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?
4 Likes
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
1 Like
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.
2 Likes
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! 
1 Like
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
Now, that is binary thinking, and to a greater or lesser extent scientific arrogance. It is precisely what my post was supposed to address… The original laws that caused the trial are clearly undemocratic and bias, but the current situation is biased in the opposite direction. It should not be either Biblical or Evolution, but to just palm off the scientific view is as wrong as to deny it altogether.
I see no benefit to Christianity at all. All it does is criticise extreme Biblical Christianity, it does not promote liberal Christianity. It promotes science under the guise of democracy.
Richard
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.
I find this curious. As a Christian I filter all of my understanding through my faith, anything else would seem to be inconsistent and insincere.
Richard