Scientists and Christian fundamentalists had been battling over Charles Darwin's theory of evolution for more than a century when, in 1961, the creationist crowd gained new ammunition for their arsenal.

It came from Henry Morris, a Virginia Tech engineer and department head, whose controversial book would help reshape the debate over evolution for decades.

"The Genesis Flood," which noted evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould later called "the founding document of the creationist movement," sought to use scientific processes to verify the words of the Bible in order to counter the teachings of evolution and modern geology.

Although largely dismissed or ignored by evolutionary biologists and geologists, "The Genesis Flood" was an instant hit among Christian fundamentalists yearning for some evidence that Noah's flood, not billions of years of wind and water, may have sculpted the Earth.

Nearly 45 years later, "The Genesis Flood" is still in print, having sold hundreds of thousands of copies.

Today's advocates for "intelligent design" can also trace at least some of their ideological roots to Morris and the book.

"Ideas can die because there is just no one to think about them," said Paul Nelson, a fellow with the Discovery Institute, one of the leading organizations promoting intelligent design.

"I love the fact that Dr. Morris kept alive dissent from Darwinian evolution."

Morris arrived in 1957

Born in Texas in 1918, Morris was a child when the world caught its first glimpse of the legal wranglings between creationists and Darwinian evolutionists during the circus-like "Scopes Monkey Trial" in Tennessee.

While raised in a Christian family, Morris did not accept the Bible as the literal, truthful word of God -- a central tenet of creationism -- until after college.

He spent the next several decades building a reputation as a scholar of hydraulics, which is the study of the movement of water and its applications to engineering.

But as a pastime, Morris delved into the Bible and its meanings. He joined Christian groups, gave spiritual counseling to students at the universities where he taught and wrote pamphlets or books espousing his literal interpretation of the Bible.

By the time Morris arrived in Blacksburg in 1957, he was a well-respected engineer and university administrator. He was also already working on "The Genesis Flood," which he co-wrote with a professor of theology, John Whitcomb of Grace Theological Seminary.

"I just didn't do leisure sports during my downtime like golf and fish," Morris said recently during a phone interview from his office in California.

"I spent my time writing."

Book backs great flood

Depending on whom you ask, "The Genesis Flood" is either a scientific approach to explaining the Bible or a religious text parading as science.

Using the Old Testament book of Genesis as a guide, Morris estimated the Earth to be between 6,000 and 10,000 years old -- a mere blip of time compared with contemporary geologists' estimates of 4.5 billion years.

But it is Noah's flood that dominates the book.

Some theologians reject the story of Noah as, at best, partially true, arguing that Old Testament writers intended the story as a fable or were merely documenting oral histories of an enormous local flood.

Morris and Whitcomb, however, contend that the Earth's geology bears the scars of a global flood.

Geologic features such as the Grand Canyon could be caused by massive flash floods rather than steady erosion over billions of years, they said.

The layers of fossils that geologists believe were laid down over billions of years could have been deposited in weeks or months as the least-fit creatures succumbed to the floods first or were sorted by the waters, the pair posited.

Even the dinosaurs may have made it onto the ark, which the authors estimated to have the carrying capacity of roughly 522 railroad cars, or about 35,000 animals.

Scientists rejected book

Evolution-minded scientists, both then and now, reject the book's findings as religious propaganda dressed up in scientific-sounding language.

Gould, a prolific author of evolution, poked fun at Morris' and Whitcomb's suggestion that dinosaurs may have lived side-by-side with modern man.

"No man keeps lithified company with a dinosaur, because we were still 60 million years in the future when the last dinosaur perished," Gould wrote in a 1982 critique of creationism and "The Genesis Flood" published in The Atlantic Monthly.

Even some conservative Christians and "progressive creationists" doubted the book's hypotheses.

Morris and Whitcomb anticipated a harsh backlash, particularly from the scientific community.

"We realize, of course, that modern scholarship will be impatient with such an approach," they wrote in the book's introduction. "Our conclusions must unavoidably be colored by our Biblical presuppositions, and this we plainly acknowledge."

But the authors saw just as many, if not more, assumptions and unproven leaps of scientific faith in naturalism as in creationism.

In fact, many of the arguments to evolution "are much farther removed from scientific actualities than our own premises," they wrote.

Regardless of the scientific criticism -- or perhaps partly because of it -- the book sold and sold well.

Although sales numbers for the book's first decade in print were unavailable, the publisher of "The Genesis Flood," Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing, said the book has sold more than 140,000 copies since the mid-1970s.

Reaction sparse at Tech

Back in Blacksburg, the civil engineering department head's new book generated few waves, at least at first.

"The general reaction was pretty good, although I didn't convert too many of the faculty," Morris said.

He added: "The only ones who really made a fuss about it were in the biology and geology departments. They never did come to me with any arguments. Indirectly, I heard they were bad-mouthing it."

Morris' engineering colleagues respected his religious views because they never influenced his administrative duties, according to James Wiggert, a retired civil engineering professor who worked eight years under Morris.

Wiggert also contributed several chapters to a textbook by Morris on hydraulic engineering that was used in dozens of universities worldwide.

"He made no bones about his religion and his views of the flood, but he did not want to argue about it particularly," said Wiggert, who disagreed with Morris' creationist views.

"He kept his own counsel on it, unless he was pressed. And we respected Henry for it. He was a good administrator."

The success of "The Genesis Flood" made both Morris and Whitcomb celebrities in creationist circles.

Morris gave dozens of special lectures and commencement addresses at Christian colleges and seminaries throughout the country.

He also authored a weekly column for the Montgomery News Messenger newspaper titled "Here's Your Answer," in which he occasionally promoted creationism and derided evolution.

Writings 'controversial'

Morris' religious beliefs and extracurricular activities eventually began attracting more attention at Tech, however.

David West, a retired Tech professor specializing in evolutionary biology, occasionally fired off responses to Morris' newspaper columns.

Faculty in biology regarded Morris and his anti-evolutionist views as almost comical, dismissing him as another odd engineer. But they treated Morris with respect.

"I would say he was well-known and, in certain circles, was known as a crank," said West. "My view was that he was an engineer. He was not a scientist. To me engineers are different, that's all."

A new engineering dean, Willis Worchester, thought Morris' prolific writings and increasingly public persona were "too controversial."

At one point, Worchester and other administrators told Morris not to list his creationist work with his engineering publications on his resume.

"That seemed like kind of the handwriting on the wall that they didn't want me to stay there too long," Morris said. "I remember when I submitted my resignation, I think Dr. Worchester was happy about that."

Morris left Virginia Tech in 1970. During his 13-year tenure, the department rose to become one of the largest civil engineering programs in the nation. A pro-creationist church he helped found in Blacksburg, Harvest Baptist Church, still exists today. "I enjoyed my time" at Tech, Morris said. "I had good relations with the students and faculty, ... and I was very happy. I thought we had a fine school."

Morris debated professor

His career in Blacksburg over, Morris moved to California and turned his attention full time to promoting creationism through the Institute for Creation Research, an organization he helped found while still at Tech.

Over the next several decades, ICR would continue to promote its literal interpretation of the Bible through events, debates and a creation-science journal.

The institute eventually launched a graduate program offering master's level degrees in biology, geology and other fields with a creationist slant.

Morris traveled around the nation as ICR president for speeches and the occasional debate. The latter brought him back to Blacksburg in 1974, when he debated a young and rising paleontologist at Tech, Richard Bambach, before several thousand people in Tech's Burruss Auditorium.

Morris was a skilled debater -- something Bambach knew well and did not underestimate. He prepared by reading some of Morris' work and trying "to figure out what these people are about," Bambach said recently.

A religious man who served as an elder in his church, Bambach still objects to what he sees as creationists' attempts to portray all scientists as atheistic and unspiritual. He said it can be difficult to debate people who "just don't accept that we've learned anything in the past 2,000 years."

Nonetheless, he said the debate "went well" and that even ICR declared it a draw.

"Morris is a gentlemanly person, quite grandfatherly," said Bambach, who retired from Tech in 2000 and now works at the Smithsonian Institution.

"He was not aggressive or anything, and I tried to be quite calm as well."

He doesn't believe many hearts or minds were changed by it -- especially Morris'.

"He's in his world and I'm in mine," Bambach said. "You just have to acknowledge that people operate under different belief systems."

Book remains prominent

ICR remains a prominent voice of the creationist cause.

Now 87, Morris still serves as the organization's president emeritus while his son John, a Virginia Tech graduate, is the organization's president.

In their book, "The Creationist Movement in Modern America," Raymond Eve and Francis Harrold called ICR the "most influential and prestigious creationist organization."

"ICR staff members have provided the main intellectual structure of creationism; their publications and lectures played a crucial role in the growth of the movement in the 1970s and 1980s," the authors wrote.

"Many newer organizations in the movement have began under the inspiration of the ICR."

Undoubtedly, some of those organizations are now among the many fighting to include "intelligent design" in science classroom curricula.

To its supporters, intelligent design recognizes that science cannot explain the existence of life or all of the Earth's amazing biological complexity, such as the development of the eye. Such unexplainable feats indicate the hand of an intelligent designer, they say.

To many hard-core evolutionists, intelligent design is merely the politically correct reincarnation of creationism trumped up by religious zealots determined to sneak Christianity into the science classroom.

It's a battle being played out in courts and legislative chambers nationwide.

Intelligent design supporters, such as Discovery Institute fellow Paul Nelson, go to great lengths to draw distinctions between young-earth creationists like Morris and believers in an intelligent designer.

Morris and other creationists proclaim the literal accuracy of the Bible, while intelligent design advocates acknowledge the contribution of a higher being, Nelson said.

But that's not to say Morris has had no effect on the intelligent design movement.

Morris' work, Nelson added, "has provided a community of scientists who dissent from modern evolutionary theory."

"He's made a real difference in this debate," said Nelson. "Things would be quite different if Henry Morris had never lived."