Scopes version 2.0+

In preparation for being part of the Faith and Reason living learning community (LLC) next semester, I’ve resumed reading about issues related to science and religion. The political circus surrounding the run-up to the U.S. presidential elections motivated me to re-read The Creationists. This key book, by historian Ronald Numbers, first published back in 1992, does an excellent job tracing the strange situation that has evolved in the United States. Since much has happened in the last 25 years, I was looking for the updated (and expanded) 2006 version at the library. They didn’t have it, but they did have the e-Book Intelligently Designed: How Creationists Built the Campaign Against Evolution by Edward Caudill published in 2013.

Like the earlier classic by Numbers, Caudill traces the rise of antievolutionism, its entanglement with the rise of Fundamentalism. (This word has a narrower meaning, but has widespread colloquial use that strays from its original definition. We have a similar situation for the word Evolution.) The usual suspects are present: George McCready Price and the Genesis Flood authors Morris & Whitcomb. But with the rise of the Intelligent Design movement in the last quarter-century, the book also covers Philip Johnson, Michael Behe, and the events of the 2006 Dover Pennsylvania legal proceedings. Caudill however situates his narrative to the 1925 Scopes trial in Dayton, Tennessee. The actual events, personalities, and key moments, in the historical version are much obscured because of the popular classic 1960 movie Inherit the Wind. The movie is based on the 1955 play (of the same name written) at the height of the McCarthy proceedings.

Our LLC watched the movie the previous Fall semester. It was amusing to observe the students who seemed somewhat bored for the first 30-40 minutes – these old classics seem hokey to them – but when the trial started, you could see them put down their cellphones and start to pay attention. The scenes are quite dramatic! The historical trial pitted three-time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan against famed American lawyer Clarence Darrow. In the movie, these characters are given different names, Matthew Harrison Brady and Henry Drummond. The stand-in for the famed acerbic journalist and critic H. L. Mencken is E. K. Hornbeck. (I think the parallels of the real and fictional names are interesting.) Brady is portrayed as a buffoon, and one gets the impression that in the battle for “reason”, that science triumphs over antiquated religion.

Who won? And is this even about winning and losing? Historically, Scopes was found guilty (of violating the Butler Act) and fined $100, which he ended up not having to pay due to a court technicality. But the aftermath was that more antievolution laws or guidelines were proposed. Did Inherit the Wind succeed in convincing the public that the folksy backward religious townspeople and their champion Brady were plain silly? The caricature might be fodder in scientific circles, but Caudill argues in his book that the Scopes trial, and in particular the flawed movie, were a watershed for many subsequent instances of Scopes version 2.0. Played out in courtrooms across the country, antievolutionists lost legally but won publicity. If anything, the simple-minded strawman ridiculing of religion had the effect of catalyzing the banding together of “creationists” (another slippery label). A parallel “science” (or perhaps pseudoscience) has developed into a multi-million dollar industry. A massive theme park, Ark Encounter, is being built in Kentucky and scheduled to open in July courtesy of Ken Ham and Answers in Genesis.

Inherit the Wind portrayed Brady and Christianity as being old-fashioned, close-minded, and stilted in reason. It is ironic to see the same strategy employed by the antievolutionist movement. The claim made is that the scientists are the close-minded ones, and not open to new possibilities at the frontier opened up by the Intelligent Design movement. The creationists may have lost in the court skirmishes, but they have fared much better on the political warfront. Caudill writes that William Jennings Bryan was not in Dayton primarily to engage in reasoning about science or faith. He was there as part of a political campaign. The event was staged for a media circus, and it certainly succeeded on that front. Scopes v2.0 plays out repeatedly as the media feels obliged to cover with “equal time” both sides of the story. That’s what you do in political media journalism. It’s not about the science.

Caudill has an excellent summary chapter if you don’t have time to read the whole book. Here is the first paragraph of Chapter 8:

“The Scopes trial was the first public performance of modern America’s science-versus-religion drama. Its high visibility and dramatic quality gave it a special place in the subsequent fight because the trial defined terms and tactics that have endured into the twenty-first century for the antievolution movement. Creationists still use Bryan’s arguments against evolution and his appeals to American myths and democratic values. His lessons in practical politics and using the press to promote one’s agenda have not been lost on the modern antievolution movement. First, putting the fight in court meant a public argument. Even without the impetus of sensation and the bizarre, news media were obligated to cover courts, much as they did legislatures, school boards, and other public bodies. Those were familiar venues, facilitating coverage and making the issue easier to follow. Second, defining belief in evolution as a test of one’s faith brought large numbers of religious people into a fight they otherwise might have ignored. Eradicating nuances helped enlist adherents, as it would in any campaign. People, by nature, will shun the effort required to sort through, perhaps to unsatisfactory conclusions, the complexities of a topic such as the impact of modernism on theology, or the place of materialistic science in one’s faith, or if science even has a place in faith.”

That last sentence is scary. If there’s something I’ve learned over the years, and I hope my students learn this as part of their education, it is that real issues bedeviling our world are complex and require nuanced discussion. There’s a lot of grey (aptly, the color of our LLC). As discussed in a previous post on Foxes and Hedgehogs, nuance requires a lot of hedging (which interestingly is what the fox does, rather than the hedge-hog). In another post a while back, I mentioned Randy Olson’s book Don’t Be Such a Scientist, where unfortunately accuracy is not the most important thing in communication; story-telling is. Many of us scientists are bad at story-telling and we throw a bunch of facts at the public as if we should obviously be believed because of our erudite data dump. Two months ago I attended a seminar where Olson had analyzed the communication of politicians past and present. Donald Trump, to his horror (and possibly to most of us academics in the audience), scored far, far better on communication than anyone else, especially on TV and video.

In his book, Caudill refers to Mencken and Darrow as elites, at least this was the company they kept back in the days of the Scopes trial. Bryan however identified with the people of Dayton, backwater as it might seem according to an elite (and certainly portrayed that way). In today’s version, academics (and scientists) are part of the new elite. There is much head-scratching and hand-wringing as to why Trump seems so popular to the “working-class white folks” even when he himself is clearly not one of them. Does Trump have policies and proposals that are realistic and practical? I would say no, but maybe that’s because I much prefer nuance to bluster. But Trump isn’t trying to convince academics or the political elite, he is running a campaign – much like Bryan did in Dayton. He might not ultimately win the presidency (Bryan did not) but he knows how to communicate to his constituency regardless of accuracy or substance.

Many op-eds hearken to the older days where one could build bridges across camps for the common good in the political arena. Today, ideology rules. We live in an “us versus them” world where the polarized battle lines are drawn as starkly as possible. (This also makes it easier for the media to write an engaging story – perhaps emphasizing the engagement, a term that is used in warfare.) Scopes version 1.0 and its descendants, thanks to Inherit the Wind, helped catalyse the drawing of battle lines between “creationists and evolutionists”. Who gets the dominant media coverage? Those willing to spout extreme (and sometimes bizarre) views.

I close this post with a sober observation by the British theologian N. T. Wright. In a chapter on politics (in his book Surprised by Scripture), he writes:

“Meanwhile the major ethical and public/political issues of our day rumble on – global debt, the ecological crisis, the new poverty in our glossy Western society, issues of gender and sex, stem cell research, euthanasia, and not least the complex questions of the Middle East – and as long as the debates are carried out in terms of fundamentalism and secularism, they will never be anything other than a shouting match. At this point, ironically, the Enlightenment dream has begun to eat its own tail, as its greatest strength – the emphasis on reason as a means to peaceful coexistence – has been undermined by its greatest weakness, the dualistic division between God and the public world, with human public discourse collapsing into spin and emotivism.”