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

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. 00:02:50.000 --> 00:02:56.080 I would say that the overriding conceptual framework was that God had written two books. 00:02:56.319 --> 00:03:00.639 One of these was the Book of Scripture, and the other the Book of Nature. 00:03:00.879 --> 00:03:04.319 Now that trope goes all the way back to the patristics. 00:03:04.639 --> 00:03:07.039 We need not talk about that further here. 00:03:07.520 --> 00:03:17.840 But in the American context, it's, I believe, strongly influenced by Francis Bacon, the famous 17th century British philosopher. 00:03:18.319 --> 00:03:27.520 He wrote a book fifteen years, in fact, before the pilgrims landed in Massachusetts, in 1605, called The Advancement of Learning. 00:03:27.840 --> 00:03:38.479 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. 00:03:38.800 --> 00:03:40.400 Both nature and scripture. 00:03:40.879 --> 00:03:50.080 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. 00:03:50.400 --> 00:03:55.199 That we need to observe an endless progress, he says, of knowledge in both. 00:03:55.599 --> 00:03:59.680 And the purpose ultimately of that knowledge was charity, caritas. 00:04:00.319 --> 00:04:03.680 It's not power, as many people criticize Bacon for, it's caritas. 00:04:03.919 --> 00:04:04.960 He's explicit about that. 00:04:05.280 --> 00:04:17.120 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. 00:04:17.680 --> 00:04:19.279 So that's where Bacon's coming from. 00:04:19.360 --> 00:04:21.279 He has a strong moral impulse in this. 00:04:21.519 --> 00:04:27.040 And American science will have that from the beginning: this interest in using science practically to help people. 00:04:27.519 --> 00:04:30.879 But the conversation between two books can also happen. 00:04:31.199 --> 00:04:33.279 Bacon is cautious about this. 00:04:33.439 --> 00:04:38.160 He cautions us not to have them unwisely mingle together is how he puts it. 00:04:38.480 --> 00:04:40.160 Some of the Americans, I think, do that. 00:04:40.560 --> 00:04:42.399 They unwisely mingle them together. 00:04:42.800 --> 00:04:52.319 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. 00:04:52.720 --> 00:04:54.480 So for our ultimate benefit. 00:04:54.800 --> 00:05:00.319 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. 00:05:00.560 --> 00:05:04.720 We can help restore some of the knowledge we lost when Adam fell. 00:05:10.480 --> 00:05:24.720 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. 00:05:24.879 --> 00:05:34.800 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. 00:05:35.120 --> 00:05:44.399 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. 00:05:44.639 --> 00:05:50.399 You can see this in people like Jonathan Edwards, certainly later on in the Second Great Awakening as well. 00:05:50.560 --> 00:06:34.560 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. 00:06:34.720 --> 00:06:47.519 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. 00:06:47.759 --> 00:06:51.519 So that fits really well with this optimistic view of science that Ted was talking about. 00:06:51.920 --> 00:07:01.120 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. 00:07:01.279 --> 00:07:06.480 I mean, you still see this in, say, evangelical colleges today, too, right? 00:07:06.639 --> 00:07:16.720 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. 00:07:16.879 --> 00:07:21.680 And here it's it's the integration of the Enlightenment, the Enlightenment view of progress. 00:07:21.920 --> 00:07:24.480 It doesn't have to be, you don't have to be afraid of it. 00:07:24.560 --> 00:07:34.319 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? 00:07:34.399 --> 00:07:39.439 We could take the best of science and we can take the best of uh Christianity, right? 00:07:39.519 --> 00:07:46.639 Or we could

take Christianity, not the best of, but Christianity as a body of theological belief and knowledge. 00:07:46.879 --> 00:07:58.000 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? 00:07:58.160 --> 00:08:00.399 Where they're completely separate, right? 00:08:00.480 --> 00:08:05.519 You know, uh evangelicals are anti-intellectual, they're they're anti-scientific. 00:08:05.920 --> 00:08:09.439 But rather they they clearly celebrated these two books. 00:08:09.600 --> 00:08:17.839 Now, again, we could talk about whether that's a good idea, the way they fused Enlightenment thinking and evangelical Christianity, right? 00:08:17.920 --> 00:08:22.240 Those are those are debates which I think we might actually get to here in a few minutes. 00:08:22.560 --> 00:08:28.560 But clearly there is this integration of kind of faith and science from the beginning. 00:08:28.720 --> 00:08:31.839 It also sort of says something about the way history moves. 00:08:32.080 --> 00:08:40.080 It seems like if you asked Ted this, he would probably say that evangelicals and science worked really well together in the 19th century. 00:08:40.240 --> 00:08:47.600 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? 00:08:47.679 --> 00:08:50.240 But then you get to like scopes and things and it's not. 00:08:50.399 --> 00:09:08.960 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? 00:09:09.440 --> 00:09:15.840 Well, I think one of the key things here is that uh Ted was responding to the question of like the antebellum period, right? 00:09:15.919 --> 00:09:23.679 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? 00:09:23.840 --> 00:09:31.039 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. 00:09:31.200 --> 00:09:37.840 I think it's Andrew Dixon White, who came from Cornell University, and maybe John Draper. 00:09:37.919 --> 00:09:47.200 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. 00:09:47.360 --> 00:10:02.879 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? 00:10:03.039 --> 00:10:04.399 Like we are battling. 00:10:04.639 --> 00:10:27.200 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. 00:10:27.360 --> 00:10:39.919 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. 00:10:40.159 --> 00:10:40.480 Yeah. 00:10:40.720 --> 00:10:46.480 Um, and it also has to do with the professionalization of science as well, which is happening in the 19th century. 00:10:46.720 --> 00:10:53.679 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. 00:10:53.759 --> 00:11:06.639 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. 00:11:06.879 --> 00:11:08.720 It really is, it really is, Maggie, right? 00:11:08.799 --> 00:11:14.879 I appreciate you bringing up that kind of uh historical positioning of the way Ted is responding to this. 00:11:15.039 --> 00:11:17.919 Everything really does change after the Civil War, right? 00:11:18.080 --> 00:11:21.600 At least the way the historiography, you know, the way it's explained, right? 00:11:21.840 --> 00:11:30.960 The influence of modernism, the research university, scientific, you know, professionalization of science, you know, all of these things completely change the conversation. 00:11:31.200 --> 00:11:45.840 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. 00:11:46.159 --> 00:11:49.360 It would be interesting, though, to like there's a project, right? 00:11:49.440 --> 00:11:57.519 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. 00:11:57.600 --> 00:11:59.840 It would be interesting to think about an argument. 00:12:00.000 --> 00:12:02.399 Is there an argument for like continuity? 00:12:02.559 --> 00:12:02.720 Right? 00:12:02.799 --> 00:12:09.759 You know, that would be a historiographical bomb dropped, you know, to suggest like the Civil War, the post-Civil War era. 00:12:09.919 --> 00:12:11.039 I don't know how you would do that. 00:12:11.120 --> 00:12:14.559 And maybe this view has been around for long enough for a reason. 00:12:15.120 --> 00:12:15.440

But yeah. 00:12:15.759 --> 00:12:23.840 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. 00:12:24.000 --> 00:12:33.039 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. 00:12:33.200 --> 00:12:37.279 In the 19th century, for science and technology, that's when things came together. 00:12:37.440 --> 00:12:43.679 And so you had this like religious historian being like things are falling apart, and this historian of science being like, absolutely not. 00:12:43.840 --> 00:12:44.559 The opposite is true. 00:12:44.720 --> 00:12:46.320 And that's very interesting. 00:12:49.200 --> 00:12:49.440 That is. 00:12:52.240 --> 00:12:53.600 I think they do each other pretty well. 00:12:53.759 --> 00:12:53.919 Yeah. 00:12:54.240 --> 00:12:56.399 Just a shout-out on the conflict thesis piece. 00:12:56.559 --> 00:13:05.840 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. 00:13:06.080 --> 00:13:10.320 And what I liked about that is he he really takes a close look at Draper and White. 00:13:11.039 --> 00:13:12.960 They are the instigators of the conflict thesis. 00:13:13.039 --> 00:13:17.759 He doesn't debate that, but they're very committed liberal or modernist Protestants. 00:13:18.080 --> 00:13:24.159 And so when they think of the conflict thesis, it's really not between science or atheism and religion. 00:13:24.320 --> 00:13:33.279 It's between a certain type of modern religion and then what they consider sort of old-fashioned Catholicism or sort of creedal Protestant. 00:13:33.840 --> 00:13:46.399 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. 00:13:46.879 --> 00:13:49.919 But Ungrianu shows that that's not how it started. 00:13:50.080 --> 00:13:51.919 It started within the Protestant fold. 00:13:52.080 --> 00:14:00.080 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. 00:14:00.320 --> 00:14:12.320 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. 00:14:12.720 --> 00:14:21.759 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. 00:14:21.840 --> 00:14:31.440 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. 00:14:31.679 --> 00:14:37.120 So, for example, how did uh evangelicals use the conflict thesis differently over time? 00:14:37.279 --> 00:14:39.039 How did it manifest for the new atheists? 00:14:39.120 --> 00:14:41.200 How did it manifest for the Jewish community, et cetera? 00:14:41.360 --> 00:15:02.960 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. 00:15:04.639 --> 00:15:08.000 The harmony between science and faith was never universal. 00:15:08.320 --> 00:15:17.759 Even in the early 19th century, there were influential Christian voices who viewed the new sciences, particularly geology and natural history, with deep suspicion. 00:15:18.080 --> 00:15:20.720 Samuel Miller was no backwoods reactionary. 00:15:20.799 --> 00:15:29.679 He was a highly educated New York City Presbyterian minister who would later become one of the founding professors at Princeton Theological Seminary. 00:15:29.840 --> 00:15:36.240 And yet, he was alarmed by what he saw as science being weaponized against revealed religion. 00:15:36.480 --> 00:15:47.360 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. 00:15:47.679 --> 00:15:56.240 The person I would pick out first here would be a New York City Presbyterian minister, Samuel Miller, who was a very learned man. 00:15:56.480 --> 00:16:02.399 He was a member, in fact, of the American Philosophical Society in downtown Philadelphia. 00:16:02.639 --> 00:16:10.000 For listeners who are familiar with downtown Philly, it still exists, the American Philosophical Society is about a block from Independence Hall. 00:16:10.320 --> 00:16:20.480 It was founded by John Bartram and Benjamin Franklin and others in Philadelphia and became effectively the first scientific society in North America. 00:16:20.799 --> 00:16:32.399 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. 00:16:32.879 --> 00:16:35.120 And so Samuel Miller was a member of that group. 00:16:35.200 --> 00:16:36.559 He was a quite learned man. 00:16:36.960 --> 00:16:48.559 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. 00:16:48.960 --> 00:16:59.840 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. 00:17:00.080 --> 00:17:04.720 And he described the eighteenth century as the age of infidel philosophy. 00:17:05.200 --> 00:17:09.839 And of course, remember philosophy really means something close to science today. 00:17:10.079 --> 00:17:18.559 And he says, one finds in every age profane and vain babblings and oppositions of science falsely so-called. 00:17:18.880 --> 00:17:26.640 He, of course, is quoting 1 Timothy 6 20, using that verse as a way of attacking secular science, if you will. 00:17:26.960 --> 00:17:39.440 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. 00:17:39.680 --> 00:17:49.359 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. 00:17:49.599 --> 00:17:51.920 So it's false science being promoted. 00:17:52.000 --> 00:18:00.880 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. 00:18:01.279 --> 00:18:29.119 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. 00:18:29.519 --> 00:18:41.200 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. 00:18:41.519 --> 00:18:45.680 And so I think that's what Miller is railing against here when he talks about this. 00:18:45.839 --> 00:18:50.160 Sometimes it's hard to tell exactly what his target is in a given time. 00:18:50.640 --> 00:18:52.960 So that but he was a very influential person. 00:18:53.039 --> 00:18:58.960 He became the second professor of theology at Princeton Seminary shortly after it opened in 1812, I believe. 00:18:59.119 --> 00:19:00.559 It's a current of thought that's out there. 00:19:00.640 --> 00:19:04.240 He's not just some Yahoo saying this from the backwoods. 00:19:04.400 --> 00:19:09.200 Um he's a highly learned, influential New York preacher who becomes a Princeton professor. 00:19:13.279 --> 00:19:26.799 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. 00:19:27.039 --> 00:19:30.960 For lack of a better term, we'll call one a kind of Edwardsian strain, right? 00:19:31.200 --> 00:19:33.680 Jonathan Edwards and his disciples. 00:19:33.920 --> 00:19:38.720 This is

perhaps best illustrated in the way that Edwards thinks about the idea of virtue, right? 00:19:38.880 --> 00:19:42.640 He has this huge tome called On the Nature of True Virtue. 00:19:42.799 --> 00:19:49.440 And he essentially says no one can be truly virtuous unless they have a kind of quote-unquote love of being, right? 00:19:49.599 --> 00:19:50.319 Capital B. 00:19:50.640 --> 00:19:51.680 You know, love of God. 00:19:51.839 --> 00:19:53.599 Virtue only comes through God. 00:19:53.759 --> 00:19:56.319 But then you have another school of evangelicals. 00:19:56.480 --> 00:20:04.400 I often associate this with John Witherspoon, the president of the College of New Jersey at Princeton, a leader of evangelical revivals in Scotland. 00:20:04.480 --> 00:20:10.880 He comes to America in 1768, but very much steeped in the Scottish Enlightenment. 00:20:11.119 --> 00:20:18.000 So for him, virtue is something that could be practiced in public life without necessarily having a conversion experience, right? 00:20:18.079 --> 00:20:24.240 You could have a remote republic of a virtuous nation without God, right? 00:20:24.400 --> 00:20:26.799 So in that sense, we see the influence of the Enlightenment. 00:20:26.880 --> 00:20:29.119 And Edwards is always pushing against the idea. 00:20:29.279 --> 00:20:32.640 I use that example because the same thing is happening in science. 00:20:32.880 --> 00:20:41.680 You have Edwards, who meant, you know, a great intellectual, but essentially a counter-Enlightenment figure, a counter-scientific revolution thinker. 00:20:41.920 --> 00:20:48.880 He reads all this stuff to counter it, to say, you know, we don't want to push modern learning too far. 00:20:49.039 --> 00:21:01.200 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. 00:21:01.440 --> 00:21:05.680 And I think that is what Ted was talking about in the last excerpt, right? 00:21:05.759 --> 00:21:06.960 Where you have the two books. 00:21:07.119 --> 00:21:18.640 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. 00:21:18.799 --> 00:21:23.839 You know, he would have been much more sort of theologic, wanted to explain these things theologically and so on. 00:21:24.000 --> 00:21:30.079 So Samuel Miller, I think, is a kind of one of the last Edwardsians, I think, in this case. 00:21:30.319 --> 00:21:42.720 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. 00:21:42.799 --> 00:21:46.960 So the fact that he gives this sermon in 1801, I think, is really, really telling. 00:21:47.039 --> 00:21:49.680 You know, he's going

to lose in this sense. 00:21:49.920 --> 00:21:54.160 If the two books thesis of the antebellum period, the way Ted describes it, are correct. 00:21:54.319 --> 00:21:55.119 I think they are. 00:21:55.440 --> 00:21:59.759 Miller is like the sort of representing this kind of last gasp of this kind of creative. 00:22:00.160 --> 00:22:07.680 Christian way of thinking about the world that is soon going to not disappear, but merge with the Enlightenment in the antebellum period. 00:22:08.079 --> 00:22:21.279 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. 00:22:21.440 --> 00:22:27.279 And you know, we'll get to talking about that view in evangelicalism in the 20th century called Young Earth Creationism. 00:22:27.519 --> 00:22:35.440 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. 00:22:35.839 --> 00:22:46.720 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. 00:22:47.200 --> 00:22:58.319 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. 00:22:58.559 --> 00:23:04.240 I tried never to pass up an opportunity to talk about James Usher, the bishop from the 17th century. 00:23:04.319 --> 00:23:10.400 And Usher was one of the many sort of pre-Enlightenment, but wanted to rationalize the Bible in a certain way. 00:23:10.480 --> 00:23:18.559 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. 00:23:18.799 --> 00:23:24.640 And so he created a timeline that went back to the year 4004 BC. 00:23:25.039 --> 00:23:29.279 And I believe it was like October 10th was creation day of 4004 BC. 00:23:29.519 --> 00:23:34.799 Um, but this this was a bishop in the Church of England, and this was he was a very respected person at the time. 00:23:34.960 --> 00:23:54.720 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. 00:23:54.880 --> 00:23:56.400 I think Miller's really responding to that. 00:23:56.480 --> 00:24:06.000 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. 00:24:06.160 --> 00:24:06.960 It's not that

old. 00:24:07.200 --> 00:24:09.599 God just created it a few thousand years ago. 00:24:09.839 --> 00:24:13.759 You know, this is even before the theory of evolution is really on the scene. 00:24:14.000 --> 00:24:23.920 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? 00:24:24.000 --> 00:24:44.000 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? 00:24:44.240 --> 00:24:46.720 That is sort of the the bigger intellectual mistakes. 00:24:46.799 --> 00:24:53.839 But I want to mention Usher there because it's not just a 20th century invention that the earth is is very young. 00:24:54.079 --> 00:25:01.119 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. 00:25:01.200 --> 00:25:09.759 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. 00:25:10.160 --> 00:25:22.319 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. 00:25:22.559 --> 00:25:28.160 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. 00:25:28.480 --> 00:25:33.519 Yeah, Miller's really an 18th-century figure, even though he's writing in 1801, right? 00:25:33.759 --> 00:25:35.119 He's summarizing. 00:25:36.640 --> 00:25:42.480 By the 1920s, the question was no longer simply whether science and faith could coexist. 00:25:42.640 --> 00:25:47.759 It was whether Christians who tried to reconcile the two were doing more harm than good. 00:25:48.000 --> 00:25:58.720 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. 00:25:58.880 --> 00:26:02.799 But his objections weren't only scientific, they were theological. 00:26:03.039 --> 00:26:10.400 For Bryan, theistic evolution was a form of Christianity that had quietly abandoned the faith it claimed to defend. 00:26:10.559 --> 00:26:20.079 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. 00:26:20.480 --> 00:26:29.279 William Jennings Bryan, though, believed all that Baconian stuff about science, and so did many of his friends,

and many Americans, ordinary Americans, did. 00:26:29.440 --> 00:27:03.440 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. 00:27:03.759 --> 00:27:16.960 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. 00:27:17.599 --> 00:27:26.160 But Brian thinks evolution is not only false, but theistic evolution is even more dangerous because it pretends to be Christianity. 00:27:26.559 --> 00:27:34.160 And he says theistic evolution, he says, is the anaesthetic that deadens the pain while the patient's faith is being removed. 00:27:34.400 --> 00:27:35.279 That's how he puts it. 00:27:35.759 --> 00:27:38.480 So theistic evolution is bad news. 00:27:42.799 --> 00:27:49.519 Any conversation about William Jennings Bryan is always going to be fascinating because he was such a multifaceted individual. 00:27:49.759 --> 00:27:55.599 And he was really a pop culture figure at the turn of the 20th century. 00:27:55.680 --> 00:27:59.039 And I think we've kind of lost that a little bit in our understanding of him. 00:27:59.119 --> 00:28:00.480 He's known as the Great Commoner. 00:28:00.720 --> 00:28:05.200 I just came across an article flipping through old issues of Christianity today from 1975. 00:28:05.359 --> 00:28:11.039 So it was like the 50th anniversary scopes retrospective that Christianity Today did. 00:28:11.359 --> 00:28:19.279 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. 00:28:19.440 --> 00:28:30.240 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. 00:28:30.400 --> 00:28:49.200 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. 00:28:49.440 --> 00:28:58.960 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. 00:28:59.359 --> 00:29:04.079 Yeah, maybe one more thing to throw on that is what's Brian responding to. 00:29:04.240 --> 00:29:14.640 In part, it's the advance of Darwinian thinking in not just in science proper, but in like all parts of the university. 00:29:14.880 --> 00:29:18.400 And I think Brian associated Darwinism with social Darwinism. 00:29:18.640 --> 00:29:24.880 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. 00:29:25.039 --> 00:29:38.160 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. 00:29:38.319 --> 00:29:57.920 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. 00:29:58.079 --> 00:30:06.400 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. 00:30:06.559 --> 00:30:10.319 So I think that's that's one thing just to think about is Brian was not a scientist. 00:30:10.400 --> 00:30:25.119 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. 00:30:25.200 --> 00:30:29.200 He's in it for what he sees as the implications of that for the broader society. 00:30:29.519 --> 00:30:32.000 Yeah, and this is his this is his populism. 00:30:32.160 --> 00:30:35.519 You know, he's the great prairie populist of the late 19th century. 00:30:35.680 --> 00:31:05.920 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. 00:31:06.400 --> 00:31:07.279 He ran three times. 00:31:07.519 --> 00:31:09.519 Um, yeah, he runs four times, actually. 00:31:09.680 --> 00:31:10.079 Well, okay. 00:31:10.319 --> 00:31:12.799 But um 96 is the cross of gold speed. 00:31:12.960 --> 00:31:13.279 Yeah, right. 00:31:13.359 --> 00:31:14.400 The cross of gold speed. 00:31:14.559 --> 00:31:22.559 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? 00:31:22.799 --> 00:31:24.480 Only the strongest survive, right? 00:31:24.559 --> 00:31:28.720 And and Carnegie and Rockefeller, these

people are the strongest, you know. 00:31:28.799 --> 00:31:37.920 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. 00:31:38.160 --> 00:31:45.119 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. 00:31:45.279 --> 00:31:57.359 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. 00:31:57.519 --> 00:32:02.319 So it's not a really much of a scientific thing for him, you know, as you pointed out, Dan. 00:32:02.400 --> 00:32:09.440 It's about, you know, a critique of kind of capitalist progress and what that does to the dignity of ordinary people. 00:32:09.599 --> 00:32:13.920 In that sense, I think at least it's a very, you know, there's a certain Christian dimension to that. 00:32:14.240 --> 00:32:27.200 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? 00:32:27.359 --> 00:32:35.200 I mean, if you look at things like the virgin birth, like that is truly very central uh to Orthodox Christian belief. 00:32:35.359 --> 00:32:40.160 And that was one of the ones that was on the chopping block for a lot of modernist Christians. 00:32:40.319 --> 00:32:45.039 And so we wouldn't connect that theology today to anti-creationism or evolution. 00:32:45.119 --> 00:32:49.200 Like you believe in evolution, therefore you somehow deny the virgin birth of Christ. 00:32:49.519 --> 00:32:56.000 But that was one of this kind of um, you know, Satan's triangle of modernist teaching. 00:32:56.319 --> 00:33:00.880 I mean, that's a quote from uh an article in the Moody Bible Monthly in the 1920s. 00:33:01.279 --> 00:33:14.559 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. 00:33:14.880 --> 00:33:21.680 And I think to Brian's point, and what a lot of the fundamentalists are arguing, it's based on bad science. 00:33:21.920 --> 00:33:26.720 Like they think that this is all going to fall apart because it's just a theory, right? 00:33:26.880 --> 00:33:30.559 That it's not something that, in their view, is true science. 00:33:30.799 --> 00:33:32.799 And of course, Brian isn't a scientist. 00:33:33.039 --> 00:33:47.920 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. 00:33:48.079 --> 00:33:57.920 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. 00:33:58.400 --> 00:34:02.960 Another interesting thing on this is the whole what you were talking about earlier, Dan, about post-millennialism. 00:34:03.119 --> 00:34:12.159 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. 00:34:12.320 --> 00:34:15.760 They both have a trajectory, an understanding of the way history is moving. 00:34:16.000 --> 00:34:20.239 And maybe in the antebellum period, right, they were going hand in hand. 00:34:20.320 --> 00:34:21.519 They were working together. 00:34:21.760 --> 00:34:32.719 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. 00:34:32.800 --> 00:34:34.000 Like I'm rejecting that. 00:34:34.159 --> 00:34:48.480 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. 00:34:48.559 --> 00:34:54.960 And now we definitely see two different views of history, of the movement of history and the movement of time. 00:34:55.119 --> 00:35:02.880 You know, and what is social Darwinism other than a kind of enlightenment modern way of thinking about where history is moving? 00:35:03.280 --> 00:35:13.840 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. 00:35:14.159 --> 00:35:16.559 But it's a very, you know, messy process. 00:35:16.639 --> 00:35:17.840 It's a violent process. 00:35:18.000 --> 00:35:28.079 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. 00:35:28.320 --> 00:35:37.840 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. 00:35:38.000 --> 00:36:01.280 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. 00:36:01.440 --> 00:36:13.280 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. 00:36:13.599 --> 00:36:22.239 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? 00:36:22.320 --> 00:36:23.199 Right kind of question. 00:36:23.440 --> 00:36:23.519 Yeah. 00:36:23.760 --> 00:36:23.920 Right. 00:36:24.079 --> 00:36:39.039 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. 00:36:39.119 --> 00:36:47.280 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. 00:36:47.360 --> 00:36:59.760 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. 00:36:59.840 --> 00:37:02.559 So one of the many sort of sub-views of the Enlightenment. 00:37:02.719 --> 00:37:11.039 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. 00:37:11.199 --> 00:37:15.519 And by commonsensically see, it's it's using my eyes, my ears, my nose. 00:37:15.679 --> 00:37:18.960 If the average person can observe it, then it's a fact. 00:37:19.199 --> 00:37:22.239 If they can't, then it's mere conjecture. 00:37:22.480 --> 00:37:28.559 And so the theory of Darwinism is conjecture for people who believe this is science. 00:37:28.639 --> 00:37:30.000 It's not actual science. 00:37:30.239 --> 00:37:37.280 Now, by this time, for other scientists, they've moved beyond this definition of science or they've added to it. 00:37:37.519 --> 00:37:51.199 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. 00:37:51.360 --> 00:37:54.000 But this is a big just difference on defining science. 00:37:54.079 --> 00:38:00.000 And so the fundamentalist people like Brian are really holding to this common sense view of science. 00:38:00.239 --> 00:38:02.079 And it's also it ties into the populism as well. 00:38:02.400 --> 00:38:03.360 Yeah, it's about to say that. 00:38:03.440 --> 00:38:03.519 Yeah. 00:38:03.679 --> 00:38:07.199 Yeah, it's it's about sort of what can the common person know. 00:38:07.519 --> 00:38:12.960 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. 00:38:13.119 --> 00:38:15.119 It's probably too intellectual or something like that. 00:38:15.280 --> 00:38:20.320 So that's also um feeding into here is is both sides are claiming to be scientific. 00:38:20.400 --> 00:38:26.079 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. 00:38:26.320 --> 00:38:32.719 Neither the opponents of evolution or the proponents are claiming to be anti-science. 00:38:32.880 --> 00:38:35.119 It's their definitions over what is true science. 00:38:35.360 --> 00:38:48.800 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. 00:38:49.119 --> 00:38:52.079 Are we talking here about the 19th, early 20th century? 00:38:52.239 --> 00:38:56.480 Are we talking about like 2020, COVID and vaccines and right? 00:38:56.559 --> 00:39:08.400 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. 00:39:08.800 --> 00:39:20.800 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. 00:39:20.960 --> 00:39:25.280 I think there's something to that about vaccines or or pandemics. 00:39:25.360 --> 00:39:29.599 It's like this is a lot in the the microscopic world or the world that we can't observe. 00:39:29.760 --> 00:39:34.880 And so we're having to take the word of experts as like this is what's really happening. 00:39:35.039 --> 00:39:46.719 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. 00:39:46.960 --> 00:39:47.119 Yeah. 00:39:47.280 --> 00:39:59.760 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. 00:40:00.079 --> 00:40:23.440 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. 00:40:23.599 --> 00:40:29.519 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. 00:40:29.840 --> 00:40:32.320 It's the major idea behind higher criticism. 00:40:32.639 --> 00:40:37.920 And that I think actually makes the fundamentalist position on evolution more rigid. 00:40:38.079 --> 00:40:50.000 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. 00:40:50.159 --> 00:40:51.599 Like that could be fine. 00:40:51.760 --> 00:41:15.360 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. 00:41:15.760 --> 00:41:22.320 The perspicuity of scripture is the sort of doctrinal uh view that it it is uh discernible by any reader. 00:41:22.639 --> 00:41:33.280 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. 00:41:33.440 --> 00:41:42.159 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. 00:41:42.480 --> 00:42:06.559 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. 00:42:06.719 --> 00:42:14.320 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. 00:42:14.400 --> 00:42:18.400 And so this is basically saying, like, don't believe your eyes when you're reading the Bible. 00:42:18.480 --> 00:42:25.360 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. 00:42:25.599 --> 00:42:33.840 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. 00:42:33.920 --> 00:42:38.639 It's about this political story or the story of the nation of Israel and all these factions. 00:42:38.800 --> 00:42:46.400 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. 00:42:46.480 --> 00:42:52.559 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. 00:42:52.719 --> 00:43:07.280 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. 00:43:07.360 --> 00:43:16.639 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. 00:43:16.960 --> 00:43:24.239 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. 00:43:24.400 --> 00:43:26.159 Yeah, good thoughts. 00:43:26.880 --> 00:43:40.000 Before we continue on with this episode of American Evangelicals, a history podcast, I wanted to remind you that the entire conversation between historian John Fiat and our friend Ted Davis is available on our YouTube channel. 00:43:40.159 --> 00:43:42.639 Just click the link in the show notes for more. 00:43:42.800 --> 00:43:47.599 Now let's continue on together on this journey, talking about faith and science. 00:43:48.639 --> 00:43:57.920 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. 00:43:58.079 --> 00:43:59.760 But the historical record is consistent. 00:44:00.079 --> 00:44:01.519 Considerably more complicated. 00:44:01.760 --> 00:44:10.000 Asa Gray was a botanist at Harvard, one of the most eminent scientists in 19th century America, and a close correspondent of Charles Darwin. 00:44:10.159 --> 00:44:14.639 In fact, the first person to champion Darwin's ideas in the United States. 00:44:14.880 --> 00:44:21.599 He was also a devout, creed-affirming Presbyterian who saw no contradiction between his faith and his science. 00:44:21.840 --> 00:44:34.000 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. 00:44:34.239 --> 00:44:43.599 The Scopes trial of 1925 is often treated as a collision between religion and science, a story of faith refusing to yield to evidence. 00:44:43.760 --> 00:44:48.320 But the actual history is more politically entangled than that framing suggests. 00:44:48.559 --> 00:44:58.239 By the early 1920s, evolution had become associated in the American popular imagination not just with atheism, but with German militarism. 00:44:58.480 --> 00:45:08.800 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. 00:45:09.039 --> 00:45:18.559 For William Jennings Bryan, that argument provided a powerful political rationale for intensifying

his campaign against evolution in American schools. 00:45:18.800 --> 00:45:29.519 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. 00:45:29.840 --> 00:45:48.719 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. 00:45:48.960 --> 00:46:03.519 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. 00:46:03.679 --> 00:46:07.519 And he even thought it was consistent with higher views of design. 00:46:07.760 --> 00:46:09.360 But I don't want to go too far with that. 00:46:09.519 --> 00:46:14.719 I simply want to point out that Asa Gray was an eminent scientist who was a traditional Christian. 00:46:14.960 --> 00:46:17.360 As a young man, Gray was a religious skeptic. 00:46:17.519 --> 00:46:26.639 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. 00:46:27.119 --> 00:46:33.920 And the Tory family, their lives, their words, their ideas deeply influenced Asa Ray. 00:46:34.079 --> 00:46:53.199 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. 00:46:53.440 --> 00:47:02.400 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. 00:47:02.639 --> 00:47:05.840 In his view, Christianity let well let me quote something from him. 00:47:06.159 --> 00:47:12.000 In 1880, Gray gave two lectures to the divinity students at Yale, and here is what he said. 00:47:12.239 --> 00:47:30.480 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. 00:47:30.800 --> 00:47:40.960 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. 00:47:41.119 --> 00:47:55.840 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. 00:47:56.079 --> 00:48:00.320 And this

manifestation constitutes Christianity. 00:48:00.880 --> 00:48:02.159 That's how Gray put it. 00:48:02.320 --> 00:48:10.000 And the incarnation, he goes on to say, was the crowning miracle, attended by other miracles that he also accepted. 00:48:10.480 --> 00:48:19.599 So in that way, Gray was able, I would say, consistently to affirm his acceptance of Darwin's ideas alongside his faith in Christ. 00:48:20.000 --> 00:48:27.920 Even a very traditional faith, to quote him again, whose essential contents were briefly summed up in the Apostles and Nicene Creeds. 00:48:28.559 --> 00:48:34.400 So there you have a classical Christian, Asa Gray, who's the first Darwinian in the United States. 00:48:34.480 --> 00:48:44.719 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. 00:48:44.880 --> 00:48:50.000 How is it that we have so many plants in North America that look like look similar to East Asian plants? 00:48:50.480 --> 00:48:52.400 He wants to know what the answer to that is. 00:48:52.719 --> 00:48:54.719 And he finds the answer in Darwin. 00:48:55.280 --> 00:48:56.639 So, you know, we have that. 00:48:56.800 --> 00:49:07.920 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. 00:49:08.239 --> 00:49:08.320 B. 00:49:08.480 --> 00:49:08.559 B. 00:49:08.719 --> 00:49:12.880 Warfield is dead, Gray is dead, there's others out there as well. 00:49:13.039 --> 00:49:36.159 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. 00:49:36.639 --> 00:49:59.679 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. 00:50:00.079 --> 00:50:06.159 It's the law of nature that Germany should dominate, and it's just natural then for Germany to want to do that. 00:50:06.480 --> 00:50:18.880 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. 00:50:19.199 --> 00:50:42.480 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. 00:50:43.039 --> 00:50:46.559 Kellogg was billeted at the headquarters of the German High Command. 00:50:46.880 --> 00:50:49.519 He had been educated for his doctorate in Germany. 00:50:49.599 --> 00:50:50.960 He was fluent in German. 00:50:51.199 --> 00:51:03.280 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. 00:51:03.519 --> 00:51:09.440 The foreword was written by Theodore Roosevelt, urging Americans to be aware of this idea. 00:51:09.599 --> 00:51:13.440 And he says in there that the Germans basically are cutthroat Darwinians. 00:51:13.599 --> 00:51:15.199 That's what World War I is about. 00:51:15.360 --> 00:51:18.320 And he's really, his pacifism is being challenged by this. 00:51:18.480 --> 00:51:24.880 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. 00:51:25.119 --> 00:51:31.840 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. 00:51:31.920 --> 00:51:33.440 He's never believed evolution's true. 00:51:33.519 --> 00:51:39.199 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. 00:51:39.280 --> 00:51:41.039 And he wants to get it out of the schools. 00:51:41.280 --> 00:51:45.199 So he takes advantage of this idea and trumpets this all over the place. 00:51:45.360 --> 00:51:49.039 A lot of other fundamentalist leaders do the same thing with this idea. 00:52:05.199 --> 00:52:09.360 It fascinates me that there were evangelicals. 00:52:09.519 --> 00:52:15.760 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? 00:52:15.840 --> 00:52:17.199 That he wasn't evangelical. 00:52:17.360 --> 00:52:21.360 He was on the evangelical side of the Presbyterian church in the 19th century. 00:52:21.599 --> 00:52:28.960 But it's interesting to see that there were, even, even I believe some of the authors of the fundamentals embraced evolution. 00:52:29.119 --> 00:52:29.519 B.B. 00:52:29.599 --> 00:52:35.760 Warfield, I thought he would say actually say more about, but Asa Gray, I guess, to him is a better example of this. 00:52:36.000 --> 00:52:45.760 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? 00:52:46.079 --> 00:52:53.599 Another Ron Numbers book to call out is uh Darwin Comes to America, where he tracks how Darwin is received by Americans. 00:52:53.679 --> 00:53:03.199 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. 00:53:03.360 --> 00:53:05.840 It's it's sort of

a pretty significant attempt. 00:53:06.000 --> 00:53:22.719 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. 00:53:23.119 --> 00:53:26.480 And that you have or these couple generations. 00:53:26.559 --> 00:53:40.159 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. 00:53:40.239 --> 00:53:46.559 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. 00:53:46.639 --> 00:53:56.079 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. 00:53:56.480 --> 00:53:59.920 Another really good resource on all of this, especially on B.B. 00:54:00.079 --> 00:54:18.320 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. 00:54:18.639 --> 00:54:30.480 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. 00:54:30.719 --> 00:54:40.719 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. 00:54:41.039 --> 00:54:48.480 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. 00:54:48.880 --> 00:54:49.199 Yeah, yeah. 00:54:49.760 --> 00:54:53.280 And he talks about Princeton quite a bit in the post-Civil War era. 00:54:53.360 --> 00:55:03.199 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. 00:55:03.360 --> 00:55:06.079 It's a quote that actually I think came from Thomas Henry Huxley. 00:55:06.400 --> 00:55:15.440 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. 00:55:15.519 --> 00:55:23.679 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. 00:55:23.840 --> 00:55:28.559 And so he talks a little bit about that, that military metaphor and how that played into uh Princetonian. 00:55:28.880 --> 00:55:31.760 Interesting languages well before the fundamentalist controversy. 00:55:32.000 --> 00:55:44.800 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. 00:55:45.199 --> 00:55:50.400 Just to bring back this idea of progress and World War I in particular. 00:55:50.559 --> 00:55:56.400 So there's an interesting way where we've set up there's there's these competing understandings of progress. 00:55:56.559 --> 00:56:09.119 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. 00:56:09.199 --> 00:56:14.159 And then there's the more Darwinian way where there's a lot of struggle to get toward progress. 00:56:14.320 --> 00:56:16.639 And I think this is actually really active during World War I. 00:56:16.960 --> 00:56:21.679 One of the reasons why so many American Christians are wanting to link Germany with Darwinism. 00:56:21.840 --> 00:56:24.079 Woodrow Wilson, who's the president of the U.S. 00:56:24.079 --> 00:56:28.719 during World War I, is probably one of the more overtly religious presidents we've ever had. 00:56:28.960 --> 00:56:31.199 And he was a post-millennialist. 00:56:31.360 --> 00:56:34.159 He was a very active Presbyterian his whole life. 00:56:34.480 --> 00:56:44.079 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. 00:56:44.239 --> 00:56:46.400 And he had a lot of supporters in American Christianity. 00:56:46.559 --> 00:56:51.199 Shaler Matthews at the University of Chicago was a main one, a theologian there. 00:56:51.440 --> 00:57:00.079 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. 00:57:00.159 --> 00:57:04.079 And you can think about there's sort of the American view of progress, which is democracy. 00:57:04.239 --> 00:57:12.159 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. 00:57:12.320 --> 00:57:22.159 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. 00:57:22.320 --> 00:57:27.840 And so I think for a lot of uh American Christians, this was how they understood the war in some sense. 00:57:28.000 --> 00:57:29.760 Was it a vision of progress? 00:57:29.840 --> 00:57:35.920 And is progress going to come through peace and democracy, or is it going to come through authoritarianism and militarism? 00:57:36.159 --> 00:57:57.679 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. 00:57:57.920 --> 00:58:12.880 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. 00:58:13.039 --> 00:58:15.440 It's really two sides of the same coin, right? 00:58:15.679 --> 00:58:23.360 I mean, but but here Ted is emphasizing the more Darwinian science dimension as opposed to the biblical criticism dimension. 00:58:23.440 --> 00:58:34.960 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. 00:58:35.119 --> 00:58:39.440 So uh, you know, it's just the nuance, I think, from the Marsden story there, right? 00:58:39.519 --> 00:58:53.360 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. 00:58:53.760 --> 00:58:55.760 And I've said this before, and I'll say it again. 00:58:56.000 --> 00:59:02.239 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. 00:59:03.039 --> 00:59:15.199 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. 00:59:15.440 --> 00:59:17.920 Within a week they were caught, they were not smart enough to get away with it. 00:59:18.239 --> 00:59:28.400 Um, but that trial was extraordinarily famous, and Clarence Darrow was the lawyer who prevented them from getting the death penalty. 00:59:28.480 --> 00:59:35.679 And his argument was that it wasn't completely their fault because they had been corrupted by Nietzschean philosophy. 00:59:36.079 --> 00:59:38.480 In that way, it was kind of the school's fault. 00:59:38.800 --> 00:59:46.960 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. 00:59:47.360 --> 01:00:00.800 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. 01:00:01.360 --> 01:00:09.679 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. 01:00:10.079 --> 01:00:18.159 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. 01:00:18.559 --> 01:00:23.280 We have come at this from we've said a full in terms of the disciplines, right? 01:00:23.360 --> 01:00:33.360 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. 01:00:33.440 --> 01:00:34.800 That's good, Mangie. 01:00:35.519 --> 01:00:42.159 After World War II, something shifted in the relationship between American evangelicalism and the scientific community. 01:00:42.320 --> 01:00:50.960 The GI Bill opened the doors of universities to generations of students who might never have attended, including large numbers of evangelicals. 01:00:51.119 --> 01:00:58.400 Some of them pursued advanced degrees in the sciences, rose to positions of eminence, and kept their faith along the way. 01:00:58.639 --> 01:01:04.480 Today, the idea that a serious scientist might hold traditional Christian beliefs is no longer surprising. 01:01:04.719 --> 01:01:06.480 But that was not always the case. 01:01:06.719 --> 01:01:21.119 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. 01:01:21.360 --> 01:01:32.239 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. 01:01:32.719 --> 01:01:36.000 Most famous example for in that group would be Francis Collins. 01:01:36.159 --> 01:02:00.079 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. 01:02:00.239 --> 01:02:03.199 He's among the most highly cited scientists in the world. 01:02:03.360 --> 01:02:08.480 His citation index is something like 250, which is an enormously high number. 01:02:08.719 --> 01:02:11.920 And people who are who know what that means will know what that means. 01:02:12.239 --> 01:02:13.519 There's many others as well. 01:02:13.679 --> 01:02:31.280 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. 01:02:31.360 --> 01:02:33.840 But he's one of the most eminent people in the world in his field. 01:02:34.159 --> 01:02:39.360 Also his equivalent at Princeton, Bob Caeda, also in um nuclear physics. 01:02:39.679 --> 01:02:51.199 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. 01:02:51.440 --> 01:03:01.760 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. 01:03:02.159 --> 01:03:08.159 People like this, or Catherine Hayhoe, distinguished climate scientist, whose husband's an evangelical pastor in Texas. 01:03:08.480 --> 01:03:17.440 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. 01:03:17.760 --> 01:03:21.119 So that things have changed dramatically since World War II. 01:03:21.760 --> 01:03:26.079 Partly because I think Protestantism has changed dramatically since World War II as well. 01:03:26.239 --> 01:03:37.039 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. 01:03:37.199 --> 01:03:41.920 That's partly where the change has occurred, but also it's partly among the scientific community itself. 01:03:44.480 --> 01:04:00.480 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. 01:04:00.719 --> 01:04:16.320 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. 01:04:16.559 --> 01:04:28.159 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. 01:04:28.239 --> 01:04:34.719 And it was by two fundamentalist Christians, but they were marshalling scientific evidence to make their claim. 01:04:34.880 --> 01:04:41.280 And since then, there's just been a whole host of institutions that have promoted that view. 01:04:41.440 --> 01:04:46.079 Um the Creation Museum in Kentucky is a really prominent one. 01:04:46.320 --> 01:04:52.480 There's multiple creation centers around the country, often connected like churches that really care about this issue. 01:04:52.719 --> 01:04:58.320 There's also the intelligent design movement, which is not exactly the same thing but comes out of the same subculture. 01:04:58.480 --> 01:05:19.840 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. 01:05:20.000 --> 01:05:26.880 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. 01:05:27.119 --> 01:05:31.039 We've already mentioned public health in the 2020s would be another example. 01:05:31.280 --> 01:05:41.920 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. 01:05:42.000 --> 01:05:50.480 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. 01:05:51.199 --> 01:05:52.880 Not that they're equal, but uh they're separate. 01:05:53.199 --> 01:05:58.079 Well, I think this is I asked Ted about this, and it didn't make the cut for our snippets from him. 01:05:58.239 --> 01:06:19.440 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. 01:06:19.599 --> 01:06:26.480 But it is worth noting that under the evangelical tent, so to speak, there is a lot of disagreement. 01:06:26.559 --> 01:06:51.039 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. 01:06:51.280 --> 01:07:04.719 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. 01:07:04.800 --> 01:07:15.119 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. 01:07:15.360 --> 01:07:29.840 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. 01:07:30.320 --> 01:07:39.920 I think one of the intriguing things about this is the way that it just feeds into the entire evangelical subculture, right? 01:07:40.000 --> 01:07:43.840 Like I just I can't help but think about homeschooling when I was homeschooled. 01:07:44.159 --> 01:07:56.320 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. 01:07:56.719 --> 01:08:09.840 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. 01:08:10.079 --> 01:08:23.359 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. 01:08:23.840 --> 01:08:30.000 And I think that the new atheists have really had a lot to do with that, particularly in the last 30 years or so. 01:08:30.479 --> 01:08:36.479 This idea that there has been an increase of pressure against faith in this in the world of science. 01:08:36.720 --> 01:08:43.840 I teach on the culture wars, and so the kind of attacks of new atheism on any person of faith, including Francis Collins. 01:08:44.000 --> 01:08:49.680 Like he was a very controversial figure to be the director of the NIH because he was a person of devout faith. 01:08:50.000 --> 01:08:54.800 Sam Harris didn't care that he was someone who was a theistic evolutionist. 01:08:55.199 --> 01:08:58.239 He cared that he was theistic and said this is a bad idea. 01:08:58.399 --> 01:09:05.119 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. 01:09:05.279 --> 01:09:20.239 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. 01:09:20.560 --> 01:09:23.439 Science thinks we're stupid because we believe in a God. 01:09:23.600 --> 01:09:29.680 And that's also out there in the narrative and the culture wars, I think, polarize people in that as well. 01:09:29.840 --> 01:09:35.840 And so you have folks like Hey Ho and Collins who are taking attacks from both sides. 01:09:36.000 --> 01:09:43.920 And I think that that also is part of the story of evangelicalism and science in the late 20th and early 21st century. 01:09:44.319 --> 01:10:04.560 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. 01:10:04.720 --> 01:10:20.640 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? 01:10:20.880 --> 01:10:24.000 I think you have parallels here down the road. 01:10:24.159 --> 01:10:43.439 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. 01:10:43.520 --> 01:10:52.319 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. 01:10:52.479 --> 01:11:03.680 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. 01:11:03.920 --> 01:11:16.239 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. 01:11:16.399 --> 01:11:21.119 Carnell, you know, former Fuller seminary professor. 01:11:21.359 --> 01:11:41.600 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. 01:11:41.840 --> 01:11:46.880 Did they kind of lay the groundwork for people like Hayho and Collins? 01:11:47.520 --> 01:11:54.159 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? 01:11:54.479 --> 01:11:55.279 Bernard Rahm, yeah. 01:11:56.159 --> 01:12:00.640 And that, I mean, Whitcomb's book, um, The Genesis Blood was a reaction to Rahm, right? 01:12:00.800 --> 01:12:03.439 Because he was saying, like, let's stop this a little bit. 01:12:03.520 --> 01:12:11.359 Um, and actually, I think in that book, he flipped White's indictment on science and religion against the fundamentalists. 01:12:11.600 --> 01:12:22.079 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. 01:12:22.720 --> 01:12:26.319 And this is Bernard Rahm, one of these evangelicals of the after World War II. 01:12:26.560 --> 01:12:30.239 Yeah, and that's uh I I think is kind of Billy Graham, I think, endorsed his book. 01:12:30.960 --> 01:12:34.399 The book was titled The Christian View of Science and Scripture. 01:12:34.560 --> 01:12:47.840 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. 01:12:48.239 --> 01:12:58.319 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. 01:12:58.479 --> 01:13:04.880 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. 01:13:05.039 --> 01:13:15.039 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. 01:13:15.279 --> 01:13:27.520 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. 01:13:27.600 --> 01:13:33.840 Like a lot of these neo-evangelicals that are accepting new ideas, they're not questioning the virgin birth of Christ, for example. 01:13:34.079 --> 01:13:40.640 Fuller does question, for example, the place of women and whether or not Paul was right in that in the 1960s, right? 01:13:40.720 --> 01:13:51.520 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. 01:13:51.600 --> 01:14:07.039 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. 01:14:07.359 --> 01:14:09.840 I'd say I agree with the large stress of that. 01:14:09.920 --> 01:14:14.640 I would say we get to the 70s and we have what, you know, it's called the Battle for the Bible. 01:14:14.720 --> 01:14:15.680 There's a book by that name. 01:14:15.760 --> 01:14:18.640 It's by one of these new evangelicals named Harold Lindzel. 01:14:19.279 --> 01:14:28.079 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. 01:14:28.239 --> 01:14:30.000 It's such a polarizing issue. 01:14:30.079 --> 01:14:35.439 It's a watershed issue, as Francis Schaefer said a few years later for the evangelical world. 01:14:35.680 --> 01:14:48.239 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. 01:14:48.319 --> 01:14:54.640 And so you get, in particular, groups like the Southern Baptist Convention, which turns really conservative in the late 70s. 01:14:54.800 --> 01:15:03.119 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. 01:15:03.279 --> 01:15:04.239 That's the default position. 01:15:04.319 --> 01:15:09.520 I don't know if every seminary has sort of a an insistence on that, but that is the default position. 01:15:09.760 --> 01:15:16.640 And they were, they're one of the biggest denomination that sort of took that inerrancy label and made it part of their identity. 01:15:16.800 --> 01:15:25.520 You have plenty of other denominations or seminaries that did not make inerrancy a center of their doctrinal statements. 01:15:25.840 --> 01:15:32.000 And they are have a much different approach to evolution, to climate change and other things. 01:15:32.159 --> 01:15:37.600 And I think this is like like new evangelicalism is creating a space, but it's contested. 01:15:37.760 --> 01:15:48.319 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. 01:15:48.399 --> 01:15:53.600 Like, are we going to give away the whole store or are we going to insist on inerrancy? 01:15:53.920 --> 01:16:00.479 And I think some people have tried to thread that to say you don't have to reject inerrancy to embrace evolution. 01:16:00.640 --> 01:16:02.640 Those are not mutually exclusive. 01:16:02.880 --> 01:16:11.359 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. 01:16:11.439 --> 01:16:14.560 Those were things people had to say, sort of side on one side or the other. 01:16:14.640 --> 01:16:17.119 So I think neo-evangelicalism is a big part of that story. 01:16:17.199 --> 01:16:19.840 And I don't think it's just the people you mentioned, John. 01:16:19.920 --> 01:16:36.960 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. 01:16:37.039 --> 01:16:44.560 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. 01:16:50.319 --> 01:16:51.760 They're very diverse, right? 01:16:51.920 --> 01:16:58.960 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. 01:16:59.279 --> 01:17:08.239 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? 01:17:08.319 --> 01:17:26.479 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. 01:17:26.640 --> 01:17:31.279 I mean, you can't get a job at Messiah and not be a theistic evolutionist. 01:17:31.920 --> 01:17:46.239 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. 01:17:46.479 --> 01:17:49.760 So there's another piece of kind of the evangelical world. 01:17:49.920 --> 01:17:59.680 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. 01:17:59.920 --> 01:18:06.319 And even in these Christian colleges, you're seeing, again, not the there's all kinds of different Christian colleges, right? 01:18:06.399 --> 01:18:13.439 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. 01:18:14.000 --> 01:18:23.520 They predate the neo-evangelical movement, but they kind of embrace the kind of intellectual engagement that the neo-evangelical movement uh put forth. 01:18:23.760 --> 01:18:26.560 Um, Wheaton being probably the primary example. 01:18:26.880 --> 01:18:32.720 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. 01:18:32.880 --> 01:18:34.800 I mentioned Harold Linzel and the Battle for the Bible. 01:18:34.880 --> 01:18:42.880 There's been a very long critique of neo-evangelicalism by more conservative fundamentalists that this is the exact problem with neo-evangelicalism. 01:18:43.039 --> 01:18:43.199 Yeah. 01:18:43.359 --> 01:18:54.720 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. 01:18:54.960 --> 01:19:02.640 Or that they're so committed to this kind of cultural engagement that it somehow like skews them seeing the real facts. 01:19:02.720 --> 01:19:02.880 Right. 01:19:03.119 --> 01:19:08.640 Because they're letting the pop the political posture or the cultural posture, right, affect. 01:19:08.800 --> 01:19:12.720 Well, we can't say that because then it'll look like we're fundamentalists, you know, kind of thing. 01:19:12.880 --> 01:19:13.119 Yeah. 01:19:13.680 --> 01:19:17.680 Well, I think it kind of goes back to Stephen Miller's um concern, right? 01:19:17.760 --> 01:19:22.880 Like there's always going to be vain babblings, there's always going to be false teachings, so-called science. 01:19:23.119 --> 01:19:37.279 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. 01:19:37.600 --> 01:19:58.880 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. 01:19:59.039 --> 01:20:03.520 That's a very active conversation, at least online in the evangelical world today. 01:20:03.760 --> 01:20:12.239 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? 01:20:12.560 --> 01:20:18.239 We managed, actually, I think we managed to talk about a history of science, evolution, inerrancy, right? 01:20:18.399 --> 01:20:19.600 I think we are good historians. 01:20:19.760 --> 01:20:24.399 We managed to do this without ever even hinting to what our personal positions on these things might be. 01:20:25.600 --> 01:20:28.159 That's that's that's a that's a plus for me. 01:20:28.640 --> 01:20:31.439 I'm sure if we have uh astute listeners, they'll be playing. 01:20:31.760 --> 01:20:33.520 I'm sure someone will read into it, right? 01:20:34.640 --> 01:20:35.279 How dare they? 01:20:35.840 --> 01:20:41.760 But also like good historians, we went down rabbit trails and got a little bit too deep and sacrificed some breadth. 01:20:41.840 --> 01:20:50.399 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. 01:20:50.800 --> 01:20:56.239 And we have mentioned a few times in this conversation that Ted had a much longer interview with John. 01:20:56.319 --> 01:20:57.760 And so check the show notes. 01:20:58.000 --> 01:20:59.520 That whole interview is on YouTube. 01:20:59.760 --> 01:21:06.399 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. 01:21:08.720 --> 01:21:13.199 Thanks so much for listening to American Evangelicals a History Podcast. 01:21:13.359 --> 01:21:21.680 A reminder that the entire conversation between one of our historians, John Fiat, and our special guest, Ted Davis, exists on our YouTube channel. 01:21:21.840 --> 01:21:23.920 Just click the link in the show notes. 01:21:24.079 --> 01:21:28.960 And if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe to this podcast so you don't miss what's next. 01:21:29.119 --> 01:21:37.119 And if this episode sparked your curiosity, consider sharing it with someone who wants a deeper, more nuanced understanding of evangelical history. 01:21:37.359 --> 01:21:39.600 Until next time, thanks for listening.