studied under (the newly arrived) Price. He graduated two years later and replaced Price (who had accepted a position at Union College, Nebraska) on the faculty. In 1929, he had dedicated his Back to Creationism, to Price. Historian Ronald L. Numbers credits this book with the introduction of the name "Creationism" to the movement, which had previously been known as "Anti-Evolution".

That summer, and a number of vacations thereafter, he spent studying glaciation, coming (in the 1930s) to the conclusion that large proportions of North America had been covered in ice for as long as one and a half millennia after the flood — a view that was anathema to Price. In 1932 he earned an MA in biology from the University of California, and on his return updated and enlarged his book, introducing his views on glaciation, and rejecting the common Adventist view, associated with Price, that species were fixed, in favour of one that allowed considerable hybridization. The revised book drew effusive praise from Price.

In 1938, Clark visited the oil fields of Oklahoma and Northern Texas, where his observation of deep drilling confirmed long-standing suspicions that there existed a meaningful geological column, a position adamantly denied by Price. Clark attributed this column to antediluvian ecologies ranging from ocean depths to mountaintops, rather than the successive layers through deep time of mainstream geology. This led Price to vitriolically and implacably break with Clark.

Publications