Henry M. Morris, the man who would revive the creationist movement in 1961 with a popular book promoting the idea of a worldwide flood and then, two years later, found the Institute for Creation Research, grew up in the Texas of the 1920s and 1930s as a religiously indifferent youth. Shortly after his graduation from Rice in 1939, however, Morris accepted the Bible, from Genesis through Revelation, as the infallible and literal word of God. In 1961, Morris and John C. Whitcomb, an Old Testament scholar, published The Genesis Flood, which Stephen Jay Gould calls "the founding document of the creationist movement." Morris believed that treating Genesis as allegorical or mythical led down a slippery slope to a point where "every man becomes his own God." Morris's Biblically-based assumption that the earth was no more than ten thousand years ago forced him to reject a concept which had dominated geology for more than a century. The uniformitarian position is that sedimentary rock, which often appear in layers thousands of feet in thickness, have been laid down by the gradual and steady process of deposition. Obviously, if that is the case, the earth is a very old place-billions of years old, not thousands as Genesis suggests. Morris replaced uniformitarianism with what he called "Biblical catastrophism," a framework that resulted in the wholesale rejection of everything geologists thought they knew about geology. The Genesis Flood book revitalized interest in a young earth cosmology among evangelical Christians. Two years after The Genesis Flood hit bookstores, Morris and nine other like-minded scientists founded the Creation Research Society, dedicated to established scientific support for the Genesis creation story. Seven years later, Morris moved to San Diego to found a creationist center called the Institute for Creation Research (ICR). ICR is an openly Christian operation. The unmistakable aim of ICR is not to convert leading scientists to their way of thinking-an all-but-impossible task-but rather to influence textbook writers, school boards, and the unskeptical public. ICR scientists generally to not seek review from "peers" in the scientific community, and rarely collaborate in any way with university researchers. The goal of ICR, simply put, is to influence the way schools teach science.