Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion

by Edward Larson

  The deeply entrenched Scopes legend continues to dominate impressions of the trial elsewhere. Even in Nashville, the morning newspaper dubbed debate on the 1996 legislation as “Inherit the Wind: The State Sequel.”40 One week after the bill’s defeat, Tony Randall’s production company revived Lawrence and Lee’s play on Broadway, with the character representing Bryan appearing fatter and more disreputable than before. Theater critics hailed the play as pertinent and timely. “We still have the creationists versus the evolutionists,” a reviewer on public television commented, and pointed to the new antievolution bill “in, yes, the state of Tennessee.” Whereas its review of the original Broadway production criticized the script’s “overall lack of tension” and “clinical quality,” the New York Times now praised the text’s “dramatic life.” The critic explained, “Here was a headline-making heavyweight bout between the rational thought of a newly rational age and old-fashioned Christian fundamentalism, which was deemed to be on its last legs, though today it’s alive and well and called Creationism.” The New Yorker, which originally scorned the play as “a much too elementary study in black and white,” now lauded it as “a thoughtful, powerful explication of religious and political issues that we still haven’t figured out.” A sign in the theater lobby quoted 1996 presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan’s comments in support of the Tennessee bill.41

  These changing responses help account for the enduring public interest in both the play and the trial. To “intellectuals” of the 1950s, as Hofstadter noted, the Scopes trial seemed “as remote as the Homeric era,” and some of them criticized the play’s simplistic presentation of America’s debate over science and religion. Such critics typically accepted a scientific explanation for human origins and assumed that virtually all thinking Americans did so too, even those who believed in God. Certainly Inherit the Wind grossly simplified the trial, yet regardless of their position on the issue, many Americans perceive the relationship between science and religion in just such simple terms: either Darwin or the Bible was true. Hofstadter recognized this. “The play seemed on Broadway more like a quaint period piece than a stirring call for freedom of thought,” he observed. “But when the road company took the play to a small town in Montana, a member of the audience rose and shouted ‘Amen!’ at one of the speeches of the character representing Bryan.”42

  As the amens for creationism have increased in both number and volume over the years since 1955, secular critics have tended to revise their views of the play and the trial. Even aloof intellectuals have come to realize that a vast number of Americans still believe in the Bible and accept it as authoritative on matters of science. Moreover, if people accept the biblical account of special creation over the scientific theory of organic evolution, which is, after all, one of the core theories of modern biology, then they most likely defer to biblical authority on other matters of public and private concern. For Americans who do not share this religious viewpoint and who fear that fundamentalists constitute the majority in some places, concerns about the defense of individual liberty under a government by the people seem all too familiar. The character representing Darrow in Inherit the Wind might just as well be standing in the doorway of their bedrooms as that of a small town’s schoolhouse—blocking the entrance of frenzied townspeople, and turning them aside by debunking their overzealous leader. The original Broadway cast did not take fundamentalist politicians seriously, Tony Randall observed shortly after the play’s revival in 1996, “but America has moved so far to the right, that they are now close to the center.”43

  Although Lawrence and Lee’s dramatic plea for tolerance originally may have been targeted against the McCarthyites, with fundamentalists standing in as straw men, the straw men have proven to be more durable than the intended targets—and the threat to individual liberty that they symbolize has become increasingly ominous for some Americans as the power of government has grown over the ensuing years. Indeed, the issues raised by the Scopes trial and legend endure precisely because they embody the characteristically American struggle between individual liberty and majoritarian democracy, and cast it in the timeless debate over science and religion. For twentieth-century Americans, the Scopes trial has become both the yardstick by which the former battle is measured and the glass through which the latter debate is seen. In its 1996 review of Inherit the Wind, the New York Times described the original courtroom confrontation as “one of the most colorful and briefly riveting of the trials of the century that seemed to be especially abundant in the sensation-loving 1920’s.”44 Dozens of prosecutions have received such a designation over the years, but only the Scopes trial fully lives up to its billing by continuing to echo through the century.

  —AFTERWORD—

  THE EVOLUTION-TEACHING CONTROVERSY SINCE SCOPES

  THE AMERICAN controversy over creation and evolution is primarily fought over what is taught in U.S. public high school biology classes. Virtually no one opposes the teaching of evolution in public colleges and universities or using public funding to support evolutionary research in agriculture or medicine. Most importantly, there is no serious debate among biologists over the core evolutionary concept of common descent. The discussion centers on philosophy and theology, not science, and it is the minds of American high school students that are at stake. Critics of evolutionary teaching typically ask for (1) removing evolution from the classroom, (2) balancing it with some form of creationist instruction, or (3) teaching it in some fashion as “just a theory.” Actually, the rises and declines of these three strategies, although always present to some extent, also neatly play out chronologically to create three discernible phases of antievolutionism.

  The first phase of antievolutionism, characterized mainly by efforts to remove evolution from the high school biology classroom altogether, is highlighted by the 1925 trial of John Scopes. Importantly, this effort coincided with and arose out of the so-called fundamentalist crisis within American Protestantism, when many mainline denominations—the Presbyterians, Methodists, American Baptists, and others—were deeply divided between the so-called modernists, who adapted their traditional beliefs to current scientific thinking, and a new breed of fundamentalists who clung even tighter to biblical literalism in the face of new ideas.

  No idea split the modernists from the fundamentalists more than the Darwinian theory of human evolution—and the rift was aggravated by the seeming rise in agnosticism among the cultural and scientific elite. From the first, the fundamentalist-modernist controversy over the interpretation of Genesis raged in the pulpit. By the 1920s, both sides had carried the dispute into the classroom. Neither side wanted the other’s views taught as fact in public school biology courses. In 1922, fundamentalists across the United States began lobbying for laws against teaching the Darwinian theory of human evolution in public schools, leading to the passage of the first such statute in Tennessee during the spring of 1925.

  From the outset, the so-called antievolution crusade was seen as evidence of a new and profound cleavage between traditional values and modernity. The antievolution crusade did not cause the cleavage—it simply exposed it. Go back a generation or two before the 1920s, and Americans (at least those of Protestant European roots) tended to share common values. There were atheists, agnostics, and deists in mid-nineteenth century America, but they were marginal, and theological disputes among Christians rarely disrupted denominational harmony. Even the academy was a conventionally religious place, that is, until the rise of positivism, biblical higher criticism, and Darwinism in the late nineteenth century. By the early twentieth century, surveys and studies began detecting a widening gap between the God-fearing American majority and the disbelieving cultural elite. It was not that the elite wanted to reject God or biblical revelation, commentator Walter Lippmann explained at the time. Rather it was that the ascendancy of rational, naturalistic modes of analysis made them unbelievable. It was the scientific method as applied to all facets of life, more than any particular scientific theo
ry, that lay at the heart of modernity—but Darwinism was critical in applying that method to the key issues of biological origins and human morality.

  The Tennessee antievolution statute thus struck a chord that resonated widely. The issue was not new, of course. Ever since Charles Darwin published his theory of evolution in 1859, some conservative Christians had objected to the atheistic implications of its naturalistic explanation for the origins of species, particularly of humans. Further, some traditional scientists—most notably the great Harvard zoologist Louis Agassiz—challenged the very notion of biological evolution by arguing that highly complex individual organs (such as the eye) and ecologically dependent species (such as bees and flowers) can not evolve by the sort of minute, random steps envisioned by Darwinism. Although the scientific community largely converted to the new theory due to its ability to explain other natural phenomena that appear utterly senseless under a theory of design or creation (such as morphological similarities of different species, rudimentary organs, the fossil record, and the geographic distribution of similar species), religious opposition remained, and these religious opponents often invoked outdated scientific arguments against evolution. These religious objections naturally intensified with the spread of fundamentalism during the early twentieth century.

  The state law against teaching evolution and the resulting trial of John Scopes did not settle the matter in Tennessee or anywhere else. America’s adversarial legal system tends to drive parties apart rather than reconcile them, which certainly happened in this case. Despite William Jennings Bryan’s stumbling on the witness stand (which his supporters attributed to the wiles of his notorious interrogator), both sides effectively communicated their message from Dayton—maybe not well enough to win converts, but at least sufficiently to energize those already predisposed toward their viewpoint. If, as the defense claimed, more Americans became alert to the danger of placing limits on teaching evolution, others (particularly evangelical Christians) became even more concerned about the spiritual and social implications of instruction in Darwin’s theories.

  The pace of antievolution activism actually picked up after the trial (especially in the South), but it encountered increased popular resistance everywhere. Arkansas and Mississippi followed Tennessee in outlawing the teaching of human evolution, for example, but similar legislation lost in many other states, particularly in the North and the West. A forty-year standoff resulted in a hodgepodge of state and local limits on teaching evolution, and, coupled with heightened parental concern elsewhere, led most publishers of high school biology textbooks and many individual teachers to basically ignore the subject of organic origins. As a result, after the Tennessee Supreme Court reversed Scopes’s conviction on a technicality, courts did not have another chance to review antievolution laws until the 1960s. By then, the legal landscape had changed dramatically.

  The change began in 1947, when the U.S. Supreme Court grafted the First Amendment bar against religious establishment onto the liberties protected from state action by the Fourteenth Amendment. Suddenly the Establishment Clause took on new life. Whereas Congress had rarely made laws respecting an establishment of religion (so that there was little case law on the point), states and their public schools had been doing so right along—hence the court’s ruling brought a torrent of Establishment Clause litigation. Scopes-like legal battles over the place of religion in public education erupted in communities across the United States, giving the Scopes trial new relevance.

  The first of these cases did not address restrictions on teaching evolution but surely implicated them. In successive decisions beginning in 1948, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down classroom religious instruction, school-sponsored prayers, mandatory bible reading, and, in 1968, antievolution laws. These old laws simply banned the teaching of human evolution—they did not authorize teaching other theories. Indeed, in his day, Bryan never called for including any form of creationist instruction in the science classroom because no scientific alternative to evolution then existed. Even he believed that the biblical days of creation symbolized vast ages of geologic time, and said as much on the witness stand in Dayton. With the publication of The Genesis Flood in 1961, however, Virginia Tech engineering professor Henry Morris gave believers scientific-sounding arguments supporting the biblical account of a six-day creation within the past ten thousand years. This book spawned a movement for so-called young-earth creationism within American fundamentalism, with Morris as its Moses leading the faithful into a promised land where science proved religion. The appearance of “creation science” or “scientific creationism” launched the second phase of antievolution politics: the quest for balanced treatment for creation science.

  Creation science spread within the conservative Protestant church through the missionary work of Morris’s Institute for Creation Research. The emergence of the religious right during the 1970s carried it into politics. Within two decades after the publication of The Genesis Flood, three states and dozens of local school districts had mandated “balanced treatment” for creation science along with evolution in public school science courses. It took another decade before the U.S. Supreme Court unraveled those mandates as unconstitutional in a 1987 decision, Edwards v. Aguillard, striking down Louisiana’s Balanced Treatment Act. Creation science was nothing but religion dressed up as science, the high court decreed, and therefore was barred by the Establishment Clause from public school classrooms along with other forms of religious instruction. By this time, however, conservative Christians were entrenched in local and state politics from California to Maine, and deeply concerned about science education.

  Then along came University of California law professor Phillip Johnson and the third phase of the controversy over teaching evolution. Johnson is not a young-earth creationist, but he is an evangelical Protestant with an uncompromising faith in God. His target became both the philosophical belief and methodological practice within science that material entities subject to physical laws account for the totality of events in nature. Whether called naturalism or materialism, such a philosophy and method excludes God from science laboratories and classrooms. “The important thing is not whether God created all at once or in stages,” Johnson asserted. “Anyone who thinks that the biological world is a product of a pre-existing intelligence ... is a creationist in the most important sense of the word. By this broad definition at least eighty percent of Americans, including me, are creationists.” 1 Darwinism may be the best naturalistic explanation for the origin of species, he stresses, but it is still wrong. If public schools can’t teach creation science because it promotes the tenets of a particular religion, then scientific evidence of intelligent design in nature or at least scientific dissent from evolution theory should be permissible. After all, evolution is just a theory, he argues, and not a very good one. His writings revived popular interest in the concept of intelligent design (or ID).

  Johnson’s books have sold about half a million copies, and it is no wonder that his arguments show up whenever objections are raised against teaching evolution in public schools. They were apparent in the United States Senate in 2001, when Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum offered legislation encouraging teachers “to make distinctions between philosophical materialism and authentic science and to include unanswered questions and unsolved problems in their presentations of the origins of life and living things.”2 That language, written by Johnson, passed in the Senate as an amendment to the No Child Left Behind Act and ultimately became part of the conference report for that law. Similar proposals promptly surfaced as stand-alone bills in over a dozen state legislatures. None have passed, but similar ideas have made their way into state and local school guidelines around the country, most famously in Kansas and in Dover, Pennsylvania.

  Another popular authority on intelligent design is Lehigh University biochemistry professor Michael Behe, a Roman Catholic who has written his own best-selling book challenging Darwinist explanations for complex organic processes a
nd, in 2006, served as the star witness for the defense in the challenge of the Dover school guidelines. If Johnson is the modern movement’s Bryan, then Behe is its Agassiz, reviving the arguments for design based on evidence of nature’s irreducible complexity. Behe has never developed his arguments for intelligent design in peer-reviewed scientific publications. Indeed, he doesn’t actually conduct research in the field and, along with other leaders of the intelligent-design movement, concedes that there is not as yet much affirmative scientific evidence supporting the concept of intelligent design.

  So far, ID proponents are basically focusing on discrediting the theory of evolution by doggedly looking for gaps. Those gaps are best filled by design, they argue, or they would be, if science didn’t a priori rule supernatural explanations out of bounds. Intelligent design advocates propose broadening the definition of science from dealing solely with naturalistic explanations for physical phenomena to include any account that draws on physical, observable data and logical inference. At least, they argue, ID-based criticism of evolution, divorced from biblical creationism, should be an appropriate subject for public school science courses. With this approach, ID proponents have expanded the number of people willing to challenge the alleged Darwinist hegemony in the science classroom beyond those persuaded by Morris’s arguments for a young earth.