Time & Perspective Quote by Henry M. Morris

Morris tries to win the argument before it starts by relocating the battleground. The opening clause, "so far as can be observed", borrows the prestige of empirical modesty, then uses it as a trapdoor: if we are not watching "creation" happen in real time, it gets filed under "the past" and declared off-limits to science. It is a slick rhetorical inversion. Science is portrayed as narrow because it cannot time-travel, while Morris gets to keep the word "creation" as a special category that conveniently resists testing.

The subtext is less about evidence than jurisdiction. By insisting that origins are "inaccessible", Morris is not merely criticizing a method; he is setting up an exemption. If creation is defined as a singular, unrepeatable act, then the usual tools of inference, prediction, and falsification are dismissed in advance. That framing functions like an intellectual sanctuary: whatever science might discover about cosmology, geology, or evolution can be treated as, at best, commentary on aftermath.

Context matters. Morris was a central architect of modern young-Earth creationism and the creation "science" movement, which aimed to compete with evolutionary biology while also arguing that evolution is "just historical". This line distills that strategy: cast any account of deep time as speculative storytelling, then elevate a theological claim as the only "accessible" explanation. The irony is that science constantly studies the unobserved past (plate tectonics, supernovas, extinct species) by following present traces. Morris isn't exposing a flaw in science so much as redefining "creation" to avoid leaving traces that could ever count against it.