Harold W. Clark


Harold Willard Clark was a prominent creationist in the middle of the twentieth century.

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. After years of church-school teaching, he enrolled at Pacific Union College in 1920, where he studied under Price. He graduated two years later and replaced Price on the faculty. In 1929, he dedicated his Back to Creationism, to Price. This book attached the name "Creationism" to the movement, which had previously been known as "Anti-Evolution". Clark became a major creationist theorist in the middle decades of the century.
Beginning that summer he spent a number of vacations studying glaciation, coming 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. 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 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. Clark attributed this column to antediluvian ecologies ranging from ocean depths to mountaintops, rather than the successive layers through deep time of mainstream geology.

Publications