Posted on 08/14/2025 9:36:36 AM PDT by Heartlander
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the 1925 Scopes “Monkey” Trial, in which an ACLU-led attempt to overturn a Tennessee law banning the teaching of evolution in schools turned into a nationally broadcasted showdown between creationism and Darwinism.
Understandably, the Scopes trial is often viewed through the lens of current debates surrounding evolution, creationism, and intelligent design. But the “past is a foreign country,” and it’s often a mistake to try to fit history into the mold of the present. Historian Edward B. Davis’s new critical anthology Protestant Modernist Pamphlets: Science and Religion in the Scopes Era provides a fascinating window into the intellectual milieu of the 1920s, and makes it clear that in this case it would indeed be a mistake. If you have been led to believe that America in 1925 was just an even-more-religious version of the America today, you should read this book. You’re in for a surprise.
Davis’s volume collects, for the first time, the ten influential pamphlets put out by the American Institute of Sacred Literature (AISL) of the University of Chicago Divinity School. The pamphlets were produced in the years surrounding the Scopes trial, and were intended to persuade the American religious public to believe in evolution.
With financial backing from John D. Rockefeller Jr. and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the AISL kicked off the project in 1922 with a salvo of three pamphlets by three famous authors: biologist Edwin Grant Conklin, pastor Harry Emerson Fosdick, and theologian Shailer Mathews. Over the next several years, they put out seven more pamphlets, recruiting other famous names: Nobel laureate physicists Robert Andrews Millikan and Arthur Holly Compton, astronomer Edwin Brant Frost, naturalist Samuel Christian Schmucker, physicist Michael Idvorsky Pupin, University of Chicago Divinity School professor Charles Whitney Gilkey, and Harvard geologist Kirtley Fletcher Mather.
Davis writes:
The significance of a project of this nature and magnitude should not be overlooked. In 1929–1930 the AISL mailing list contained nearly 45,000 names, including more than 1,000 scientists specifically chosen for their eminence. Between 1922 and 1933 they printed perhaps as many as one million copies of the ten pamphlets, distributing these to tens of thousands of prominent Americans and a comparable number of ordinary folk, especially college students and church members.
The pamphlets were sent to pastors throughout the nation to put in the pamphlet racks of their churches. Since the University of Chicago Divinity School had a reputation as a “hot bed of heresy,” they decided to leave the name of the school off the cover of the pamphlets.
Perhaps one of the most striking revelations of the book, to someone unfamiliar with the era, is just how confident the pamphlet authors seemed to be that their progressive style of religion would prevail. A time traveler from 2025 going back to the time of the Scopes trial might be surprised at how very modern high society was. One of the pamphlet authors, Robert Millikan, went so far as to say that “it is certain also that no modern religious leader believes in the god who has the attributes which Moses, Joshua and the Judges ascribe to their Deity.” That was not true, of course. But it’s hard to imagine anyone even making such an assertion today. In the 1920s, however, there was a great sense of optimism about the progress of science and religion: if the dogmas and superstitions of the past could be discarded, and sweet reason prevailed, society could grow into a new and enlightened belief system that took the very best from the religions of the past, and combined it with the best of what science had to offer. So instead of the God of Moses, Millikan believed in “the spirit of rational order and of orderly development, the integrating factor in the world of atoms and of ether and of ideas and of duties and of intelligence.”
The result was an utter dismissiveness towards traditional or orthodox theology, which might seem overconfident in 2025. “So far as the doctrine of the Atonement is concerned,” Shailer Mathews said, “it is one of those things which has slipped back into oblivion as a religious doctrine of the person of Christ, but as a philosophy of life, embodied in the idea of vicarious suffering it still has a place, for there is no human society in which vicarious suffering is not taking place and does not affect human life.” When Mathews was asked whether he believed in God, he is said to have replied, “That, my friend, is a question which requires an education rather than an answer.” The God that Mathews believed in was “the personality-evolving and personally responsive elements of our cosmic environment.”
Kirtley Mather had a similar view. Davis writes:
[Mather was] somewhat reluctant to use the word “God,” because he wanted to avoid so many of the images with which it was traditionally associated. For him, it is “a symbolic term used to designate those aspects of the administration of the universe that affect the spiritual life and well being of mankind.” God is “a creative and regulatory power operating within the natural order,” who “is immanent, permeating all of nature, unrestricted by space or time,” yet “transcendent only in that His spirit transcends every human spirit, possibly the sum total of all human spirits melded together. He is not supernatural in the sense of dwelling above, apart from, or beyond nature.”
Sameul Christian Schmucker’s view was also similar. He wrote:
The laws of nature are not the decisions of any man or group of men; not even — I say it reverently — of God. The laws of nature are eternal even as God is eternal. The tendency of two bodies to draw together is not only as old as Newton, but as old as the bodies. It is inherent in the nature of the bodies. It was not “put there” by a higher power.
The laws of nature are not the fiat of almighty God, they are the manifestation in nature of the presence of the indwelling God.
Although there had been prominent scientists in the 19th century arguing for both evolution and orthodox Christianity, they were practically extinct by the 1920s. “With the rise of fundamentalism after the Great War,” Davis writes, “we look almost in vain for American voices of comparable magnitude who affirmed both evolution and the ecumenical creeds. If they existed, they tended to keep their ideas under wraps as controversy raged.”
So in the 1920s, everyone agreed that traditional theology was a superstition of the past. Or, well, every sophisticated person agreed. Arrayed against such enlightened individuals were the “fundamentalists,” represented in the Scopes trial by the populist politician William Jennings Bryan.
That group contained essentially zero scientists, according to Davis:
Almost no professional scientist shared Bryan’s low view of evolution. Ronald L. Numbers has identified just one biologist from this period who rejected common ancestry, the “reputable but relatively obscure” zoologist Albert Fleischmann of the University of Erlangen, but he was not an American. From letters by American scientists to the AISL, just one more name can perhaps be added, that of analytical chemist Francis Perry Dunnington, recipient of the Charles Herty Medal in 1935, who spent his whole career at the University of Virginia.
At the same time, the leaders of the fundamentalist movement were not predominantly young earth creationists. They believed in an old earth, same as the modernists. Davis quotes William Bell Riley, the first president of the World Christian Fundamentals Association: “There is not an intelligent fundamentalist who claims that the earth was made six thousand years ago; and the Bible never taught any such thing.”
If so far we have presented a picture of a 1920s that the mainstream scientific establishment of today would be very comfortable in, there’s another surprise coming. Creationism wasn’t the only worldview that was seen by sophisticated society as a dying relict of the past. So was… materialism.
Initially, the editors had wanted to produce the pamphlets in the style of a debate, with the views of an anti-evolution scientist, an atheist/materialist scientist, and a theistic evolutionist scientist all present. But chemist and science journalist Edwin Emery Slosson advised them that “it would be hard, if not impossible, to find any scientific man of standing who would argue for evolution based on materialistic and atheistic principles.” Without much more enthusiasm from the other scientists the editors contacted, the project was abandoned.
Slosson’s dismissive view of materialism seems to have been fairly widespread. It was certainly the opinion of the pamphlet authors. Schmucker, for example, asserted that “materialism died with the last century. The great scientists of the new century are to a very large degree intense spiritualists. God is now recognized in His universe as never before…”
Michael Idvorsky Pupin, likewise, wrote that he thought that he would “not have very grave difficulty in proving that the mechanistic view of the universe” was untenable (62).
“Chemical and physical sciences have made it certain that there is no such thing as dead matter, but that there is universal activity,” Mathews pointed out. “A few years ago men thought of atoms as little pellets of dead matter which in some way or other joined to make molecules. But today the atom is itself analyzed into a nucleus of positive discharge, around which circle one or more electrons of negative discharge.”
“There is no adequate evidence known to the writer that the universe is automatic, that it has within itself the power to make the laws which govern it,” said Edwin Frost. “Mere matter cannot be imagined to be endowed with such capacity.”
Millikan (one of the Nobel laureate physicists) said that “materialism, as commonly understood, is an altogether absurd and an utterly irrational philosophy, and is indeed so regarded by most thoughtful men.”
The other Nobel laureate physicist, Arthur Compton, was equally dismissive, saying: “I myself should consider it more likely that the principle of the conservation of energy or the second law of thermodynamics would be found faulty than that we should return to a system of strict causality.” In his pamphlet, he wrote:
The detailed proof by Professor [Henri] Bergson that “there is infinitely more in a human consciousness than in the corresponding brain,” and that “the mind overflows the brain on all sides, and cerebral activity corresponds only to a very small part of mental activity” (Mind-Energy, pp. 41 and 57), seems convincing.
And later:
The old-fashioned evolutionary attitude was that the world as we know it developed as a result of chance, variations of all kinds occurring, some of which would be more suited to the conditions than others, and therefore surviving. More recent thought has found this viewpoint increasingly difficult to defend.
Mather, likewise, rejected the materialist worldview as old-fashioned and already debunked:
For several decades the results of scientific investigation appeared to be leading directly toward a mechanistic explanation of the nature of cosmic energy. All that has changed in the last few years. We now know that the latest results of the analysis of material objects, when we penetrate as far as we may into the secret of the nature of things, give us a wholly different impression from that which our fathers had a generation ago.
Of course, materialism was not really dead. But it certainly seemed to be on the down-and-out. The emerging picture of America in the 1920s, then, is a consensus of educated elites who adhered to a heterodox, watered-down form of Protestant Christianity, frustrated and under siege from both sides by the low-brow opinions of the masses: atheist-agnostics like Clarance Darrow and traditional Christians like William Jennings Bryan.
In spite of fierce and sometimes bitter disagreement, the fundamentalist anti-evolutionists and the “Protestant modernist” evolutionists agreed on one thing: there was plenty of evidence for intelligent design.
Mathews thought that evolution might provide “a new basis for the argument of design” in evolution. Compton, characteristically, went further: “The chance of a world such as ours occurring without intelligent design becomes more and more remote as we learn of its wonders,” he said. In his pamphlet, he wrote: “This situation strongly suggests that the evolutionary process is not a chance one but is directed toward some definite end. If we suppose that evolution is directed, we imply that there is an intelligence directing it.”
“If the universe is purposeful,” said Frost, “then it is plain to me that man, who is the highest form of development on the earth, must himself be distinctly a result of purpose rather than of accident. His evolution, whether it is by procedures which are clear to us or not, must be consistent with purpose and not with chance.”
It wasn’t just that these evolutionists personally believed in a deity of some sort. They believed that the evidence for “intelligent design” in nature was discernable to science and could be debated by scientists. In 2025, those views would land them in the “big tent” of the intelligent design movement — strange though that may seem.
If the pamphlet authors were anti-materialist intelligent design advocates, you might be wondering… why were they so keen to convince everyone about evolution?
Their primary concern seemed to be that if religion ever sided with traditional theology instead of consensus science, it would always lose. Several of the writers had been influenced by the writings of Arthur Dickson White, the author of a (now-discredited) book presenting science and religion as at war with each other, with science always winning in the end. They key takeaway from this so-called “warfare thesis” was that religion must never argue with science about factual claims, because that would only end in humiliating defeat. Modernists thought it was their duty to accommodate any and every scientific consensus into their religion, without concern for theological dogma.
Thus, Edwin Conklin argued: “It is a dangerous thing for defenders of the faith to affirm that one cannot be a Christian and an evolutionist, for students of nature who find themselves compelled by the evidences to accept the truth of evolution will be apt to conclude that they must therefore count themselves as hostile to the Church.”
Conklin asserts, not once, but twice, in his pamphlet that evolution “is not contradicted by any scientific evidence,” although he didn’t think that it was his duty to prove that:
It is fortunately not necessary here to review the evidences of evolution, for these may be found in many elementary textbooks on biology. The evidences are so numerous and come from so many sources that no intelligent man can study them at first hand and not be impressed with their importance. As a consequence there is probably not a single biological investigator in the world today who is not convinced of the truth of evolution.
Ironically, much of the evidence for evolution that was presented in the pamphlets has since been proven false. Conklin, for instance, uses the supposedly significant differences between human races as evidence:
It is generally held by scientists that the existing races of men all belong to one species, Homo sapiens, because these races are generally fertile inter se. But fertility is not a safe and certain criterion of a species. Some individuals belonging to distinct species are fertile inter se and other individuals belonging to the same species are sterile. But if the differences between different races of men are not sufficiently great to warrant placing them in different species, they are at least great enough to constitute sub-species. How did these differences arise if not by divergent evolution?
While hedging on whether different races of humans could be considered different species, he insists that they are at least different enough to be considered sub-species, and that this is undeniable evidence for evolution, since even Biblical creationists had to admit that humans share a common ancestor. (Of course, that is only evidence for macroevolution if the racial differences are “macro” — and even creationists have never had a problem with microevolution.) Needless to say, such arguments would not fly today. But scientific racism and eugenics was merely applied evolutionary theory in those days.
Another now-debunked argument came from the astronomer, Frost. He pointed to the extreme ordinariness of Earth, implying that life may have emerged on many planets. “There is no logical reason to suppose that our sun is any better fitted to have planets about it than thousands of others, or that the planet earth should be highly exceptional.” Of course, we now know that our planet, solar system, and location in our galaxy are anything but ordinary.
The geologist of the group, Mather, invoked unlimited time to enhance the a priori plausibility of gradual evolution:
The geologist has a distinct advantage here over most other scientists because the geologist has learned to think in terms of vast intervals of time; he has necessarily adopted a world-view; he stands on the mountain top and looks far into the past; he surveys a universe, limitless both in time and in space. To him there comes no suggestion of any real beginning, no hint of any final end.
Ironically, the scientifically trained real estate mogul James F. Porter, who was not at all sympathetic to the attempt to reconcile religion and science, had made a very similar argument in critique of the pamphlet project: “[Y]ou carefully select and quote partial truths of science… Why not take into consideration the probable fact that from chaos itself, given endless time, and the effects of innumerable collisions just such a universe as our own with all our formulas and laws might evolve.”
Whether you interpret the infinite age of the universe as evidence of an entirely purposeless world, or merely as proof that evolution would have time to do its work, through whatever means, the argument doesn’t hold up now. Now we know about the Big Bang. The universe had a beginning in the finite past — as William Jennings Bryan could have informed both the pamphlet authors and their materialist critics. The supposedly available “endless time” was not actually there.
As you read the arguments of a hundred years ago, you begin to feel that the evolutionary paradigm was built on a foundation that simply doesn’t exist anymore.
It’s interesting to imagine what the pamphlet authors might say if they could see America one hundred years after their grand propaganda project. On one hand, a majority of the populace now believes in evolution, according to the most recent Gallup polls. About a third believe in some form of theistic evolution, comparable to the number of young-earth creationists. Only a quarter believe in unguided, non-theistic evolution. That would surely count as a victory.
On the other hand, Gallup refers to the idea that evolution occurred “without God’s involvement” as “the scientific theory of evolution,” implying that theistic evolution is unscientific. And it is — at least according to the definition of “science” approved by Judge Jones in the 2005 Kitzmiller vs. Dover Trial, when he ruled that intelligent design cannot be taught as science in American schools.
That result would probably cause some consternation to the modernists who thought it was just fundamentalist paranoia to suppose that the theory of evolution might lead back to materialism. But, at least so far, it appears that the modernists’ long-dreamt-of marriage of scientific and religious consensus is doomed never to be.
Thought will go more and more in the direcction of ‘theistic evolution’ and intelligent design in the future.
(And physics has been eroding the materialist, mechanist concept of Nature for over a century. Science can’t disregard concepts usually thought of as ‘spiritual’ for much longer.)
Exceptions of course came from the fake church leaders who had infiltrated God's churches then just like now. But make no mistake: the main push for scientific racism came from the secularists.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/07/secular_mythology_the_scopes_monkey_trial.html
Back in ‘96, I was in Dayton Tn. Visited the Rhea County Courthouse where the trial was held. Visitors are welcome to visit the courtroom as long as court is not in session. There was a museum in the basement as well.
Regardless of one’s thoughts regarding the trial, it was an interesting place to visit. As I sat in the courtroom, I could almost picture Darrow and Bryan arguing the case.
That seems like a simplistic and misleading dichotomy. Among those with interest in the subject, there were many Christians who were not fundamentalists, and many secularists who were not racist white supremacists.
I don't disagree with that. But, respectfully, make sure you're not falling for the straw man argument. As I said in my post you replied to, there were some Christians who argued the same thing as the secularists. That doesn't change the point that for the most part it was a church movement that was arguing for the 14th Amendment's "equal treatment of the law" to being implemented as stated (same rules across races).
For example, in the 1920s I believe it was the Methodists and Episcopalian churches who promoted eugenics. While the more "fundamental" churches (including Catholic) were against eugenics. Fortunately, the fundamentalist churches were on the rise.
If Wikipedia is to be believed, the eugenics movement was funded largely from the Carnegie Institution, Rockefeller Foundation, and Kellogg.
So except for a few exceptions on each side (again, not falling for the straw man argument), for the most part it was Christian fundamentalists vs secularist institutions.
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