More Complicated Than the Scopes Trial: A History of Evangelicals and Science (Episode 8)

When most people imagine evangelical Christianity and science in America, they picture conflict: the Scopes Trial, school-board fights over evolution, faith retreating before modern science. But that picture is largely a product of the twentieth century. For much of American history, evangelicals understood faith and scientific inquiry as deeply compatible — even mutually reinforcing.

In this episode, hosts John Fea, Dan Hummel, and Maggie Capra trace that longer, more complicated story with historian Ted Davis of Messiah University, one of the leading scholars of science and religion in American Protestant history. Beginning with the seventeenth-century idea that God authored “two books” — Scripture and nature — the conversation follows the relationship between evangelical faith and science through the early Republic, the arrival of Darwinism, the culture wars of the 1920s, and into the complex evangelical landscape of today.

Along the way, the hosts and Ted Davis explore why the “conflict” between evangelicals and science is both older and newer than we tend to assume — and why the real story resists the tidy narratives offered by both sides.

BONUS: The Full Interview on YouTube

John Fea sat down with Ted Davis for an extended conversation that ranges well beyond what we could fit into this episode. Watch the complete interview on our YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/OHTG1yY-6bY 

KEY THEMES

The “Two Books” Framework

For more than two centuries, educated Christians assumed God had authored two books — Scripture and nature — and that reading either carefully was an act of worship. Drawing on Francis Bacon’s The Advancement of Learning (1605), evangelicals embraced the pursuit of knowledge as a moral obligation oriented toward charity and human benefit rather than power or self-aggrandizement.

Progress, Postmillennialism, and the Antebellum Fusion
Early American Protestants fused Enlightenment ideas of progress with a postmillennial confidence that the Kingdom of God was advancing through human effort. Scientific and technological advances were understood as part of a divine plan — an outlook that made faith and science natural partners well into the nineteenth century.

The Rise of the “Conflict Thesis”
The idea that science and religion have always been at war is itself a historical product, popularized after the Civil War by writers like John William Draper and Andrew Dickson White. Notably, these were liberal or modernist Protestants; the original conflict was less science-versus-faith than a struggle over which “book” would define Christianity.

Defining “True Science”
By the 1920s, fundamentalists were not anti-science by their own lights — they held a “common sense” view of science rooted in the Scottish Enlightenment, in which only what could be directly observed counted as fact. Evolution, unfolding too slowly to observe, was therefore dismissed as conjecture. The same logic shaped resistance to higher criticism of the Bible.

Evolution, Germany, and World War I
The anti-evolution movement was politically entangled, not merely scientific. Evolution became linked in the American imagination with German militarism, a connection amplified by Vernon Kellogg’s Headquarters Nights (1917). For William Jennings Bryan, that link supplied a powerful political rationale for driving evolution out of public schools.

Faith and Science After World War II
The GI Bill, the neo-evangelical movement, and organizations like the American Scientific Affiliation opened space for devout Christians to pursue eminent scientific careers — Francis Collins, Ian Hutchinson, Katharine Hayhoe, and others. At the same time, a well-organized Young Earth Creationist subculture emerged, producing parallel institutions and a lasting polarization within the broader evangelical “tent.”

PEOPLE

• Ted Davis — historian of science and religion, Messiah University; episode guest
• Francis Bacon — 17th-century English philosopher; The Advancement of Learning (1605)
• Jonathan Edwards — colonial theologian; counter-Enlightenment strain of evangelical thought
• John Witherspoon — president of the College of New Jersey (Princeton); Scottish Enlightenment influence
• Samuel Miller — New York City Presbyterian minister and early Princeton Seminary professor
• James Ussher — 17th-century Church of Ireland bishop who calculated a creation date of 4004 BC
• John William Draper & Andrew Dickson White — popularizers of the “conflict thesis” after the Civil War
• William Jennings Bryan — populist politician, three-time presidential nominee, anti-evolution campaigner
• Asa Gray — Harvard botanist, Darwin’s first American champion, and a devout Presbyterian
• Vernon Kellogg — Stanford biologist and pacifist; author of Headquarters Nights (1917)
• B. B. Warfield — conservative Calvinist theologian at Princeton Seminary who engaged evolution
• Francis Collins, Ian Hutchinson, Katharine Hayhoe, Joan Centrella — prominent contemporary scientists of faith
• Bernard Ramm — neo-evangelical author of The Christian View of Science and Scripture

BOOKS

• The Advancement of Learning, by Francis Bacon (Henrie Tomes, 1605)
• A Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century, by Samuel Miller (T. and J. Swords, 1803)
• Headquarters Nights, by Vernon Kellogg (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1917)
• The Genesis Flood, by John C. Whitcomb and Henry M. Morris (Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1961)
• The Creationists, by Ronald L. Numbers (Harvard University Press, 2006)
• The Warfare between Science and Religion: The Idea That Wouldn’t Die, edited by Jeff Hardin, Ronald L. Numbers, and Ronald A. Binzley (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018)
• Science, Religion, and the Protestant Tradition, by James C. Ungureanu (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019)
• Process and Providence: The Evolution Question at Princeton, 1845–1929, by Bradley J. Gundlach (Eerdmans, 2013)
• Fundamentalism and American Culture, by George M. Marsden (Oxford University Press, 1980)
• The Christian View of Science and Scripture, by Bernard Ramm (Eerdmans, 1954)
• The Battle for the Bible, by Harold Lindsell (Zondervan, 1976)

Hosts:

JOHN FEA - Visiting Fellow in History, Lumen Center; Distinguished Professor of History, Messiah University

MAGGIE CAPRA - Visiting Instructor in American History, Beloit College

DAN HUMMEL - Director of the Lumen Center; Honorary Research Fellow, University of Wisconsin-Madison

This podcast is brought to you by the Lumen Center and STUDIO, both initiatives of the SL Brown Foundation. 

Find out more about our work:

• slbf.org/lumen-center
• slbf.org/studio

Produced by Daniel Johnson and Dave Conour

Edited by Dave Conour 

Transcript

— Cold open: the popular picture of evangelicals and science, and why it’s mostly a twentieth-century invention

SPEAKER_01 0:11

When most people think about the relationship between evangelical Christianity and science in America, they tend to picture conflict. They picture the scopes trial. They picture school board battles over evolution. They picture a long unbroken tradition of suspicion, faith retreating before the advance of modern science. But that picture, as historians are quick to point out, is almost entirely a product of the 20th century. For much of American history, the relationship between evangelical faith and scientific inquiry looked nothing like that. In this episode, we explore how American evangelicals have understood and sometimes misunderstood, and sometimes fiercely contested, the natural world and the science used to explain it. We begin in the 17th century with a framework that shaped Protestant thinking for more than 200 years: the idea that God had authored two books, Scripture and Nature, and that reading either one carefully was an act of worship. We follow that tradition through the early American Republic, into the upheaval of Darwinism, through the culture wars of the 1920s, and into the complex landscape of evangelical science today. Along the way, we hear from historian Ted Davis from Messiah University, one of the leading scholars of science and religion in American Protestant history. John Fia sat down with Ted for an extended conversation, and throughout this episode, we'll hear clips from that interview. Ted helps us understand why the conflict between evangelicals and science is both older and newer than we might expect, and why the story is far more complicated than either side usually admits. We published the full-length conversation between Ted Davis and John Fia on our YouTube channel. The link is in the show notes. John, Dan, and Maggie referenced some clips that didn't make it into the full episode, so we encourage you to watch Ted and John's full conversation. For most of American history, educated Christians

— The “two books” framework and Francis Bacon: knowledge as a moral obligation oriented toward charity (Ted Davis)

SPEAKER_01 2:08

assumed that God had authored two books, The Bible and the Natural World. To read one was to learn about the other. This idea traces back to the 17th-century English philosopher Francis Bacon, who argued that the pursuit of scientific knowledge was not just intellectually worthy, it was a moral obligation. Knowledge, in Bacon's view, existed to serve humanity, not to glorify the person who possessed it. In the following clip, historian Ted Davis explains how this Baconian framework shaped the way American evangelicals understood science from the very beginning, and why the relationship between faith and inquiry was far more harmonious than we might expect.

SPEAKER_00 2:50

I would say that the overriding conceptual framework was that God had written two books. One of these was the Book of Scripture, and the other the Book of Nature. Now that trope goes all the way back to the patristics. We need not talk about that further here. But in the American context, it's, I believe, strongly influenced by Francis Bacon, the famous 17th century British philosopher. He wrote a book fifteen years, in fact, before the pilgrims landed in Massachusetts, in 1605, called The Advancement of Learning. And in that book he talks about how it's appropriate for a person to be learned, both in the book of nature and the book of God's Word and the Book of God's works is how he puts it. Both nature and scripture. There's a difference in what those books are talking about and how they do it, but there can be some conversation between them is important. That we need to observe an endless progress, he says, of knowledge in both. And the purpose ultimately of that knowledge was charity, caritas. It's not power, as many people criticize Bacon for, it's caritas. He's explicit about that. And he's Pinks thinks that the knowledge we gain from both of these books should not be used for ostentation or self-aggrandizement, but should be used for the charitable benefit of our fellow humans. So that's where Bacon's coming from. He has a strong moral impulse in this. And American science will have that from the beginning: this interest in using science practically to help people. But the conversation between two books can also happen. Bacon is cautious about this. He cautions us not to have them unwisely mingle together is how he puts it. Some of the Americans, I think, do that. They unwisely mingle them together. But this influence that there's these two books, both divinely authored, and that we should read both of these and try to make as much progress as we can of knowledge in both of them. So for our ultimate benefit. He even thinks, of course, that knowledge of the book of nature can be used to help overcome some of the consequences of the fall. We can help restore some of the knowledge we lost when Adam fell.

— Host debrief: postmillennialism, Enlightenment progress, and the antebellum fusion of faith and science

SPEAKER_02 5:10

So one of the things that Ted's comments make me think about, he had that quote that he was attributing, I think, to Bacon, uh Francis Bacon, about endless progress between scripture and sort of science or knowledge of the world. And it made me think too that one of the most important sort of theological parts of particularly early American Christianity is their post-millennialism. This sense that the kingdom of God was something that was actually going to be ushered in through, in part, the work of American Christians. You can see this in people like Jonathan Edwards, certainly later on in the Second Great Awakening as well. And so this idea of endless progress actually fit really well with the way that most American Protestants understood the direction of the world and sort of the way that the Bible even laid out the culmination of history, that these scientific advances, advances in transportation, in communication, in understanding medicine and other areas were actually part of the divine plan that was in part to spread the gospel to the whole world, and these technologies and science would help do that, but also were just part of the intention by God, as particularly Protestants understood the scriptures to say that the kingdom of God would be coming through the work of the church. And particularly for someone like Jonathan Edwards, the new world and the ability to start that work in a much more expansive continent seem to be epochal or cosmic insignificance. So that fits really well with this optimistic view of science that Ted was talking about.

SPEAKER_03 6:51

It also gets at the another way of saying what you just said, Dan, is it it gets at the fusion that really exists in the early 19th century. I mean, you still see this in, say, evangelical colleges today, too, right? In evangelical colleges today, you call this the integration of faith and learning is the mantra that came from Arthur Holmes from Wheaton and, you know, these other thinkers. And here it's it's the integration of the Enlightenment, the Enlightenment view of progress. It doesn't have to be, you don't have to be afraid of it. You don't have to, you know, worry about this progressive agenda that's going to undermine the faith and the attempt to integrate these two things together, right? We could take the best of science and we can take the best of uh Christianity, right? Or we could take Christianity, not the best of, but Christianity as a body of theological belief and knowledge. Ted's trying to get us to not think about the relationship between religion and science in the early 19th century by looking back through the lens of, like, say, the scopes trial, which we'll get to later, right? Where they're completely separate, right? You know, uh evangelicals are anti-intellectual, they're they're anti-scientific. But rather they they clearly celebrated these two books. Now, again, we could talk about whether that's a good idea, the way they fused Enlightenment thinking and evangelical Christianity, right? Those are those are debates which I think we might actually get to here in a few minutes. But clearly there is this integration of kind of faith and science from the beginning. It also sort of says something about the way history moves. It seems like if you asked Ted this, he would probably say that evangelicals and science worked really well together in the 19th century. And then, you know, rejecting this kind of progressive view of history that says like it's always going to be a good relationship, right? But then you get to like scopes and things and it's not. So it's uh yeah, it's an interesting study there and kind of how to think historically about this period and not just to assume, like most, I don't know, maybe I'm stereotyping here, but like maybe some secular people might think that evangelicals are, you know, have always been kind of anti-intellectual, anti-science, anti, right?

— The post–Civil War origins of the “conflict thesis”: Draper, White, and the professionalization of science

SPEAKER_05 9:09

Well, I think one of the key things here is that uh Ted was responding to the question of like the antebellum period, right? Like what's going on before the Civil War, because immediately after the Civil War is where you get this emergence of the conflict thesis, right? Um, you get a couple of really key works that come out, um, and the names of these guys are going to escape me, Draper and White. I think it's Andrew Dixon White, who came from Cornell University, and maybe John Draper. Um, and they wrote right after the Civil War, I think 69 to 73 is when they're out there lecturing on their idea that basically religion and science have always been in conflict. Um, and they're not evangelicals, liberal Protestant, I know, for White, but that has deeply set into the kind of ethos of evangelicals, this idea that, oh no, no, there is a war, right? Like we are battling. Um, and so that is something that um I think historians of science, particularly theistic historians of science, have been really trying to combat for a couple of generations now, that actually that's not true, that there have been plenty of scientists, and I'm assuming Ted Davis would count himself amongst us, like looking at the history and saying, no, the two books thesis was actually the big theme here. So if you're looking at sort of the big trends within the history of science, the fact that before the Civil War, you don't see that kind of conflict thesis the way that you do after the Civil War is really incredible. Yeah. Um, and it also has to do with the professionalization of science as well, which is happening in the 19th century. That many of the folks that would interact with Bacon's ideas would have been more theologians, at least uh on the American side of things. Those thinking in terms of science, they wouldn't have used that term necessarily, but they would have been thinking from a more theological perspective rather than a professional scientific perspective as we would think about science today in the 21st century.

SPEAKER_03 11:06

It really is, it really is, Maggie, right? I appreciate you bringing up that kind of uh historical positioning of the way Ted is responding to this. Everything really does change after the Civil War, right? At least the way the historiography, you know, the way it's explained, right? The influence of modernism, the research university, scientific, you know, professionalization of science, you know, all of these things completely change the conversation. I think maybe the way Ted might put it would be to say uh the book of nature gets too much power, or, you know, or the balance is off, right, between the book of nature and the book of faith or Christianity after the Civil War. It would be interesting, though, to like there's a project, right? You know, I often wonder, like, it's the Civil War becomes such a breaking point in like American evangelical history that in the way I just described. It would be interesting to think about an argument. Is there an argument for like continuity? Right? You know, that would be a historiographical bomb dropped, you know, to suggest like the Civil War, the post-Civil War era. I don't know how you would do that. And maybe this view has been around for long enough for a reason. But yeah.

SPEAKER_05 12:15

One of my favorite things from graduate school is a dear friend of mine was doing his syllabus field, and he named his syllabus for 19th century history, things fall apart. And Ron Numbers, um, who Ted Davis had talked about, very wonderful late historian of science here at UW Madison, was like, you can't name it that. In the 19th century, for science and technology, that's when things came together. And so you had this like religious historian being like things are falling apart, and this historian of science being like, absolutely not. The opposite is true. And that's very interesting.

SPEAKER_03 12:49

That is. I think they do each other pretty well. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 12:54

Just a shout-out on the conflict thesis piece. So there's a there's a historian named James Ugurianu, who actually had a stint here at UW for a while, who wrote a book a few years ago called Science, Religion, and the Protestant Tradition. And what I liked about that is he he really takes a close look at Draper and White. They are the instigators of the conflict thesis. He doesn't debate that, but they're very committed liberal or modernist Protestants. And so when they think of the conflict thesis, it's really not between science or atheism and religion. It's between a certain type of modern religion and then what they consider sort of old-fashioned Catholicism or sort of creedal Protestant. That changes the way we talk about that too, because I think today we think of certainly post early 2000s, we think of the new atheists and they're sort of the people promoting this, and so it's the atheist against the believers in the conflict thesis. But Ungrianu shows that that's not how it started. It started within the Protestant fold. It was sort of visions for how to in John and your way, like which which of these books would have the upper hand in defining Christianity, basically. So anyway, just a shout out to James's work because I think that that helps much more nuance that conversation in the late 19th century because it's gotten so crude in the 20th century talking about that that conflict.

SPEAKER_05 14:12

I was just gonna say another really good, if you're really interested in looking at the conflict thesis is Ron Nubers collection with Jeff Harden, the warfare between science and religion, the idea that wouldn't die. And it's actually a collection of articles specifically looking at the thesis itself and how it lived and was kind of manipulated and changed in different faith communities. So, for example, how did uh evangelicals use the conflict thesis differently over time? How did it manifest for the new atheists? How did it manifest for the Jewish community, et cetera? And it really has lived a thousand lives in both its original intent, draper and white, as you pointed out, but also in the way that people accepted it and then sort of acted in response to it, um, has really shaped the reactions between science and religion really profoundly in the late 19th and 20th centuries in ways that absolutely impact all of us.

— Samuel Miller as a case study in early evangelical resistance; the age of the earth and “deep time” (Ted Davis)

SPEAKER_01 15:04

The harmony between science and faith was never universal. Even in the early 19th century, there were influential Christian voices who viewed the new sciences, particularly geology and natural history, with deep suspicion. Samuel Miller was no backwoods reactionary. He was a highly educated New York City Presbyterian minister who would later become one of the founding professors at Princeton Theological Seminary. And yet, he was alarmed by what he saw as science being weaponized against revealed religion. In this clip, Ted Davis introduces Samuel Miller as a case study in early evangelical resistance and explains what was at stake in debates over the age of the earth.

SPEAKER_00 15:47

The person I would pick out first here would be a New York City Presbyterian minister, Samuel Miller, who was a very learned man. He was a member, in fact, of the American Philosophical Society in downtown Philadelphia. For listeners who are familiar with downtown Philly, it still exists, the American Philosophical Society is about a block from Independence Hall. It was founded by John Bartram and Benjamin Franklin and others in Philadelphia and became effectively the first scientific society in North America. And it the word philosophical then meant what we now would say scientific, because natural philosophy was the closest equivalent to our word science as used in the modern sense. And so Samuel Miller was a member of that group. He was a quite learned man. And in 1801, on the very first day of the 19th century, January 1st, 1801, Miller preached a sermon reflecting upon the century just completed. And about three years later, he published a massive two-volume work, more than a thousand pages, rather oddly called a brief retrospect of the eighteenth century. And he described the eighteenth century as the age of infidel philosophy. And of course, remember philosophy really means something close to science today. And he says, one finds in every age profane and vain babblings and oppositions of science falsely so-called. He, of course, is quoting 1 Timothy 6 20, using that verse as a way of attacking secular science, if you will. In Miller's opinion, never before the eighteenth century had there been so many deliberate and systematic attacks on revealed religion through the medium of pretended science, he says. And he says it was pushed to an atheistical length by some who assumed the name and gloried in the character of philosophers, that is, scientists. So it's false science being promoted. And he really means here early natural history, which begins to challenge the traditional biblical chronology of just a few thousand years for the existence of the earth. By about 1800, anyone really working actively in natural history is fully aware that the earth is a whole lot older than six thousand years, and indeed that there have been creatures on the earth for a long time, longer than humanity, and that second idea gets greatly extended in the 19th century as people begin to find more and more and more of these extinct creatures that existed and died before humans were ever around. So this notion of deep time, as Martin Rudwick, a great historian of geology, has called it, that notion becomes well established by 1800 or not long very after that in America. And so I think that's what Miller is railing against here when he talks about this. Sometimes it's hard to tell exactly what his target is in a given time. So that but he was a very influential person. He became the second professor of theology at Princeton Seminary shortly after it opened in 1812, I believe.

— Host debrief: Edwardsian vs. Princeton strains; Ussher’s chronology and what the “average farmer” believed

SPEAKER_00 18:59

It's a current of thought that's out there. He's not just some Yahoo saying this from the backwoods. Um he's a highly learned, influential New York preacher who becomes a Princeton professor.

SPEAKER_03 19:13

Yeah, I think what Ted is getting at here is a, you know, there really are in the 18th century two kind of streams of how to embrace the scientific revolution and how to embrace the Enlightenment. For lack of a better term, we'll call one a kind of Edwardsian strain, right? Jonathan Edwards and his disciples. This is perhaps best illustrated in the way that Edwards thinks about the idea of virtue, right? He has this huge tome called On the Nature of True Virtue. And he essentially says no one can be truly virtuous unless they have a kind of quote-unquote love of being, right? Capital B. You know, love of God. Virtue only comes through God. But then you have another school of evangelicals. I often associate this with John Witherspoon, the president of the College of New Jersey at Princeton, a leader of evangelical revivals in Scotland. He comes to America in 1768, but very much steeped in the Scottish Enlightenment. So for him, virtue is something that could be practiced in public life without necessarily having a conversion experience, right? You could have a remote republic of a virtuous nation without God, right? So in that sense, we see the influence of the Enlightenment. And Edwards is always pushing against the idea. I use that example because the same thing is happening in science. You have Edwards, who meant, you know, a great intellectual, but essentially a counter-Enlightenment figure, a counter-scientific revolution thinker. He reads all this stuff to counter it, to say, you know, we don't want to push modern learning too far. But then you have this more kind of, I would call it a Princeton strain, very, again, very evangelical, that are willing to embrace, you know, science and make the connections between the Enlightenment and so forth. And I think that is what Ted was talking about in the last excerpt, right? Where you have the two books. That certainly comes out of, and Mark Knoll and others have written about this, the fusion of evangelicalism with the Enlightenment, which I think Edwards would have largely kind of rejected in principle. You know, he would have been much more sort of theologic, wanted to explain these things theologically and so on. So Samuel Miller, I think, is a kind of one of the last Edwardsians, I think, in this case. By looking at the 18th century and seeing science, he sees it as a threat to um true scriptural biblical way of understanding the world, and is really questioning some of the new Enlightenment ideas. So the fact that he gives this sermon in 1801, I think, is really, really telling. You know, he's going to lose in this sense. If the two books thesis of the antebellum period, the way Ted describes it, are correct. I think they are. Miller is like the sort of representing this kind of last gasp of this kind of creative. Christian way of thinking about the world that is soon going to not disappear, but merge with the Enlightenment in the antebellum period.

SPEAKER_02 22:08

I think when I was hearing Ted talk, you know, one of the things that that drew me was the topic that Miller was so worked up about here, which is the age of the earth, or it's sort of this um idea that the earth is only a few thousand years old. And you know, we'll get to talking about that view in evangelicalism in the 20th century called Young Earth Creationism. But I think it's interesting to think that that's not only there's a way that that young earth creationist movement is very m recent, or you could say 20th century. Meggie, I see you holding a book they're called The Creationists, which is by Ron Numbers, and makes this argument that really the creationist movement really comes around in the early 20th century. But for a lot of uh American Christians, they sort of inherited a particular chronology of Earth history that was still really recent, so 6,000 or whatever. I tried never to pass up an opportunity to talk about James Usher, the bishop from the 17th century. And Usher was one of the many sort of pre-Enlightenment, but wanted to rationalize the Bible in a certain way. And so he meticulously tried to count how many years going by the biblical narrative did so-and-so live and so-and-so live, and sort of count that up. And so he created a timeline that went back to the year 4004 BC. And I believe it was like October 10th was creation day of 4004 BC. Um, but this this was a bishop in the Church of England, and this was he was a very respected person at the time. And so this was sort of just the chronology of Earth's history that was passed down generation to generation without much critical thinking to it until you get the natural history philosophers or scientists really interrogating that, doing geological research and so forth, and starting to undermine that in the 18th century. I think Miller's really responding to that. Like there's this sort of tradition instituted by church leaders in large part, um, of a way of thinking about the age of the earth and how, you know, in some ways how special the earth is. It's not that old. God just created it a few thousand years ago. You know, this is even before the theory of evolution is really on the scene. But this idea of, well, if it's millions of years old, or at least many much older, sort of what does that do to the traditional way of understanding the Bible and then how God works in the world? And I think that that we'll touch on that a few more points, but that that really gets at the nub of what evangelicals are struggling with when they confront scientific theories like Darwinism and later theories as well, that seem to go against the sort of plain reading or the commonsensical reading of the biblical text, or these questions of what do I do then with the Bible? That is sort of the the bigger intellectual mistakes. But I want to mention Usher there because it's not just a 20th century invention that the earth is is very young. It's something that I'm sure someone's sort of thought about this, but I don't know how often the average 19th century Christian thought about this at all. Uh sort of this is something that comes into our minds a lot because we're a much more scientific culture and we have these debates that have a lot of cultural stakes to them. But had you asked an average farmer in Virginia in the year 1800, most likely he or she would have said something like 6,000 years old, probably inherited some of this Usher uh tradition. But that's really coming into the fore and then having to be contested here in the uh at the turn of the 19th century.

SPEAKER_03 25:28

Yeah, Miller's really an 18th-century figure, even though he's writing in 1801, right? He's summarizing.

— William Jennings Bryan and theistic evolution: “the anesthetic that deadens the pain…” (Ted Davis)

SPEAKER_01 25:36

By the 1920s, the question was no longer simply whether science and faith could coexist. It was whether Christians who tried to reconcile the two were doing more harm than good. William Jennings Bryan, a populist politician and three-time presidential candidate, was one of the most prominent voices against the teaching of evolution in American public schools. But his objections weren't only scientific, they were theological. For Bryan, theistic evolution was a form of Christianity that had quietly abandoned the faith it claimed to defend. In this clip, Ted Davis walks through Bryan's arguments, including one of the most memorable lines in the entire history of the science and religion debate.

SPEAKER_00 26:20

William Jennings Bryan, though, believed all that Baconian stuff about science, and so did many of his friends, and many Americans, ordinary Americans, did. But in addition, Bryan believed that what was called theistic evolution, a term Bryan uses all the time and always with derision, that particular term has referred since at least the eighteen seventies to efforts to mingle evolution in biology with traditional Christian theology, and by the nineteen twenties, often with non-traditional Christian theology, theology that even denied the divinity of Jesus, the resurrection, the inspiration of Scripture, and the transcendence of God. There's very many forms of this theistic evolution that evolved, if you will, over the years, especially on the liberal side, these theologically very liberal views of God and nature that are often tied closely with evolution. But Brian thinks evolution is not only false, but theistic evolution is even more dangerous because it pretends to be Christianity. And he says theistic evolution, he says, is the anaesthetic that deadens the pain while the patient's faith is being removed. That's how he puts it. So theistic evolution is bad news.

— Host debrief: Bryan as populist and pop-culture figure; social Darwinism and the critique of Gilded Age capitalism

SPEAKER_05 27:42

Any conversation about William Jennings Bryan is always going to be fascinating because he was such a multifaceted individual. And he was really a pop culture figure at the turn of the 20th century. And I think we've kind of lost that a little bit in our understanding of him. He's known as the Great Commoner. I just came across an article flipping through old issues of Christianity today from 1975. So it was like the 50th anniversary scopes retrospective that Christianity Today did. And they were trying to reclaim Brian as a big hero because of his progressive politics, and he was a hero to rural America, et cetera. But one of the things that I think Ted Davis is getting to in this segment is that he was also really good at speaking to the common person and their fears. And so situating Brian as a post-World War I figure who was dealing with a modern America that was terrifying to most Americans, and putting the blame for all of this modern thinking, philosophy, technology on evolution. Like that became the scapegoat for it all, is really, I think, a central way of understanding where fundamentalists are coming from in the 1920s.

SPEAKER_02 28:59

Yeah, maybe one more thing to throw on that is what's Brian responding to. In part, it's the advance of Darwinian thinking in not just in science proper, but in like all parts of the university. And I think Brian associated Darwinism with social Darwinism. Well, this idea that if it's survival of the fittest out in nature, well, maybe that's how it works in society as well. And that was just a you know, that was a William Graham Sumner was another was a sort of a figure in the late 19th century who was sort of making this case that Darwin actually shows us sort of the the laws of how the economy should work as well and should be survival of the fittest. So so that's something Brian's connecting a lot of dots here, and it's not just this scientific theory that happens to explain how species you know develop and and we get new species, but that there's a deeper sinister logic to that that's undermining for him Christian values, values of charity, of equality, caring for the poor. You know, if you're in a truly Darwinian situation, then the poor deserve what they get, and there's no real room for the beatitudes to function there. So I think that's that's one thing just to think about is Brian was not a scientist. I mean that that's very evident at the Scopes trial, where that's sort of the major embarrassment is that he can't answer some pretty basic questions posed to him about interpreting the Bible or about contemporary science in the 1920s, but he's not really in it for the science proper. He's in it for what he sees as the implications of that for the broader society.

SPEAKER_03 30:29

Yeah, and this is his this is his populism. You know, he's the great prairie populist of the late 19th century. And, you know, it's starting to happen now among historians, but the the connection, you know, most historians haven't been particularly interested in how to connect his kind of political leanings in the again, uh, it's probably this is unfair, probably what I'm saying, but it's an interesting thing to talk about how his political leanings in the late 19th century when he runs for president, well, he runs as a Democrat, but the part of the populist party, which eventually gets co-opted by the Democrats by the time of the election of 92, 1892, I think it is, or 96.

SPEAKER_05 31:06

He ran three times.

SPEAKER_03 31:07

Um, yeah, he runs four times, actually.

SPEAKER_05 31:09

Well, okay.

SPEAKER_03 31:10

But um 96 is the cross of gold speed. Yeah, right. The cross of gold speed. So, you know, if you think of even if you think of like big corporate kind of capitalism as a marking of social Darwinism, right? Only the strongest survive, right? And and Carnegie and Rockefeller, these people are the strongest, you know. So this social Darwinism explains why they've risen to such wealth and power within uh the sort of Gilded Age and then into the 20th century. This is what, you know, as a populist, he wants to defend the sort of ordinary farmer, and they're getting trampled on by these people. And so, yeah, it's a really interesting connection between his political convictions and his uh and his performance or his interest in evolution and the scopes trial and things. So it's not a really much of a scientific thing for him, you know, as you pointed out, Dan. It's about, you know, a critique of kind of capitalist progress and what that does to the dignity of ordinary people. In that sense, I think at least it's a very, you know, there's a certain Christian dimension to that.

SPEAKER_05 32:14

And I think another thing um that Ted is kind of highlighting here is that there were real attacks on Orthodox Christianity coming out of the modernist segment of society, right? I mean, if you look at things like the virgin birth, like that is truly very central uh to Orthodox Christian belief. And that was one of the ones that was on the chopping block for a lot of modernist Christians. And so we wouldn't connect that theology today to anti-creationism or evolution. Like you believe in evolution, therefore you somehow deny the virgin birth of Christ. But that was one of this kind of um, you know, Satan's triangle of modernist teaching. I mean, that's a quote from uh an article in the Moody Bible Monthly in the 1920s. And so that central connection that all modernist theology has this kind of root in Darwinian thinking, um, and that is going to sweep through American culture and corrupt America's youth. And I think to Brian's point, and what a lot of the fundamentalists are arguing, it's based on bad science. Like they think that this is all going to fall apart because it's just a theory, right? That it's not something that, in their view, is true science. And of course, Brian isn't a scientist. And you do have scientists who have more Christian leanings who are complicating that story in the 1920s, but they're not the ones that are the great speakers or the great writers, and they certainly don't have the attention of the fundamentalists in the 1920s. And so that idea that evolution isn't even true science is something that's circulating in those conservative evangelical circum uh circles post-World War I.

SPEAKER_03 33:58

Another interesting thing on this is the whole what you were talking about earlier, Dan, about post-millennialism. Because clearly, if you merge like post-millennialism and enlightenment progress in the way that we're talking about in the antebellum period, Darwin's kind of skeptical of that merger. They both have a trajectory, an understanding of the way history is moving. And maybe in the antebellum period, right, they were going hand in hand. They were working together. Now you see Jennings Bryan saying, well, yeah, history's moving, you know, towards the eschaton or whatever, but not with this social Darwinist progress kind of thing. Like I'm rejecting that. So maybe there, I don't know, I'm not a historian of science, but maybe there's a pulling apart now of what we saw in the antebellum period between the way most of the antebellum period scientists, evangelical scientists didn't have any problem with the two being fused. And now we definitely see two different views of history, of the movement of history and the movement of time. You know, and what is social Darwinism other than a kind of enlightenment modern way of thinking about where history is moving?

SPEAKER_02 35:03

You know, Darwinism, or at least taken outside of its scientific and moved into the social, people who would talk about Darwinism do believe in progress in the sense that species get better or more fit. But it's a very, you know, messy process. It's a violent process. It's one where most of the, you know, these are you know debates that happen much later, but like most of the suffering of creatures is not actually contributing to the progress. And you can just imagine that this is a much different way of thinking about progress than an antebellum way, and it would map on to your understanding of like God's kingdom or the millennium. You know, that millennium coming about through the process of evolution is just a very messy way of thinking about how God works in the world versus a more, you know, you could say simple, but but more direct reading of, say, Genesis 1 and 2, where it seems like God sets up creation to be very complementary to each other, and it's not a survival of the fittest picture that most Christians get out of that. So yeah, it even complicates just there there might be a sense of forward movement with the annabellum view of progress and the Darwinian view, but the ways that it that that movement happens are much different and cause a lot of consternation among people.

SPEAKER_03 36:13

I think we're gonna get to, I think we're gonna get to this discussion of World War I here coming up too, which which plays right into that kind of well, is progress really working? Right kind of

— “Common sense” science, populism, and higher criticism of the Bible (including the documentary hypothesis)

SPEAKER_03 36:23

question.

SPEAKER_02 36:23

Yeah. Right. Well, one last thing I want to mention um with what Maggie was talking about was this is something Ted talked about in a part of the interview that we're not playing for you, but this idea of like what is science and how by the 1920s, evangelicals or fundamentalists have they have a view of science. They're not they they don't understand themselves to be anti-science, but they're they're using a definition of science that we often call the common sense traditions definition. And and common sense is a word we just use in our language, but it means if you capitalize it, common sense, it's referring to a particular way of thinking about knowledge that is usually attributed to the Scottish Enlightenment. So one of the many sort of sub-views of the Enlightenment. And in the common sense view of science, and I'm I'm just quoting here from Ted, only what we can commonsensically see in nature is actual scientific fact. And by commonsensically see, it's it's using my eyes, my ears, my nose. If the average person can observe it, then it's a fact. If they can't, then it's mere conjecture. And so the theory of Darwinism is conjecture for people who believe this is science. It's not actual science. Now, by this time, for other scientists, they've moved beyond this definition of science or they've added to it. And hypotheses are a very important part of science, and there's a technical word way where a hypothesis isn't just something you think is true, it's something that you've actually tested, but you don't have a certain level of proof to be able to follow the law or something like that. But this is a big just difference on defining science. And so the fundamentalist people like Brian are really holding to this common sense view of science. And it's also it ties into the populism as well. Yeah, it's about to say that. Yeah. Yeah, it's it's about sort of what can the common person know. If it requires a PhD to know it, then it's probably not true, um, is sort of the populist way of thinking of it. It's probably too intellectual or something like that. So that's also um feeding into here is is both sides are claiming to be scientific. Um, and I think we we heard that with Miller in the last one too, you know, sort of so-called science and and things like that. Neither the opponents of evolution or the proponents are claiming to be anti-science. It's their definitions over what is true science. Both see themselves as modern, as people embracing, in some sense, the Enlightenment, or at least the parts of the Enlightenment that are about we can know a lot about the world through our senses, but they're very they're defining science differently and then coming into conflict.

SPEAKER_03 38:49

Are we talking here about the 19th, early 20th century? Are we talking about like 2020, COVID and vaccines and right? You know, it's amazing how you know you could have lifted Dan that what you just said and placed it in a 2020 context about what's true science and these kinds of things, and it would have been the same, still, still is relevant.

SPEAKER_02 39:08

And there's something too about, I mean, the reason why something like evolution doesn't mat meet the definition of common sense science is because it happens so slowly over a long period of time that none of us can observe evolution happening in that way. I think there's something to that about vaccines or or pandemics. It's like this is a lot in the the microscopic world or the world that we can't observe. And so we're having to take the word of experts as like this is what's really happening. And there's a level of skepticism there where it's like, well, if I can't see it, or or if it's like not something I can check out personally, I'm gonna have a higher level of skepticism because I'm I have a certain sense of of what is true knowledge.

SPEAKER_04 39:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 39:47

And evangelicals, maybe not in the early 19th century, if Ted's right, but they have a long history of gravitating towards these kind of populist, anti-intellectual, common sense views, not only science, but of the world.

SPEAKER_05 40:00

Well, one way that this plays a role back in the 1920s is in the idea of biblical interpretation more broadly, because one of the other big tenets of modernism is higher criticism of the Bible, which is the idea that these experts, right, and evangelicals, particularly conservative evangelicals at the time, are getting increasingly skeptical of experts because they're starting to attack the most central component to their life, which is the Bible. Uh, and they're coming in and they're saying, no, we have to apply our intellect to the Bible, put it under our authority. It's the major idea behind higher criticism. And that I think actually makes the fundamentalist position on evolution more rigid. Because, like in the original fundamental papers that were published, there was actually a pretty amenable pro-harmony view of, well, maybe the Bible isn't actually talking about as a textbook on science. Like that could be fine. Um, that's virtually gone from the fundamentalist movement 10 years later because they've become more rigid on how to read the Bible, I think, in response to these kinds of criticisms to the type of basic common sense reading that they believe is so central, because if this is the book given to them by God for their salvation, he would want a common person to be able to gain true.

SPEAKER_02 41:15

The perspicuity of scripture is the sort of doctrinal uh view that it it is uh discernible by any reader. Yeah, and I think actually that the way that we've been talking about the idea of like hypotheses being not true science, and that that's another way that you can see the resistance to higher criticism. Um, the the big thesis at this time, and it's still, I think, uh active, is the documentary hypothesis of at least parts of the Old Testament. Julius Vellhausen was the German scholar of the I think it's the 19th century, where he came up with this thesis that actually in in say the book of Genesis, it's not just one person writing, it's actually at least four different competing agendas that are in the text, and you can parse verses and say, well, this verse you know affirms a certain view of Israel or or of a certain patriarch. And so that verse goes to the priestly writer, and another one is the Deuteronomist writer, and another there's there's two other writers. And so this is basically saying, like, don't believe your eyes when you're reading the Bible. Like you think this is a you know sort of smooth narrative that starts with the creation, goes to the flood, and then goes to Joseph. But what you see, you know, behind that is this like, you know, all this history and this way of like basically saying the text isn't really about the story that that is being told. It's about this political story or the story of the nation of Israel and all these factions. It's another one where you're having to take that on authority, on expert authority, because that is not apparent to the average, certainly English reader. I mean, a lot of this would be going back to the original languages, which which most Americans um don't have in any case. But um, but it's another case of a sort of populism or a sense of that's not what I see, against a, well, you know, there's an expertise here that is going to tell you something that you can't observe, but you just need to, you know, sort of trust that it's true. So whether we're talking about Darwinism or biblical criticism, there's the same dynamic there that's creating the similar tensions between evangelicals and the culture.

SPEAKER_03 43:16

And we will have an episode coming up on the Bible where I think we'll revisit some of these ideas about common sense thinking, common sense realism. Yeah, good thoughts.

SPEAKER_01 43:26

Before we continue on with this episode of American Evangelicals, a history podcast, I wanted to remind you that the entire

— Asa Gray, Darwin’s first American champion, and a traditional Christian faith (Ted Davis)

SPEAKER_01 43:34

conversation between historian John Fiat and our friend Ted Davis is available on our YouTube channel. Just click the link in the show notes for more. Now let's continue on together on this journey, talking about faith and science. It is tempting to read the history of evangelicals and science as a story of inevitable conflict, a long retreat from engagement with the natural world. But the historical record is consistent. Considerably more complicated. Asa Gray was a botanist at Harvard, one of the most eminent scientists in 19th century America, and a close correspondent of Charles Darwin. In fact, the first person to champion Darwin's ideas in the United States. He was also a devout, creed-affirming Presbyterian who saw no contradiction between his faith and his science. In this clip, Ted Davis profiles Gray in his own words and explains why his example continues to challenge easy assumptions about what evangelicals have or haven't been willing to believe.

— The Scopes Trial reframed: evolution, German militarism, and Vernon Kellogg’s Headquarters Nights (Ted Davis)

SPEAKER_01 44:34

The Scopes trial of 1925 is often treated as a collision between religion and science, a story of faith refusing to yield to evidence. But the actual history is more politically entangled than that framing suggests. By the early 1920s, evolution had become associated in the American popular imagination not just with atheism, but with German militarism. A widely read book by biologist Vernon Kellogg claimed that the officers of the German High Command had used Darwinian logic to justify the conquest of weaker nations. For William Jennings Bryan, that argument provided a powerful political rationale for intensifying his campaign against evolution in American schools. In this clip, Ted Davis traces that largely forgotten connection and reframes the anti-evolution movement as something more than a simple rejection of modern science.

SPEAKER_00 45:29

Now there had been in the 19th century some very important, I would say, conservative Protestant leaders, theologically conservative, people who believed in the truth of the Bible, the miracles of Christ, the divinity of Christ, the resurrection, things like this, who had also thought evolution was true. A few of the prominent names, the most prominent would be Asa Gray, a botanist at Harvard, an exact contemporary of Darwin, who reviews Darwin's Origin of Species very favorably the year after it comes out in 1860. And he even thought it was consistent with higher views of design. But I don't want to go too far with that. I simply want to point out that Asa Gray was an eminent scientist who was a traditional Christian. As a young man, Gray was a religious skeptic. And then he went to medical school in New York and he took rooms with a new school Calvinist named John Tory, who was a botany professor. And the Tory family, their lives, their words, their ideas deeply influenced Asa Ray. He converted to New School Presbyterianism from skepticism and indeed remained a new school Presbyterian the rest of his life, even though there was not a new school church in Cambridge, where Harvard is, and so he attended a congregational church, which was closer to where he was coming from. He was, you know, he was this devout Christian, but he had a different view of theology, if you will, than traditional uh many other traditional Christians in America. In his view, Christianity let well let me quote something from him. In 1880, Gray gave two lectures to the divinity students at Yale, and here is what he said. He said, I accept Christianity on its own evidence, and I'm yet to learn how physical or any other science, here he means natural science, using the Greek word physis, learn how physical or any other science conflicts with it any more than it conflicts with simple theism. I take it that religion is based on the idea of a divine mind, capital D, capital N, revealing himself to intelligent creatures for moral ends. And Gray says that revelation, meaning scripture, culminated, he says, in the advent of a divine person, capital D, capital P, who being made man, manifested the divine nature, capital D, capital N, in union with the human. And this manifestation constitutes Christianity. That's how Gray put it. And the incarnation, he goes on to say, was the crowning miracle, attended by other miracles that he also accepted. So in that way, Gray was able, I would say, consistently to affirm his acceptance of Darwin's ideas alongside his faith in Christ. Even a very traditional faith, to quote him again, whose essential contents were briefly summed up in the Apostles and Nicene Creeds. So there you have a classical Christian, Asa Gray, who's the first Darwinian in the United States. He knows about Darwin's ideas before anybody else in America because he corresponds with Darwin for several years before they're published and applies them to his own ideas about botany in North America. How is it that we have so many plants in North America that look like look similar to East Asian plants? He wants to know what the answer to that is. And he finds the answer in Darwin. So, you know, we have that. But by the 1920s, Gray and any others prominent leaders who had endorsed evolution and Orthodox faith in the 19th century, anybody else like that is dead.

unknown 49:08

B.

SPEAKER_00 49:08

B. Warfield is dead, Gray is dead, there's others out there as well. But those folks are all dead, and here you suddenly have the appearance of this German idea, the idea in the 19th century in the 20th century, in the early 20th century, evolution becomes associated with Germany more than with England because of the fact that the world's leading authority on evolution as a worldview is Ernst Heppel, a German biologist. And they associate that with Germany, and they also associate it with Germany because during World War I there were publications in America promoting the idea that evolution was used by German thinkers to undergird their idea of military conquest, that ultimately World War I was based on practical Darwinism, if you will. It's the law of nature that Germany should dominate, and it's just natural then for Germany to want to do that. So that idea was promoted by some Germans, and especially it was promoted in America by a fear of this, was promoted by a great biologist from Stanford, Vernon Kellogg. Vern was an evolutionist, he was also a pacifist, and he, when America was not yet involved in World War I, which it means before 1917, he went to Belgium and France with his former student, Herbert Hoover, who of course was a Quaker, and was involved in relief efforts, humanitarian relief efforts in Germany and Belgium. Kellogg was billeted at the headquarters of the German High Command. He had been educated for his doctorate in Germany. He was fluent in German. He spoke to these officers, many of whom had been university professors, and he presents a persona of these people, a collective persona of them, in a book called Headquarters Knights in 1917. The foreword was written by Theodore Roosevelt, urging Americans to be aware of this idea. And he says in there that the Germans basically are cutthroat Darwinians. That's what World War I is about. And he's really, his pacifism is being challenged by this. He ends up confessing that he thinks it's going to take actual force to stop them, that arguments alone aren't going to do it. So Brian reads this book, and that gets him really lights a fire under him to get going against the teaching of evolution in America. He's never believed evolution's true. He's thought it's anti-Christian from the get-go, but now he's got a huge political reason to want to oppose it. And he wants to get it out of the schools. So he takes advantage of this idea and trumpets this all over the place. A lot of other fundamentalist leaders do the same thing with this idea.

— Host debrief: B. B. Warfield, Ron Numbers, and Princeton’s “turning the guns” on Darwinism

SPEAKER_03 52:05

It fascinates me that there were evangelicals. I mean, he I think Ted goes out of his way to make sure he's a gray by talking about his new light Presbyterian roots, right? That he wasn't evangelical. He was on the evangelical side of the Presbyterian church in the 19th century. But it's interesting to see that there were, even, even I believe some of the authors of the fundamentals embraced evolution. B.B. Warfield, I thought he would say actually say more about, but Asa Gray, I guess, to him is a better example of this. Yeah, so again, this whole kind of narrative of evangelicals not being in tune to science and so forth, I think he's trying to debunk this, right?

SPEAKER_02 52:46

Another Ron Numbers book to call out is uh Darwin Comes to America, where he tracks how Darwin is received by Americans. And of course, Asa Gray is a big part of that story, but he's certainly not the only professing Christian, public Christian, who is trying to merge these things together. It's it's sort of a pretty significant attempt. And I think one of the things Numbers is doing in that is much like trying to push back against the conflict thesis, is trying to push back against this idea that the only people who accepted Darwinism or something were the atheists or the agnostics, that it was actually much more complicated than that. And that you have or these couple generations. So we're talking like the late 19th century, the early 20th century, there's a few generations of thinkers, of scientists, of theologians who are not seeing the conflict like many would at the time. There were certainly many people opposed to Darwinism right off the bat, and who today don't see as much of a conflict between them. So there's definitely a way that history helps us understand when this idea crystallizes that Darwinism and Christianity are exact opposites from each other.

SPEAKER_03 53:56

Another really good resource on all of this, especially on B.B. Warfield, who was this conservative Calvinist theologian at Princeton Seminary in the late 19th century, is um a book by Bradley Gundlack on uh Warfield Process and Providence, the evolution question at Princeton, 1845 to 1929. It gets into Charles Hodge, James McCosh, all of these kind of conservative Presbyterians who were um playing around with, if you will, and some embracing the doctrine of evolution. And of course, these would have been the people that people, fundamentalists like Jay Gresham Machin, studied under, you know, as he becomes prominent in the 20s in the fundamentalist movement.

SPEAKER_05 54:41

Yeah, it's interesting because he wrote the essay on evangelicals in that book that I brought up earlier on the warfare between science and religion.

SPEAKER_03 54:48

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 54:49

And he talks about Princeton quite a bit in the post-Civil War era. And one of the things that he talks about is that the Princetonians really embraced this kind of military metaphor after the Civil War of being embattled, but that they wanted to turn the guns. It's a quote that actually I think came from Thomas Henry Huxley. And in doing so, they sent a lot of their brightest students to Europe to be trained under Darwinian scientists, but with a Christian mindset. So the hope was that they would come back and be able to use science for the Christian faith in a kind of Christian offensive. And so he talks a little bit about that, that military metaphor and how that played into uh Princetonian. Interesting languages well before the fundamentalist controversy. Um so yeah, definitely an interesting look at the relationship there, but that it didn't cause them to reject the ideas, but instead to look into them and hopefully, in their mind, reform them uh in a Christian mindset.

— Progress, World War I, and Woodrow Wilson’s postmillennial vision; the Leopold–Loeb trial and the Scopes context

SPEAKER_02 55:45

Just to bring back this idea of progress and World War I in particular. So there's an interesting way where we've set up there's there's these competing understandings of progress. There is this way that is maybe more lends itself to a sort of linear, the the kingdom is coming, and Christians are supposed to be part of bringing it in, and America is part of that story. And then there's the more Darwinian way where there's a lot of struggle to get toward progress. And I think this is actually really active during World War I. One of the reasons why so many American Christians are wanting to link Germany with Darwinism. Woodrow Wilson, who's the president of the U.S. during World War I, is probably one of the more overtly religious presidents we've ever had. And he was a post-millennialist. He was a very active Presbyterian his whole life. And he was famous for saying he wanted to wage the war to end all wars, to bring in something like that millennial kingdom, the peace promised in the Bible. And he had a lot of supporters in American Christianity. Shaler Matthews at the University of Chicago was a main one, a theologian there. And Matthews was one of the people I'm sure Ted was thinking of when he was thinking about how a lot of uh Americans associated Germany with Darwinism. And you can think about there's sort of the American view of progress, which is democracy. We are going to spread democracy, people are going to get empowered, they're going to get rights, and this is going to be the way, in a Christian sense, the way the kingdom of God will come on earth. And then you have the opposing German view, which is through military conquest, through survival of the fittest, the Germans are going to usher in their world order. And so I think for a lot of uh American Christians, this was how they understood the war in some sense. Was it a vision of progress? And is progress going to come through peace and democracy, or is it going to come through authoritarianism and militarism? And that anyway, that just takes our story up and sort of links up the sort of the more particular story about science and how scientific ideas are being talked about, with the way that people like Brian get activated by the war to be anti-Darwinian, but also people that are like Shaler Matthews or Woodrow Wilson are thinking through this Darwin question in a much different way as well.

SPEAKER_03 57:57

Yeah, George Marston actually stresses in his book, Fundamentalism in American Culture, actually comes at this a different way, not a way that contradicts what Ted is saying, but it's this idea of higher criticism of the Bible that's coming out of German universities. It's really two sides of the same coin, right? I mean, but but here Ted is emphasizing the more Darwinian science dimension as opposed to the biblical criticism dimension. Although, of course, right, the biblical criticism dimension is rooted in this kind of social Darwinistic kind of understanding of how to interpret a text and you know all the all the critical ways of doing it. So uh, you know, it's just the nuance, I think, from the Marsden story there, right? That that he brings in this Kellogg and this discussion of evolution being associated with Germany rather than the higher criticism like von Harnach, I think, and others who are promoting this critique of the inspiration of the Bible.

SPEAKER_05 58:53

And I've said this before, and I'll say it again. One of the key things to understand in the Scopes trial is you have to understand the Leopold Loeb trial from 1924, the year before. Where you had two young teenage boys who had read Nietzsche, a German philosopher, and had taken it upon themselves to be the Ubermensch and kill a classmate because they thought that they were smart enough to get away with it. Within a week they were caught, they were not smart enough to get away with it. Um, but that trial was extraordinarily famous, and Clarence Darrow was the lawyer who prevented them from getting the death penalty. And his argument was that it wasn't completely their fault because they had been corrupted by Nietzschean philosophy. In that way, it was kind of the school's fault. And that was what Bryan really wanted to go after in his closing speech in the Scopes trial, but he was never able to give that speech because the trial ended early. But this kind of fear of what is being taught in the school, not necessarily as much about what is true as much as what kind of havoc can it wreak upon our youth. And that kind of and it's it's a very different question and a very different impetus for the fight against evolution than just this fight over ideas. But the fight over impact, particularly impact on children, it really can't be overstated, I think, in understanding what was going on in a scope's trial.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:18

We have come at this from we've said a full in terms of the disciplines, right? We have a philosophical, we have a scientific, we have a biblical studies dimension here, all informed by this kind of social Darwinianism, the Enlightenment, you know, these kinds of things. That's good, Mangie.

— Post–WWII shift: the GI Bill, the American Scientific Affiliation, and Christian scientists today (Ted Davis)

SPEAKER_01 1:00:35

After World War II, something shifted in the relationship between American evangelicalism and the scientific community. The GI Bill opened the doors of universities to generations of students who might never have attended, including large numbers of evangelicals. Some of them pursued advanced degrees in the sciences, rose to positions of eminence, and kept their faith along the way. Today, the idea that a serious scientist might hold traditional Christian beliefs is no longer surprising. But that was not always the case. Organizations like the American Scientific Affiliation, founded just before the United States entered World War II, played an important role in building a community where rigorous science and orthodox faith were understood as compatible. In this clip, Ted Davis names some of the most prominent scientists who have navigated that combination and explains what their careers reveal about how much the landscape has changed.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:32

Most famous example for in that group would be Francis Collins. Everybody pretty much knows who he is, and of course, he's an adult convert from atheism to believing in Jesus as his savior and has risen from the dead, traditional Christian views, traditional evangelical views, and he also was highly eminent in science, as the indeed the uh person who brought the human genome project to completion, among many, many other things that he did, important things that he did in his career. He's among the most highly cited scientists in the world. His citation index is something like 250, which is an enormously high number. And people who are who know what that means will know what that means. There's many others as well. For example, Ian Hutchinson of MIT, British born, but an American, he was a Methodist uh lay reader, and he sings in a church choir with a beautiful voice, and he also is the leader of the plasma physics project at MIT, from which he's recently retired. But he's one of the most eminent people in the world in his field. Also his equivalent at Princeton, Bob Caeda, also in um nuclear physics. And Bob is a very traditional Christian, and you have people of this kind, or someone someone in astrophysics, someone like Joan Centrella, one of the premier gravitational wave experts in the world. And she's she is an adult convert to Christianity who led a Bible study when she was at Drexel University, and then also when she continued for NASA as a scientist. People like this, or Catherine Hayhoe, distinguished climate scientist, whose husband's an evangelical pastor in Texas. You know, you have people like this out there in large, large numbers, who no one like them existed in the public sphere in the 1920s. So that things have changed dramatically since World War II.

— Host debrief: the Young Earth Creationist movement, The Genesis Flood, and parallel 01:09:44 — Neo-evangelicalism, Bernard Ramm, inerrancy, and the contested space for science within evangelicalism

SPEAKER_00 1:03:21

Partly because I think Protestantism has changed dramatically since World War II as well. There are far more churches today in which a person can hold different views of creation than they would have been allowed to hold back in the 1920s in churches that actually believe and teach the Bible. That's partly where the change has occurred, but also it's partly among the scientific community itself.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:44

So one thing I was thinking about when Ted was listing all those names was, you know, obviously he's right, there's a lot of public Christian scientists that just weren't around, as he makes a point in another part of this interview, weren't around in the 50s and 60s in the same way. But I also think that the other side of the coin, if if exactly the other side, is the the young earth creationist movement, is also quite well organized in a way that is an interesting history in itself and really starts in the 1920s. And, you know, there's a famous book in the 1960s called The Genesis Flood that claims that the flood, as recounted in Genesis 6, happened just a few thousand years ago and covered the whole earth. And it was by two fundamentalist Christians, but they were marshalling scientific evidence to make their claim. And since then, there's just been a whole host of institutions that have promoted that view. Um the Creation Museum in Kentucky is a really prominent one. There's multiple creation centers around the country, often connected like churches that really care about this issue. There's also the intelligent design movement, which is not exactly the same thing but comes out of the same subculture. And so while you have a lot of scientists who are openly Christian, you also have a very organized alternate, depending on where you want to land, of a very well-developed young earth creationist world that has its own journals and its own way of talking about this that is not necessarily beholden to the mainstream scientific consensus. And you know, that that's a microcosm of a lot of our culture where there are alternate views on a lot of mainstream science things. We've already mentioned public health in the 2020s would be another example. But that's all to say there is an interesting way where both sides, or you could say multiple sides, have developed really robust subcultures or or views over the last 50 years. So it's not just the triumph of one view over another, it's actually the polarization into almost separate echo chambers where people talk. Not that they're equal, but uh they're separate.

SPEAKER_03 1:05:53

Well, I think this is I asked Ted about this, and it didn't make the cut for our snippets from him. But yeah, I mean, I think if you listen To this podcast up until this point, at least, you are thinking that there were the, you know, we're talking in the kind of professional science, you know, the way it develops as a profession and the university and so forth, and how that merges with evangelicalism and the two books, and and then you hear about Francis Collins and Catherine Hayho and so forth. But it is worth noting that under the evangelical tent, so to speak, there is a lot of disagreement. And, you know, the young earth creationists, the Genesis flood, the, you know, uh Whitcomb and Morris kind of books, you know, which as late as like the late 1980s, or may 85, 86, mid-80s, you know, I was reading as a as a student at at Philadelphia College of Bible, now known as Cairn University, we were assigned Whitcomb and Morris, you know, in those classes. So uh so it's a much bigger, broader tent than granted, Collins and Hay-ho and Hutchinson and these guys are doing uh these people are doing great, great work in the kind of field of integrating science and faith. But it's it's if we want to talk about evangelicalism as a kind of large m larger movement, there's still a lot of the stuff you're talking about, Dan, the young earth stuff going on. I think that's worth remembering because I think the through line, a lot of the through line in this episode has been on the ways in which evangelicals have gravitated towards some might call good science or professional science or university academic kind of science.

SPEAKER_05 1:07:30

I think one of the intriguing things about this is the way that it just feeds into the entire evangelical subculture, right? Like I just I can't help but think about homeschooling when I was homeschooled. And the fact that if you look at younger creationism and the connection that it has to homeschooling curriculum, that also has impacted generations of evangelicals since the kind of flourishing of that homeschool movement. And again, it's not necessarily just about what the science says, it's also about the posture of what the science teaches kids about their relationship with the world. And I think that's the thing that homeschooling parents often fear with secular science textbooks is that they're going to be indoctrinating their kids with something that, in their view, is antithetical to faith. And I think that the new atheists have really had a lot to do with that, particularly in the last 30 years or so. This idea that there has been an increase of pressure against faith in this in the world of science. I teach on the culture wars, and so the kind of attacks of new atheism on any person of faith, including Francis Collins. Like he was a very controversial figure to be the director of the NIH because he was a person of devout faith. Sam Harris didn't care that he was someone who was a theistic evolutionist. He cared that he was theistic and said this is a bad idea. And so any kind of faith for those who are writing books like The God Delusion and things like that is going to be problematic. So you have also this new factor in the 21st century that is, I think, informing a lot of evangelicals, which is that, at least in the way that the marketing of this book is teaching them, science hates us because we believe in God. Science thinks we're stupid because we believe in a God. And that's also out there in the narrative and the culture wars, I think, polarize people in that as well. And so you have folks like Hey Ho and Collins who are taking attacks from both sides. And I think that that also is part of the story of evangelicalism and science in the late 20th and early 21st century.

SPEAKER_03 1:09:44

I wonder what the kind of changes within evangelicalism post-World War II kind of changes in a certain kind of evangelical that would allow back to the Collins and Hay-ho and Hutchinson and so forth, that allowed these kinds of prominent scientists of faith to you know, I don't know. How much do you think it's part of the whole 1940s, 50s, a kind of neo-evangelical movement where it was mostly sort of theologians who were trying to, you know, engage the larger conversations around biblical and theological topics? I think you have parallels here down the road. Again, it's connecting it with the neo-evangelicals might be a little bit of a stretch, but you see this in other fields within evangelicalism too, whether it be in our discipline of history, you know, the the Marsden Knoll kind of Nathan Hatch resurgence of of their scholarship on evangelicalism. You know, we often think of all of them together, throwing maybe Grant Wacker there, or even in philosophy, right, with the planting, Alvin Plantikas and Walter Storce. Now, they came out of a particular Dutch Reformed movement, but the Christian Reformed Church is a member of the National Association of Evangelicals, or at least, I'm not sure it still is, but at least recently till recently. So I so I'm wondering how much of these scientists, you know, people like Carl Henry in theology, Noel Marsden in history, Planet of Wildersdorf in philosophy, you know, this whole emphasis, uh E.J. Carnell, you know, former Fuller seminary professor. I wonder how much that kind of neo-evangelical movement, and again, for those unfamiliar, uh, this is this is the or those, we may have discussed this already, but those coming out of fundamentalism that wanted to have, you know, these are kind of the Donald Gray Barnhouse kind of people that you were talking about in episode three, Meg, you know, those who want to engage the world a little bit more from an academic point of view. Did they kind of lay the groundwork for people like Hayho and Collins?

SPEAKER_05 1:11:47

Well, I think um one of the things that again we cut from what Ted Davis shared with us was the book by um, is it Bernard Rahm?

SPEAKER_03 1:11:54

Bernard Rahm, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:11:56

And that, I mean, Whitcomb's book, um, The Genesis Blood was a reaction to Rahm, right? Because he was saying, like, let's stop this a little bit. Um, and actually, I think in that book, he flipped White's indictment on science and religion against the fundamentalists. He basically says, like, you fundamentalists are the reason that faith is getting a bad name, uh, because we're so um radical against science.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:22

And this is Bernard Rahm, one of these evangelicals of the after World War II.

SPEAKER_05 1:12:26

Yeah, and that's uh I I think is kind of Billy Graham, I think, endorsed his book.

SPEAKER_03 1:12:30

The book was titled The Christian View of Science and Scripture. And uh Ted says uh that Ram did not go as far as embracing the theistic evolution, but the book was a critique of the way in which um these old earth creationists were were dealing with these questions of religion and science.

SPEAKER_05 1:12:48

So one of the quotes, and again, this is from the Gunblack article, Ram called evangelicals to turn from what he termed the ignoble tradition prevalent among fundamentalists in recent decades. And this is a quote from him sad has been the history of the evil that good Christian men have done in regard to science. Uh, and so he really did put it out there that he thought that this fundamentalist and like antagonism uh to the scientific tradition was a problem. And I think a lot of neo-evangelicals were poised to embrace certain components of secular culture that they had been, the fundamentalists had been so fearful of because a lot of it had been worked out. Like a lot of these neo-evangelicals that are accepting new ideas, they're not questioning the virgin birth of Christ, for example. Fuller does question, for example, the place of women and whether or not Paul was right in that in the 1960s, right? So there's some question over what exactly biblical inerrancy is, infallibility, et cetera, all of that is part of this story, but the kind of battle lines have softened. And I think that allowed devout evangelical Christians who did believe heartily in the gospel and the Bible to welcome new scientific ideas with, I think, a little bit of their defenses down in a way that they couldn't in the 1920s.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:07

I'd say I agree with the large stress of that. I would say we get to the 70s and we have what, you know, it's called the Battle for the Bible. There's a book by that name. It's by one of these new evangelicals named Harold Lindzel. And I think this is actually this is one reason why the inerrancy issue, that the idea is the Bible entirely without error or not, including on scientific claims in the Bible. It's such a polarizing issue. It's a watershed issue, as Francis Schaefer said a few years later for the evangelical world. And I think it's, you know, this isn't true in every case, but basically where you land on inerrancy by the end of the 70s will really shape how you're thinking about science for the next few decades. And so you get, in particular, groups like the Southern Baptist Convention, which turns really conservative in the late 70s. And it's it's pretty much, you know, standard in the Southern Baptist Convention now that you're, at least in the seminaries, that you're young earth creation. That's the default position. I don't know if every seminary has sort of a an insistence on that, but that is the default position. And they were, they're one of the biggest denomination that sort of took that inerrancy label and made it part of their identity. You have plenty of other denominations or seminaries that did not make inerrancy a center of their doctrinal statements. And they are have a much different approach to evolution, to climate change and other things. And I think this is like like new evangelicalism is creating a space, but it's contested. It's not just sort of opening up and saying, oh yeah, you know, some of us can, it's actually really about the in the 70s, at least, it's it's a sense, at least by the conservatives, that it's about the fate of the evangelical movement. Like, are we going to give away the whole store or are we going to insist on inerrancy? And I think some people have tried to thread that to say you don't have to reject inerrancy to embrace evolution. Those are not mutually exclusive. And that might be very true in a sort of philosophical sense, but in terms of the way it works out in the institutions, though those were trade-offs. Those were things people had to say, sort of side on one side or the other. So I think neo-evangelicalism is a big part of that story. And I don't think it's just the people you mentioned, John. I think it's also think about how many thousands of students were in intervarsity or something who got a different view of the at a place like UW or another big, you know, Big Ten school or something like that, who majored in a science but were also Christian. I mean, they're just having a different way of encountering these ideas than if you are on a Bible institute campus, like Moody Bible Institute or something like that.

SPEAKER_03 1:16:50

They're very diverse, right? You know, I don't know, for example, like I'm sure there's young earth creationists teaching in the science department, say like Liberty University. But if you look at the sort of Coalition for Christian College and University Science Departments, and these are the places where science is actually being taught to undergrads, right? It as an undergraduate subject in a Christian college, I think the dominant, you know, I'm sure there's there's young earth people around, you know, they're probably older, uh, you know, but but Wheaton, Messiah, Westmont, Gordon, their science departments are almost completely. I mean, you can't get a job at Messiah and not be a theistic evolutionist. Talking to some grad students actually from Madison here recently who both went to Wheaton and they were saying they're still one or two older creationists in some of the science departments at Wheaton, but all of the new hires are theistic evolutionists. So there's another piece of kind of the evangelical world. Those professors who are theistic evolution would all see these people that we've mentioned, like Hutchinson, He-Hoe, Collins, and so forth, as there's their great heroes and models. And even in these Christian colleges, you're seeing, again, not the there's all kinds of different Christian colleges, right? You know, like liberty is a different beast, but in these more mainstream kind of evangelical colleges that came out of, I think that's necessary. They predate the neo-evangelical movement, but they kind of embrace the kind of intellectual engagement that the neo-evangelical movement uh put forth. Um, Wheaton being probably the primary example.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:26

And by the way, we're we're we're talking about this in in a um maybe in a more celebratory way, like these are good openings. I mentioned Harold Linzel and the Battle for the Bible. There's been a very long critique of neo-evangelicalism by more conservative fundamentalists that this is the exact problem with neo-evangelicalism.

SPEAKER_03 1:18:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:43

Is that by being so interested in culture or in higher education and being accepted there, that there's been a tendency to blur the theological distinctives to get that, to be in those spaces.

SPEAKER_03 1:18:54

Or that they're so committed to this kind of cultural engagement that it somehow like skews them seeing the real facts. Right. Because they're letting the pop the political posture or the cultural posture, right, affect. Well, we can't say that because then it'll look like we're fundamentalists, you know, kind of thing. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:19:13

Well, I think it kind of goes back to Stephen Miller's um concern, right? Like there's always going to be vain babblings, there's always going to be false teachings, so-called science. And so I think from a conservative fundamentalist viewpoint, that's exactly what's taken over in the evangelical, um, neo-evangelical world, that they kind of caved to that sort of cultural accommodation.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:37

And you can even see it even in the you know last few years, the labeling of evangelicals who were more eager to adopt COVID policies and other things by, you know, could more conservative evangelical fundamentals like calling that out and saying you're just trying to cater favor with the mainstream culture, or you're just deferring to these non-Christian experts. That's a very active conversation, at least online in the evangelical world today.

SPEAKER_03 1:20:03

Yeah, I think that's a nice way to bring this back around to what we talked about earlier with the populism, the anti mistrust of elites, educated people, right? We managed, actually, I think we managed to talk about a history of science, evolution, inerrancy, right? I think we are good historians. We managed to do this without ever even hinting to what our personal positions on these things might be. That's that's that's a that's a plus for me.

SPEAKER_05 1:20:28

I'm sure if we have uh astute listeners, they'll be playing.

SPEAKER_03 1:20:31

I'm sure someone will read into it, right?

SPEAKER_05 1:20:34

How dare

— Closing reflections: the historians keep their personal views to themselves; outro and YouTube reminder

SPEAKER_05 1:20:35

they? But also like good historians, we went down rabbit trails and got a little bit too deep and sacrificed some breadth. Uh, so obviously we did not get to the vast majority, even, of topics that we could have talked about in this podcast on science and evangelicalism.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:50

And we have mentioned a few times in this conversation that Ted had a much longer interview with John. And so check the show notes. That whole interview is on YouTube. And if you're interested in this conversation, Ted does cover a few of the issues that we were able to get to in this conversation.

SPEAKER_01 1:21:08

Thanks so much for listening to American Evangelicals a History Podcast. A reminder that the entire conversation between one of our historians, John Fiat, and our special guest, Ted Davis, exists on our YouTube channel. Just click the link in the show notes. And if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe to this podcast so you don't miss what's next. And if this episode sparked your curiosity, consider sharing it with someone who wants a deeper, more nuanced understanding of evangelical history. Until next time, thanks for listening.