Harold Willard Clark (1891 – 12 May 1986) was a prominentcreationist in the middle of the twentieth century.[1]
Clark was born in 1891[2] and raised as aSeventh-day Adventist on a farm inNew England. His interest inscience and religion was first evoked byGeorge McCready Price'sBack to the Bible (1916). After years of church-school teaching, he enrolled atPacific 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 atUnion College, Nebraska) on the faculty. In 1929, he had dedicated his workBack to Creationism to Price.[3] HistorianRonald L. Numbers credits this book with the introduction of the name "Creationism" to the movement, which had previously been known as "Anti-Evolution".[4]
That summer, and a number of vacations thereafter, he spent studyingglaciation, coming (in the 1930s) to the conclusion that large proportions ofNorth 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 inbiology from theUniversity 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 ofOklahoma and NorthernTexas, where his observation of deep drilling confirmed long-standing suspicions that there existed a meaningfulgeological 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.[5] Despite continuing to point out that he still believed in six-day creation, Clark was pelted with criticisms from Price, who accused Clark of having contracted "the modern mental disease of universityitis" and curried favor with "tobacco-smoking, Sabbath-breaking, God-defying" evolutionists.[6] This led Price to vitriolically and implacably break with Clark,[6][5] who Price would continue to criticize strongly in his 1947 pamphletTheories of Satanic Origin.[7]
Clark died inSt. Helena Hospital on 12 May 1986, aged 94.[8]
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