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Harry Rimmer (1890-1952) was a American creationist, itinerant evangelist and writer of anti-evolution pamphlets. Rimmer had very limited training in science, though he tried to use science to prove the veracity of the Bible. He is most prominent as an early pioneer in the creationist movement in the United States.

Biography

Early life

Rimmer grew up in poverty in mining and lumber camps in northern California. He was forced to quit school before completion of the third grade, and thereafter worked in a range of manual labouring roles, whilst receiving some informal education from a mining engineer, heavily slanted towards the sciences. At nineteen he joined the US Army, serving in the artillery and gaining some fame as a boxer. After the military, he spent two terms at a small homeopathic medical school, supporting himself as a prizefighter, before being forced to drop out before completing the third term (and gaining a qualification), due to lack of financial resources. It was here that he obtained much of his limited understanding of science, of which he bragged that he had accumulated a vocabulary of "doublejointed, twelve cylinder, knee-action words".

Ministry

Prior to this point Rimmer had shown little interest in religion. However, while returning from a prizefight he was converted to Christianity by a street preacher, and retreated to the Lake County woods with a Bible to master the tenets of his new faith. Thereafter Rimmer went to the Bible College of San Francisco (where he met his wife) and then, in 1915, to souther California, where he studied briefly at Whittier College and at the Bible College of Los Angeles (now Biola University) and served as pastor of a Quaker church. In the early 1920s Rimmer abandoned the Quakers for Presbyterianism and worked as an itinerant speaker for the YMCA.[1] He took advantage of this contact with young men to evangelize and proselytize. He often spoke at churches, secular and religious colleges, military installations, and Bible conferences.[2]

During this period he became interested in evolution and constructed a workshop, which he called his laboratory, which he used to take pictures of microscopic organisms and other objects to illustrate his lectures and books, though rarely for actual experiments. Rimmer enrolled in a correspondence course in geology (at the University of Colorado, while on a speaking tour in the Rocky Mountains region) and started collecting fossils. Thereafter his lectures increasingly featured evolution and he acquired a reputation among fundamentalists as a qualified critic of evolution, with a fundamentalist journalist declaring:

Dr. Harry Rimmer is one of the most remarkable young men in the country. He is the rare combination of a scientist, who is a successful soul-winning evangelist

By the time he had achieved this prominence Rimmer had founded, on paper, the Research Science Bureau, which "existed primarily, if not exclusively, to underwrite Rimmer's ministry and occasional field trips." In return members received copies of Rimmer's pamphlets and, for a short period in 1927, a monthly newsletter. However with the Great Depression, funding for the Bureau dried up, and it went into abeyance until the early 1940s, with Rimmer's creationist efforts instead being channelled through William Bell Riley's World Christian Fundamentals Association. In 1934, Rimmer became pastor of the First Prebytarian Church of Duluth, Minnesota, on the understanding that he would spend six months of the year writing and lecturing.[3]

A writer for the Debunker, who attended one of Rimmer's lectures, described that his "scientific" method as:[4]

to accept the Bible as absolute truth and discard, ignore, or hopelessly distort all facts that had been gathered, until the remaining facts in their distorted nature 'proved' the religious conclusions which had been established even before the facts had been consulted.

His rough-and-tumble style of debating all comers, however, and his complete rejection of evolution have both been deeply influential on contemporary creationists.[citation needed]

He was awarded an honorary DSc by the Wheaton College. He claimed to have visited 4000 high school assemblies in a 25 year period, or about one every two days. His principal theme was that "There are no scientific errors in the Bible."[5]

He was the author of several books including "Dead Men Tell Tales", "Harmony of Science and Scripture", and "Modern Science and the Genesis Record." His books sold well; some in the hundreds of thousands.[2]

Rimmer simply loved to debate; he would debate anyone--atheists, religious scientists, college faculty, even fellow fundamentalists. [6] In a famous instance, he debated another creationist, William Bell Riley about the nature of the days in Genesis. He was apparently a colorful speaker and some called him the "noisiest evangelist in America".[5]

Views

Rimmer contended in some of his writings and lectures that there might have been several million years that could be squeezed between the first and third verses of the first chapter of Genesis, a position now described as "Gap Creationism" and one that is rejected by adherents of the Young Earth creationist view.[7] Rimmer was particularly interested in the Noachian Flood and Joshua's long day. Rimmer maintained that the Flood in Genesis was only a local flood, another view that is inconsistent with young-earth creationism.[7]

He wrote that, "In all of our scientific progress we have not yet discovered one single fact that contradicts or refutes any statement in the Bible." He had a gift for producing unlikely explanations to protect the veracity of the biblical text. For example, Rimmer stated that Jonah could live after being swallowed by a whale because Rimmer postulated that there is special cavity in the heads of whales which are the whales' "breathing tanks" for underwater breathing. Rimmer also insisted that the passage where rabbits chew their cuds is the result of a mistaken translation, and claimed that camels do not have cloven hooves. [5]

Rimmer tried to use science to prove the veracity of the Bible. One of the sources he relied on was a speculative book by Joshua's Long Day and the Dial of Ahaz published by Charles Totten, an instructor in Military Science at Yale. In 1890. Rimmer claimed that the Bible story in which Joshua ordered the sun to stand still in the heavens had been definitely proved by a Yale Professor (Totten). A updated version of this claim has it that some NASA scientists discovered a missing period of 24 hours. [8] He also promoted a version of the urban legend of James Bartley and a sperm whale, which he used to uphold a literal interpretation of Jonah.[9]

Offer and trials

In the mid 1920s Rimmer offered $100 to anybody who could prove that the Bible was not inerrant. Although he received an enormous number of responses, he accepted none as demonstrating a biblical error to his satisfaction.

On two occasions claimants took Rimmer to court. The first was in 1929 when a retired army colonel challenged the story of God feeding the children of Israel in the wilderness by sending so many quail that they were piled two cubits high for a days journey around the camp, which he calculated would require over 29x1012 quails (or over 12 million per Israelite). However the judge, apparently reasoning that Moses was a more reliable witness than the colonel, ruled against him. In 1939, the Research Science Bureau upped the offer to $1000.[10]

Floyd-Rimmer Trial

William Floyd, the editor of an atheist magazine, sued Rimmer on the grounds that he had discovered five scientific errors in the Bible:

  1. the six-day creation story;
  2. contradictions between Genesis 1 and 2;
  3. the record of Noah's Ark;
  4. the alleged number of quail; and
  5. descriptions of the camel, the coney and the hare in Leviticus 11:4-6.

Floyd disclaimed interest in the money, describing his intent as "to convince fundamentalists, through court judgement[,] that there are such errors in the Bible."[11]

During the trial, Rimmer defended the Bible with statements such as "You could get two of every species of insect on the hides of two good-sized elephants, and they would not, therefore, occupy any additional space in the ark" and "most all present-day scientists have completely discredited the theory of the record of the rocks." Rimmmer said of his testimony, "I showed how God pushed the clouds further back and made what the aviators call a 'ceiling' between the clouds and the substance of the earth, and God called it a 'firmament' and men call this cloudy ceiling 'heaven'."[12]

Rimmer won the case on a technicality: that the particular newspaper advertisement that Floyd responded to was not placed by Rimmer himself. Despite this, Rimmer claimed that the trial "ended in legally establishing the position of all who hold that the Word of God is inerrant".[11]

The trial in a New York court is described by his defense attorney James E. Bennet in his book The Bible Defeats Atheism - A Story of the Famous Harry Rimmer Trial as told by Attorney for Defendant James E. Bennet.

See also

Bibliography

  • Lot's wife and the science of physics, Harry Rimmer, Wm. B. Eerdmans Pub. Co (1947) ASIN: B0007EHCPK
  • Dead men tell tales, Harry Rimmer, Eerdmans; Thirteenth ed edition (1974), ISBN-10: 0802811671
  • Modern science and the Genesis record, Harry Rimmer, Eerdmans (1937), ASIN: B0007ELV7A
  • The harmony of science and scripture, Harry Rimmer, Eerdmans; 12th ed edition (1947), ASIN: B00088BO6I
  • Voices from the silent centuries, Harry Rimmer, Wm. B. Eerdmans Pub. Co; 4th ed edition (1937), ASIN: B00086ZVIW
  • The crucible of Calvary, Harry Rimmer, Eerdmans; 3rd ed edition (1945) ASIN: B0007HHFAO
  • The theory of evolution and the facts of science, Harry Rimmer, Wm. B. Eerdmans; 7th ed edition (1944) ASIN: B0008C8FAM
  • The Coming War and the Rise of Russia (Shadows of Things to Come, 2), Hary Rimmer, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company; 2nd edition (1942) ASIN: B000AQO76C
  • The coming King, Harry Rimmer, Wm. B. Eerdmans; 2d ed edition (1943) ASIN: B0007I70XU
  • Internal evidence of inspiration, Harry Rimmer, Wm. B. Eerdmans Pub. Co; 7th ed edition (1946), ASIN: B00087HOWM

Notes

  1. ^ Numbers(2006), p76-77
  2. ^ a b The Antievolution Pamphlets of Harry Rimmer by Edward B. Davis, Ed. 1995, as summarised in Flesh for The Creationists' Bones, J. W. Haas, Jr., Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith 45 (September 1995): 199.
  3. ^ Numbers(2006), p77-79
  4. ^ Numbers(2006), p80
  5. ^ a b c Essays of an Atheist, Woolsey Teller, The Truth Seeker Company, Inc, 1945, Chapter V: Froth and Fraud in Fundamentalism
  6. ^ "Fundamentalism and Folk Science Between the Wars," Edward B. Davis, Religion and American Culture 5 (1995): 217-48
  7. ^ a b Numbers(2006)
  8. ^ Has NASA Discovered Joshua's “Lost Day"?, Bert Thompson, Apologetics Press :: Reason & Revelation, February 1999 - 19(2):14-15
  9. ^ "A Whale of a Tale: Fundamentalist Fish Stories," Edward B. Davis, Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith 43 (1991): 224-37
  10. ^ Numbers(2006), p84-85
  11. ^ a b Numbers(2006), p85
  12. ^ Bennet, 1941

References

  • Numbers, Ronald (Nov 30, 2006). The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design, Expanded Edition. Harvard University Press. pp. 624 pages. ISBN 0674023390. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
  • The Bible Defeats Atheism - A Story of the Famous Harry Rimmer Trial as told by Attorney for Defendant James E. Bennet, James E. Bennet, Zondervan; Frederick Naef, Printers, 1941.
  • The Antievolution Pamphlets of Harry Rimmer (Creationism in Twentieth-Century America, Vol 6), Edward Davis, Routledge; first edition (March 1, 1995) ISBN-10: 0815318073
  • "Rimmer, Harry," Edward B. Davis, in American National Biography, Oxford University Press, 1999, vol. 18, pp. 520-1.
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