It says something about our culture that the news outlets have duly reported the deaths in recent days of three actors, Don Knotts, Dennis Weaver, and Darin McGavin, but the death of perhaps the most culturally consequential writer of the last fifty years has gone almost completely unremarked. As we noted yesterday, Henry Morris was a giant in terms of the influence he exerted on the debate over the efficacy of natural selection and mutation to account for the phenomena of living things. Virtually everyone on the spectrum of those who are skeptical of the ability of mechanistic processes and forces to by themselves produce living organisms was deeply influenced by him, notwithstanding their disagreements with his young earth creationism.
Even many of those firmly in the materialist camp still felt compelled to address his arguments. At a time when there were scarcely any who could be found to carry the argument for creation to the secular world Henry Morris and a small band of like-minded colleagues waged their solitary struggle against enormous odds with dignity and courtesy.
Total vindication of his efforts may never come, but the American landscape is covered today with a forest of skeptics and dissenters from the Neo-Darwinian paradigm who are carrying on the battle that Morris began. Long after the movies of the departed actors have faded from memory, Henry Morris' legacy will still be ramifying throughout the institutions of our culture. He truly was a great man.
See here for William Dembski's thoughts on Morris' life.
