How the Scopes Trial Framed the Modern Debate Over Science and Religion

Every decade or so America produces a “trial of the century.” My favorite candidate for this overused epithet is not the recent O.J. Simpson trial but the trial of the leaders of the Third Reich at Nuremberg in 1945. By clarifying the difference between law and justice and by rejecting the defense that the defendants followed their superior’s orders as a justification for genocide, the Nuremberg tribunal stands out as a beacon of light in a century scarred by dark slaughter, legal and illegal.

A trial that comes close to meriting the designation “trial of the century,” at least for its lasting impact on American culture, took place in Dayton, Tenn., in 1925. Two great advocates, William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow, struggled with one another in a test of the constitutionality of a recent state statute against the teaching of evolution in public schools. Both sides desired only one legal outcome at the trial: the conviction of John Scopes for teaching from George Hunter’s “Civic Biology,” a high school textbook that promoted Charles Darwin’s “The Descent of Man.” From the perspective of the ACLU attorneys who arranged and orchestrated the trial, Scopes’ conviction would trigger an appeal that might overturn the Tennessee statute. As an icon of the triumph of science over religion, the Scopes trial would enter into the American imagination primarily through the trenchant, if selective, cynicism of that proto-curmudgeon, H.L. Mencken, who covered the trial for the Baltimore Sun, and later through the gross distortions of historical reality in “Inherit the Wind,” the 1955 play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee, which became a hit film in 1960.

Edward Larson’s training both in legal history and in the history of science serves him well in “Summer for the Gods,” which was recently awarded the Pulitzer Prize for history. With playful irony Larson borrows the title of his meticulous study from Darrow’s autobiography, written seven years after the Scopes trial. Darrow immodestly referred to the event as the “summer for the gods,” an odd designation either for a staunch agnostic like himself or for a devout monotheist like Bryan. Larson unearthed contemporary newspaper accounts of the trial and probed archival materials previously unexamined, including the archives of the ACLU, and the papers of Bryan, Darrow and Justice Abe Fortas. (A young Tennessean in 1925, Fortas followed the trial assiduously and was prompted by it to embark on a legal career that would lead in time to his service on the Supreme Court, where he wrote for the court in the Epperson case [1968], invalidating an Arkansas law forbidding the teaching of evolution.)

Larson unlocks the past and renders it gracefully accessible in a narrative style that is easy to follow, despite the complexity of the intellectual currents and counter-currents of his theme. He does not skimp in helping the reader to grasp the full significance of the crusade against the teaching of evolution in public schools in the 1920s; more than half of the book is spent setting the stage for the trial. By the time Larson begins to retell what occurred at the trial, we are well introduced to the history of the ideas that the trial was meant to test.

We can be especially grateful to Larson for his rich contextualization of the principal characters, who emerge from this account as vivid and interesting, by no means the silly cartoon caricatures of “Inherit the Wind.” For example, Larson paints a much more complex sketch of Bryan than the popular misconception of him as a Bible-thumping buffoon. Many of Bryan’s assumptions, both biblical and scientific, are now outdated. His interpretation of the Bible was never literalist, but his lack of theological training made him vulnerable to following Darrow’s bait down blind alleys. Bryan knew, moreover, of serious scientific difficulties with Darwinism, such as Darwin’s positing that slight, random variations were enough to generate life from nonlife and to produce the current vast array of biological species. But Bryan mistook the lack of consensus about the particular mechanisms advanced by Darwin for a lack of scientific support for the general theory of organic evolution.

In spite of Bryan’s deficiencies, he was no fool for opposing Darwinism. A leading Populist (three times the presidential candidate of the Democratic Party), “the Great Commoner” opposed the mandated teaching of Darwinism in public schools primarily because he thought the people should exercise local control over the curriculum of public schools. But he was opposed to Darwin for two intrinsic reasons as well. First, natural selection was repugnant to Bryan because its central tenet of violent competition was indissolubly linked at the time with unbridled capitalism. In the laissez faire “social evolutionism” advanced by William Graham Sumner, a political scientist at Yale who propagated Darwinism in the social sciences, market forces determine the “survival of the fittest.”

It should cause no surprise that captains of industry like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller eagerly advocated the social Darwinism that Bryan denounced as early as 1904 as “the merciless law by which the strong crowd out and kill off the weak.” Second, the cutthroat competition at the heart of Darwin’s model was also reflected in the militarism that led to the senseless slaughter of World War I. As President Wilson’s secretary of state, Bryan strove to avert this war by advancing several treaties that required nations to arbitrate their disputes, and he resigned from that post when it became clear that Wilson no longer shared his goal.

It is intriguing to learn from Larson the real reasons why Bryan opposed Darwinism. If more were known of some of Darwin’s teachings, would we not be opposed as well? For example, who of us really wants our children taught, as Darwin wrote in “The Descent of Man,” that “[a]t some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races”? Or who desires the public schools to advance the racist nonsense in “Civic Biology,” in which Hunter wrote that, after the first four “races of man” (“Ethiopian, Malay, American Indian, [and] Mongolian”), there is “finally, the highest type of all, the Caucasians, represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America”?

As Larson’s subtitle suggests, the debate over evolution is not simply of historical interest but continues as a deep conflict to this day. This debate is now focused sharply on scientific and philosophical difficulties with Darwinism that have nothing to do with how one reads the creation narratives in the Book of Genesis. Many Americans falsely assume that the issue of evolution was resolved once and for all in the Scopes trial, at which, to believe “Inherit the Wind,” religion lost and science won. Far from it. Thanks to this century’s stunning breakthroughs in physics and biology, the contemporary approach to the origins of the universe and of life is much more complex and interesting than the mechanical determinism embedded within Darwinism.

Modern astrophysicists, for example, see far more in the stars than our Victorian ancestors could. From Edwin Hubble’s discovery in 1923 that the stars are receding, we learned of the origin of the cosmos in a Big Bang some 15 billion years ago. To some this discovery confirms Darwin’s view that the cosmos is purposeless. But the stars also contain hints of a design that includes us. The rate of their acceleration away from the Big Bang is itself so marvelously precise that the slightest deviation by the tiniest fraction of that formula (higher or lower) would have caused the universe either to explode or to implode. And the stars are steady energy sources needed for the long-term possibility of evolution over billions of years. They do not burn up rapidly but are the chemical source of carbon, which makes the complicated macro-molecules that form the basis of life. As the Cambridge physicist John Polkinghorne puts it, “We’re all made from the ashes of dead stars.”

Darwin and Darrow were satisfied that the entire evolutionary process is a causeless and pointless effect of raw dumb luck. This agnostic faith is deeply unsatisfactory to scientists like Polkinghorne, who views the precision of our “finely tuned universe” as the basis for its “amazingly fruitful history that has turned a ball of energy into a world containing human life.” The laws of physics are not formal proofs of God’s existence, but they provoke new approaches to the big question of cosmology, which is not whether we live in an evolutionary universe but why. It is becoming increasingly difficult to answer that question without acknowledging design and purpose in the universe. “That’s just the way things are” is not much of an answer.

Similarly, advances in biology challenge the Darwinian orthodoxy that a cell is something simple that could ooze itself up out of some chemical broth. In “Darwin’s Black Box,” the molecular biologist Michael Behe has drawn attention to the enormous complexity of a single cell, let alone an organ as marvelous as the eye, with a design as intricate as a spaceship or a computer. Another molecular biologist, James Shapiro, disagrees with Behe that biochemical systems are the product of design but agrees that “[t]here are no detailed Darwinian accounts for the evolution of any fundamental biochemical or cellular system, only a variety of wishful speculations. It is remarkable that Darwinism is accepted with so little rigorous examination for such a vast subject--evolution--and with so little examination of how well its basic theses work in illuminating specific instances of biological adaptation or diversity.” As Berkeley law professor Phillip Johnson has written, “You can’t explain the origin of any biological capability (like vision) unless you can explain the origin of the molecular mechanisms that make them work.” To return to the Scopes trial, Darrow’s anti-religious agenda is not of lasting value.

What has endured from the Scopes trial is the ACLU’s agenda: that legislatures should not restrain the freedom of scientific inquiry in the observation of empirical data, the positing of hypotheses to account for them and the formulation of a theory that relates these hypotheses in a comprehensive explanatory model and that society should respect the value of academic freedom. The scientific and religious issues surrounding Darwinism were not cleared away by the Scopes trial, or by the court’s latest intervention on evolution, in Edwards vs. Aguillard (1985), invalidating a Louisiana law mandating “balanced treatment” by requiring--in addition to the teaching of evolution--the teaching of an alternative to Darwinism known as “scientific creationism.” The court sensed that there is a problem when the government advances the doctrine that God created the universe, but it failed to perceive or address the problem of mandating a curriculum that advances mechanistic determinism as though that were value-neutral.

Carl Sagan, one of the most resolute defenders of evolution by natural selection, acknowledged in his last book, “The Demon-Haunted World,” that “[o]nly nine percent of Americans accept the central finding of modern biology that human beings (and all the other species) have slowly evolved by natural processes from a succession of more ancient beings with no divine intervention needed along the way.” For Sagan, this is a lament that so few of us accept that evolution is inexorably linked to the materialist ideology that forms a major predicate for Darwinism. For a Populist like Bryan, the same statistic (which Larson shows has not changed much since Bryan’s day) is simply an unsurprising statement that the overwhelming majority of Americans continue to believe in a power greater than themselves who is in some sense the source (and some would add, the guide and goal) of all that is.

A lot of the people can be fooled, of course. But not, according to Lincoln or Bryan, all of the people all of the time. In an open democratic society that cherishes rigorous debate, it will not do to cast aside the convictions of so sizable a majority, at least not with a smugness that assumes that there is nothing to debate at all (because, of course, the terms of the debate are defined in such a way as to manipulate the outcome). The terms of what Larson calls “America’s continuing debate over science and religion” must be clarified. The tone of the discourse also needs to be more civilized on both sides, lest we be torn asunder in the dubious battle of our current “culture wars.” For its insight into the ongoing significance of the Scopes trial as a “trial of the century,” Larson’s “Summer for the Gods” is a historical and scientific masterpiece.