[W]hen I read The Genesis Flood [the 1961 book by John C. Whitcomb and Henry M. Morris which sparked much of “creation science”] I was really surprised by the fact that they were offering an insightful critique of 1950s geology. You know I kind of held my nose and read the book, and then I found it fascinating that they would recycle seventeenth-century ideas about the earth. But they were noticing something legitimate that was missing... In the 1950s, geologists at the time were really struggling to put together plate tectonics. So The Genesis Flood was critiquing a “beta version” of modern geology. Morris and Whitcomb realized the shortcomings of what was out there, and they teed up off of that. They went off on an irrational tangent, but had a surprisingly rational foundation for their argument.

Montgomery nevertheless laments how creationism has polarized faith: