REFLEC TIONS: SCIENCE AND RELIGION

Science and Religion:

A Historical Perspective on the Conflict
over Teaching Evolution in the Schools

Bryan F. Le Beau

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness;
and let them have dominion . . . over all the earth.”
— Genesis 1:26

In November 2005 the Kansas State Board of Education revised its science stan-
dards for the second time in six years in its tug-of-war between those who favor
and those who oppose the teaching of evolution in the state’s public schools. A
conservative-led board altered the definition of science and qualified its acceptance
of evolution. The old definition of science had read: “Science is the human activity
of seeking natural explanations for what we observe in the world around us.” The
new definition described science as “a systematic method of continuing investiga-
tion that uses observation, hypothesis testing, measurement, experimentation, logi-
cal argument and theory building to lead to more adequate explanations of natural
phenomena.” The key change here was the removal of the words “natural expla-
nation.” Scientists saw that as a red flag that would allow supernatural as well as
natural explanations — read intelligent design. The new standards pointed out that
“discrepancies in the molecular evidence” had challenged the evolutionary theory

Radical History Review

Issue 99 (Fall 2007) doi 10.1215/01636545-2007-011
© 2007 by MARHO: The Radical Historians’ Organization, Inc.

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of common ancestry of all living things, and that “whether microevolution can be
extrapolated to explain macro evolutionary changes is controversial.”1
Kansas was not alone in this exercise. In Dover, Pennsylvania, eight families
sued their school board over its decision in October 2004 to require schoolteach-
ers to read the following statement before ninth-grade biology classes: “Because
Darwin’s theory is a theory, it continues to be tested as new evidence is discovered.
The theory is not a fact. Gaps in the theory exist for which there is no evidence.” It
referred students to an intelligent design textbook, Of Pandas and People, available
in the library, and encouraged students to “keep an open mind” in the matter.2 And
in a third case, a suburban Atlanta school district (Cobb County) voted to place
stickers on each science book with the statement: “This textbook contains material
on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things.
This material should be regarded with an open mind, studied carefully and critically
considered.”3
At that point, in as many as thirty-one states, anti-evolutionists pinned their
hopes on the persuasiveness of the latest alternative to Darwinism, intelligent design.
Intelligent design is predicated on the concept of irreducible complexity, which
asserts that certain biological entities are so complex that they cannot be explained
through natural causes — or evolution and natural selection. They presuppose an
intelligent cause, commonly held to be God. Intelligent design is not entirely new.
Philosophers and theologians have suggested variations on this theme for centuries
under other names. In the challenge it has come to pose to the teaching of evolution
in the schools, however, it has remained largely an American phenomenon.4

A History of the Warfare between Science and Religion

A level of tension has long existed between science and Christianity when new sci-
entific theories have challenged established religious beliefs concerning humans’
supposed special place in the universe, most notably at the hands of Copernicus
and Darwin. These two examples, as well as the well known case of the Vatican
versus Galileo, have provided the building blocks for the widely held view of sev-
eral centuries of warfare between science and Christianity — perhaps most ardently
presented in John William Draper’s History of the Conflict between Religion and
Science (1874) and Andrew Dickson White’s A History of the Warfare of Science
with Theology in Christendom (1896).5 The problem is that recent scholarship sug-
gests it is an exaggeration and that it no longer serves to explain the actual historical
relationship between science and Christianity. The historian Gary Ferngren has
labeled it a “creation myth,” used “to explain the world as seen in the light of mod-
ern research.”6
The myth persists because it offers an appealing explanation of the world
around us. It establishes science and Christianity as opposites, locked in a conflict
between reason and faith, inquiry and authority, thereby establishing contending
 Le Beau | Teaching Evolution in the Schools 189

forces that are easily identified, ridiculed, and demonized. Historically, there have
been periods of considerable tension between science and Christianity, but, for the
most part, they have been seen as compatible, or at least reconcilable. Indeed, some
have argued that Christianity was present at the creation of, and was responsible
for, the rise of modern science in the West. As Rodney Stark argues in For the
Glory of God, the appearance of science in world history was “the normal, gradual,
and direct outgrowth of Scholasticism and the medieval universities.” It was made
possible by the “theological assumptions unique to Christianity,” to which he adds:
“Contrary to the received wisdom, religion and science not only were compatible;
they were inseparable.”7
E. Brooks Holifield has found that American theologians have always empha-
sized “the reasonableness of Christianity.” In the early nineteenth century, he writes,
among a wide range of denominations commonsense theology prevailed.8 Darwin
did little to change that. At the end of the century, well after the publication of The
Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871),9 James Cardinal Gibbons
could still write that although some continued to harbor “a lurking suspicion” that
some antagonism existed between “certain dogmas or revelation and the results of
scientific investigation,” “the truth is, that how much so ever scientists and theolo-
gians may quarrel among themselves, there will never be any collision, but the most
perfect harmony will ever exist between science and religion.”10 And Mark Noll
has written about the constant engagement of science and Christianity even among
evangelicals and fundamentalists in nineteenth-century America. They continually
sought to reconcile their religious beliefs with science, he argues, seeking to exploit
the prestige of science, or showed a reliance on science to bolster their cause.11

Enter Darwin
The debate over evolution was drawn even before Darwin published Origin. John
Herschel and Charles Lyell — even Erasmus Darwin (Charles’s grandfather) — among
others, forced the intellectuals of the day to consider the possibility that a reading
of Genesis and its stories of creation ought not to be literal, that the age of rocks was
far older than the commonly ascribed six thousand years, and that some form of evo-
lution was possible. Twenty years before the publication of Origin, Herschel wrote
to Lyell wondering when someone would solve the “mystery of mysteries,” or how
apparently new species came to replace extinct species in the fossil record.12 Some
sided with Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, believing that evolution followed the inheritance
of acquired characteristics. Others preferred a more teleological evolutionary theory
established by God, or divine design. What Charles Darwin (and Alfred Russel Wal-
lace) added to the conversation were the means by which evolution occurred: ran-
dom mutation and natural selection.
Darwin’s theory of natural selection met with mixed reviews. Over a century
ago, Andrew Dickson White wrote that Origin “had come into the theological world
19 0 Radical History Review

like a plough into an ant hill. Everywhere those thus rudely awakened from their
old comfort and repose had swarmed forth angry and confused. Reviews, sermons,
books light and heavy, came flying at the new thinker from all sides.”13 And indeed
the historian James Turner has argued that by the 1880s, as a result of Darwin
having provided a purely naturalistic explanation for the variations of life on earth,
as well as of so-called biblical higher criticism, which also called into question any
literal reading of Scripture, “agnosticism emerged as a self-sustaining phenomenon.
Disbelief in God was, for the first time, plausible enough to grow beyond a rare
eccentricity to stake out a sizable permanent niche in American culture.”14 So it is
not surprising that some ministers and theologians attacked Darwinian evolution as
“the most extreme manifestation of the atheistical tendency inherent in the idea of
evolution.”15 As the Princeton theologian Charles Hodge put it in What Is Darwin-
ism? (1874), Darwin’s theory undercut belief in divine design, and such a “conclu-
sion . . . is virtually the denial of God.” Therefore, “Mr. Darwin’s theory is virtually
atheistical.”16
Others, however, embraced evolution — if not Darwin’s theories of random
mutation and natural selection, quite yet — as a revelation that would result in reli-
gious teachings being placed on a “firmer and broader foundation.”17 As the Rever-
end Henry Ward Beecher put it in Evolution and Religion (1886), evolution “lifted
[divine design] to a higher place, and made it more sublime than it ever was contem-
plated to be under the old reasonings.”18 And John Zahm, a Roman Catholic priest
and a professor of chemistry and physics at the University of Notre Dame, welcomed
evolution as “a strong and useful ally of Catholic dogma.”19 Most, however, steered
a middle course, suggesting that there just was not enough evidence yet to prove or
disprove Darwin’s thesis.
Lay scientists were similarly divided in their responses to Darwin. Some
clearly believed that Darwin’s theory was correct and even that it undermined,
if not destroyed, belief in God, or at least any certainty of his existence. Thomas
Huxley — who actually coined the term agnostic in 1869 — was among the most
outspoken of this group, but he was not alone. As James Turner put it, God’s result-
ing “absence from scientific work constituted no logically valid argument against His
existence, but it did mean one less reason to believe in Him.”20
Most were conflicted, but a number of scientists hastened to make known
their belief that science and Christianity remained reconcilable. By way of exam-
ple, some ten years after the publication of Origin, Alexander Winchell, a Univer-
sity of Michigan professor of geology, zoology, and botany, confirmed his belief
that “science prosecuted to its conclusions leads to God.”21 But even the better-
known botanist Asa Gray “found his way back to theism,” as the historian Paul
Carter later put it. To Gray, “Darwinian evolution . . . is neither theistical nor non-
theistical.” However, as Carter explains, “the alternative to a belief in a divinely
based order in nature was belief in chaos, a belief which for both the religionist
 Le Beau | Teaching Evolution in the Schools 191

and the materialist in the Gilded Age would have been difficult to accept; and
Gray’s own option was for God.”22
And, finally, still others took a wait-and-see approach. They believed that
further research was required to support or deny what Darwin proposed — espe-
cially to explain the mechanism by which random mutation and natural selection
worked, genetic research then being in its infancy at best. As an editorial in Scrib-
ner’s Monthly declared in 1872: “The doctrine of evolution, with its offspring Dar-
winism, is nothing more than a provisional hypothesis, based on a priori reasonings,
and not on any valid induction of facts.”23
It should be recalled at this point that although in time the man who once
considered a life in the Anglican Church would be drawn toward agnosticism,24
Darwin did not intend his book to be an attack on revealed religion. Rather, as he
put it, it was to be “a hymn to the Creator’s immutable laws by which the ‘higher ani-
mals’ had evolved.”25 On the title page of Origin he included a quote from Francis
Bacon on the necessity of studying God’s work as well as God’s word.26 Few doubted
his intent. Even Charles Hodge made clear that Darwin’s theories notwithstanding,
he did not believe him to be an atheist.27 And as others like to point out, Darwin was
buried in Westminster Abbey in a public funeral that involved both men of the cloth
and the laboratory, symbolizing the continued reconciliation between faith and sci-
ence.28 As the professor of science and theology William Dembski put it, divine
design did not wither as a result of Darwin, “indeed, its roots were deeper, ramify-
ing into the physical laws that structure the universe.”29 Richard Dawkins was no
doubt correct when he wrote that Darwin created a new class of men Dawkins
called “intellectually fulfilled atheists,” who allowed that God might exist, but that
the physical world did not require it. But, at least for the moment, they remained
few and mostly silent.30

Opposition to Teaching Evolution in the Schools

Draper’s and White’s histories notwithstanding, then, science and Christianity in
the matter of evolution remained in accord, or at least in a state of détente, into the
twentieth century. But early research into the inheritance of traits lent support to
Darwin’s theory of natural evolution, and it became increasingly more difficult to
suggest that Darwinian evolution was “nothing more than a provisional hypothesis.”
As Ronald Numbers has written: “By the closing years of the nineteenth century,
evolution was infiltrating even the ranks of the evangelicals, and, in the opinion
of many observers, belief in special creation seemed destined to go the way of the
dinosaur.”31 But that was not to be the case.
Any reconciliation among scientific and religious leaders did not necessarily
reflect the position of the rank and file of American Christians, who remained true
to their traditional reading of Genesis and to the idea of special creation. The debate
over evolution became public once again during the first few decades of the twen-
192 Radical History Review

tieth century. To begin with, although the majority of scientists accepted the idea
of evolution, some continued to debate Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Their
published doubts no doubt encouraged religious anti-evolutionists to more publicly
champion their own cause. 32 And they were further encouraged to do so by the
more formal organization of fundamentalists with the publication of the Fundamen-
tals between 1905 and 1915 and the Scofield Reference Bible in 1909. This actually
resulted in a division among anti-evolutionists. One school of thought continued
to hold out for a theory of evolution devoid of natural selection or one that fol-
lowed a divine plan. The other returned, or perhaps continued to adhere, to the pre-
evolutionary worldview in which species, especially humans, were directly created
by God — a literal interpretation of Genesis and a complete denial of the geological
time scale and other scientific advances. The middle ground accepted evolution,
even Darwinian evolution, but insisted that it stopped short of humankind.33
The strict creationist school, or young earth school, as it was variously known,
spread throughout the United States during the 1920s, especially among conserva-
tive Christians in the South. The adherents were convinced that Darwinism, to
which they most strenuously objected because of its emphasis on natural selection,
was a source of moral corruption that threatened to undermine traditional values.
In April 1924, just one year before Tennessee v. John T. Scopes, Vernon Kellogg
voiced concern with the growing religious opposition to Darwin’s theory in “The
Modern View of Evolution,” which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly. He wrote of
the revival of religion following World War I, which had galvanized resistance to
Darwin. He referred to evolution as the “whipping boy” for those who “take their
religion too emotionally and thoughtlessly, hence violently.” And he explained that
anti-evolutionists did not oppose the theory on the basis of scientific uncertainty,
but rather because they simply preferred biblical creation.34
The anti-evolution movement coincided with the Progressive public school
movement to create a “perfect storm.” The public school movement emphasized the
need for more widespread compulsory school attendance at public institutions led
by professional educators. Enrollment in the nation’s schools increased from about
two hundred thousand in 1890 to 2 million in 1920, and many more students went
to high school than ever before, where they would be exposed to the teaching of
evolution. The prospect of having their children attend such godless institutions
and be exposed to “atheistical evolution” outraged parents, who in turn prompted
more than forty anti-evolution bills in twenty-one state legislatures between 1921
and 1929. They were passed in Tennessee, Mississippi, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and
Florida.35 The focus of the quarrel over the validity of evolution as a scientific theory
shifted to the teaching of evolution in the public schools.
An attempt by the American Civil Liberties Union to challenge the constitu-
tionality of Tennessee’s Butler Act, which banned the teaching “of any theory that
denies the story of divine creation of man as taught in the Bible,” brought the forces
 Le Beau | Teaching Evolution in the Schools 193

of pro- and anti-evolution to Dayton, Tennessee, in 1925. The anti-evolutionists

were led by William Jennings Bryan, the former secretary of state and a three-time
presidential candidate. As Edward Larson has argued in his recent book on the
Scopes Trial, the prosecution’s position would be that the public, at the state and
local levels, had the right to control the content of public education, not “outsiders,”
with their decidedly dangerous ideas. As Bryan put it, “the real issue is not what can
be taught in public schools, but who shall control the education system.”36
Bryan, however, voiced a larger message, one that incorporated local con-
cerns but placed them in a broader context. That message was not original to Bryan,
but rather dated to the closing years of the nineteenth century. In brief, it was
prompted by social Darwinists who sought to apply Darwin’s scientific theories to
human society — something Darwin and most natural scientists resisted, especially
when Darwin’s theory of natural selection was used to bolster a proposed social
order based on the concept of the survival of the fittest. Soon after Descent of Man
appeared, for example, J. B. Drury wrote this criticism in Scribner’s Monthly: “Dar-
winism in deriving man from brute, making him an improved rather than a fallen
spirit, at one blow robs morality of its sanctions. Might, and cunning, and whatever
tends to advance self-interest, will and more tell in the struggle for existence, and be
the goal of human progress. The Christian virtues of self-denial, thoughtfulness for
others, care of the infirm, the destitute, and the aged . . . must, under such evolu-
tion, be eliminated.”37 Bryan was of like mind. He saw Darwin’s theory of natural
selection as the basis on which social Darwinism was built. And that, in turn, was
the root cause of materialism, which if allowed to dominate human thinking, would
lead humanity to no longer believe in God’s special creation of man in his image.
This in turn would eclipse any belief in humans’ higher purpose in life and negate
any reason to act according to the teachings of the Bible, which Bryan believed pro-
vided the foundation on which civilized society existed.38
Bryan’s opponent, Clarence Darrow, a nationally prominent trial lawyer —
most recently in the news for his role in the sensational Leopold and Loeb case in
Chicago — explained his purpose in defending John Thomas Scopes as opposing a
law that perpetuated religious bigotry. He explained: “Bryan would block enlighten-
ment with law. . . . Had Mr. Bryan’s ideas of what a man may do towards free think-
ing existed throughout history, we would still be hanging and burning witches and
punishing people who thought the earth was round.”39

After Scopes
It is widely believed — largely as the result of the popular movie Inherit the Wind
(1960) — that the Scopes Trial humiliated and discredited anti-evolutionists. His-
torians have concluded that the results of the trial were closer to a draw. Scopes’s
conviction was overturned by the state Supreme Court on a technicality, but the
defense’s goal of testing the law’s constitutionality was thwarted in the process. And
194 Radical History Review

perhaps most important, Bryan’s opposition became an article of faith among the
like minded, especially when Bryan died within days of the end of the trial, thereby
making him a martyr to the cause.40
The crusade for state legislation to outlaw the teaching of evolution in the
schools flagged by the end of the decade and came to a halt in 1968 when the
U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Epperson v. Arkansas that Arkansas’s law, which was
similar to Tennessee’s, was an unconstitutional establishment of religion. But anti-
evolutionists had already shifted their efforts to the local level. They were successful
in influencing the adoption of science textbooks, assuring that publishers would not
include any significant information on Darwin, as well as in intimidating teachers
not to allow evolution into their classrooms.41
This state of affairs continued until the Sputnik era and the renewed empha-
sis on science. Evolution, which had continued to build a more solid scientific foun-
dation on which to defend itself, was included among the new science standards to
be introduced into the classroom. And this sparked another round in the battle over
teaching evolution in the schools that raged in the 1960s and 1970s.
In the first phase of this reinvigorated movement, opponents of evolution
fought to have “creation science,” as it was styled, taught as an alternative scientific
theory. By adopting scientific language, proponents of creation science hoped to
avoid the charge of religious purpose that had blocked them in the courts, as well
as to gain credibility in championing the theory being taught in the schools. The
creation science movement was bolstered by the publication in 1961 of The Gen-
esis Flood by John C. Whitcomb Jr. and Henry M. Morris. Whitcomb and Morris’s
book was really an updated version of George Price’s New Geology (1923), which
sought to reestablish the inerrancy of the Bible and the Genesis story of creation.42
Their book renewed anti-evolutionists’ emphasis on the recent creation of the world
by arguing that a massive flood had occurred some five thousand years ago that
accounted for the apparent, but not real, older age of fossil remains.43
Special creationists welcomed The Genesis Flood for giving their cause intel-
lectual support. Evolutionists rejected the book, but so, too, did moderate creation-
ists, who continued to seek to reconcile their view of creation with the geological
record. They denounced the book as “a travesty on geology that threatened to set
back the cause of Christian science a generation.”44
A few states passed legislation providing for the teaching of creation science,
but once again they were blocked in the courts, which found that creation science
was not a science at all, but rather an attempt to insert a literal reading of Genesis
into the classroom. So creationists proposed a more limited approach, encouraging
schools to teach “only the scientific aspects of creationism,” which meant their great
flood theory. The approach attracted support. It was adopted by the state legisla-
tures of Arkansas and Louisiana, but in 1987, in Aguillard v. Edwards, the U.S.
Supreme Court found, in the matter of a Louisiana law, that the teaching of creation
 Le Beau | Teaching Evolution in the Schools 195

science in the public schools was unconstitutional. Earlier a federal appeals court
had referred to the history of the matter as continuing “the battle William Jennings
Bryan carried to his grave.”45
Finally, in the 1990s, once again frustrated by the courts, anti-evolutionists
moved on to intelligent design. Basic to this concept is the existence of what they
term “irreducible complexity” in nature, which can only be attributed to an intelli-
gent designer. They also argue that although it can be responsible for small changes
in various forms of life, evolution cannot account for the large-scale differences that
account for entirely new species and for the origin of life from nonliving matter in
the first place. Some intelligent designers have campaigned for “equal time” with
evolution in the public schools. Others are willing to settle for an acknowledgment
on the part of educators that evolution is only a theory, by which they mean an
unsettled or incomplete explanation, whose gaps can be explained by intelligent
design.
Proponents of intelligent design have expanded their efforts to develop a
scientific research program to bolster their theory, most notably at the Discovery
Institute in Seattle. This research will require proof that whatever they point to as
designed can be scientifically proven to be designed by other than natural laws and
processes. Most scientists agree that such proof is impossible and that therefore
intelligent design is not a science. William Dembski has put it another way: “To
say that intelligent causes are empirically detectable is to say that there exist well-
defined methods that, on the basis of observational features of the world, are capa-
ble of reliably distinguishing intelligent causes from undirected natural cause.”46
This, he argues, cannot be done.

The Future of Evolution and Its Opponents

The Harvard scientist Edward O. Wilson attracted considerable attention when he
wrote that the “perennial culture war between science and fundamentalist Chris-
tianity about evolution . . . is insoluble.”47 Most scientists and public intellectuals of
various sorts, however, while endorsing evolution, see no contradiction between the
theory of evolution and belief in God. Francis Collins has gained the limelight, as
of late, in this category. In The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for
Belief (2006) the director of the National Human Genome Research Institute — a
self–described “pretty obnoxious atheist” in his earlier days — calls for a truce in the
war between science and Christianity. “Science is not threatened by God,” he says;
“it is enhanced. God is most certainly not threatened by science. He made all pos-
sible.” Collins rejects intelligent design but finds God’s hand elsewhere.48
Beyond the academy public opinion remains as divided as it has been for
centuries. James Turner correctly identified the root cause of people’s concern with
science when he wrote that the blow of modern science to the masses of people
“hit more of the psyche than the intellect, which made it all the harder to defend
196 Radical History Review

against.”49 Moreover, perhaps Turner was correct in arguing that religious leaders
were at least partly responsible for the damage done when, for centuries, “the cer-
tainty of knowledge of God through science” was a mainstay in the West — only
to have that central pillar seriously undermined when modern science seemed no
longer capable of providing any real knowledge of God. That, in turn, led people to
wonder whether knowledge of God was possible at all.50
Nevertheless, the choices people have in responding to the latest scientific
advances continue to be limited pretty much as they have been for more than a cen-
tury. Some will continue to simply ignore the entire situation and believe what they
wish in reference to creation. Others will compartmentalize and allow to coexist in
their minds their conflicting religious beliefs and scientific understanding. Still oth-
ers will continue the struggle to bring science and Christianity into closer alliance,
as has been the case for centuries.
Most Americans are unable, or at least unwilling, to accept any explanation
of creation that adds greater distance between them and their God, or that might
lead to their God becoming an impersonal force in the world, especially if taught to
their children. Thomas Frank has described the battle in Kansas as typical, rather
than unique. It is “symbolic combat” wherein proponents of evolution are seen as
part of a sinister “war against God” to legitimize materialism and to teach chil-
dren that “there is no meaning to life, no inherent value in humans and no absolute
source of moral authority.”51
This idea was so often voiced during the Kansas School Board deliberations
that a leading opponent of intelligent design felt compelled to answer the charge in
print. Keith Miller, a member of Kansas Citizens for Science, responded directly to
the intelligent design leader John Calvert, who accused his opponents of seeking “to
promote a materialist world view that seeks to demean the idea of creation.” Miller,
who in addition to being a scientist is also an evangelical Christian, insisted that he,
in fact, believed that “God is always active in the natural world, and upholds the
very existence of physical reality.” He denied the “false popular view that evolution
rejects meaning and purpose in the universe,” saying that the latter was something
science simply could not prove or even state.52
The fact remains, however, that according to a national poll conducted in
October 2005, 64 percent of Americans believe that religion is “under attack” and 53
percent that religion is “losing its influence in American life.53 To be more specific,
most people, not just conservative Christians, cannot accept the idea that evolution,
if indeed it exists, is simply a matter of random mutation and natural selection and
not guided by a higher power. Neither can they accept the proposition that what
they believe follows from any such materialistic understanding of the world, that
such concepts as good or bad, right or wrong, are culturally relative and not abso-
lute. And, to return to the quote from Genesis with which we began, they cannot
accept the demotion of the human as a special creation. As the science writer David
 Le Beau | Teaching Evolution in the Schools 197

Quammen has put it: “Let’s be clear. This is not evolution versus God. The existence
of God . . . is not what Darwin’s evolutionary theory challenges. What it challenges
is the supposed godliness of man — the conviction that we above all other life forms
are spiritually elevated, divinely favored, possessed of an immaterial and immortal
essence, such that we have special prospects for eternity, special status in the expec-
tations of God, special rights and responsibilities on Earth.”54
But as the current intelligent design debate suggests, that to which many
people also object is not that science is raising questions concerning the origins of
life, but that scientists often see the matter as settled and that scientific naturalism
is the only source of answers — or as Francis Collins has put it, that they operate
with a “mind-set of reductionism,” which insists that “anything worth understanding
can be understood by using the tools of science and basic physical and mathematical
principles.”55 They commonly point to scientists who publicly criticize religious lead-
ers or ridicule religion “for not only oppressing human freedom and creating various
psychological and sociological disorders but also [for] impeding human progress by
diverting our attention to some putative supernatural order instead of helping us
scientifically deal with our problems.”56 Dawkins is the poster boy for this group,
once commenting publicly that “anyone who chooses not to believe in evolution is
ignorant, stupid, or insane.”57 All of this has led some to question whether this is an
“independent conviction,” as scientists insist it is, or, as Bertrand Russell suggested,
“a system of dogma set up to combat orthodox dogma.”58

So Where Do We Go from Here?

Over the past 150 years, hostility between conservative Christians and evolution-
ists has ebbed and flowed, while the majority of Americans watch from a distance,
sympathetic with the former but willing to coexist with the latter. Further, since
the 1940s, the federal courts have remained steadfast in their defense of the wall of
separation between church and state, if occasionally breached to accommodate the
free exercise of religion. Both have lessened the chances for any long-term success
on the part of those who oppose the teaching of evolution in the schools. In 1999 the
Kansas State Board of Education succumbed to religious conservatives and adopted
limitations on the teaching of evolution, only to face national ridicule. The follow-
ing year, liberals and moderates once again took control, and the board rescinded
the measures. In 2004 the conservatives were back in the majority and the process
began again, resulting in the state science standards of 2005. But in 2006 moderates
took control once again and soon restored evolution to its central role in the state’s
biology curriculum.59
In November 2005 the people of Dover, Pennsylvania, threw out all eight
of the members of their local school board who voted in favor of the measure that
would require the one-minute classroom statement noted earlier. A new, more mod-
erate school board pledged to reexamine the matter, but they did not have to do so.
198 Radical History Review

On December 20, 2005, a U.S. district judge in Harrisburg ruled that the policy
was unconstitutional, and in January 2006 the Dover School Board rescinded the
measure.60 And in the matter of the textbook stickers in Cobb County, Georgia, a
federal court in January 2005 ordered the school district to remove them.61
The historian of science Brian Ogilvie has argued that Christians do them-
selves a disservice by seeking to support intelligent design as a science because it is
bad science and only makes their faith seem ridiculous.62 Seventy percent of evangeli-
cal Christians believe that living things have always existed in the current form, com-
pared with 32 percent of mainline Protestants and 31 percent of Roman Catholics.
But more than half of all Americans reject evolution.63 Dawkins was no doubt correct
when he said in a recent interview that the ability of most people to comprehend the
more complicated matters of science is limited. He suggested that they must take
some things on trust.64 But thus far that trust has been lacking for a large segment of
the population. The result? The public’s acceptance of evolution in the United States
over the past twenty years has actually dropped from 45 to 40 percent, putting the
United States next to the bottom of thirty-four countries included in one study of
popular attitudes toward evolution. Only Turkey showed less support.65
In a recent article, the public policy researcher Daniel Yankelovich lists the
nation’s poor performance in science education as one of the five major challenges
facing higher education in the next ten years. He suggests that the lack of scientific
knowledge among the general population has led to divergent “ways of knowing” or
views of the “nature of truth” — which underscores the differences over evolution
and intelligent design. And that, he argues, has resulted from the failure of scien-
tists to communicate those basic concepts necessary for a general understanding of
science. As a result, “while higher education has grown more scientific in its quest
for knowledge, the American people at large have grown more religious, more fret-
ful about moral ‘truths,’ and more polarized in their struggle to find political and
existential truth.” They believe the nation has lost its way and “must rediscover the
path of truth,” but they have little confidence that higher education, in general, or
science, in particular, can lead us there.66
Scientists have been reluctant to debate proponents of intelligent design.
While mindful of the concern within scientific circles that such rebuttals or pub-
lic debates could lend intelligent design a level of credibility it does not deserve, I
nevertheless think it is a mistake. To remain silent will do little to change prevail-
ing attitudes. But at the time of this writing things seem to be changing. Both the
National Academy of Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement
of Science have launched projects to foster more dialogue between the two sides.
A spate of new books have appeared on the subject.67 And Niles Eldredge, a lead-
ing evolutionist, is creating a new journal, Outreach and Education in Evolution,
designed to provide teachers with accessible and current information on the subject
for use in the classroom.
 Le Beau | Teaching Evolution in the Schools 199

As one of the more liberal of the authors of these new books on evolution,
Michael Shermer, suggests: “Christians should embrace modern science for what it
has done to reveal the magnificence of the divinity in a depth and detail unmatched
by ancient texts.”68 But then even the conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer
would agree. In observing the intelligent design debate of the past few years, he has
written: “How ridiculous to make evolution the enemy of God. What could be more
elegant, more simple, more brilliant, more economical, more creative, indeed more
divine than a planet with millions of life forms, distinct and yet interactive, all ulti-
mately derived from accumulated variations in a single double-stranded molecule,
pliable and fecund enough to give us mollusks and mice, Newton and Einstein?
Even if it did give us the Kansas Board of Education, too.”69

Notes
1. Dennis Overbye, “Philosophers Notwithstanding, Kansas School Board Redefines Science,”
Kansas City Star, November 15, 2005.
2. “Federal Evolution Trial Begins,” Kansas City Star, September 27, 2005; “Witness:
Assertion Isn’t Science,” Kansas City Star, September 29, 2005; David Klepper, “Evolution
Wins Round in US Court,” Kansas City Star, December 21, 2005. Percival Davis and Dean
H. Kenyon, Of Pandas and People: The Central Question of Biological Origins (Mesquite,
TX: Haughton Publishing Company, 1989).
3. “Court Reviews Ruling against Textbook Stickers,” Kansas City Star, December 16, 2005.
4. William A. Dembski, “The Design Argument,” in Science and Religion: A Historical
Introduction, ed. Gary Ferngren (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002),
336 – 37. In September 2006 a creationist group, Truth in Science, began promoting
intelligent design as an alternative to the teaching of evolution in secondary schools in
Britain. Similar efforts have been made in Poland, Germany, and elsewhere in Europe,
but to date little has come of it. Susan Brown, “De-emphasizing Darwin Might Advance
the Argument for Evolution, Biologists Say at Scientists’ Meeting,” Chronicle: Daily News,
February 19, 2007, chronicle.com/daily/2007/02/2007021902n.htm.
5. John William Draper, History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874; reprint
edition, New York: Appleton, 1928), Andrew Dickson White, A History of the Warfare of
Science with Theology in Christendom (New York: Appleton, 1896).
6. Gary Ferngren, introduction to “Charles Darwin,” by James Moore, in Ferngren, Science
and Religion, 208; see also Matthew Day, “Reading the Fossils of Faith: Thomas Henry
Huxley and the Evolutionary Subtext of the Synoptic Problem,” Church History 74 (2005):
534.
7. Rodney Stark, For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science,
Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 3.
8. E. Brooks Holifield, Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans
to the Civil War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 175.
9. Charles Darwin, From So Simple a Beginning: The Four Great Books of Charles Darwin,
ed. Edward O. Wilson (New York: Norton, 2006).
10. James Cardinal Gibbons, Our Christian Heritage (1889), in Critical Issues in American
Religious History, ed. Robert R. Mathisen (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2006), 388.
11. Mark A. Noll, “Evangelicalism and Fundamentalism,” in Ferngren, Science and Religion,
270, 275.
20 0 Radical History Review

12. Niles Eldridge, Darwin: Discovering the Tree of Life (New York: Norton, 2005), 9.
13. Andrew Dickson White, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom
(1896), in Mathisen, Critical Issues, 399.
14. James Turner, Without God, without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 171.
15. Peter J. Bowler, “Evolution,” in Ferngren, Science and Religion, 223.
16. Charles Hodge, What Is Darwinism? (1874), in Mathisen, Critical Issues, 171.
17. Moore, “Charles Darwin,” 213, 214.
18. Henry Ward Beecher, Evolution and Religion (1886), in Mathisen, Critical Issues, 387.
19. John Zahm, Evolution and Dogma (1890), in Mathisen, Critical Issues, 398.
20. Turner, Without God, 180 – 82.
21. Quoted in Paul A. Carter, The Spiritual Crisis of the Gilded Age (1971), in Mathisen,
Critical Issues, 407 – 8.
22. Carter, Spiritual Crisis, 408.
23. Quoted in Mathisen, Critical Issues, 409.
24. Bowler, “Evolution,” 220. It should be noted that some scholars point to the untimely
death of Darwin’s daughter as contributing to his loss of faith. See, for example, Shankar
Vedantum’s conversation with James Moore in Vedantum, “Eden and Evolution,”
Washington Post, February 5, 2006, www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/
article/2006/02/03/AR2006020300822_pf.html.
25. Moore, “Charles Darwin,” 213.
26. The edition of Darwin’s The Origin of Species I have used is included in Darwin, From So
Simple a Beginning.
27. Hodge, What is Darwinism, 380.
28. Moore, “Charles Darwin,” 216.
29. Dembski, “The Design Argument,” 339.
30. Quoted in ibid., 339.
31. Ronald L. Numbers, “Creationism since 1859,” in Ferngren, Science and Religion, 278.
32. Ibid., 278, 280.
33. Carter, Spiritual Crisis, 411.
34. “Flashback: Defending Darwin,” Atlantic Online, originally published April 1924; excerpted
on August 10, 2005, www.theatlantic.com/doc/200508u/fb2005-08-10.
35. Edward J. Larson, Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing
Debate over Science and Religion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997),
23 – 24.
36. Ibid., 104.
37. Carter, Spiritual Crisis, 410.
38. Larson, Summer for the Gods, 39 – 40.
39. Ibid., 103.
40. Edward J. Larson, “The Scopes Trial,” in Ferngren, Science and Religion, 207.
41. Numbers, “Creationism Since 1859,” 283.
42. John C. Whitcomb Jr. and Henry M. Morris, The Genesis Flood (Philadelphia: Presbyterian
& Reformed Publishing Co., 1961); and George Price, New Geology (Mountain View, CA:
Pacific Press, 1923).
43. Numbers, “Creationism since 1859,” 284.
44. Ibid., 284.
45. Larson, Summer for the Gods, 259.
46. Dembski, “The Design Argument,” 341.
 Le Beau | Teaching Evolution in the Schools 201

47. Edward O. Wilson, “Let’s Accept the Fault Line between Faith and Science,” USA Today,
January 16, 2006.
48. Collins is quoted in: Catherine Clabby, “Under the Microscope,” Kansas City Star, August
5, 2006.
49. Turner, Without God, 15.
50. Ibid., 186 – 87.
51. Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of
America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004), 207.
52. Keith B. Miller, “Intelligent Design Proponents Distort Foes,” Kansas City Star, July 27,
2006.
53. “American Attitudes toward Religion in the Public Square,” Kansas City Star, November
26, 2005.
54. Quoted in Robert Lee Hotz, “Laws of Nature,” Sunday Book Review, Los Angeles Times,
July 30, 2006, R3.
55. Collins is quoted in: Clabby, “Under the Microscope.”
56. Edward B. Davis and Robin Collins, “Scientific Naturalism,” in Ferngren, Science and
Religion, 329 – 30.
57. Quoted in Vedantum, “Eden and Evolution.”
58. Davis and Collins, “Scientific Naturalism,” 329 – 30.
59. David Klepper, “Science Decision Creates Fallout,” Kansas City Star, November 12, 2005;
“Victories by Pro-science Candidates Are a Win for Kansas,” Kansas City Star, August 3,
2006; David Klepper, “Kansas Science Guides Revised,” Kansas City Star, February 14,
2007.
60. Jill Lawrence, “ ‘Intelligent Design’ Backers Lose in PA,” USA Today, Nov. 10, 2005;
Klepper, “Evolution Wins Round.”
61. “Court Reviews Ruling against Textbook Stickers.”
62. Brian Ogilvie, “A Triumph for Religion as Well as Science,” History News Service,
November 27, 2005, www.h-net-org/~hns/articles/2005/122605b.html.
63. Pew Research Center for the People and the Press Poll, discussed in Hotz, “Laws of
Nature.”
64. Laura Sheehen, “The Problem with God: An Interview with Richard Dawkins,” November
11, 2005, Beliefnet, www.beliefnet.com/story/178/story_17889.html.
65. Nicholas D. Kristof, “The Hubris of the Humanities,’ New York Times, December 6, 2005.
66. Daniel Yankelovich, “Ferment and Change: Higher Education in 2015,” Chronicle of Higher
Education: The Chronicle Review, November 25, 2005, B6.
67. See, for example, David Quammen, The Reluctant Mr. Darwin: An Intimate Portrait of
Charles Darwin and the Making of His Theory of Evolution (New York: Atlas, 2006); John
Brockman, ed., Intelligent Thought: Science Versus the Intelligent Design Movement (New
York: Vintage, 2006); Michael Shermer, Why Darwin Matters: The Case against Intelligent
Design (New York: Henry Holt, 2006); and James D. Watson, ed., Darwin, The Indelible
Stamp: The Evolution of an Idea (New York: Norton, 2006).
68. Quoted in Hotz, “Laws of Nature.”
69. Charles Krauthammer, “Insulting Science and Religion,” Kansas City Star, November 20,
2005.