[DEBATE] Dr. Duange Gish debates Dr. Russel Doolittle (1981)

The debate was held at Liberty Baptist College (now Liberty University). It was between Dr. Duane Gish from the Institution for Creation Research (ICR) in San Diego, California and Dr. Russell Doolittle. Prof. Doolittle is a famous evolutionist who agreed a couple of years prior to 1981 to a face to face confrontation with Dr. Gish over the issue of creation/ evolution
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«No single creation-evolution debate, regardless of how glorious or dismal, could undo what the Bryan-Darrow confrontation did. Nevertheless, ICR achieved a set-piece victory that more or less expiated the 1925 disaster and let the ghost of William Jennings Bryan rest in peace.
Duane Gish, ICR's premier debater, met Russel Doolittle, a biochemist at the University of California, San Diago, in a debate at Rev. Jerry Falwell's Liberty Baptist College in Lynchburg, Virginia on 13 October 1981. Both parties agreed that Falwell's television program, the "Old-Time Gospel Hour", would tape the debate and broadcast it later. The timing was ideal for creationists: the cause was in the news almost every day, attracting support subsequent to the Segraves trial at March, the Arkansas law of the same month, and the Louisiana law in July. Excitement was rising as the Arkansas law approached its December trial.
Doolittle and Gish had debated previously, though not for television. With Falwell as the moderator and his college as the audience, Gish had the advantage of talking on his own turf.
..<..>..Gish. the T. H. Huxley of creationism was smooth, telegenic, and perfectly timed. ICR could justifiably claim vicroty, and, even better, it had the victory on videotape».
(Christopher P. Toumey, «God's Own Scientists: Creationists in a Secular World», p. 115)
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«The protein chemist from the University of California came to Jerry Falwell's fundamentalist country in Lynchburg, Va., to defend evolution against Biblical creationism. It was the biggest debate of its kind ever, one that will be aired in prime time on national television in four to six weeks.
"I am aware that I shouldn't be doing this. It's a no-win situation," the chemist, Russell Doolittle, said before the debate Tuesday night.
He was right. If there had been debate judges present, they would have given the match to the fundamentalist, Duane Gish of the Institute for Creation Research, who attacked the "atheistic theory of evolution" and maintained that dinosaurs and all other creatures were created by God and lived in recent times alongside man».

«Science Loses One to Creationism» by Philip J. Hilts
Washington post,
October 15, 1981