Anti-evolution from Dayton to Dover
Karl Giberson, Eastern
Nazarene College
Editor, Science and Spirit
Editor, Science and Theology News
Charles A. Israel. Before Scopes: Evangelicalism, Education, and Evolution in Tennessee,
1870-1925.The University of Georgia Press, 2004. 252 pp. Bibliography,
index. $19.95 (paper), ISBN
0-8203-2646-1.
World War I, charged the editor of the
Methodist Nashville Christian Advocate,
was the natural consequence of “the materialistic education of Germany,
stripped of Christian ethics and resting on the ethics of the jungle.”[i] The editor’s judgment reflected the view of
many Tennesseans in the years leading up to the Scopes Trial. Pundits across the South made the same
argument to their constituencies. William Jennings Bryan took the argument to
national audiences. Governments and
school boards, largely but not entirely in the South, debated the practical
questions of education and how it might best serve the families whose children
were turned over to it. German education had clearly failed its citizens, so
too did the education of liberal, secular Massachusetts, for that matter.
Before Scopes
is historian Charles A. Israel’s brief but somewhat ponderous analysis of the
confluence of factors that created the perfect storm that was the trial of John
Scopes in 1925 for teaching evolution to the public schoolchildren of Dayton,
Tennessee. Focusing on the Baptists and
Methodists, who comprised the majority of the residents, Israel documents a
perspective on public education that, in the half-century prior to Scopes, went
from opposition to accommodation to control.
Tennesseans initially considered
education to be the responsibility of the family and the church, opposing
proposals to create public schools lest they “estrange children from the faith
and culture of their parents.”[ii] But practical considerations, like the
failure of families to actually educate their children, eventually motivated
many to make their peace with public education, provided the teachers were
solid Christians and the programs were not overly secular. As the enrollments
in public schools began to climb, consideration of the hiring of teachers, the
role of bible reading, and related concerns moved front and center. Tennessee
Christians believed they were building a Christian society. It would serve as an example to the United
States and the rest of the world of just how blessed a society might be if it
took God’s plan seriously. By contrast, Germany offered a frightening example
of what happened when public education lost its religious moorings.
As public education became ever more
public, and the curriculum secularized, Tennesseans grew alarmed. The weakening
connections between the public schools and the local communities they served
seemed inadequate to ensure that the former would serve the latter. Concerns
expressed by Jewish and Catholic minorities about the overt Protestantism of
the curriculum raised awkward questions.
Out of these and related concerns emerged a need to exercise control
over a curriculum that appeared to be evolving on its own.
The most infamous of these curricular
controls was House Bill 185, submitted to the General Assembly of Tennessee in
1925 by John Washington Butler and passed, after some political shenanigans, by
a vote of 24 to 6. The bill forbade the
teaching of evolution. The rest, as
they say, is history and is summarized in the short chapter that concludes the
book.
Israel’s account, while dry and
over-documented (there are 50 more names listed in the index than there are
pages in the book) sheds considerable light on the continuing controversy over
the teaching of evolution in America’s public high schools, at least outside
Massachusetts. The story of this conflict is not a peculiarly southern tale. Though the South witnessed much light and
heat on the issue, Dixie held no monopoly on the controversy. Indeed, an analysis of the cultural
developments that led to the recent Dover, Pennsylvania, trial, or the 1999
Kansas decision to drop evolution from its list of topics on which students
would be tested, or the verdicts that will be making news in the next few
years, would have much in common with Israel’s account of Tennessee in the half
century after Darwin.
Then, and now, we must note that the
debate about evolution is not about evolution at all. Neither Butler, nor
Bryan, nor Scopes really cared about evolution. The infamous textbook that Scopes used, Hunter’s A Civic Biology, had but a few pages on
evolution and those were very tame. Likewise, the 2005 school board in Dover
did not care about evolution as a scientific theory. America’s ongoing aversion
to evolution is best understood as a reaction to the ideological baggage of the
theory. A great many leaders in Tennessee
were absolutely convinced that evolution had led Germany into World War I. The implied materialism and “might makes
right” sociology were scary. Evolution also threatened general public morality,
which was broadly perceived as deriving from the special relationship between
God and man, a relationship challenged by suggestions that man had an animal
ancestry.
In Bryan’s classic In His Image, published in 1922, he developed an argument that
belief in evolution was like trying to tell time with a broken mainspring in a
watch. Morality, he argued, was
“dependent upon religion,” and religion was “the most practical thing in the
world.” Anything that challenged this—that broke the mainspring of the moral
order—is a menace and must be opposed.
“I believe there is such a menace to
fundamental reality,” he writes. “The hypothesis to which the name of Darwin
has been given—the hypothesis that links man to the lower forms of life and
makes him a lineal descendent of the brute—is obscuring God and weakening all
the virtues that rest upon the religious tie between God and man.”[iii]
Bryan’s argument was fundamentally
teleological, not scientific. He made
the case that evolution was bad for society and should be opposed on that
ground. He continued with a critique of
Darwin’s theory, which he called a mere “hypothesis” or a “guess.”[iv]
These were the arguments that Bryan and
others developed in the years leading up to the Scopes Trial. Evolution was a bad idea in the most literal
sense of that word.
And, although the rhetoric is less
explicitly Christian today, the concerns are the same. Philip Johnson’s influential polemic Reason in the Balance is an assault on
the same philosophy that Tennesseans perceived in turn-of-the-century
Germany. Subtitled The Case Against Naturalism in Law, Science, and Education,
Johnson’s book and similar ones by other contemporary leaders of the
anti-evolution crusade, make it clear that the concern is not about a
scientific theory that may or may not be true, but rather about a society and
its foundations. The assault on evolution
is intended to topple the naturalism that rests on it.
“The culturally important element in
the Darwinian theory,” writes Johnson, “is not the claim that there was some
process of ancestral descent in biology, nor is it the claim that biological creation
was a gradual and lengthy process rather than the single week described
literally in Genesis. The important
claim is the one that substitutes a purposeless material process for the
Creator.”[v]
The scientific community has, for over
a century, responded to these concerns with a condescending smugness.
Evolution, they assured, was nothing but a scientific theory. It had no larger implications, either
religious or social and one should not be so afraid of its introduction into
the classroom. It did not cause World War I, and it is not responsible for
anything of interest happening to contemporary worldviews. It’s just a
scientific theory, like gravity.
Such assurances, however, are really
little more than disingenuous attempts to win the culture war over who will
provide the creation story for America’s public schools and all that is
entailed by that. Consider, for
example, the following concluding summaries of the implications of evolution
provided by our leading science popularizers and most respected scientific
voices:
Carl
Sagan writes in the final paragraph of the 345 page Cosmos, on which the major television series was based: “We are the
local embodiment of a Cosmos grown to self-awareness. . . . Our loyalties are
to the species and the planet. We speak for Earth.”[vi] Stephen Jay Gould presents the great
mysteries of life thusly, “if you wish to ask the question of the ages—why do
humans exist?—a major part of the answer, touching those aspects of the issue
that science can treat at all, must be: because Pikaia survived the Burgess decimation.”[vii] So what is the place of religion? Edward O. Wilson answered that question in
his Pulitzer prize-winning On Human
Nature: “If religion, including the dogmatic secular ideologies, can be
systematically analyzed and explained as a product of the brain’s evolution,
its power as an external source of morality will be gone forever and the
solution of the second dilemma will have become a practical necessity . . . What
I am suggesting, in the end, is that the evolutionary epic is probably the best
myth we will ever have.”[viii] In the final three paragraphs of his 614
page The Ancestor’s Tale, Richard
Dawkins makes equally clear his position: “My objection to supernatural beliefs
is precisely that they miserably fail to do justice to the sublime grandeur of
the real world. They represent a
narrowing-down from reality, an impoverishment of what the real world has to
offer.”[ix]
These quasi-religious sentiments are
not uncommon and such examples could be multiplied almost indefinitely: those
scientists who think—or at least write—about the significance of evolution see
it as much more than a scientific theory like gravity. Evolution (and by
extension, the Big Bang theory of cosmic origins), through the eyes of William
Jennings Bryan and Phillip Johnson, who opposed it, and through the eyes of the
science popularizers just quoted who embrace it, is a theory with substantial
cultural implications. It is not now, and has never been, a theory like
gravity.
The debates outlined by Israel in Before Scopes are not only still going
on, but they need to be going on.
Concerned parents who pay taxes to run public schools to which they send their
children need to pay attention to what is being taught in those schools and how
it will affect their children. If the
Tennesseans of yesteryear were uneasy about sending their children to public
schools, the Tennesseans of today feel the same way, as they pull their
children out of those schools and educate them at home, or in private schools. But the problem is much larger than
Tennessee. Indeed, even in
Massachusetts private and home schooling is on the rise.
Moreover, the Scopes Trial, and its
successors, are not merely unfortunate episodes in America’s long search for a
creation story, to be dismissed as aberrations. (Israel’s book ably recounts the deep roots of the struggle in
Tennessee.) These conflicts are windows
into a profound and troubling concern that something important is lost when
human beings begin to think of themselves as animals.
[i] Charles A. Israel, Before Scopes. Evangelicalism, Education, and Evolution in Tennessee,
1879-1925 (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 2004), 136.
[ii] Ibid., 26.
[iii] William Jennings Bryan, In His Image (New York: Fleming H.
Revell, 1922), 88.
[iv] Ibid.,
92.
[v] Philip Johnson, Reason in the Balance. The Case Against Naturalism in Law, Science, and
Education (Downers Grove, Illinois: Intervarsity Press, 1995), 14.
[vi] Carl Sagan, Cosmos (New York: Ballantine Books,
1985), 345.
[vii] Stephen Jay
Gould, Wonderful Life. The Burgess Shale
and the Nature of History (New York: Norton, 1990), 323.
[viii] Edward O.
Wilson, On Human Nature (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978), 201.
[ix] Richard
Dawkins, The Ancestor’s Tale. A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004), 613-4. See also, Stephen W. Hawking, A Brief
History of Time, updated and expanded tenth anniversary edition (New York:
Bantam Books, 1998), 19, and Steven Weinberg, The First Three Minutes. A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe,
updated edition (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 154-5.