The EPM existed as only a paper organisation until it was publicly launched in February 1935, at a meeting attended by over six hundred. In its early years, Dewar was the main driving force within the EPM, publishing a booklet entitled "Man: A Special Creation" and engaging in public speaking and debates with supporters of evolution. In the late 1930s he resisted the American creationists call for acceptance of flood geology. Dewar's association with the EPM was to span a quarter century, and saw it grow to about two hundred members, with small branches in Australia and New Zealand. However it failed to win the public endorsement of C.S. Lewis, the most prominent Christian apologist of his day (and a personal friend of Acworth's), though he privately admitted to finding their arguments increasingly compelling.