by Thomas Dixon
It is a colourful story, and one that has become part of Darwinian folklore. In 1860, Wilberforce, Huxley, and Hooker all thought that they had won the day. But by the time the tale came into wider circulation a couple of decades later, Huxley and Hooker, who had long been pressing for the autonomy of science from the Church, had risen to positions of much greater influence. The ascendancy of the professionalizing agnostics within the British scientific establishment was witnessed by the fact that both Hooker and Huxley were chosen to serve as Presidents of the Royal Society. The Huxley-Wilberforce story was then used retrospectively, as a piece of victors’ history, to suggest a clearer triumph for scientific naturalism over Anglican conservatism than had really been achieved in Oxford in 1860. It suited the new elite to be able to tell the story in a way that seemed to foreshadow and legitimize their own rise to power, while simultaneously depoliticizing the issue. The 1860 confrontation between Samuel Wilberforce and Richard Owen, on the one hand, and the young Darwinians, on the other, had resulted from a struggle for dominance within the institutions of British science and education – a conflict between competing social interests as well as between competing interpretations of the scientific evidence for evolution. The later recasting of the Huxley-Wilberforce debate as one more instance of a simple and timeless conflict between ‘science’ and ‘religion’ helped to suggest that the agnostics’ rise to power was the result of an inexorable historical process rather than a deliberate political campaign.
13. Cartoons from Vanity Fair depicting Professor Thomas Huxley and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, whose encounter in Oxford in 1860 became legendary
Evolution and theology
Wilberforce’s review of On the Origin of Species identified the theological issues which would play out repeatedly among Christians, Jews, Muslims, and others as they considered the implications of evolution for their religious beliefs in the 19th century and afterwards. Some of these were not new. Discoveries in astronomy and geology had already given theologians plenty of opportunity to discuss the relative authority of science and scripture in determining natural knowledge. Darwin’s view of nature drew particular attention to suffering, violence, and death. But people hardly needed Darwin to tell them that these were features of the natural world in general and of human life in particular. Again, theologians were already aware of the problem of evil, and had various responses to it. One common response to human evil was to explain that God must allow his creatures free will, which could be turned to either good or evil ends. Bishop Wilberforce’s response to Darwin’s remarks on imperfections in nature, and on the apparent cruelty of such creatures as the ichneumon wasp, was to refer to the Christian idea of the Fall. On this view, when Adam and Eve, the crowns and rulers of creation, were expelled from the Garden of Eden for their disobedience, it was not just they and their human descendants who fell from grace into a disordered state; it was the whole of nature. As Wilberforce put it, the ‘strange forms of imperfection and suffering amongst the works of God’ were the ongoing expression of ‘the strong shudder which ran through all this world when its head and ruler fell’.
What was theologically new and troubling was the destruction of the boundary securely separating humanity from the ‘brute creation’ (and, to a lesser but significant extent, the destruction of the boundaries separating kinds of plants and animals from each other). The publication of Darwin’s theories about human evolution in The Descent of Man (1871) and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) provided further material for discussions about the relationship between humanity and the other animals. In these works Darwin speculated, as he had not dared to in 1859, on how even the most elevated of human faculties – the emotions, the moral sense, and religious feelings – might have evolved by natural means (including the ‘Lamarckian’ process of the inheritance of acquired characteristics, which Darwin always maintained operated alongside his own favoured mechanism of natural selection).
By the end of the 19th century, there was no serious scientific opposition to the basic evolutionary tenets of descent with modification and the common ancestry of all forms of life. There was considerable dispute about the explanatory sufficiency of the mechanism identified by Darwin and Wallace as the main driving force of evolution, namely natural selection acting on random variations. Lamarckian mechanisms of various forms were still discussed, and the process of heredity was a matter of dispute. From 1900 onwards, there were debates between those who used the work of Gregor Mendel to argue that characteristics were inherited in all-or-nothing units of the kind that came to be known as ‘genes’, and those who believed that inheritance was a question of an infinitely gradated ‘blending’ of traits. Only during the 1930s and 1940s did the modern evolutionary framework of neo-Darwinism, with which we are now familiar, take shape. That framework combined Mendelian genetics with the theory of natural selection, and finally rejected evolutionary theories that appealed either to the inheritance of acquired characteristics or to some innate life-force driving evolution from within.
14. One of many 19th-century images which satirized Darwin’s theory of human evolution by depicting him as an ape
Throughout these developments, theologians continued to make various uses of evolutionary ideas. The early 20th century saw a flourishing of ideas about creative evolution and guided evolution that appealed to religious thinkers. Since then, the triumph of neo-Darwinism has posed different theological problems. Within each faith tradition, there have been those who embrace evolution but also those who reject it – each has its own evolutionists, its own creationists, and many others in between.
For Jews, the theory of evolution not only raises questions about biblical interpretation and about human nature but also has connotations of Nazism and the Holocaust. Ideas about the ‘survival of the fittest’ were used by Nazis to try to justify their racist and eugenic ideology. Their regime was responsible for the murder of millions of Jews and others of supposedly ‘inferior’ races during the Second World War. The theory of evolution by natural selection has been used to bolster all sorts of different ideologies, including socialism, liberalism, and anarchism. Recent historical research has even shown how evolutionary ideas were used in the construction and defence of Zionism. While the idea of evolution has proved to be politically very malleable, it is generally accepted that in itself the scientific theory does not lead to any of these positions. Ideas of evolution will surely nonetheless continue to carry a menacing undertone given the anti-Semitic uses to which they have been put in the past. It has been pointed out that two biologists who were prominent in resisting more deterministic evolutionary theories of mind and society in the later 20th century, namely Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin, were both Jewish (although they both had scientific and political reasons for resisting such theories too).
Since the 19th century, the Roman Catholic Church has gradually developed an official line accepting that the human species has physically evolved in the way described by science, but which states that each individual human soul is created in the image of God and cannot be explained merely as the product of materialistic evolution. There have been Roman Catholics on and slightly beyond the fringes of orthodoxy who have spoken in favour of evolution, such as the 19th-century anatomist St George Mivart, who tried to persuade the Church of the plausibility of theistic evolution, and the Jesuit palaeontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whose popular mid-20th-century books interpreted evolution as a divinely guided cosmic process with human moral and spiritual awareness as its goal. Pope Benedict XVI, speaking at his inaugural mass in 2005, struck a cautionary note on the subject. ‘We are not,’ he said, ‘some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary.’ The Roman Catholic Church has not generally been supportive of the anti-Darwinian ‘Intelligent Design’ movement, however. The Pope’s warnings are not against evolution as science but against adop
ting the idea of evolution as an overarching view that deprives the world of meaning and purpose. It seems that the Catholic Church remains ambivalent towards evolution. One of the leading advocates of ‘Intelligent Design’, Michael Behe, and one of its most accomplished scientific critics, Kenneth Miller, are both Roman Catholics.
In recent decades, the most prominent religious opponents of evolution have come from within two particular traditions – Protestantism and Islam. The varieties of creationism that have emerged in these traditions in the 20th and 21st centuries are remote from the theological and scientific discussions about Darwinism that took place in the late 19th century. In order to understand the 20th-century rise of scientific creationism, we need now to turn our attention to the history and politics of the United States of America.
Chapter 5
Creationism and Intelligent Design
E. coli is the poster-bug for ‘Intelligent Design’. It propels itself with an ingenious rotating tail or ‘flagellum’ – a sort of bacterial outboard motor. With its many connected parts working together towards the specified end of locomotion, this flagellum fulfils the criteria for design set out by William Paley in 1802. But surely the triumph of the modern theory of evolution has made it impossible to prefer Paley’s theological explanation of such adaptations to Darwin’s naturalistic one? Apparently not for everyone.
Since the early 1990s, supporters of the movement promoting ‘Intelligent Design’ or ‘ID’ in the United States have been mounting a challenge to the neo-Darwinian theory that all forms of life have evolved through the processes of genetic variation, heredity, and natural selection. Devotees of ID, including the lawyer Philip Johnson, the mathematician, philosopher, and theologian William Dembski, and the biochemist Michael Behe, say that it represents a serious scientific challenge to evolution. They think that certain aspects of the natural world, such as the bacterial flagellum, are too complex and too unlikely to have been produced by processes of genetic mutation and natural selection. And they use detailed calculations, based on debatable mathematical assumptions about information and probability, to quantify that unlikeliness and to justify their incredulity. Michael Behe focuses especially on complex chains of chemical processes within cells such as the series of reactions involved in the clotting of blood in mammals, known as the ‘blood clotting cascade’. He is, if you like, Paley with a doctorate in biochemistry. The most plausible explanation of the ‘irreducible complexity’ of the flagellum, the blood clotting cascade, and many other phenomena which rely on complicated interactions between multiple components, Behe believes, is that they were produced by an intelligent designer (whom he and most of his readers suppose to be God).
The American Association for the Advancement of Science has stated that ID is characterized by ‘significant conceptual flaws in its formulation, a lack of credible scientific evidence, and misrepresentations of scientific facts’ and that its central concept is ‘in fact religious, not scientific’. In a landmark case in Pennsylvania in 2005, Judge John E. Jones ruled against the Dover Area School Board’s policy of requiring biology teachers to read out a statement about ID. Judge Jones stated that ID was religious, not scientific; and that the decision of the Board to adopt this policy, breaching the First Amendment prohibition on state sponsorship of religion, showed ‘breathtaking inanity’. Religious leaders have come out against ID too. An open letter affirming the compatibility of Christian faith and the teaching of evolution, first produced in response to controversies in Wisconsin in 2004, has now been signed by over ten thousand clergy from different Christian denominations across America. In 2006, the director of the Vatican Observatory, the Jesuit astronomer George Coyne, condemned ID as a kind of ‘crude creationism’ which reduced God to a mere engineer.
Given the impressive array of scientific, legal, and theological opinion ranged against it, you might wonder how the ID movement ever became as popular as it undoubtedly has within certain sectors of American society. To answer that question it is necessary to understand the history both of anti-evolution campaigns in the United States since the 1920s and of state and federal courts’ use of the First Amendment to keep religion out of public schools from the 1960s onwards. What these histories reveal is that the ID movement is the latest in a series of attempts by a broadly conservative and Christian constituency in the United States to have religiously motivated anti-evolutionary ideas taught in the public schools. The debate about evolution and ID is a conflict not primarily between science and religion but between different views about who should control education.
Opponents of the various forms of scientific creationism and ID have sometimes portrayed them as a ‘return to the Middle Ages’. This reveals a common historical misunderstanding. These movements are the products of 20th- and 21st-century America. They simultaneously mimic and reject modern science and have become quite widespread in modern America through the convergent influence of a number of factors, including an advanced state of scientific development, a high level of religious observance, and a strictly enforced separation between church and state.
The Scopes trial
On 21 March 1925, Austin Peay, the Governor of Tennessee, put his signature to an Act making it unlawful for a teacher employed by the State of Tennessee to ‘teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals’. Other states, including Mississippi and Arkansas, adopted similar anti-evolution measures in the 1920s, but it was in the small town of Dayton, Tennessee, that the issue came to a head.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) saw the passing of the Tennessee law as an opportunity to take a stand in defence of intellectual freedom. They placed an advertisement seeking a volunteer to bring a test case. Some of the lawyers and businessmen of Dayton, grasping the opportunity to put their town on the map, persuaded a local science teacher, John Scopes, to put himself forward. What followed generated more publicity than the townsfolk of Dayton can possibly have envisaged. The Dayton ‘Monkey Trial’ became international news and was the first to be broadcast on national radio. It also attracted two of the most famous lawyers of the age, William Jennings Bryan acting for the prosecution, and Clarence Darrow for the defence. Bryan had stood three times for President, as the candidate of the Democratic Party, and three times had been defeated. Known as ‘The Great Commoner’ because of his belief in the absolute sovereignty of the people, an opponent of imperialistic foreign policy and supporter of votes for women, in later life Bryan became increasingly taken up with moral and religious crusades, including his support for Prohibition and his biblically based opposition to the teaching of evolution in schools. Darrow was a famous agnostic and a leading member of the ACLU.
The clash between Bryan and Darrow, and the associated carnival of religious and evolutionary activism which descended upon Dayton in July 1925, has been memorably, if not altogether accurately, depicted in the 1960 film Inherit the Wind. The story has been brilliantly and more reliably retold by Edward J. Larson in his Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate over Science and Religion, which won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1998. Although the courtroom confrontation between Bryan and Darrow became legendary, as a legal drama it was of limited interest. No-one denied that Scopes had broken the law. Both sides accepted that Scopes had taught evolution, and when the trial came to its conclusion, he was duly convicted and ordered by the judge to pay a fine of 100 dollars. The main purpose of the case, as far as Darrow and the ACLU were concerned, was to obtain a conviction at Dayton which could then be appealed to higher state and federal courts, in order to test the constitutionality of the anti-evolution law. For Bryan, the purpose of convicting Scopes was to strike a political blow for honest Christian folk who wanted to shield their children from the anti-religious ideas of an arrogant intellectual elite.
15. The stall of the Anti-Evolution League in Dayton, Tennessee, during the
Scopes trial
Although some saw the Scopes trial as a simple confrontation between science and religion, the political speeches made by William Jennings Bryan at the time reveal that the more powerful dynamic was a generally conceived conflict between the fundamentals of Christianity and the evils of the modern world. Bryan was a defender of the newly formed movement for Christian ‘fundamentalism’. For the fundamentalists, the spread of Darwinism was both a cause and a symptom of the degeneration of human civilization which they witnessed all around them, from the barbaric violence of the First World War in Europe to the sensual decadence of the Jazz Age in America. Christianity and a literal reading of the Bible were bulwarks against these developments. Bryan and others feared that teaching children they were animals would brutalize and degrade them. Bryan noted that in a diagram in Hunter’s Civic Biology, the textbook from which Scopes had taught evolution, humanity was ‘shut up in the little circle entitled “Mammals”, with thirty-four hundred and ninety-nine other species’:
