80 - Darwinism and the Divine in America: Protestant Intellectuals and Organic Evolution 1859-1900

Darwinism and the Divine in America: Protestant Intellectuals and Organic Evolution 1859-1900
By Jon H. Roberts
Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1988. 339 pp. $26.75.

The history of the relationship between science and religion, if not always or even primarily a series of battles, as has often been charged, is certainly very checkered. For those with an interest in the creation/evolution controversies in particular, Darwinism and the Divine in America is an important and helpful book. As Professor Roberts documents, religious responses to emerging scientific data and theories were extremely varied. Roberts confines himself to American Protestant responses to biological theories from the time of the publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species (1859) to the end of the century. Included in his very thorough purview are not only Protestant theologians, church historians, and biblical scholars but also Protestant scientists, such as Asa Gray and Louis Agassiz, prominent clergy, such as Henry Ward Beecher, and a variety of other Protestant intellectuals.

In the first decade after Darwin's bold thesis that species are the product of a long history of transmutation by natural selection, most Protestant intellectuals rejected the thesis on any of a number of grounds. This was not, by and large, the result of religious conservatism, since the majority of scientists at the time were also cautious to critical, regardless of their religious persuasion. Those, on the other hand, who espoused Darwinism so vociferously, such as Huxley, were clearly motivated by an anti-theism they saw confirmed in the new theories. Darwin's thesis was a grand conjecture, not well supported in 1859 by the available paleontological evidence and not satisfactorily explained in terms of natural selection. The fixity of species seemed much more demonstrable from the cumulated history of observation, in addition to and apart from its apparent support from the Bible.

By 1870, Roberts argues, biologists had given overwhelming support to the general outlines of the evolution of species with the major points of dispute now shifting to the mechanisms of evolutionary change and to the specifics of biological ancestry. By this time, there were also a growing number of Protestant intellectuals who had embraced either a theistic evolutionism or a progressive creationism (the attempt to combine long periods of variation within species with periodic special creations of new species). Some progressive creationists were even willing to allow a transmutation of species for the whole of the animal kingdom, as long as the special creation of human beings was preserved. On the other extreme were those who so identified God with the immanental forces of nature as to lose any transcendent reality (pantheism); while others were essentially deistic evolutionists whose God

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seemed to have little relevance beyond an initial setting in motion of matter, laws, and processes. (Darwin himself had taken a deistic position.)

According to Roberts, the principal concerns evidenced by Protestant intellectuals were not so much a defense of a literal interpretation of the Bible or the inerrancy of the Bible, as a defense of divine purpose, design, and providence, along with the uniqueness of humanity as the goal of creation. Both concerns were seriously threatened by the increasing successes of science in providing naturalistic explanations that seemed to leave no room for God and that furthermore-like the mechanisms of natural selection-seemed random, accidental, and directionless. Theology, teleology, and anthropology seemed equally at stake.

This was all too much for a vocal minority of Protestants who wanted no compromise with Darwinism, insisting instead on a literal-historical interpretation of the Genesis creation stories that should not (and so interpreted could not) be accommodated to the new theories. The truth about origins was divinely revealed in the Bible and should not be sacrificed to an ever-changing science or to a science that seemed-both in motivation and in result-to be naturalistic. Leading in this fight were Princeton Seminarians Charles Hodge and his son Archibald, aided by such notables in science as Louis Agassiz of Harvard. Significantly, as Roberts points out, Charles Hodge located his attack on Darwinism in his Systematic Theology (1872-73) under the section entitled "Anti-Scriptural Theories."

Strangely, few parties to the dispute paid careful attention to the question of the original issues being addressed by the creation accounts, the meaning and intent of the materials, and the specific literary form and linguistic usage employed to challenge effectively the polytheistic cosmogonies, of surrounding cultures. Though this was the same period that saw the rise of biblical criticism, those who made use of it tended to talk in terms of cultural borrowing from pre-scientific cosmologies now superseded by modern science. Those who saw biblical criticism as of the same order as evolutionary and naturalistic thinking were unsympathetic with a discussion of historical context and literary characteristics. They argued, rather, that the early materials of Genesis were divinely revealed accounts of historical events, to be interpreted in terms of their "plain meaning," which was presumed to be such. In almost all cases, the assumption was that Genesis intended to provide something on the order of a modern natural history and chronology of events.

One of the few dissenters from this view, James Woodrow of Columbia Theological Seminary, suggested that much of the controversy hinged on the assumption made by almost all parties that Genesis and modern science were using words in a comparable manner and for a comparable purpose; but they were not comparable and "to take its language [Gen. 1-3] in a scientific sense is grossly to pervert its meaning." One therefore did not need to choose between evolution and

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creation, or to work out ingenious harmonies between Genesis and scientific scenarios, but more carefully to distinguish between biblical issues and uses of language and those of modern scientific discourse. The result of Woodrow's proposal was that the General Assembly in 1886 voted (137 to 13) to reject his views as not in accord with Scripture or the Confession or Catechism, and the seminary board dismissed him from his teaching post.

Roberts has done an excellent and thorough job of sifting through a vast literature, summarizing the main arguments advanced by American Protestant intellectuals from biblicists to deists. It is surprising, and somewhat disconcerting, to realize that the same positions and arguments--often stated almost verbatim-continue to be found very prominently in the literature of the 1960s, 70s and 80s. If there is a disappointment in the book, it is that the concluding chapter contains no suggestions as to where much of this argumentation might have been misplaced, misguided, or misdefined. The attempt of the book to be as objective as possible, and to avoid any suggestion of bias, favoritism, or the proverbial axe to grind, is certainly commendable. And Roberts does a remarkable job of being a sympathetic reporter and interpreter of every position. Yet when the issues continue to be so controversial, and so much misunderstanding of both Bible and science persists to fuel the flames, it is unfortunate that, after forty years of minute argumentation is heard from the parties to the dispute, no hint of a verdict is forthcoming.

Conrad Hyers

Gustavus Adolphus College
St. Peter, Minnesota