Activities and Goals of the Institute for Creation Research
One of the leading creationist organizations is the Institute for Creation Research (ICR). Through the Creation Life Publishing Company, the ICR is the leading publisher of creation science material. Henry M. Morris is the Director of the ICR and Duane Gish is Associate Director (Nelkin, 1977, 66). Duane Gish (1978) in his public school edition textbook on creation science and evolution, defines creation as "the bringing into being by a supernatural Creator of the basic kinds of plants and animals by the process of sudden, or fiat, creation" (p. 40). The Institute for Creation Research (ICR), is a research division of Christian Heritage College founded in 1970 and sponsored by the Scott Memorial Baptist Church. In 1972, the church purchased a monastery on 30 acres of land east of San Diego in order to build a parochial high school and college (Nelkin, 1982).
Henry Morris, in April of 1972, with a group of other scientists, formed the Institute for Creation Research (ICR) located in California. The Institute for Creation Research was for several years a research division of Christian Heritage College, a liberal arts college formally founded in 1970 which has a full undergraduate curriculum leading to degrees in many areas, including biology, physics, and education (Morris, 1984, 236).
The first science staff consisted of Drs. Henry Morris, John Morris, Duane Gish and Harold Slusher, soon followed by Drs. Richard Bliss, Theodore W. Rybka, Steven A. Austin, Kenneth B. Cummings, and Gary Parker (Bliss, 1992). Contributions through the Act & Facts mailing list typically have provided about 75% of the necessary support. The rest has come from such items as honoraria, royalties, book sales, and tuitions (Morris, 1990).
The original goal of the ICR was to publish creationist literature and to campaign for scriptural interpretations of human origins in publ...