He was born on August 26, 1870 in Havelock, New Brunswick, Canada, the son of George Marshall Price, a farmer and mill operator, and of Susan McCready. Within two years of his father's death in 1882, Price, his mother, and his younger brother joined the Seventh-day Adventist Church.
From 1891 to 1893, Price studied at Battle Creek College in Michigan, and during 1896-1897 he completed a teacher training course at the Provincial Normal School of New Brunswick.
In 1912, College of Medical Evangelists granted him a B. A. In 1918, Pacific Union College awarded him an honorary M. A.
After his marriage Price and his wife sold religious books in eastern Canada. In 1897, he taught at a small high school in Tracadie, New Brunswick. He tried unsuccessfully, in 1903-1904, to run a Seventh-day Adventist high school, Farmington Industrial Academy, in Nova Scotia.
After brief stays in New York City, Washington and Oakland and Los Angeles, he settled in 1906 in Loma Linda, California, where he taught nursing and medical students in the newly opened College of Medical Evangelists. Price subsequently taught at other Adventist institutions: San Fernando Academy (1912 - 1913); Lodi Academy (1914 - 1920); Pacific Union College (1920 - 1922); Union College, Nebraska (1922 - 1924); Stanborough Missionary College, England (1924 - 1928), where he was president during 1927-1928; Emmanuel Missionary College, Berrien, Mich. (1929 - 1933); and Walla Walla College (1933 - 1938). He often taught courses in religion as well as in geology, and during his last decade in the clasroom he held the title professor of philosophy and geology. In 1923, Price published The New Geology. Despite attacks from the scientific establishment, Price's influence among fundamentalists grew steadily.
On the eve of the Scopes trial in 1925, William Jennings Bryan invited Price to assist the prosecution as an expert witness. Because Price was then teaching in England, he could not accept. During the trial, when Bryan named Price as one of the two scientists he respected. That same year Price debated Joseph McCabe, a prominent evolutionist, at Queen's Hall in London.
By the late 1930's Price realized that he was fighting for a lost cause. Public interest was declining, and even his former students were beginning to defect. Although his intemperate attacks on Clark and others damaged his reputation, Price continued to work in creationist circles.
Early in 1938, during a period of intense theological turmoil at Walla Walla College, he collapsed and remained in a coma for two days. At the end of the school year he retired. He was coeditor of the Bulletin of Deluge Geology and Related Science, published by Deluge Geology Society between 1941 and 1945.
He died in Loma Linda, California.
George McCready Price remained for decades the most influential scientific authority in the fundamentalist camp. He wrote more than two dozen books and hundreds of articles advocating the "new catastrophism", his most comprehensive and systematic book The New Geology. He also helped organize the Deluge Geology Society. He received the Langhorne-Orchard Prize of the conservative Victoria Institute for the essay "Revelation and Evolution. "
For most of his adult life Price led a spirited crusade against evolution. He first developed an interest in the subject in the late 1890's, when a physician in Tracadie challenged the creationist views held by Seventh-day Adventists. The progressive nature of the fossil record nearly convinced Price of the truth of evolution, but reading Seventh-day Adventist founding prophetess Ellen G. White's Patriarchs and Prophets (1890), which Price believed to be divinely inspired, persuaded him that the Noachian Flood explained all.
He believed in his law of comformable stratigraphic sequences, "Any kind of fossiliferous beds whatever, 'young' or 'old, ' may be found occuring conformably on any other fossiliferous beds, 'older' or 'younger. '"
When Harold W. Clark began promoting his own theory of flood geology in the 1940's, Price charged him with heresy and denounced his views in Theories of Satanic Origin.
Quotations: "The one simple postulate that there was a universal Flood clears up beautifully every major problem in the supposed conflict between modern science and modern Christianity, " he wrote.
He was, though, a voracious reader of geological literature, an armchair scientist who self-consciously minimized the importance of higher education and firsthand knowledge.
Quotes from others about the person
By the mid-1920's the editor of Science could accurately describe him as "the principal scientific authority of the Fundamentalists".
As one evangelical observed in 1950, Price's ideas had "grown and infiltrated the greater portion of fundamental Christianity in America. "
On December 15, 1887 he married Amelia A. Nason, an Adventist colporteur twelve years his senior. They had three children.
In October 1954, his first wife died, and in April 1957 Price married Florence Bresee.
