“The Biology Wars: The Religion, Science & Education Controversy”Key West, Florida

Speaker:Dr. Edward J. Larson, Talmadge Chair of Law & Russell Professor of American History, University of Georgia

MICHAEL CROMARTIE: Ed Larson is not only a lawyer in the law school at the University of Georgia, he is also a historian of science, with a Ph.D. in the history of science, and he has written several award winning books. One of his earlier books was Trial and Error: the American Controversy Over Creation and Evolution. He’s also written Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in history. Ed has covered this both as a lawyer and as a historian. It is great to have him put all of this in context for us.

DR. EDWARD J. LARSON: As you say, I’m both a historian and a lawyer. I did write a book on the Scopes trial, so I can’t really leave Scopes entirely behind. I’ll try to give us a perspective, with an overall framework that brings us up to today. Then I will look forward, and we can have a conversation about the variety of the issues of today.

The American controversy over creation and evolution is primarily fought out over what is taught in American public high-school classes. As far as I can tell, virtually no one disputes teaching the theory of evolution in public colleges and universities or using public funds to support evolutionary research in agriculture and medicine. And there is no serious debate over core evolutionary concepts of common descent among biologists.

It is the minds of American high-school students that are at stake. Opponents of evolutionary teaching typically ask for: 1) removing evolution from the classroom or, 2) balancing it with some form of creationist instruction, or 3) teaching it in some fashion as “just a theory.”

Actually, these three strategies have always been present to some extent over the last 80 or 85 years of debate. But they also play out chronologically, at least to which is primary, so you can look at the history of this event as having three discernible, though not exclusive, phases. Allow me to deal with the first two of these phases — the history part — mostly as prologue.

First comes the 1925 trial of John Scopes and the phase of anti-evolutionism characterized mainly by efforts to remove evolution from the high-school biology classroom altogether. Importantly, this effort coincided with the so-called “fundamentalist crisis” within American Protestantism, when many mainline Protestant denominations (the Methodists, the Presbyterians, the American Baptists, you name them) were deeply divided between so-called “modernists” (that was the word used back then) who adapted their traditional beliefs to current scientific thinking, and a new breed of fundamentalists who clung ever tighter to biblical literalism in the face of these new ideas.

No idea split modernists from fundamentalists more than the Darwinian theory of human evolution, and the rift was aggravated by the seeming rise of agnosticism within the cultural, scientific and media elite of America. From the first, the fundamentalist/modernist controversy raged over the interpretation of Genesis in the pulpit. And that would actually go back even as far as 1900, or even the late 1890s.

By the 1920s, both sides had carried this theological dispute into the classroom. Neither side wanted the other’s view taught as scientific fact in public school courses. In 1922, fundamentalists across the nation began lobbying for laws against teaching the Darwinian theory of human evolution in public schools. It was the first time they’d done that. But of course, much earlier than that you did not have compulsory secondary education, so it wasn’t a universal issue. By 1920, however, you basically had nationwide, compulsory secondary education.

The so-called “anti-evolution crusade” began just after World War I, during the return to normalcy, the Harding administration, the Red Scare, everything that was happening in those hyper-charged, emotional times. This was a national crusade, popping up all around the country from the West Coast to the East Coast. There were some marginal victories for anti-evolutionists. Some states passed certain limited restrictions, and textbooks had begun to change.Then came 1925, when Tennessee became the first state to pass a clean anti-evolution law, one that banned the teaching of the theory of human evolution in public schools.

From the outset — and this is probably why it created so much media attention — the anti-evolution crusade was seen as evidence of a new and profound cleavage between traditional values and modernity. I use the term

“evidence” advisedly. The anti-evolution crusade did not cause the cleavage; it simply exemplified it, exposed it and became one of the most visible manifestations of it. There were others back at that time. Just like today there’s the Ten Commandments posting. Certain issues back then were hot in the same way.

You go back a generation or two before the 1920s and Americans tended to share common values — or at least those Americans of Protestant/European roots who set the cultural tone for America. Certainly there were atheists, agnostics and deists in mid-19th-century America, but they were marginal, and theological disputes among Christians rarely disrupted denominational harmony. Even the universities were conventionally religious places, as captured in books by such scholars as George Marsden, and they remained so until the late 1890s, when the rise of positivism, biblical higher criticism and Darwinism began disrupting that harmony.

By the early 20th century, surveys and studies began detecting a widening gap between the God-fearing American majority and the disbelieving cultural elite. It was not that the elite wanted to reject God or biblical revelation, commentator Walter Lippmann famously explained in a very influential essay at the time. It was that the ascendancy of rational, naturalistic modes of analysis made revelation, to the cultural elite, virtually unbelievable.

Indeed, it was the scientific method as applied to all facets of life, more than any particular scientific theory that lay at the heart of modernity. But Darwinism was criticized for applying that method to the key issue of biological origins and human morality. The morality part was important right from the start, just as it is now if you read any of the writings about intelligent design or creationism.

The anti-evolution statute thus struck a chord that resonated widely. The nationwide attention garnered by passage of the Tennessee law soon focused on tiny Dayton, Tennessee, when a local science teacher named John Scopes accepted the invitation of the American Civil Liberties Union to challenge that law in court. The media promptly proclaimed it, “the trial of the century” before it even began, as this young teacher, backed by the nation’s scientific, educational and cultural establishment, stood against the forces of fundamentalist religious lawmaking.

Of course, we are used to the Inherit the Wind version, where the poor fellow is in jail. In reality, after he was indicted, at the request of the local civic leaders who asked him ahead of time and informed him he was part of their scheme, he went on a nationwide speaking tour. He was filmed in the American Museum of Natural History, he was at the Supreme Court; he went around the country with a media tour during that intervening time between the indictment and the trial.

For many Americans at the time and ever after, the Scopes trial represented the inevitable conflict between newfangled scientific thought and old-fashioned supernatural belief. Like many archetypical American events, the trial itself began as a publicity stunt. Inspired by the ACLU’s offer to defend any Tennessee school teacher willing to challenge the new court, Dayton’s civic leaders saw a chance to gain attention for their struggling young community.

While Scopes became their willing defendant at the invitation of school officials, the young teacher was neither jailed nor ostracized. And as I said, he spent much of the time between the indictment and the trial speaking to reporters and traveling around the country. Of course, the ill-conceived publicity stunt quickly backfired on Dayton when the national media condemned the town for indicting one of its teachers.

Tennessee had barred its teachers from teaching their students about Darwinism. That was the real news story of the day, and it had long roots. Ever since Charles Darwin published his theory of evolution in 1859, some conservative Christians objected to the atheistic implications of its naturalistic explanation for the origin of biological species, particularly of humans.

Further, some traditional scientists, most notably the great Harvard zoologist, Louis Agassiz, promptly challenged the very notion of organic evolution by arguing that highly complex individual organs, such as the eye, and ecologically dependent species, such as bees and flowers, could not evolve through the sort of minute, random steps envisioned by Darwinism. In short, as he said, species and organs were simply too irreducibly complex. They involve too many pieces and you cannot change one without changing the others.

But the scientific community largely converted to the new theory due to its ability to explain natural phenomena that appear utterly senseless under the explanation of design or creation, such as the fossil record, the geological distribution of similar species, the morphological similarities between different related species — all these different factors that seemed so easily and clearly explained through evolution. If you’ve read Origin of Species, you’ll know that is what Darwin does. Darwin goes through one long argument, as he calls it, and he shows how evolution can explain so many observations. But he always had trouble fully accounting for complex organs, such as the human eye. Darwin himself called it the antidote to atheism. He could never explain the design argument for irreducible complexity. What he did was take so many other things and give a logical explanation for them.

Those explanations brought the scientific community overwhelmingly over to Darwin’s side within a dozen years, and certainly by 1900 it was solid. Religious opposition remained, though, long after Agassiz, William Dawson and the other holdouts in science had died. These religious opponents often invoked the earlier scientific arguments against evolution that had been used by people like Agassiz, and before him Cuvier in France. These religious objections naturally intensified with the spread of fundamentalism, which I’ve already discussed, in the early 1900s in America.

The legendary American politician and orator, William Jennings Bryan, a political progressive who had decidedly orthodox religious beliefs, added his voice to the chorus during the 1920s as he came to see Darwinian struggle-for-survival thinking, known as social Darwinism when it’s applied to human society, behind World War I militarism and post-war materialism, both of which Bryan saw as great sins.

Of course, Bryan also held a religious objection to Darwinism, and he invoked Agassiz’ scientific arguments against it as well; but his fervor on the issue rose out of his social concerns. He was always talking about militarism, materialism and eugenics. With his progressive political instincts of seeking legislative solutions to social problems, Bryan campaigned for restrictions against teaching the Darwinian theory of human evolution in public schools, leading directly to passage of Tennessee’s anti-evolution statute in 1925. He then volunteered to assist the prosecution when his law was challenged in Dayton, using the trial to focus the nation’s attention on the issue. He

described it as a show trial and planned to leverage off of the trial into a nationwide campaign to get similar laws passed in other states.

The prospect of Bryan using the trial to defend biblical religion and attack Darwinism drew in Clarence Darrow — who else would be more appropriate in 1925. By the ‘20s, Darrow unquestionably stood out as the most famous criminal defense attorney in America. His trials were sensational. We really do not have any lawyer of that visibility at this time in America. At those trials, all followed by the media, Darrow pioneered techniques of jury selection, cross-examination and the closing argument to defend his typically notorious clients in bitterly hostile courts.

Darrow used his celebrity status and oratorical skills to challenge traditional morality. At the time, most Americans clung to biblical notions of right and wrong. By those standards, Darrow’s defendants were usually quite wrong. However, with his modern mind, he saw nothing as really wrong or right. Everything was culturally or biologically determined. For him, dogmatic beliefs springing from revealed religion were usually the real culprit and he didn’t mind saying so in public. He thought that they imposed narrow standards and divided Americans into sects — made people judgmental.

Just as Bryan hailed God as love and Christ as the prince of peace — and those are two of Bryan’s famous speech titles — Darrow damned religion as hateful and Christianity as the cause of war. Indeed, Darrow saw rational science, particularly the theory of organic evolution, as offering a more humane perspective than any irrational religion. This offered no ground for compromise between the two. Both men were affable enough; they had long been friends, but their worldviews were at war.

At the time, Bryan and Darrow were perhaps the two most famous orators in America. They toured on the national Chautauqua speaking circuit. Thus the Scopes trial was a national event that attracted the media. Having these two people who were always speaking on these topics and writing popular, best-selling books, debating issues of naturalistic science versus revealed religion, and academic freedom versus popular control over public education turned the trial into a media sensation then and the stuff of legend thereafter.

Hundreds of reporters descended on Dayton, generating front-page stories around the world. Many American newspapers carried a complete transcript every day. The New York Times had a complete transcript. It was broadcast

live over the radio — the first nationally broadcast trial in American history, a sort of a patched-together broadcast that was sometimes knocked out by storms. In time, it became the subject of Broadway plays, Hollywood movies and Nashville songs. Clearly, Scopes remains the best-known misdemeanor trial in American history.

Despite Darrow’s eloquent pleas for academic freedom and his humiliating cross-examination of Bryan, Scopes ultimately lost the case and Tennessee’s anti-evolution statute was upheld. In large part, this resulted from the simple fact that the United States Supreme Court had not yet extended the constitutional bar against government establishment of religion to public schools, so you could not invoke the First Amendment.

When it was all over, most neutral observers viewed the trial as a draw, so far as public opinion was concerned. When I was working on my books, I looked at hundreds of editorials from around the country written the day after the trial. There wasn’t a single editorial at the time that thought the trial was decisive. They all viewed it as some sort of a draw.

If, as the defense claimed, more Americans came to be alert to the dangers of teaching evolution, others, particularly conservative Christians, came to be more concerned about the spiritual and social implications of Darwinian instruction. This became an issue for both sides. Stopping the restrictions on evolutionary teaching, including evolutionary teaching in the public schools, became a fighting issue for the secular side. This side did not only include non-Christians, however. For many mainline Christians, evolution was a part of their religious beliefs, and they took this as a religious assault.

Remember, the pro-evolution side was winning the dispute within the mainline denominations, which were very powerful at that time. Indeed, this side included, at the national level, both Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover. One was then president and the other was secretary of commerce. Both were prominent religious leaders within their denominations, thoroughly evolutionist and modernist. Of course, being able to attack William Jennings Bryan and the Democrats on this progressive issue was a great fun for them. They loved defending evolution and attacking Bryan at the same time. Politics makes strange bedfellows. Bryan, of course, was thinking of running for public office again (as senator from Florida), and his brother had been the vice presidential

candidate just one year before, running against Coolidge. His brother was governor of Nebraska.

Consequently, the pace of anti-evolutionism actually quickened following the trial; it didn’t die down. More states passed anti-evolution statutes, more local communities enacted anti-evolution statutes. Nationwide, the idea of evolution virtually drops out of American public school textbooks during the late ‘20s, the ’30s and the ‘40s. That was the immediate legacy of the Scopes trial.

Because Scopes’ conviction was overturned on appeal on a technicality, and because no one else ever challenged these early anti-evolution laws in court, this issue did not return to the courts until the 1960s. By the time it went back to the courts, the legal landscape had totally changed for a very simple reason. Beginning in 1947, the United States Supreme Court began applying the First Amendment against public schools. That first decision came in 1947, when the Supreme Court, by a ruling, grafted the First Amendment bar against religious establishment on to the individual liberties protected against state action by the 14th Amendment. Until you do that, it only applies against acts of Congress, acts of the federal government.

Suddenly, with this decision in ’47, the Establishment Clause took on new life. Congress had rarely made laws respecting an establishment of religion prior to 1947. There was little case law on that point; the Mormon statutes were about the only ones. States and their public schools had been doing so right along. They had been passing bills affecting religion in education and religion in public policy. Therefore, once you make this transition in ’47, there is a torrent of Establishment-Clause litigation before the United States Supreme Court. Soon, Scopes-like legal battles over the place of religion in public education began erupting in communities across the land; the old trial had new relevance everywhere.

The first of these cases did not address restrictions on teaching evolution, but they surely implicated those restrictions. In successive decisions beginning in 1948, the United States Supreme Court struck down classroom religious instruction, school-sponsored prayers, mandatory Bible readings, and finally, in 1968, the anti-evolution laws.

Those old laws simply banned the teaching of human evolution. They did not authorize teaching an alternative theory. Indeed, in his day, Bryan never called for the inclusion of any form of creationist instruction in the science

classroom because there literally was no scientific alternative to evolution. There was simply the Bible. Even Bryan believed that the biblical days of creation symbolized vast ages of geologic time. (It was known as the Day-Age theory, for those of you who follow that sort of biblical trivia.)

The second phase begins with the publication in 1961 (that’s how recent it is) of the book The Genesis Flood. Virginia Tech engineering professor, Henry Morris. He gave believers scientific-sounding arguments supporting the biblical account of a six-day — literally six-day — creation within the past 10,000 years. This book spawned a movement within American fundamentalism with Morris as its Moses, leading the faithful into a promised land where science proved religion.

He called it “creation science” or “scientific creationism.” Those two terms were used alternatively by its proponents; they mean the same thing. And this launched the second phase of the anti-evolution politics; the phase associated with seeking balanced treatment for creation science.

First, creation science spread out within the conservative Protestant church. Then, with the emergence of the so-called religious right, it moved into politics during the 1970s. Within two decades after the publication of Genesis Flood, three states and dozens of local schools, in all parts of the country, mandated balanced treatment, as they called it, or equal time for creation science along with evolution in the public school science classroom.

It took another decade before the United States Supreme Court unraveled those balanced treatment mandates as unconstitutional. Creation science was nothing more than religion dressed up as science, the high court decreed in a 1987 decision called Edwards v. Aguillard, though I should note that was not a unanimous decision. Justice Scalia dissented. Therefore, if creation science was nothing other than religion dressed up as science, it was barred automatically by the Establishment Clause from public school classrooms, along with any other form of religious instruction.

By this time, however, conservative Christians were deeply entrenched in local and state politics from California to Maine, and deeply concerned about science education. Then along comes University of California law professor, Phillip Johnson, and ushers in the third phase of the creation/evolution controversy. Johnson, is not (or at least he was not then) a young-earth

creationist. But he is an evangelical Christian with an uncompromising faith in God. His target became the philosophical belief and methodological practice within science that material entities subject to physical laws account for everything in nature. Whether you call it naturalism or materialism (Johnson will use both phrases, and so will any philosopher working in the field), such a philosophy or method excludes God from science laboratories and classrooms using methodological naturalism.

Darwinism may be the best naturalistic explanation for the origin of the species, Johnson likes to say, but it is still wrong. If public schools cannot teach creation science because it promotes the tenets of a particular religion, the scientific evidence of design in nature or at least scientific dissent from evolution should be permissible, he argues. After all, evolution is, “just a theory,” and, according to him, not a very good one.

Johnson’s books have sold over a half million copies. And it is no wonder that his kind of argument now appears whenever objections are raised against teaching evolution in public schools. They were apparent in the United States Senate in 2001 when Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum introduced legislation encouraging teachers “to make distinctions between philosophical materialism and authentic science, and to include unanswered questions and unresolved problems in their presentations of the origin of life and living things.”

That language, which was penned by Phil Johnson for Rick Santorum, passed the Senate as an amendment to the No Child Left Behind education bill, and eventually became part of the conference report for that legislation. Similar proposals surfaced as stand-alone bills in over a dozen state legislatures over the past four years. None of these state bills has passed, but similar language has been incorporated into state and local school guidelines, which has proved to be an easier route of access for evolution critics. Those restrictions have opened the door to intelligent design, the most famous example of which is in Dover, Pennsylvania.

Another popular authority on this topic is Lehigh University biochemistry professor, Michael Behe, who is not a Protestant like almost everybody else we’ve talked about so far. He is a Catholic, and he wrote his own best-selling book, Darwin’s Black Box, challenging Darwinist explanations for complex

organic processes. He most recently served as the most visible of the expert witnesses on behalf of the school guidelines in Dover, Pennsylvania.Behe has never developed his arguments for intelligent design in peer-reviewed science articles. Indeed, he does not actually conduct research in the field. Indeed, along with other leaders in the intelligent design movement, he has conceded, (such as at the trial in Dover) that there is not yet much affirmative scientific content to their so-called “design revolution.” So far, intelligent design theorists remain mainly critics of the reigning paradigm in biology, doggedly poking holes and looking for gaps in evolution theory. They argue — and this is important — that those gaps are best filled with design. Indeed, they posit, the gaps would be filled with design if it wasn’t for the fact that science a priori ruled out supernatural explanations.

With this sort of thinking driving them, they now propose altering the rules of science to admit a broader range of valid explanations. Indeed, at the trial in Dover, Behe argued that design-based criticisms of evolutionary naturalism divorced from biblical creationism should be a fit subject for science public school classrooms. Using this approach, they have expanded the tent of people willing to challenge the alleged Darwinist domination of the science classroom beyond those persuaded by Morris’ evidence for a young earth.

When you look at public opinion surveys, including the recent Pew survey, they suggest that the bedrock for anti-evolutionism in the United States remains not the intelligent design movement, but the biblical literalism of the Protestant fundamentalist church where there is typically much greater concern about the earth age to which the Bible speaks than about such intellectual abstractions as scientific naturalism.

Despite judicial rulings against the incorporation of scientific creationism in the public school curriculum, vast numbers of Americans continue to accept biblical creationism of the sort espoused by Morris and his Institute for Creation Research. The recent Pew poll that came out this summer suggests that 42 percent of American people accept that view.

After its publication 53 years ago, The Genesis Flood, now in its 42nd printing, continues to sell well in Christian bookstores, but now it’s only one of a shelf

full of such books. Last time I went over and checked, it was still there, still selling, but now there’s a whole section of origins books.

Christian radio and television blankets the nation with creationist broadcasts and cablecasts such as Ken Ham’s Answers in Genesis. I recommend to all of you to go on their web page and listen to their most recent broadcast, and you can get a tenor for what is being heard. Answers in Genesis is heard on over 700 radio stations across America, hundred around the world in Latin America, Africa and Asia. It is on in 49 states and 15 different countries. These broadcasts describe the tenets of creation science. There are also students who are going to Christian schools and being taught in home schools, often using the writings of Henry Morris.

So this is the issue that is driving the opposition to teaching evolution. If you have a solid majority of people in many places believing creation science, and another group everywhere accepting intelligent design, and in addition, more believing it is only fair to include a variety of ideas, the teaching of the theory of evolution inevitably becomes highly controversial in some places.

Five years ago in Kansas, the state school board deleted the big-bang theory in macro-evolution from the topics covered in the state science standards. Last year, Cobb County Public School Board decreed that biology textbooks should carry a disclaimer saying that evolution is only a theory. This year, the Dover, Pennsylvania School Board mandated not only an oral disclaimer akin to the Cobb County written one, but it also urged students to read the creationist text, Of Pandas and People, for an alternative explanation of origins.

The only one of these challenges that has reached a decision, albeit under appeal, is the Cobb County decision; and it is an interesting one. The Cobb County disclaimer written on a sticker inside the textbook, tells students: “Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origins of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered.”

The Georgia judge, Clarence Cooper, struck down that decision on two grounds. He ruled that any high school student reading it in the current climate would conclude that the school board was endorsing a particular religious viewpoint, one associated with, as he called them, fundamentalists and

creationists. And by taking sides, it violated the second prong of the Lemon Test — the test for violating the separation of church and state — that the government must not promote a religious doctrine. He also ruled that it violated the third prong of the Lemon test because it is seen as taking sides within a religious dispute that divides Christians. The argument is between those Christians who accept the theory of evolution and those who oppose it, so you’re entangling the government with religion. On those two grounds he struck it down.

That, in brief, is where the creation/evolution teaching controversy stands today, still making front-page news 80 years after Dayton, Tennessee gained headlines by prosecuting John Scopes. It resurfaces periodically in countless Daytons throughout the United States over everyday episodes of science teachers either defying or deifying Darwin.

Such laws generate lawsuits and legislation precisely because religion continues to matter in America. Public opinion surveys invariably find that nine in ten Americans believe in God, just as every survey has found since the 1950s. A recent survey indicated that more than three-fourths of Americans believe in miracles, while another found that nearly half of those surveyed believe “that God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years,” and that more than three-fourths of the rest believe that God actively guided the evolutionary process.

Three out of five Americans now say that religion is very important in their lives. It troubles many of us when science does not seem to affirm our faith and outrages others when their children’s biology courses seem to deny their biblical beliefs.

As a diverse people, Americans have learned to seek middle ground wherever possible. As a species, however, we instinctively respond to stirring oratory. Bryan and Darrow had mastered that craft and used it in Dayton to enlist their legions. They tapped into a cultural divide that deeply troubles this national house of ours, offering us no middle ground. And we all know either from the Bible or from a Broadway classic, “he who troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind.” That wind has been sporadically touching off maelstroms over the past 80 years, storms that surely test our national traditions of tolerance. If history is any guide, I’d say that dark clouds remain on the horizon. Thank you.

JAY TOLSON, U.S. News & World Report: I’m curious to know if there were any Christian modernists on the American scene in that crucial period between 1890 and 1920 who might have had a scientific orientation, who tried rather than to mock the opposite side, to engage it seriously.

DR. LARSON: There was a very vigorous middle ground. This was a tremendously wrenching event in American history because the Protestants had been so dominant in American society and the cultural elite. Universities were conventionally Protestant, and the politics were conventionally Protestant. This rise of modernism seemed to change everything, and not for the better in the eyes of fundamentalists. A better term would be literalism. Fundamentalism was a term they coined in 1919. There was a very active group seeking to reconcile Christianity with science, but for the most part it included modernists, such as [Harry Emerson] Fosdick in New York and Shailer Matthews at University of Chicago. They were very sincere religious believers, but hated by the biblical literalists.

There was a group that tried to respond with a series of pamphlets that tried to respond in a serious way to argue how religion and science could be reconciled. The most visible person associated with that was probably the famous American physicist Robert Millikan.

Millikan was a great scientist and a sincere Christian. He wrote pamphlets and became very much involved in the effort to reconcile science and religion. From England, Arthur Eddington was also very much involved in this. He probably played a role like Polkinghorne does now, and he was even more prominent as a scientist than Polkinghorne. He was especially popular in America, and he would come over and speak frequently about his books. James Jeans was another British astronomer who was very active in this effort. At the national level, Herbert Hoover (who was a highly respected engineer as well as the President) joined this effort. He was a deeply believing Quaker. He became very involved in this activity, and he would write and speak to it from his point of view.

In short, there was a niche for people who were trying to argue that we can be sincere, meaningful Christians and still accept modern science. Because of his relief work in World War I, Hoover was viewed as a great public servant as well as a top engineer. These people had a national voice, and they tried to forge reconciliation, but of course you had other people pulling apart. You

have people trying to bridge the divide today, but back then you had very visible people trying to reconcile that division. The splitters tend- to get the attention; it’s a better story.

WILLIAM SALETAN, Slate: You referred to the Philip Johnson theory about the idea of a supernatural explanation, and I saw this in the Kansas school board debate too. When you talked to or read about what intelligent design proponents have to say, what is their explanation of what a supernatural explanation would be or what a research program based on intelligent design would look like, given that it doesn’t exist? How would they do it?

DR. LARSON: At least to some extent, at an official level (such as in the claims of the National Academy of Sciences), scientists are pulling the philosophical naturalism out of their public presentations of evolution theory and saying that all evolution theory can really do is give natural explanations for how things operate. They will dig in their heels on that subject, insisting that all science can do is give naturalistic explanations because that is the limit of science. The same thing is happening in the intelligent design movement. George Gilder, who is the philosophical guru of the ID movement, said there is no affirmative intellectual content to intelligent design. Michael Behe said roughly the same thing at the Dover trial. He hypothesized one possible experiment that you could do to test design, but it really was a test of natural selection, not design (unless you assume there are only two alternatives: selection or design). At the trial he said there are a lot of things in nature best explained by natural selection; and he testified that natural selection does happen.

There is not really in that sense an affirmative scientific research paradigm for ID. It is more a negative critique, albeit a potentially significant one. ID offers an alternative explanation that could account for some things that come about. But Michael Behe has also been quoted in Time magazine, in the Evolution Wars cover article, that you cannot do an experiment to prove intelligent design. I think that is almost an exact quote.

MATT LABASH, The Weekly Standard: The creationists and proponents of intelligent design seem to be comfortable working hand-in-glove to torpedo science as much as they can. I’m wondering what the pushback is from old-line creationists. What are the theological implications once you allow yourself

to go into the intelligent design realm, with such aspects as the fall of Adam, unpleasant things to talk about, things that we don’t usually like to address in scientific debates, but which have real theological implications? Have you seen divisions between the two sides as they assess it?

DR. LARSON: The creation science people focus squarely on the Fall. That is what it’s all about to them. You have to accept Adam in the biblical account of the creation primarily because of the need for the Fall. The criticisms that theologians have levied about evolution theory from the very beginning is that it shows man progressing, which is not really an accurate read of the science because evolution technically is not progressive. But it is perceived as progressive because we use our own lenses, and we are better than amoebas, so we have progress. Amoebas probably don’t view it that way.

The theory of evolution gives a sense of progress where the Fall should have us going the other way. That has been an important issue theologically for some conservatives who have raised problems with the idea of evolution. But I should add, there are many conservative theologians over the past 150 years who have had no problems reconciling their viewpoint to a form of theistic evolution. That means God uses evolution as a means of creation. Then, at some point, in the evolutionary process God breathed in the human soul, and therefore created the first true humans with this human soul. Then you can play out the human drama after that stage. So there certainly are, both in the Protestant and the Catholic Church, theologians who can reconcile their works with evolution.

MR. LABASH: Could you illuminate for us how over the years, the numbers of creationists have bled away as intelligent design has picked up steam?

DR. LARSON: I have been trying to follow this as closely as I can, and I don’t think there is a criterion of intelligent design because it really doesn’t fill much of a role. There have always been three categories. There is a category of 40 to 50 percent that believes that God created human beings in their present form directly: specially created them within the last 10,000 years. Those percentages really have not changed since the ’70s. Then you have the other 50 percent — about two-thirds to three-fourths of them who believe in a theistic evolution — humans were created by divinely guided evolution. The

other quarter to a third that believes in a naturalistic process and the ideas someone like Richard Dawkins would present.

So you have got these three categories. Intelligent design does not neatly fit in any of them. Of course anybody who is in the creation science group believes there is an intelligent designer. But many people within the theistic evolution group believe there is an intelligent designer, at least in creating the original laws of creation and maybe intervening periodically throughout. You do not really get a discrete group because intelligent design itself is pretty thin. There is not too much there when you think about it; it’s simply that God is somehow involved in the process.

E.J. DIONNE, The Washington Post: It is clear that people who believe in creationism believe in it on the basis of faith and revelation, and whatever science proved would not in the end matter to them. And I don’t get why there is the insistence on turning intelligent design into a form of science as opposed to the presentation of an argument that public schools might teach, that there are people who believe on other grounds that are not scientific that God intervened in this process.DR. LARSON: I agree with you that this is first and foremost a religious concern. People don’t come to creation science and then go to religion; it is rather that they have a religious viewpoint and creation science reinforces that. Still, it is important to have some science involved.

I don’t think intelligent design is simply creationism dressed up in a tuxedo or whatever phrase you want to use. It is actually has a much older pedigree. Creation science is truly offering an alternative science. It may not be very good science but it is an alternative science. It may be a good science. But intelligent design, as I think they’re focusing on it, is more a critique of science. In that sense it is really separate from creation science. That does not mean somebody who believes in creation science would also say sure, intelligent design is true but there is not much to it compared to what we’re offering. We are offering an alternative science, and they are saying no, there is not enough to it; it’s distracting. But others can say, no, it’s reinforcing. So it depends on what you are doing, but I do think it has a much longer and separate intellectual pedigree.

MS. GROSSMAN: In recent years Catholics have moved increasingly into public life. The Catholic perspective I think needs to be taken into consideration as to what’s going to happen with this tension in society between the fundamentalist neo-conservative approach and the ultra-modernist purely scientific approach.

Statistically speaking, the rising group in this country is those who have no religious identity. And I wonder where that’s going to take us as people who may say they believe in God, but don’t have any specific doctrinal approach to God. It’s a very amorphous God, sort of a computer boot-up God. He got us here but he doesn’t do anything once he’s there. How much is that also going to influence the future direction of this debate?

DR. LARSON: This amorphous God is very easily reconciled with evolution. It’s a vague form of theistic evolution. God is somehow involved in the process. This is a great unknown and is evidence of the power of God’s laws eminent in nature. It would almost read like something Emerson would have written nearly 200 years ago, or Thoreau, sort of transcendentalism. Those viewpoints (certainly to the extent that they draw on Buddhist and Hindu thought) tend to be very open and accepting of evolution being a process, an ongoing process that has divine significance and that will play into the debate.I’ve spoken at Catholic universities in all parts of the country and so many Catholics that I meet are so happy that they’re out of this debate, that they’re not caught in the crosshairs of it. I was speaking at St. Mary’s College just last month but I spoke at Fordham, Notre Dame, San Diego, Gonzaga. They are watching it in an informed way, saying the Church says the human soul is special and is specially created. All the compromise is offered by science on this front, such as the National Academy of Science. In saying science can tell us nothing about God because it can’t tell us anything about the supernatural leaves open the possibility of the soul.

Certainly, it is true that there are scientists like Ed Wilson and Richard Dawkins who will not accept that compromise and do tell us directly that the way they read evolution and the way they read science excludes a belief in anything separate that is a soul. There is certainly a lot of work in neuroscience. You get neuroscientists and computer scientists who are trying to show that the human mind works just like a computer — that it’s all matter that you can explain. This rise of neurosciences and computer science and with those two merging together and computer processed models of evolution

and all this, that’s where challenge is coming to this possible compromise that there is a supernatural and there is a natural. It’s not necessarily coming directly out of evolution theory. It’s coming out of work in neurobiology and work on the brain. Focusing on the soul, where is it left but to lie somewhere in the brain.

So the real threat in many ways to this view of a soul, which is what would engage the Catholic Church, is not coming from evolution theory. It’s coming from other areas of science. There are, however, areas within the Catholic Church. The previous pope had made a very clear statement in ‘96 and it wasn’t just an off-the-cuff statement. This was a formal declaration to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences restating the traditional Catholic viewpoint that as long as you’ve got a human soul, as long as God creates the soul, as long as that is created in God’s image, then evolution and Darwinism is more than just a hypothesis. There’s a conciliation there that gives it vitality within the larger scientific community.

KATHLEEN PARKER, Tribune Media Services: I just wanted to know how it’s going to play out with the school board elections and the textbooks though. Because while Catholics are sort of out of it on the journals front possibly, when they come to vote for the school board, when they’re choosing textbooks in Texas and California, where does that Catholic point of view have any influence, if any?

DR. LARSON: I think those really play out on a local level. Among conservative Catholics, politically and theologically conservative Catholics, there is a serious and important debate going on. In the Catholic universities of America, they seem to be very happy with the Pope’s statement. You get down to the individual parishes, and Catholics are split. So you’ve got the cultural Catholics, you’ve got liberal Catholics, and you‘ve got some very conservative Catholics, and it breaks down differently in each of those areas.

Then you have the local relationship among the Catholics with the conservative Protestants. That varies in different places. In some places they work together. In some places there is a historic tension and conflict between the two. You can feel that when you’re in a community. The Catholic Church tends to be a cultural as well as a religious institution. It’s different in different communities. So you have to look at the way it plays out.

JASON DePARLE, The New York Times: If the critics of Darwinism gained extra energy in part by their concerns over social Darwinism and militarism, what social factors are increasing their passion now or intensifying the debate now? What are the modern equivalents?

DR. LARSON: In a way the issues are really the same then and now. If you go back to the 1920s, Bryan and the others would talk about phenomena like eugenics. Well, eugenics involved mass sterilization, trying to weed out the weaker, less fit individuals. It was widespread in America and, of course, grew even bigger in Germany. Eugenics is a big issue now because of genetic engineering, human gene therapy, stem cell research. It ties into sterilization. It ties in with abortion.

If you go to a school board meeting on this issue or you go to some sort of a public rally, and I’ve been to been to both settings, you will see people marching outside. Outside the school, outside the courtroom, the anti-evolutionists will have signs saying things like: evolution leads to abortion or evolution caused eugenics. You’ll still see those signs. Evolution and Hitlerism. You’ll see the connection.

Bioethical questions are connected, but now I think it’s just materialism. It’s the denial of a spiritual cause and of absolute values of right and wrong, because everything is relative to the environment and you fitting into the environment; and you’re not dealing with an absolute.

JANE LITTLE, BBC: In reading some of the transcripts from the Dover, Pennsylvania trial, there seems to be striking parallel to 1860s Britain, where you hear the famous Archbishop Wilberforce tackling Darwin’s bulldog, T.H. Huxley. But as I understand it, that was a real point in Britain where there was a sort of mini-cultural war going on very briefly. But then it was resolved somehow. It never filtered into the popular culture. And we have these various well-known thinkers coming up with progressive creationism and theistic evolution and interventionist evolution and all these different theories. Why didn’t that happen here or did it and we just not hear about it? You mentioned a few names at the top. But basically why were those prominent thinkers not there trying to reconcile the two? And why did popular culture not worry too much about it in Britain as opposed to here?

DR. LARSON: There is still a debate in Britain, but Britain tends to be a more hierarchical society, while America is less that, so there is less deference to the experts in America. There have always been Americans who have tried to work out a reconciliation. Perhaps the most notable one right from the very beginning was a person who had become a close friend of Charles Darwin, Asa Gray, who was America’s leading botanist at Harvard, a very visible public speaker at the time. There was a group of people like Asa Gray who were trying to work out a reconciliation. On the religious side, you had Beecher, the brother of Harriet Beecher who was a renowned minister in America at a congregational church in Brooklyn. He tried to work out ideas of theistic evolution. There were others, so we’re talking about people either from the science or from the theology side who tried to work reconciliation. That basic pattern held. You didn’t find a major controversy in America over evolution until the 1920s.

So we’re talking about a pretty large jump. Then you have William Jennings Bryan coming in who was a very popular speaker who could reach the people in America and the people responded to his movement. After he died, there was a period of quiet. Granted, evolution wasn’t taught widely, but there was this period of quiet until you get Henry Morris and the creationist movement of the ‘60s, which again reached out to this vibrant American subculture of churches.

That’s another area that the United States differs from England. England has an established church, and therefore churches aren’t competing for membership in the same way you have in America. You don’t have the number of people going to independent churches that you have in America. So in America, you’ve got the Southern Baptist Church that Henry Morris was part of, which was the one large denomination that went with the fundamentalist side or the literalist side. You’ve got independent churches, and then you have the independent growth of the Pentecostal movement in America that started at the turn of the last century in 1900, but grew enormously since then. You also have the Mormon Church, which has been creation-friendly historically. Mega-churches can be reached by this, where you don’t have a similar parallel in England. You’ve got a large Anglican church that is state-supported and then you’ve got some other churches. But you don’t have the same framework that someone who is starting a movement can reach out to.

KEN HERMAN, Cox Newspapers: Several of us had a conversation with the President, and the topic of intelligent design came up briefly. His comments were “I feel like both sides ought to be properly taught. I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought.” Is what he is proposing legal?

DR. LARSON: I don’t think that there is enough specificity to what he said to judge it legally. You’d need a context. Personally, I don’t see why a science teacher — good science teacher cannot, for valid, scientific reasons, pedagogically sound reasons — introduce issues raised by the intelligent design movement into an individual science classroom and talk about these issues in a way that helps students better understand evolution theory and better understand how science operates. Now, one way you can read the requests of the intelligent design movement is for nothing more than that.Now, you could raise the issue with a school board mandating that intelligent design be taught as some sort of a equal alternative scientifically — as a scientific theory in some way as an alternative to evolution theory. And there, you’re in a whole different setting. You’re not talking about an individual science teacher. You’re in a situation such as Dover, where all of the science teachers look at the school board and say, this is crazy. There’s nothing we can teach. We can’t do that. We won’t do that. We’ve been teaching for 40 years, some of those teachers could say. And this is not the way you do science. This is proselytizing, and we think that what the board is trying to do here, and you look at all of the facts behind what’s motivating the board, and you get this tremendous amount of evidence that these are religiously motivated people on the board trying to promote religion. And so suddenly you’ve got a whole different set of facts and you’ve got a situation, which I view as very problematic from the constitutional viewpoint.

MR. HERMAN: In this country, we have somehow evolved to any discussion of religion in the classroom is considered proselytizing or close to it. It’s an unbelievable hole in American education, the cause of a lot of our problems of how ignorant we are of each of the religions that we’re afraid of teaching.

DR. LARSON: I think that in many cases, the school districts are simply using the court as a cover. The Supreme Court has always been clear that you can teach about religion in public schools. I think what happens is a lot of times the schools don’t want to deal with it. They’re nervous because they don’t

want to get the local taxpayers who pay for their bond issues or the local parents mad.

JOSHUA GREEN, The Atlantic Monthly: I was going to ask if you could speculate a little bit on where the future of the intelligent design movement was headed, because if there really isn’t an affirmative scientific argument, and if all the publicity at the Dover trial of the last couple years has caused them, as you said, to sort of pull back on some of their more exotic claims, what exactly is the ambition? Is it simply to sow doubts about Darwinism? The idea that they’re trying to sort of improve the teaching of biology doesn’t quite ring true to me.

DR. LARSON: Science is not a homogenous group with one message. You’ll get one message from the National Academy of Science on evolution, another message from Ed Wilson, another message from Francis Collins. You’ll get differences of opinions. And those differences lead to uncertainty of how it will actually play out, and about whether there will there be a consensus message.Certainly, some people in the intelligent design movement firmly believe that evolution itself in the narrow sense of the term, evolution that is common descent, is a flawed idea that will be on the dust heap of history in 20 years just as Freudian psychology and Marxism are on the dust heap of history. There are other people who would say it’s not common descent; it’s just natural selection. But now we know that Behe thinks that even natural selection is an important process.

So you end up with these different sorts of viewpoints, and how it will play out, I would think that there will always be room for a broadening critique of both science and the limits of science.

MS. LITTLE: As I understand it, the Supreme Court has ruled that creationism shouldn’t be allowed in the classroom, but it has never said that its mandate is to teach evolution.

DR. LARSON: The Supreme Court has ruled that you can’t teach scientific creationism or creation science as science. You can still teach creationism in religion class or social studies. On the other hand, the Supreme Court has struck down the Arkansas law that banned the teaching of evolution, but it has

never ruled that schools have to teach evolution. Schools are free to either teach evolution or not teach evolution.

NAOMI SCHAEFER RILEY, The Wall Street Journal: A couple of years ago, I visited Bob Jones University and they teach evolution there. The dean explained the rationale to me. He said, we teach evolution, but we teach that it’s wrong. He felt that the students who were graduating from the school needed to know this because it was a common thing to know in the United States today. They wanted to be able to send students on to medical school, as they do, and have them well-versed in what science today says. I wonder if you could address, first of all, how widespread a belief this is, that pragmatic approach to teaching evolution. The idea that, we have to accept it because it’s a pretty common scientific theory out there, and when it was that certain fundamentalists decided it was okay to let this into a classroom at some level.

DR. LARSON: It’s tough to know exactly what was being taught everywhere, but there were disputes going all the way back to the 1880s where teaching evolution in a church-related college would become an issue, and they stopped teaching evolution, because the parishioners in that state. But really since the 1950s, evolution has become such a core concept in biology that the general norm, so far as I understand it in virtually all colleges, religious or otherwise that try to have science programs. There are some bible institutes that really don’t have any science per se. But if you’re trying to teach biology, you will include evolution.

MS. RILEY: Why doesn’t that idea ever trickle down into primary and secondary education?

DR. LARSON: Ever since Henry Morris and the Institute for Creation Research came up with an alternative theory, the rallying cry of even the strongest creationist has not been to exclude evolution. The rallying cry has been equal treatment, balanced treatment, and equal time for creation science. That was characterized by the second phase. There is a sincere group of people who think we should teach both ideas.

Certain doors are open or closed by the Supreme Court decisions, but I don’t think people are simply posturing to fit in under those decisions. I think they reflect sincerely held positions. We can’t forget that evolution theory itself is a

very dynamic field, and the ideas of the dominant theories in evolution are on a yearly basis evolving, morphing, changing, and some of these are drawn on.

DELIA RIOS, Newhouse News Service: I’d read that the Natural History Museum exhibit on Darwin in New York includes his bible, which he took with him on his travels. And I wondered if you know how Darwin himself reconciled his own religious beliefs with his theories and what it was he was discovering.

DR. LARSON: The exhibit, despite the Bible, really downplays the role religion played in Darwin’s life. I don’t think you ever see enough of that in it. Darwin was religious, sort of conventional Anglican early in life. But the role of religion in his own life declined. He was religious when he went on the voyage of the Beagle. He gradually would say he’d lose his religion. He would publicly describe himself and privately described himself usually as an agnostic.

Now, what caused the decline in religion in his life? It may have been his entire immersion in methodological naturalism in doing science and looking for naturalistic answers. And maybe that leads to a philosophical materialism. But certainly an important event was when his beloved daughter Annie died. That was profoundly life changing. He didn’t really want to believe in a God who could cause Annie’s death. He became a really convinced agnostic. He never described himself as an atheist. He would vary though between effectively being a deist at times and effectively being near an atheist at times, but always somewhere within the two parameters of being an agnostic.

CARL CANNON, National Journal: A lot of Christian Evangelicals consider Inherit the Wind as propaganda at their expense. But they also felt that way about the coverage of the Scopes trial, and H.L. Mencken, who appears in both the play and in the trial, what was the universal joke. Do Evangelicals think they’re not getting a fair shake on intelligent design? Is that why there are these radio shows? Is that their attempt to bypass the mainstream media?

DR. LARSON: The Scopes trial was a traumatic experience for conservative Christians. Before that time, the media seemed to be treating both sides of the fundamentalist/modernist controversy with a certain dignity. And after that time, they weren’t. It was throughout the country. And there was this pullback, this visible disengagement from the larger media and the larger culture. You suddenly see a surge of building a separate counterculture.

Now, it had been happening before. But now, it just became — “we’ve got to build our own. We can’t try to save Wake Forest.” What we’ll do is we’ll build our own institutions. So you see a whole bunch of different schools all around the country being formed — a separate counterculture. Their own radio stations, their own bible camps, the whole new structure being built of fundamentalist subculture.

The distrust of the media began then, but it was mutual. The media stopped covering religious news. You can go before that in every newspaper — the New York Times, any newspaper put summaries of many local church sermons in Monday’s paper. That disappears. The media disengages.

DAN GILGOFF, U.S. News & World Report: If 50 percent of the country, as you said, believes that mankind was created within the last 10,000 years, that seems to suggest some resonance beyond the Evangelical movement, and I’m wondering who else? What other religious traditions is this finding traction in? And is there any correspondence/correlation to other sort of demographic factors like levels of education? Or, is it largely or completely explained by levels of religious commitment?

DR. LARSON: The Pew survey that came out in the summer (on the Pew web page) is an excellent breakdown. And it tracks what Gallup and the other organizations have been finding. It’s not actually 50, it’s more like 40. It tends to be about 40-45 percent. Pew had it at 42 percent. So it is less than 50. It does resonate beyond the conservative Protestantism, which has been the driving force, the people most involved, but simply because they’re probably the largest group. But neither creation science nor intelligent design has ever been just limited to Evangelical and fundamentalist Protestants. Pentecostals have resonated with this issue to a large extent.

The Mormons historically have been very strong on creationism always. This issue resonates among some Jewish groups. This has become a big issue in Israel. There have been riots in Israel in front of the education ministry over the issue of teaching evolution or intelligent design. This is an issue in Israel. This is an issue among theologically conservative Jews. This is certainly a major issue in Islam. In any country with conservative Islamic law, it’s a capital offense to teach evolution in Islamic countries. So this has resonated among

Islamic groups in America. It’s not just White Protestants. It is also a cause among African-American Protestants as well.

PETER BOYER, The New Yorker: Outside of movements, outside of these faith-oriented movements within the scientific community, what’s the nature of community? Your biology teachers, for example, ideally would say what?

DR. LARSON: A biology teacher could talk about the critique of evolution offered by intelligent design and talk about that there are alternative possible explanations for the origin of life. But when they move to talk about what scientists do, what scientists do is evolution. When you look at biologists who are working in fields that relate to issues that need a theory of origins? There are many areas. There’s agricultural research. There’s medical research. This is all being researched within an evolutionary framework. There is much debate; there’s always been debate, just not over the issue of common descent. Because if you’re trying to look for naturalistic explanations, which is the only thing repeatable and testable and therefore exploitable with disease treatments or whatever or in agriculture, it has to be naturalistic, so it has to be coming not directly from God, but from other species, so you’re going to be working in an evolutionary framework.Where there has been continual debate is how evolution operates. Historically, from the very beginning, there was debate among scientists about how evolution worked. There was a debate in Darwin’s day. There is a debate today. They’re constantly debating the punctuated equilibrium as an example, but assisted facilitated variation is a recent theory. There is a tremendous new discussion of the importance of gene flows and hybridization in evolving new species. Well, the neo-Darwinian synthesis doesn’t emphasize any of that. So there is considerable dynamism in how evolution operates, and that’s what biology teachers can talk about.

The questions of these differences seem to run into the time problem. The two issues that have constantly bedeviled the Darwinian explanation for evolution are the irreducible complexity issue that Michael Behe revised, but which has always been there and this issue of time. Is there enough time for Darwinian sorts of mechanisms — tiny, minute changes selected by a struggle for survival? Is there enough time to have produced the current diversity of life? Well, that’s always been an issue, and scientists deal with that issue —

punctuated equilibrium, assisted variation, hybridization, all these are a way to speed up the clock because a lot of scientists don’t think there is enough time.

MR. CROMARTIE: Ladies and gentlemen, Professor Larson has done a terrific job and we should thank him by clapping. Thank you, Ed.