The advent of Darwinism presented a far greater threat to Christians than simply a long geological history and the progressive appearance of species. When Darwin’s
Origin of Species
first appeared in 1859, few scientists accepted the concept of organic evolution. Within two decades, however, even a hostile church journal could identify only two working American naturalists who still opposed it.
12
Darwin’s eloquent presentation of evidence for evolutionary development drawn from careful observation of nature certainly contributed to this turnabout, but he proposed also that a “survival of the fittest” process of natural selection drove evolutionary change rather than the benign process of individual adaptation envisioned by Lamarck. Although Darwin always maintained a place for Lamarckian-type mechanisms within his theory of evolution, his concept of natural selection became widely identified as the central feature of Darwinism.
The high school textbook at issue in the Scopes trial, George William Hunter’s A
Civic Biology,
summarized Darwin’s alternative evolutionary mechanism in a section entitled “Charles Darwin and Natural Selection.” Darwin observed that individual plants and animals tended to vary slightly from their ancestors, Hunter noted. “In nature, the variations which best fitted a plant or animal for life in its environment were the ones which were handed down because those having variations which were not fitted for life in that particular environment would die,” Hunter wrote. “Thus nature seized upon favorable variations and after a time, as the descendants of each of these individuals also tended to vary, a new species of plant or animal, fitted for the place it had to live in, would be gradually evolved.” In short, as Hunter explained, Darwin postulated new species “arising from very slight variations, continuing during long periods of years.”
13
This mechanism attributed these all-important variations to random individual differences inborn in the offspring rather than to Lamarckian vital forces or acquired characteristics. “Species have been modified, during a long course of descent,” Darwin concluded in the
Origin of Species,
“chiefly through the natural selection of numerous successive, slight, favorable variations.”
14
Darwin’s account of random variations, coupled with his survival-of-the-fittest selection process, posed a critical problem for many Christians who retained a teleological view of nature. In 1860, Darwin anticipated this problem in an exchange with the Harvard botanist Asa Gray, a devout Protestant. Christians long maintained that the harmonious structure of the physical universe and each living thing reflected intelligent design by a creator, and thereby contributed evidence of the existence and loving character of God. Gray, who had arranged the initial publication of the
Origin of Species
in the United States, asked Darwin about the book’s theological implications. “I had no intention to write atheistically,” Darwin replied. “But I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice.”
15
For some conservative theologians and pious scientists, this represented the ultimate challenge of Darwinism to a Christian world view: Beneficial variation was random and natural selection was cruel. If nature reflected the character of its creator, then the God of a Darwinian world acted randomly and cruelly. Darwin could not accept such a God, and became an agnostic. Others recognized the magnitude of the issue.
Battle lines formed quickly. The self-proclaimed “gladiator-general” of Darwinism, English naturalist T. H. Huxley, claimed to take up the banner for science.
16
Anticipating religious opposition to Darwin’s ideas, the agnostic Huxley—who embraced the theory of evolution as a naturalistic rebuttal to the claims of Christianity—wrote to Darwin shortly before publication of
Origin of Species,
“I am sharpening up my claws and beak in readiness.”
17
Following publication, Huxley aggressively championed the cause in countless public debates and popular articles, clashing with such religiously motivated critics of Darwinism as Oxford bishop Samuel Wilberforce and British prime minister William Gladstone. “Whether astronomy and geology can or cannot be made to agree with ... Genesis,” Huxley wrote in a typical passage, “are matters of comparatively small moment in the face of the impassable gulf between the anthropomorphism (however refined) of theology and the passionless impersonality ... which science shows everywhere underlying the thin veil of phenomena. Here seems to me to be the great gulf fixed between science and theology.”
18
Counterattacking in the name of religion, Princeton theologian Charles Hodge took the lead in challenging Darwinism. His provocatively titled 1874 book
What is Darwinism?
presented a tightly reasoned argument that led to the inevitable answer: “It is atheism [and] utterly inconsistent with the Scriptures.” For Hodge, Darwin’s “denial of design in nature is virtually the denial of God.”
19
Hodge and some other church leaders raised an alarm against teaching evolution, particularly within seminaries and denominational colleges, but scientific developments temporarily quieted the conflict. In the 1870s and 1880s, Darwinism faced a host of technical challenges. The best evidence from the physical sciences suggested that the solar system was not old enough for slight, random variations in one or more organisms to produce the current array of biological species, much less to generate life from nonlife. Further, without a means to preserve inherited differences, such variations did not lead anywhere. Like most naturalists working before the acceptance of Mendelian genetics, Darwin believed that the inherited traits of an offspring consisted of a blending of those possessed by its parents. Slight, random variation in an individual—no matter how much it helped that animal or plant survive—quickly would be swamped as that individual bred with others of its species, so that gradually each succeeding generation would lose its distinctiveness. Even if individuals with a particularly beneficial trait mated solely with those possessing the same trait—such as happens in the breeding of domesticated animals—their offspring then simply would tend to preserve that trait, not exceed it. If organic evolution occurred (and by 1880 most naturalists believed that it did), then some mechanism must accelerate and direct variation; for some devout Christians, this left a role for God.
Two alternative theories of evolution were discussed widely among American and European scientists during the final third of the nineteenth century. Ever the traditional Christian, Asa Gray proposed a theory of theistic evolution in which God channeled variations into a pattern of progressive development. The renowned British scientists Charles Lyell, Richard Owen, and St. George Mivart toyed with similar ideas. For some, this offered a way to reconcile religious faith with evolutionary theory and science. Other naturalists, led in the United States by the likes of Joseph LeConte, Clarence King, and Edward Drinker Cope, revived Lamarckian-type explanations to account for the speed and direction of evolution. According to these late-nineteenth-century naturalists—some of whom went so far as to call themselves “neo-Lamarckians” —indwelling vital forces pulled each species forward toward increasing complexity, while each individual pushed in the same direction through the use and disuse of organs in response to shared environmental conditions. Variations became purposeful and natural selection marginalized.
These alternative theories of evolution might not fit neatly with traditional Christian doctrines, but they certainly could be spiritual. In a lecture to Yale seminarians, for example, Gray declared that with evolution, “the forms and species, in all their variety, are not mere ends in themselves, but the whole a series of means and ends, in the contemplation of which we may obtain higher and more comprehensive, and perhaps worthier, as well as more consistent, views of design in Nature than heretofore.”
20
Similarly, the neo-Lamarckians’ principal journal,
American Naturalist,
professed a goal of “illustrating the wisdom and goodness of the Creator.”
21
LeConte defined the “laws of evolution” as “nought else than the mode of operation of the ... divine energy in originating and developing the cosmos.”
22
King denounced natural selection: “A mere Malthusian struggle was not the author and finisher of evolution; but that He who brought to bear that mysterious energy we call life upon primeval matter bestowed at the same time a power of development by change.”
23
A Quaker turned Unitarian, Cope concluded in his
Theology of Evolution,
“The Neo-Lamarckian philosophy is entirely subversive to atheism.”
24
Conservative Christians might disagree with these views on various points of doctrine, but few raised loud objections, and many liberal Christians wholly embraced an evolutionary creed.
25
Neo-Lamarckianism and other non-Darwinian forms of evolutionary thought swept the scientific community, particularly in the United States. “From the high point of the 1870s and 1880s, when ‘Darwinism’ had become virtually synonymous with evolution itself, the selection theory had slipped in popularity to such an extent that by 1900 its opponents were convinced it would never recover,” the historian Peter J. Bowler observed. “Evolution itself remained unquestioned, but an increasing number of biologists preferred mechanisms other than selection to explain
how
it occurred.”
26
Even Darwin granted an ever larger role to Lamarckian explanations for variation in later editions of the
Origin of Species.
“The fair truth is that Darwinian selection theories,” Stanford zoologist Vernon L. Kellogg concluded in 1907, “stand to-day seriously discredited in the biological world.”
27
With the “eclipse of Darwinism,” as T. H. Huxley’s grandson Julian later referred to this period in the history of biology, many conservative Christians toned down their rhetoric. “I do not carry the doctrine of evolution as truth as some do,” William Jennings Bryan assured audiences around the turn of the century. But he quickly added, “I do not mean to find fault with you if you want to accept the theory; all I mean to say is that while you may trace your ancestry back to the monkey if you find pleasure or pride in doing so, you shall not connect me with your family tree without more evidence than has yet been provided.”
28
Apparently the evidence satisfied such highly orthodox Protestant theologians as Princeton’s James McCosh and Rochester seminary president A. H. Strong, who now took the position that Christians could accept evolution as, to use Strong’s words, “the method of divine intelligence” in creation.
29
A similarly conciliatory tone sounded in some early essays in
The Fundamentals,
a series of popular booklets published between 1905 and 1915 that helped define the tenets of Protestant fundamentalism. Princeton theologian B. B. Warfield contributed an article to the first volume of this series about the same time as he publicly endorsed theistic evolution as a tenable theory of the “divine procedure in creating man.”
30
The theologian James Orr allowed his favorable views on organic evolution to spill over into his four essays for The
Fundamentals.
Earlier he had written, “Assume God—as many devout evolutionists do—to be immanent in the evolutionary process, and His intelligence and purpose to be expressed in it; then evolution, so far from conflicting with theism, may become a new and heightened form of the theistic argument.”
31
In The
Fundamentals,
Orr added, “Much of the difficulty on this subject has arisen from the unwarrantable confusion or identification of evolution with
Darwinism.”
Now that the
“insufficiency of ‘natural selection’”
has been widely recognized by
scientists
, Orr asserted that evolution was “coming to be recognized as but a new name for ‘creation.’” Based on this endorsement for theistic evolution, Orr could confidently proclaim, “Here, again, the Bible and science are felt in harmony.”
32
By the turn of the century, secular historians and essayists rather than theologians and scientists were largely responsible for keeping alive the public perception of hostility between Christians and evolutionists. During the last third of the nineteenth century, two academicians from New York, John William Draper and Andrew Dickson White, wrote enormously popular but highly biased histories of the relationship between science and religion. Draper described his
History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science
as “a narrative of the conflict of two contending powers, the expansive force of the human intellect on one side, and the compression arising from traditionary faith and human interests on the other.”
33
White opened his
Warfare
of Science with the sentence, “I propose to present an outline of the great, sacred struggle for the liberty of science—a struggle which has lasted for so many centuries, and which yet continues.”
34
He later fleshed out this brief book into a massive, two-volume
A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom
. These books recounted Roman Catholic attacks on Copernican astronomy, including the seventeenth-century trial of Galileo and execution of Giordano Bruno, and fostered the impression that religious critics of Darwinism threatened to rekindle the Inquisition. They neither reported the growing harmony between theologians and evolutionists nor noted that most great physical scientists of the period, from John Dalton and Michael Faraday to Lord Kelvin and James Clerk Maxwell, were devout Christians. Instead, as James Orr complained in The
Fundamentals
about these books, “Science and Christianity are pitted against each other. Their interests are held to be antagonistic.”
35