The Challenge.

In the 1970s mainstream science was once again challenged by creationists. Advocates of creationism, almost exclusively evangelical and fundamentalist Christians, as were the earlier critics of evolution, believed that the biblical version of the beginning of time in the Book of Genesis ruled out the possibility of evolution. In the strict creationist account, popularized in John Whitcomb and Henry Morris's The Genesis Flood in 1961, the earth had been formed about ten thousand years ago, and God created all plants, animals, and humans in the following six days. Humans and dinosaurs had coexisted. Fossils were the result of the mass deaths in the biblical flood. Carbon-14 dating, by which scientists had established the antiquity of many fossils, could be explained away by a vapor cloud that had covered the earth during the flood and prevented radioactivity from reaching the earth.

Skirmish in California.