I wrote the column published yesterday (10 July) marking the 100th anniversary of the Scopes trial. If readers have comments or questions, this is the place to talk about it. Who’s first?
Good to see you here again, Dr. Davis! I do hope some lively and fruitful discussion comes out of your article. I know it provoked a lot of eye-opening realization for me regarding how deeply ingrained eugenics was into the “progressive Christianity” of the time! I hope to dive in here later with more detailed questions of my own over some of the narratives you shared.
For now I’ll just make a brief comment that I was surprised C.S. Lewis’ name wasn’t included on AIG’s list of verboten or ‘compromised’ evangelical leaders. Then again - I guess Lewis wouldn’t have really been considered an ‘evangelical’ leader to begin with? But certainly still a strong cultural voice for us on the theological front of this last century.
Do you ever think it productive to speculate on who might be the true “intellectual heirs” to whom from the cast of modernists and religious “dogmatists” you discuss? Or what those same people would think were they brought forward to now? [I know - that’s an unfair question to put to an historian, and people remain firmly rooted in the time they actually lived.] It fascinated me how easily the evolutionists of that time accepted at least some (if vague) design premises, with a definite component of teleology (progress) thrown in! Apparently WW1 hadn’t quite yet eradicated all our utopian-minded visions of prior decades? Had those people been alive today and known what has been learned about evolution since their time, I wonder how they might have responded. Today any notion of teleology has been pushed fairly far back into material origins themselves (to phrase that in a ‘conflict-way’ that following the spirit of White). But as somebody who rejects that spirit myself, I would articulate our conflicts differently now (and even as it played out then). I hope to
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I’m glad to be back as an author at BL, Merv. Thank you for the warm welcome!
I don’t have a specific URL to offer, in which AiG uses the verb “compromise(d)” in close proximity with the name “C. S. Lewis” (although maybe someone can show us such), but I can say that AiG probably considers Lewis to be someone who failed to interpret Scripture correctly. Here’s a place where they imply this, while noting that Lewis expressed some doubt about evolution in a letter late in his life: Which Is Worse? | Answers in Genesis
On the other hand, AiG often references Lewis favorably and doesn’t hesitate to praise Lewis when they like what he did or said. For example: Science Fiction: Not Just Entertainment | Answers in Genesis or
Man: The Image of God | Answers in Genesis or especially Christmas Gift Idea: The Horse and His Boy | Answers in Genesis
AiG treats Charles Spurgeon similarly. Despite finding him a compromiser (as I mentioned), they think he wrote lots of good stuff about the Bible, judging from the large number of long excerpts from Spurgeon on their site, such as this (to give just a single example): 1102. Royal Homage | Answers in Genesis
In the book–and briefly in my column–I do identify some contemporary examples of people who seem to be channeling people from the origins controversy of the 1920s. I really do see Spong as almost a literal incarnation of a radical modernist like Gerald Birney Smith or a slightly less radical modernist like Mathews. The difference (for me) is, that there’s no originality (IMO) in Spong; he simply regurgitated (I’m using the same verb in my column deliberately here) an overall attitude that for the modernists of 100 years ago was new and still somewhat exploratory. I think the Social Gospel, in and of itself, was spot on: Jesus does want us to work out social consequences of the Gospel. Salvation in Jesus’ ministry DID involve changed actions and structures, not just changed hearts and minds. The problem (IMO) with the modernists was that they jettisoned the reality of the disciples encounter with the Risen Christ and not just with Jesus of Nazareth, the great healer and moral teacher. Without the Risen Christ, there’d never have been a Christian church at all. The modernist tried to keep a Christian influence in the world, through the social ministry of churches, but they cut the heart out of the Gospel by denying (not just downplaying) the fact of Jesus’ bodily Resurrection–and of course the close connection between what I call the “Big 3” doctrines (not to imply that all the rest are trivial), namely, Creation (ex nihilo), Resurrection (bodily), and Eschatology (the bodily Resurrection of all believers together with the created world). The links between those 3 are laid out beautifully by Ted Peters, in the essay of his that I serialized for BL many years ago: On Creating the Cosmos: Excerpts from Ted Peters - Article - BioLogos. It was a very deliberate decision on my part to put those specific ideas on BL, where a much larger audience than the original very small academic audience would see them.
As for the purposeful/teleological universe of the modernists, WW1 may have had some dampening effect on that, at least according to the standard narrative. I don’t know how far to push that. My sources were mostly from the 1920s and 1930s. The belief in teleology didn’t diminish after the War, as far as I can tell.
What did change, is that some of the modernists either became pacifists–Fosdick was a prime example, remaining a pacifist even down through WW2 and the Cold War as far as I can tell. One of Compton’s pastors at Hyde Park was also a pacifist. Compton’s Mennonite mother was a pacifist, but he never was as far as I can tell. I wrote about this for the ASA here: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://www.asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/2009/PSCF12-09Davis.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwiLuJn6zrWOAxUPkokEHQwhDDoQFnoECBcQAQ&usg=AOvVaw2fT2R1FE1YPtnDARIZ_03w (this URL downloads a pdf)
The elephant in this room is the neo-Darwinian synthesis, often dated from ca. 1930. All of the modernists in my book were mid- or late career thinkers before evolutionary biologists started insisting that evolution was “blind” or “unguided” or “not designed.” I say “insisting,” because people like Ernst Mayr and (in our day) Richard Dawkins or Jerry Coyne and others served as Lord High Executioners of biologists who still believed in a purposeful universe: they didn’t want the cat of teleological evolution (very popular before 1930) to be let out of the bag. There were of course important exceptions, especially the great geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky, who contributed fundamentally to the synthesis yet endorsed a type of theistic evolution and remained a devout Russian Orthodox believer. IMO, Dobzhansky was simply too large a figure to be trivialized or silenced, a far greater scientist than most preachers of scientific atheism. He was quiet about his faith for a while after coming to America in 1927, but I suspect he didn’t want to antagonize the atheist whose Columbia University lab he joined, Thomas Hunt Morgan. Dobzhansky had basically escaped Stalinist Russia, where just a few years later scientists who didn’t support Lysenko could disappear, and to some extent he may have regarded Morgan as literally saving his life. After Morgan’s death, however, Dobzhansky was more outspoken, even serving as president of the Chardin Association.
Sorry for such a long and rambling reply.
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Ditto that! It certainly puts the trial in a different light.
I once argued that very thing with some companions in grad school who seemed to think he was practically a prophet – nice to know I was on the right track!
I came to the same conclusion recently via thinking about the differences in culture between Rome then and the West now: back then everything was individual; government was nothing but force without any care for individuals, so if any application of Christ’s teaching was to happen, it had to happen on the individual level. But in today’s world, government is a different creature altogether, and it seems a logical extension to say that it, too, should be brought into conformity with the Gospel, i.e. that (especially if one considers one’s country to be Christian) all the how-to-treat-your-neighbor aspects of the New Testament (and the prophets before) must be put into action in government.
It’s not an argument I’ve fleshed out much, but so far I find it convincing.
As I recall, the point was made in there that the doctrine of creation ex nihilo derives from the plan of redemption, specifically the Resurrection, and not the other way around – something I insist on if theology is to be Christian!
Interesting. The way things get presented these days, one might never suspect that anyone ever though evolution was guided in any way!
I know an Orthodox believer (Antiochene, I think) online who maintains that Theodosius Dobzhansky should be decreed a saint.
Oh, rambling is a hobby here! 
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Not being from the USA I ws not familiar with this trial. It seems that what we have now is precisely what the opposers to Evolution feared whereby the teaching of Evolution goes unchecked and unopposed.
I am not suggesting that we go back to Biblical creationism, but there would seem to be no suggestion that there is any dispute to any of Evolutionary theory, or that there could be a Christian view that does not just embrace the scientific one or conversely reject it altogether.
My experience here is that any sort of argument or dissent is taken as an insult to science and scientists.
Richard
I think about it from the issue of democracy. I think evolution gets the science correct and something like flood geology is incorrect. But in a democratic society, who ultimately determines what is normative to teach in schools funded with public tax dollars? Needless to say? I’m not a fan of the government telling us what to believe, what to learn, what to read, etc.
Also, I don’t think the scopes trial is or was as important to Catholics as Protestants prone to literalism. I think its importance is often overstated. People love good story and narrative.
Vinnie
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13 posts were split to a new topic: Science, causality, final causes
There are a lot of interesting topics raised in this thread. In addition to the trial, there is the social gospel, teleology in evolution, and P. T. de Chardin (just to name a few which caught my attention).
On the social gospel I have mixed feelings, and Davis covered the most important reservations. To be sure the social gospel is certainly better than social Darwinism, but of course I reject the reduction of Christianity to such a thing. James 1:27 and Matthew 25:31-46 are crucial but they only half the story. On the other side there is John 6 and Matthew 26:11 making the spiritual side of Christianity more important. In the end, Christianity is not about social reform but the reform of the human heart to reflect the character of God.
Regarding teleology I also have mixed feeling. I love to remind people of Aristotle’s wider understanding of causality in the four causes, but I think the restriction of science to effective (time-ordered) causes is fundamental, though the assumption of material (reductionist) causality has lost some ground in science. And I think many things which have always looked teleological are not as teleological as we thought. So I have suggested phrases such as “intentional in hindsight.”
As for Chardin, in some ways we sound similar with our strong belief in the role of the human mind. On the other hand, our ways of conceiving of this are fundamentally different. Chardin looks too much like a revival of Plato to me – something which I am rather opposed to. He still sees the mind as primarily rational, whereas I think AI is the nail in that coffin. I think the mind is a living organism in the medium of language and rationality is largely just a matter of following as set of rules which is pervasive in nature including matter itself (nothing all that special). Of course we are coming from very different directions. He is a Christian finding value in science and I am a scientist finding value in Christianity. And so I object when it looks to me like he is making Christianity his filter and organizing principle for understanding the universe.
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A post was merged into an existing topic: Science, causality, final causes
It’s good to know that they (AIG) aren’t completely given to the “purity death spiral” as it has been called. Though (AIG & co. notwithstanding) I have personally known some conservatives for whom Lewis is removed from their “trusted source” zone - I suspect because of his failure to submit himself fully to their fundamentalistic creeds - likely including his early failure to join in the religiously-motivated moral outrage over evolution. They are a minority and Lewis is still at least accepted or even celebrated in most spaces - and I rejoice in that rare overlap these days.
I’ve heard ‘fundamentalism’ described as being “more a psychology than a theology”. (Psychology of certitude, ferocity, warfare mentality, etc.) From your article, it sounds like those modernists from the inter-war period you describe could also then be described as ‘fundamentalist’ in their own way too (in the broader use of that term). They too waxed eloquently and passionately about the crowning achievement of evolution (the Caucasian ‘race’) and how there must have been Divine directive involved to steer it that way.
As off-putting as such former convictions have rightly become for us now, I have to wonder how much such wider fundamentalism still survives (beyond the explicitly religious set to whom it’s applied). Is there a new ‘fundamentalism’ now wrapped around new and politically updated philosophies - whatever cause du jour the culture has served up for this political season?
There are those voices, even present on this thread as we see, who are quick to object to what they see as imperious demands of conformity from scientific quarters. Where as science-minded individuals (I include myself here) tend to respond still that reality remains and always has been a constraint that persists, however objectionable one thinks it may be. It seems to me that this same attitude is what animated such as A. Compton back in that day too (thanks for that article, btw, - even though I haven’t completed my more recent reading of it yet.) While he may have been holding to lots of now-recognized errors, it’s hard not to think that he would nonetheless have been able to let those go if he was privy to all that has unfolded since.
Question for general discussion here: Can we rightly consider ourselves distanced from the ‘certitudes’ of fundamentalism now if we mostly react against any notion of certitude divorced from evidence while yet embracing our certitude that scientific evidence and consilience does indeed count?
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A post was merged into an existing topic: Science, causality, final causes
This is precisely the question Bryan was asking of Americans. Precisely. I didn’t go into the political side of Bryan’s campaign here, but obviously a career politician and 3-time candidate for President (as a Democrat) hardly ignored the political side of canceling evolution. Indeed, he knew that he couldn’t succeed in changing public education without politics. In his view, “the hand that writes the paycheck rules the school.” Parents, not the educational elite/establishment, should have the final say on what gets taught to their own children with their own tax dollars.
As a rule, I don’t go political. I didn’t when I was teaching college students, I don’t in my scholarly work, and I don’t do it at BL either. The one exception–which I announced in class (when I did go political) and which I am announcing here–is that I will comment on politics when it’s directly pertinent to the material I am teaching or writing about within my areas of expertise. This fits that rule.
I think Bryan was mainly right. I’ve said for decades, that in the realm of public education, the evolution controversy will never go away. Never. Unless parents are given more control over what their children are taught and how it’s taught. Anyone familiar with my many columns here (mostly several years old, so you might have to search for them) knows that I am no fan of AiG and the YEC view. Indeed, in some ways I think it’s spiritually dangerous. (I lack time and space to detail my reasons here and now.) But, IMO families who want their children taught YEC and not evolution should have the same rights as families who want the opposite. Both families are American taxpayers. Both are REQUIRED to provide education for their children, whether they do it themselves or entrust public or private schools to do it. But down to almost right now (2025), only families in the latter category get to use their own tax dollars to educate their own children. I think that’s undemocratic and unjust.
[Since I opened this can of worms myself, I can hardly object if others go equally political in response. Obviously–I state the obvious only to make sure that readers realize I think it’s obvious–one could fairly critique this position in many ways. Should Nazi families be able to use tax dollars to send their children to white supremacist schools? etc. My only request, is that anyone offering support or dissent from my view stay on this topic, narrowly defined in the context of this thread. I didn’t go beyond the thread, and I hope the moderators don’t let others go beyond it either. We’re talking about evolution in public school classrooms, not anything else.]
Things might now be changing, and rapidly, as many states are acting on opening up what has previously been a monopoly in public education. When I was writing about this type of thing (just briefly, in the context of the origins controversy) in years past, such as here (Debating Darwin: The ‘intelligent design’ movement | The Christian Century) and here (https://www3.trincoll.edu/csrpl/RINVol8no3/intelligent%20design%20on%20trial.htm), I honestly thought I would NEVER see the day when monopolistic public education would be seriously challenged. It’s starting to happen. I sill put forth one caution: the existence in many states of “Blaine” amendments to state constitutions (Blaine Amendment - Wikipedia), which (ironically) were motivated by Protestant families to keep Catholic families away from having access to publicly funded education dollars for their families, at a time when most Protestants were happy with public education. To the best of my knowledge, POTUS hasn’t yet had any cases in which Blaine amendments were being challenged by Christian groups or individuals. It ain’t over 'til it’s over…
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I’m no fan of Chardin’s ideas, either. I brought him up in connection with Dobzhansky only to emphasize the seriousness of Dobzhansky’s religious beliefs.
In it’s original context when the word was first used, “Fundamentalist” meant a traditional Christian who was willing to defend those views militantly. I’ll quote from my book:
“After the Great War, some of the more radical conservatives began to identify under a new label. The word “fundamentalist” was defined in July 1920 by Curtis Lee Laws, editor of the Watchman-Examiner, a national Baptist weekly. Laws applied the term “in compliment and not in disparagement” to himself and others who “cling to the great fundamentals and who mean to do battle royal” for them. His language implies that the term was already in use verbally, but no earlier published instance is known. Although differences with modernists over the Bible and theology obviously motivated fundamentalists, Laws’ definition gave fundamentalism an attitude—militant rejection of modernity in the name of traditional religion. According to George M. Marsden, ‘until about 1960 the term ‘fundamentalists’ referred to those evangelical Protestants who were militantly opposed to modernist theology and to related secularizing trends in the culture’.”
Marsden defined it briefly as “militant anti-modernism,” a definition that fits the issues in my book quite well.
Obviously the word is used today in so many other contexts, including some that are unrelated either to Christianity or to any other religion. Even Stephen Jay Gould used the term in his own way: Darwinian Fundamentalism | Stephen Jay Gould | The New York Review of Books.
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Incidentally–perhaps not so incidentally–Bryan himself did not identify as a “Fundamentalist.” He declined to use that label. However, he shared the very low views of evolution and of the dangers of higher education held my most “Fundamentalists” and wasn’t shy about voicing those opinions.
That seems quite fitting!
Good question. I don’t have “certitude” in science, I just insist that if someone wants to challenge a scientific point then they must use science to do so.
That argument was made when I was in high school and we rebelled against the dress code. We managed to demonstrate that ultimately the students ruled: we had the “jocks”, the popular students, and the honor students all united and showed that if we all acted together we could stop the school from working (over a third of the student body on a specified day showed up in violation of the dress code; by lunchtime it was almost half).
Not even then – that just splits the parents into two angry factions and a third that just wants the argument to go away.
A measure in support of homeschooling failed on that point when a group of parents who wanted a “socialist curriculum” came out in favor of it – the religious supporters hadn’t conceived that non-believers might use homeschooling for their own benefit! They saw the “socialists” as “evolutionist atheists” and didn’t want to do anything that could benefit them.
(I never figured out if the “socialist” group was serious or just making a point.)
When I was student teaching I got a question (I’d been warned to expect) from a student about design. I turned the question back, asking the student, “At what point does the design appear? – think about it”.
I got in trouble with the administration for not just crushing the question by responding that nothing was designed. I stood my ground, saying, “I can’t prove that and neither can you – but I can tell students to think about things”.
Which reminds me of when I commented in a history class on the matter of earthquakes and city walls: a student jumped in during a discussion of earthquakes with the comment that it would be a great way to win a battle if you could use an earthquake to knock down an enemy’s walls! I just responded, “Sure, and some people say that happened”. And again I got pounced on by the administration for affirming religion, to which I responded that such things happened in the fourth and eighth centuries in the near east and had nothing to do with religion (though the conquests were opportunistic; the earthquakes broke city walls and enemies took advantage of that situation).
That militant aspect triggered me one day in college in church – I refused to sing “Onward Christian Soldiers” because of the militant attitude it conveyed.
A friend went ballistic one day when we heard someone mention “fundamentalist liberalism” – he insisted the terms were opposites.
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And thus contributed to the American streak of anti-intellectualism.
A fair conclusion from my article, but an unintended one if no nuance is added. Let me add nuance.
Among the 11 authors of the 10 pamphlets (the one on “Life After Death” had 3 authors, and 2 authors contributed twice each), Conklin and his former student Schmucker were the two most associated with eugenics (Millikan and Mathews were less vocal but supportive, while Fosdick was an advisor to the eugenics society but I can’t flesh out what that actually meant). Conklin was the one most associated with white supremacy, though all of them worked in an America that was deeply stained by racism and still even by the legacy of slavery: all of them were born before 1900, some of them during the Civil War. Liberal Protestants (and some liberal Jews and Catholics, too, as Christine Rosen shows https://global.oup.com/academic/product/preaching-eugenics-9780195156799) tended to support eugenics, and some of them also scientific racism. However, most of the liberal Protestants who figure prominently in my book believed that evolution was in some way a divinely guided process that culminated in humans made in God’s image. A divine personality had produced other personalities. Indeed, they used that belief–which some almost took as a plain “fact”–as a plank in natural theological arguments. How could a blind process do what evolution did? As Mathews said, “Science warrants religion because it affords evidence of immanent reason, purpose and personality in the cosmic environment and its discovery of the laws of human life." Compton put it this way: “Whence then comes our world? Though science does not offer a positive answer to this question, it can point out that an intelligible world in which intelligent creatures appear seems reasonably to imply an intelligence working in the world, a basis on which most scientific men build their approach to religion.”
They also used their belief in guided evolution leading to humans to argue for personal immortality, especially Compton. In his Terry Lectures at Yale, he wrote, “The thoughts of man, which have come to control to so great an extent the development of life upon this planet, are conceivably to the Lord of Creation among the most important things in the world. From this point of view we might expect nature to preserve at all costs the living souls which it has evolved at such labor. This would mean the immortality of the individual consciousness.”
I should add, however, that Conklin could not bring himself to accept the bodily Resurrection. He just didn’t believe in miracles. It’s a loud omission for a Christian, when the pamphlet he wrote on “Life After Death,” based on an Easter-season talk he gave at the U of Chicago chapel, omits the Resurrection. Remember: he was a modernist, not a traditional Christian. His son John J. Compton, a philosopher, told me that his father would not stand to recite the Apostles’ Creed in church, because he didn’t want anyone to assume he believed it.
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I spoke too soon. Sloppy of me not to notice that the wiki article I referenced about the Blaine amendment ends this way: “On June 30, 2020, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue that Montana’s no-aid provision in its constitution, a Blaine amendment, had been inappropriately used to block tax-credit scholarship funds for private schooling for being used at a religious school in violation of the Free Exercise Clause. The ruling effectively stated that if the state offered public scholarship funds for a private school, they could not discriminate against religious schools. As a result, it is expected that states that have similar programs with no-aid provisions in their constitutions will be forced to re-evaluate any program restrictions.”
I should have known this, given the topics I taught, but (being generous to myself) that happened just as I was preparing to retire from teaching and I probably wasn’t paying close attention.
Anyway, assuming that paragraph is accurate, it’s consistent with some earlier SCOTUS decisions, at least one or two regarding tax dollars going to students at Christian colleges, namely, that if a governmental entity provides tax dollars for non-public education, that entity can’t discriminate against religious institutions of the same general type. So, I assume now that it’s up to each state to figure out whether or not to offer tax dollars or credits to families with children in non-public schools. If they do, then religious schools must be in the mix. CAUTION: I’m not even an attorney, let alone a law professor or a judge. You’d better get more authoritative opinions before going very far with this… 
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I think that Carson v. Makin (2022) is also relevant. And IIRC both hearken back to Trinity Lutheran Church v. Comer (2017).
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