Download Transcript: Text

William Jennings Bryan was dead, John Scopes was off in Chicago staring at rocks, and the Tennessee Supreme Court had managed to find a technicality that allowed them to dispense with the case in a way that meant the Butler Act could stay on the books even if it would be very difficult to actually enforce. But that was hardly the end for the movement to get Darwinism out of public schools.

Within months of the trial, in March 1926 Mississippi had passed its own version of the Butler Act, this time banning public schools from teaching that “man ascended or descended from lower animals”.

The ACLU wanted to pull off a Scopes-style stunt in Mississippi too, and George Rappleyea himself, the Dayton industrialist who’d masterminded the Scopes Trial, travelled south to try and set one up, but they couldn’t even find a defendant.

In January 1927, Arkansas followed, with its own antievolution law, worded almost exactly the same as the Butler Act, but this time with a minimum penalty of $200, rather than $100, and offending teachers would have their teaching license revoked. It actually failed in the state legislature, but ended up as a ballot measure the following year.

Public opinion in Arkansas was, like in Tennessee, overwhelmingly anti-evolution, and churches of virtually all denominations publicly supported the law. There were obviously objections from the university of Arkansas, as well as Charles Smith, President of the American Association for the Advancement of Atheism (also this guy straight-up openly described himself as a white supremacist).

He was arrested for blasphemy when he displayed a placard reading "Evolution is true. The Bible is a lie. God's a ghost.” He obviously refused to swear a religious oath, so he couldn’t testify in his own defence. He was eventually convicted of distributing obscene literature, and sentenced to 26 days in prison, during which he went on hunger strike. He was straight back at it afterwards though, and this time they actually did manage to get him for blasphemy. He was sentenced to 90 days in prison, but the conviction was overturned on appeal. He’s often considered to be the last person convicted of blasphemy in the US.

But to nobody’s surprise, the referendum resulted in the law being passed with a solid 63% of the vote.

While anti-evolution activism was mostly concentrated in the Southern states, there were attempts at spreading the monkey law wave further north. William Bell Riley, one of the key figures of the early fundamentalist movement, who ran a Minneapolis Baptist Church, tried to push a similar bill through the Minnesota state legislature. Minnesotans proved to be far less friendly to anti-evolution legislation than Southerners had been. After Riley had spent several months trying to persuade the University of Minnesota to let him speak there, they eventually gave in and let him give a series of four talks on Evolution. They were well-attended, although how many of the students attending were there to take the piss is unclear. The Minnesota Daily refused Riley’s request for them to print his first talk in full. 

And that winter Riley and his Fundamentalist allies left behind the liberal university cities of Minneapolis and St Paul and struck out into the state’s frozen hinterland, seeking more receptive audiences among conservative, Lutheran farmers in Minnesota’s small towns.

Obviously academics at Minnesota’s universities protested when the bill was introduced to the State Legislature. And the media was mostly hostile too. The St Cloud Journal-Press, for example, said

“Be it said to the credit of hundreds of the able churchmen of Minnesota of every faith that they are opposed to the vicious attempts of Reverend Riley to inject a bitter, hate-making controversy on the people, which will be futile in results. You cannot change the opinions of thinking people by legislation.”

Shortly before the bill was due to go before the Senate and house education committees, a full 5,000 University of Minnesota students attended a rally opposing it, which meant when Riley tried to tell the Senate that while the university faculty opposed the bill, the students were in favour, it kind of fell flat. One senator even brought out a petition against the bill signed by 6,500 students.

The meeting was adjourned amid the ensuing chaos, and the following day the bill was defeated by a comfortable margin of 55 votes to 7.

And to be fair on the South, many attempts at getting Monkey Laws passed were unsuccessful there too. Arkansas, Mississippi and Tennessee were the exceptions more than the rule. The legislatures of Alabama, Florida, North Carolina and Oklahoma (which had earlier, in a space of two years, passed and repealed a bill banning school textbooks that taught evolution) all rejected similar bills, and apparently in Missouri an anti-evolution bill was met with laughter when it was presented in the House. Within two years of the Scopes trial, the initial surge of legislative anti-evolution momentum was already running out of steam.

William Bell Riley was undeterred though, and in May 1927, in Atlanta, deep in fundamentalist territory, he spoke at the annual conference of his own organisation, the World Christian Fundamentals Association. He announced a plan to take the anti-evolution movement global. They would start, naturally enough, in the Southern US, where their support was strongest, then spread to the North, then to Europe, South America, Australia, and even China, where Riley blamed the current chaotic situation on Modernist Missionaries, who believed in Evolution, spreading secular ideas like Nationalism, rather than purely focusing on Christian evangelisation.

This doesn’t seem to have really gone anywhere, but it’s worth noticing how it shows how fundamentalists had come to see Evolution as at least symbolic of everything wrong with the world.

The Evolution controversy always had been a culture war issue, with views on evolution associated closely with alignments on all sorts of other issues. William Bell Riley had consistently attempted to associate Evolution with Communism and various forms of modern immorality. The pseudogeologist George McCready Price, a Seventh-Day Adventist who spent his career looking for geological proof of the Biblical flood, wrote in 1921 that “The Evolution doctrine develops logically and inevitably into Socialism and Bolshevism as its natural expression in the department of social and civil life”.

And the Reverend W.E. Dodds, in 1925, apparently said:

“A modernist in government is an anarchist and a Bolshevik; in science he is an evolutionist; in business he is a Communist; in art a futurist; in music his name is jazz and in religion he is an atheist and infidel.”

That’s not to say there was no substance at all to this. It was largely true one way round. Communists were virtually always evolutionists. After all, Marx and Engels themselves, contemporaries of Darwin, living at a time before the overwhelming acceptance of Evolution as fact by the scientific establishment, had seen the theory of Evolution by Natural Selection as an example of their materialist philosophy in action. And American Communists of the 1920s were some of the most important figures in promoting the theory of Evolution. 

A good example would be Ludwig Katterfeld, a founding member of the Communist Labour Party. He was a victim of the Palmer Raids in the First Red Scare, and, despite a defence from Clarence Darrow, had spent a year in prison from 1923 to 1924 for Criminal Syndicalism. And in 1927, he would launch the magazine Evolution: A Journal of Nature, explicitly non-partisan despite its founder’s background, and specifically dedicated to promoting the theory of Evolution and opposing the anti-science views that seemed to exert a great deal of influence on American politics and culture.

While Communists were generally evolutionists (at least, before Stalin began to be taken in by Trofim Lysenko’s pseudoscientific alternative to natural selection in the 1930s), it goes without saying that evolutionists were often not communists, although to someone like William Bell Riley they may as well have been.

And after the war, as the Cold War descended and the American Right increasingly sought to represent America as a fundamentally Capitalist and Christian nation, as opposed to the Communist State Atheism of the Soviet Union, at the same time as the Fundamentalists had largely plunged all the way into full-on Young Earth Creationism, Bryan, with his comparatively moderate day-age creationism, and left-wing politics that actually now that you think about it look suspiciously like Communism, wasn’t really a hero they wanted to focus on.

Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee’s 1955 play Inherit the Wind, which Stanley Kramer made a film of in 1960, was a product of this era. It’s not actually a historical retelling of the Scopes Trial, but a fictional story based on it, intended more as a comment on McCarthyism than on the actual Scopes Trial - sort of to the Scopes Trial what The Crucible was to the Salem Witch Trials. Nonetheless, it’s played an important part in defining how subsequent generations have perceived the Scopes Trial.

In the small Tennessee town of Hillsboro, the schoolteacher Bertram Cates is arrested for teaching a lesson on Darwin’s Descent of Man, and in his trial he is defended by the notorious agnostic Henry Drummond, while his prosecution team includes the Tennessee Attorney General Thomas Davenport and the fundamentalist campaigner (and three-time presidential candidate) Matthew Brady. 

At the climax of a sensational trial, and amid a subplot about Cates’s relationship with a local Fundamentalist pastor’s daughter, Drummond interrogates Brady about various inconsistencies in the Bible, humiliating him in the process. The judge convicts Scopes - I mean Cates, and adjourns the court before Bryan - I mean Brady - has a chance to make the speech he’d prepared. While everyone’s leaving Brady attempts to deliver his speech anyway but dies in the process.

The biggest difference between Inherit the Wind and reality is probably the attitude of the people of Dayton. While in the film they burn an effigy of Cates and throw a rock through the window of his jail cell while singing  “We’ll hang Bert Cates from a sour apple tree” to the tune of The Battle Hymn of the Republic, in reality (while they were largely hostile to Evolution), the atmosphere was much friendlier. There were certainly many people in the area who did vehemently hate Scopes, but I don’t get the impression he was ever in any real danger from the locals. He wasn’t the only Evolutionist in Dayton, either. George Rappleyea, for example, whose idea the whole thing had been, was well-known and respected locally and was an outspoken evolutionist. And while in the film it’s taken for granted that he’s lost his job as a teacher, in reality the school board confirmed that he could keep his job the next term, and he quit of his own accord to go and study geology.

Bryan is obviously a bit Flanderised, too, as Brady. Obviously the actual Scopes trial didn’t involve Bryan having a mental breakdown and actually dying on the spot in the courtroom while seeming to hallucinate that he’d won one of his three Presidential election campaigns, but going further than that, Brady is a young earth Creationist, and in Drummond’s interrogation he insists on the accuracy of Bishop Ussher’s biblical chronology, and that God started the creation of Earth on October 23rd, 4004 BC at 9 AM, while Drummond introduces the possibility of day-age Creationism. In reality Bryan himself was a day-age creationist, and said as much in the trial. And even most Young Earth creationists don’t take Ussher’s chronology as anything better than a rough estimate of the date of Creation. But this was a time when a lot of Fundamentalists saw the real-life Bryan’s day-age compromise as a weak and cowardly betrayal of the inerrant word of God.

Scopes himself, by now 59 years old, working for the United Gas Corporation in Shreveport, Louisiana, was persuaded by Stanley Kramer to return to Dayton for the premiere of the film. It was a bit of a Scopes Trial reunion. Sue Hicks, one of the prosecutors, was still alive, he’d gone on to become a judge. Three of the jurors were still around, William Jennings Bryan’s Granddaughter, Rudd Brown, was there, as was Vera Raulston, the judge’s daughter. F.E. Robinson’s son was there, as was his drugstore, where the whole thing had started, selling “Scopes Soda - 15 cents - Priced now as then - in honour of Scopes’ return to Dayton.”

The mayor of Dayton gave Scopes the keys to the city, and on the radio the Reverend Paul Levengood proclaimed that “The Devil is here in Dayton and is having a heyday.”

While, after the War, the fundamentalist movement was associated with a sort of right-wing American Cold War anti-communism, before the war it had started going in another direction. Many fundamentalist leaders, as well as seeing Communism as part of the network of interconnected ideas that were destroying Christian society, were also extremely Anti-Semitic, and during the 1930s some of them became outright Nazi sympathisers. I mentioned all the way back in the very first episode how William Bell Riley, the Minneapolis Baptist Preacher who founded the World Christian Fundamentals Association, spoke very favourably of Hitler, who he saw as taking on, in his words, a “Jewish-Bolshevik-Darwinist conspiracy”.

By 1941, when actively cheering Hitler on was no longer acceptable in polite American society, Riley pivoted to a more Bryanesque position, publishing a pamphlet titled Hitlerism; or, The Philosophy of Evolution in Action, which associated Nazism with the Darwinian idea of the Survival of the Fittest.

The association of Nazism with the theory of Evolution wasn’t actually completely without merit, and in the early 20th Century, in the decades preceding the Scopes Trial, some of the most prominent defenders of Evolution had been enthusiastic proponents of the kind of racial pseudoscience that the Nazis fed off.

For instance, one of the leading evolutionists that William Jennings Bryan had personal beef with, who I mentioned in the first episode, was paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn, an advocate of scientific racism and white supremacy absolutely committed to the belief that the first humans couldn’t possibly have been Africans.

For another example of typical evolutionist thinking about race at the time, take George William Hunter’s Civic Biology, the textbook that played a key role in the Scopes Trial. That includes a list of racial categories, culminating in what it calls

“The highest type of all, the Caucasians, represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America.”

Many evolutionists at the time seem to have thought like this, seeing human evolution as a process of gradual progression from monkeys to white people. I guess it’s a consequence of not really being able to let go of the ancient way of thinking about life forms in terms of a Great Chain of Being, with all created things placed in a hierarchy from inanimate objects, through plants, animals, humans, angels, and eventually to God. If you try to understand evolution by natural selection while still thinking within that system, you end up with weird nonsense about racial hierarchies.

For an extreme and disturbing illustration of where this attitude could end up, and the sort of behaviour that many fundamentalists came to associate with Evolutionism, consider the case of Ota Benga, an Mbuti man who was abducted by slave traders in the Congo Free State, sold to the American explorer and human trafficker Samuel Philips Verner and ended up being literally exhibited in Bronx Zoo in 1906, alongside an Orang-Utan. The African American Baptist minister James H Gordon, who successfully petitioned the Mayor of New York for Benga’s release, obviously objected to the zoo’s degrading treatment of Ota Benga, the ethical repugnance of treating a human being as a zoo exhibit, and the zoo’s explicitly racist intentions, but he also wrote that

“The Darwinian theory is absolutely opposed to Christianity, and a public demonstration in its favor should not be permitted.”

When it came to Racism, neither side of the Evolution debate came off particularly well. On the evolutionist side, there were the eugenicists and skull-measurers, while on the anti-evolutionist side there were Nazi sympathisers and the Ku Klux Klan.

A lot of other prominent fundamentalists, who William Jennings Bryan was perfectly happy to collaborate with, were very unashamedly supporters of the Klan. But Bryan certainly didn’t share their Anti-Semitic and Anti-Catholic views, and in fact, he was very vocally opposed to the Anti-Semitism of people like Henry Ford.

Despite everything Bryan said in his speeches about the dignity of humankind, he was certainly not a committed anti-Racist. He seems to have had little difficulty in publicly supporting Racial Segregation, as Democrats in the South generally did.

I get the impression that he just didn’t see race as a particularly important issue. His supporter base largely consisted of rural white Southerners, who were, for the most part, very racist indeed, and he doesn’t seem to have been prepared to risk alienating them over it.

To an extent what Bryan actually sincerely believed is both unknowable and not particularly important, compared to what he publicly said he believed.

And even if Bryan disapproved of the KKK, his willingness to work with fundamentalist preachers like Frank Norris, who were proud supporters of the Klan, and his alignment with them on issues like evolution, prohibition, and even women’s suffrage (which I was surprised to learn is something the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s actually strongly supported), meant that many of the KKK saw him as an ally. In fact in Dayton, Klansmen marked his death in their own inimitable way by, of course, burning a cross. And on it were written the words

“In memory of William Jennings Bryan, the greatest Klansman of our time, this cross is burned; he stood at Armageddon and battled for the Lord.”

The Scopes Trial sort of marks a high point of a wave of legislative anti-evolutionism in the 1920s. Fundamentalism didn’t go away, by any means, but for a while serious efforts to introduce anti-Evolution legislation largely did. It’s hard to tell how much of this was directly down to the Scopes Trial, and how much was simply down to the fundamentalists having run out of states where they had a realistic chance of succeeding. William Bell Riley’s defeat on his home turf in Minnesota demonstrated that there was a geographical limit to how far anti-evolution legislation might realistically spread.

Another thing Edward Larson points out in Summer for the Gods is that once there were several states where it was illegal to teach evolution, textbook publishers across the country had to adjust the way they wrote about evolution if they wanted to be able to sell their textbooks in those states.

Even Hunter’s Civic Biology, that played a critical role in the Scopes Trial as a textbook officially endorsed by the State of Tennessee but at the same time illegal under the Butler Act, underwent revisions like this, with content on natural selection being revised to make it clear that this was only what Charles Darwin claimed, and not scientific fact.

And what also started to happen in the thirties is that Fundamentalists became increasingly detached from mainstream culture. Much like Bryan himself had suggested that the evolutionists were free to establish their own schools where they could teach their perverse doctrines without ordinary god-fearing taxpayers having to pay for it and have evolutionist propaganda inflicted on their children, the fundamentalists were actually setting up their own fundamentalist institutions to promote Fundamentalism. In fact, during the Scopes Trial itself, there had been talk of setting up a Fundamentalist University in Dayton, named for William Jennings Bryan. Bryan’s death and subsequent transformation into a Fundamentalist martyr made this a certainty, Bryan College still exists to this day, on the outskirts of Dayton, with the aim of “establishing, conducting, and perpetuating a university for the higher education of men and women under auspices distinctly Christian and spiritual, as a testimony to the supreme glory of the Lord Jesus Christ, and to the Divine inspiration and infallibility of the Bible”.

And as they became more divorced from mainstream Protestantism, Fundamentalist views on Creation became more extreme. As I’ve already alluded to, Old Earth Creationist ideas, like the Day-Age Creationism espoused by William Jennings Bryan and William Bell Riley, or the Gap Creationism of the Fundamentalist preacher Harry Rimmer, that attempted to reconcile creationism with the mainstream geological position on the age of the Earth, became much less popular. Instead, the dominant views became those of figures like George McCready Price.

Price rejected geology as generally understood by actual geologists, and instead built his career around reimagining geology such that the fossil record could be interpreted as showing not that Earth is billions of years old, but that the entire Earth was flooded a few thousand years ago, exactly as Genesis describes. Price had already been around for a while by the time of the Scopes Trial, and during Darrow’s cross-examination of him, Bryan had actually cited him as an example of a geologist who acknowledges the reality of the Biblical flood.

Price’s geological ideas gained another boost in popularity with the publication of The Genesis Flood by Henry Morris and John Whitcomb in 1961, which essentially covered the same ideas.

But as far as legislation went, things were pretty static. The campaign for new monkey laws had largely ground to a halt by the end of the 1920s, but the states that had monkey laws kept their monkey laws. 

And that brings us to Arkansas, in 1965. 

If you remember earlier in the Episode, in 1928, Arkansas had passed, by a referendum, a law very similar to Tennessee’s Butler Act. This time, though, the consequences were more severe. Offenders would be fined a minimum of $200 and stripped of their licences to teach.

In 1965, the law had never been enforced in the 37 years it had been on the books, but when the Central High School in Little Rock adopted a textbook that actually violated the law, the Arkansas branch of the National Education Association saw an opportunity to take the state to court and try to create a legal precedent against the Arkansas law and against Anti-Evolution laws in general.

Susan Epperson was 24 years old, the same age as Scopes had been, and taught Biology to a 10th Grade class at Central High School. She was a local, and a respectable, law-abiding, practicing Presbyterian. She’d be perfect.

Despite not actually being prosecuted, Epperson sought a chancery court judgement that would stop the state from prosecuting her if she taught from the textbook she’d been told to teach from.

The chancery court ruled that the law was unconstitutional and that Epperson was safe to teach from the required textbook. The state appealed to the supreme court of Arkansas, and they overturned the chancery court’s ruling. As was the plan all along, Epperson and the Arkansas Education Association took the case up another level, and appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States.

Nothing like this had been done since the Scopes Trial, but now the environment was a bit different. First off, things were different in a strictly legal sense. Everson v. Board of Education, in 1947, a fairly unromantic case to do with the State of New Jersey paying for transport to Catholic schools, had ended up with the Supreme Court ruling that the 14th Amendment of the Constitution meant that the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment (“Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion”) applied not only to the US Federal Government, but also to State governments.

Also, the supreme court of the time, under chief justice Earl Warren, wasn’t afraid to seriously enforce the 14th Amendment. Brown v. Board of Education had ended School segregation in 1954, and a string of cases over the next decade shut down various workarounds being used to maintain de facto segregation. Lucy v. Adams the following year had forced the University of Alabama to start admitting Black students. Loving v. Virginia was working its way through the courts at the same time as Epperson v. Arkansas, and would end up with the supreme court ruling that bans on interracial marriage were unconstitutional.

The Supreme Court of the era was serious about the bill of rights, too, applied to state legislatures through the 14th Amendment.

Yates v. United States in 1957 extended the first amendment’s protections on free speech much further (ruling that California couldn’t prosecute people simply for being members of the Communist Party), and Brandenburg v. Ohio in 1969 would extend them further still, creating the current, very high standard for what speech can be prosecuted in the US. 

When it came to the Establishment Clause in particular, in Engel v. Vitale and Abington School District v. Schempp, in 1962 and 63 respectively, the Supreme Court had ruled that school-sponsored prayer in public schools was not allowed.

And from another perspective, the Space Race was well underway, and at this point the Americans were just starting to catch up with the Soviets. If the Americans didn’t get serious about teaching proper science, they were at risk of falling well behind their rivals, and the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study had been launched in 1958 to overhaul the way Biology was taught in American Schools (ironically, in 1957, when they launched Sputnik, the Soviet Union still officially endorsed Lysenkoism, rather than Evolution by Natural Selection).

And this time, unlike 40 years earlier in Tennessee, the US Supreme court actually did hear the case, and they ruled that the Arkansas Monkey Law did indeed violate the Establishment Clause. The majority opinion concluded:

“Arkansas' law cannot be defended as an act of religious neutrality. Arkansas did not seek to excise from the curricula of its schools and universities all discussion of the origin of man. The law's effort was confined to an attempt to blot out a particular theory because of its supposed conflict with the Biblical account, literally read. Plainly, the law is contrary to the mandate of the First, and in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.”

It was now going to be much more difficult for states to ban public schools from teaching evolution.

While all this had been going on, back across the Mississippi, in Tennessee, the teacher Gary Scott had been fired after he apparently told students that the Bible was “a bunch of fairy tales” (which, to be fair, is a pretty unprofessional thing for a teacher to say). And he threatened to take the state to court, for a do-over of Scopes. 

There had been two previous attempts to repeal the Butler Act, in 1935 and in 1952. Both of them failed amid denunciations from fundamentalists in the legislature, and outrage from the staff and students of Bryan College. But now the climate was different. The legislature saw which way the wind was blowing, and they didn’t want to be the Monkey State anymore. 

With the remaining pro-Monkey-Law legislators fervently proclaiming their faith in the literal truth of the Creation Narrative in Genesis, and apparently a monkey in a cage brought into the house by supporters of the repeal, with the sign “Hello Daddy-o”, the house voted to repeal the act. The Senate was a bit harder to crack, and ended up tied, sixteen to sixteen. 

But as the ACLU offered to assist Scott’s lawsuit, and keen to avoid what had become known as Scopes II, enough of the remaining pro-Butler-Act senators finally cracked, and the Butler Act was repealed.

Now the only state left with a Tennessee-style ban on teaching evolution was Mississippi.

Now that a precedent was in place from Epperson v. Arkansas, a similar case unfolded there. Mrs Arthur G. Smith took the state of Mississippi to court, saying that their anti-evolution law meant her daughter was being deprived of a proper scientific education and it was detrimental to her higher education prospects. When the case ended up with the Supreme Court of the State of Mississippi, in 1970, the precedent from Arkansas left them with little choice but to rule that the anti-evolution law violated the Establishment clause. The last Monkey Law in the United States was void. 

Straight-up Butler Act-style bans on teaching evolution were clearly not fit for purpose anymore in the legal environment of the 1960s and 70s. Now, if you wanted creationism taught in schools, you’d have to be a bit more subtle about it. And with that we’re back where else but Tennessee, in the year 1973. This time, the state legislature passed a law that didn’t specifically ban public schools from teaching evolution, but it said that any school textbooks that include content of evolution have to give equal treatment to “the Genesis account in the Bible” and other theories about human origins, with the exception of what the bill called “the teaching of all occult or satanical beliefs of human origin”, whatever that means.

Two simultaneous and unconnected lawsuits were filed against the state textbook commission, both claiming that the law violated the Establishment clause. In both cases, the Sixth circuit court of Appeals, and the Tennessee Supreme Court respectively ruled that it obviously did violate it, and that was that for another method for trying to make schools teach creationism in biology lessons.

At least, that was that within the jurisdiction of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals - that is, Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio and Michigan. Arkansas, for example, in 1981, was perfectly free to pass its own law requiring “balanced treatment” in public schools for “creation science and evolution science”. This was a bit more sophisticated than the Tennessee law, referring to Creation Science, rather than specifically mentioning the Bible. The legislature managed to define “creation science” without explicitly mentioning any religious concepts at all. Instead it was defined in terms of purported scientific evidence for things like a Young Earth, a worldwide flood, and evolution being impossible apart from small changes within separate ‘kinds’ of life form. You can’t teach the Bible in science lessons, but there’s nothing stopping you teaching a scientific theory that just happens to align with a hyperliteral reading of the Book of Genesis.

Obviously this ended up in court. The ACLU got together a long list of plaintiffs, including both scientists and religious leaders, suing the Arkansas Board of Education. The Board of Education argued that the Act did indeed have a legitimate secular purpose - that is, to ensure balance between competing scientific theories. This is where it gets interesting, because the case now depended on whether or not “creation science” genuinely is a legitimate scientific theory, or whether it’s just cover for a religious belief.

In the ruling, the judge actually drew up a list of criteria for defining what counts as a scientific theory.

“1. It is guided by natural law;
2. It has to be explanatory by reference to nature law;
3. It is testable against the empirical world;
4. Its conclusions are tentative, i.e. are not necessarily the final word; and
5. It is falsifiable.”

Creation Science, so the ruling said, failed these tests on various counts. It depends on claims of supernatural intervention, rather than relying entirely on natural laws, it makes unfalsifiable claims, like that the world was created suddenly, from nothing, the concept of “kinds” - the categories of life forms within which, according to creation science, evolution might be possible - has no consistent definition, meaning it can’t form the basis of a falsifiable scientific theory with real explanatory power, and the whole thing isn’t tentative at all. Creation Science proponents aren’t prepared to revise their claims in the light of new evidence.

I’m not totally sold on these arguments, at least, as applied to the definition of Creation Science given in the act, taken at face value. As the Philosopher of Science Larry Laudan wrote shortly after the ruling, creation science is science, it’s just incorrect science. That said, if you don’t take the definition given in the act at face value, and consider other writings by proponents of creation science, it becomes very clear that what we’re dealing with is a pseudoscientific smokescreen for beliefs that are actually held as a matter of religious faith.

Anyway, the court ruled that Arkansas’ law requiring balanced coverage of evolution and creation science in public schools wasn’t constitutional because it had no genuine secular purpose. “Creation Science” was actually a religious belief system, rather than legitimate science.

After all this, this was only a district court. These two precedents between them were only binding in Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, Michigan, and a bit of Arkansas. That left 45-and-a-bit states where there was still no binding precedent against laws requiring public schools to teach creation science.

But then we get to Louisiana, 1987. Essentially, the case wasn’t too different to the Arkansas case. Louisiana had a similar law, requiring balanced treatment for evolution and creation science. A science teacher sued, claiming it violated the First Amendment, and went to court backed by a colossal stack of amicus briefs from scientists.

This time, though, it ended up in the US Supreme Court. Now there was finally a chance to get a precedent that applied to the whole country. 

And the Supreme Court went the same way as the District Court had in the Arkansas case. They rejected the state’s argument that the law actually does serve a legitimate secular purpose by promoting academic freedom, because there was already nothing stopping teachers from teaching any legitimate science. That and, as per the Arkansas Court’s ruling, Creation Science was not in fact actual science but a religious belief system. 

So States weren’t going to be able to force schools to give equal treatment to Creation Science and evolution in Science lessons. The Fundamentalists needed another strategy.

While the Louisiana and Arkansas cases had stopped states from requiring schools teach creation science specifically, they had left open the option of requiring schools to teach genuinely scientifically valid alternatives to evolution. This meant that if you could persuade a court that a Creationist theory was respectable science then they’d have to let you teach it.

This is where intelligent design comes in.

Intelligent Design had emerged over the 1980s as a more modern, sophisticated take on creationism. It was much more restricted in its claims than Creation Science was. There was no flood, no specific claim about the age of the Earth, just the claim that the complexity of many features of living organisms is such that they can’t possibly have been generated gradually by natural processes, and must have been deliberately designed by an intelligent being - nobody’s saying it has to be a monotheistic God, it might have been aliens or something. Essentially it’s the 18th Century Clergyman William Paley’s argument - if I see a watch lying around, it’s reasonable to assume there must be a watchmaker who made it on purpose - but repurposed for the closing stages of the 20th Century. 

In 2004, Dover School District, in Pennsylvania, introduced a requirement for teachers to read a statement to their 9th Grade Biology Students, saying, in part:

“Because Darwin’s Theory is a theory, it continues to be tested as new evidence is discovered. The Theory is not a fact. Gaps in the Theory exist for which there is no evidence. A theory is defined as a well-tested explanation that unifies a broad range of observations. Intelligent Design is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin’s view. The reference book, Of Pandas and People, is available for students who might be interested in gaining an understanding of what Intelligent Design actually involves.”

You know the drill by now. The mother of a child at Dover High School sued the school board for violating the third amendment by quartering troops at her house - just kidding it was actually the establishment clause of the first amendment. The question was now ‘Is Intelligent Design an actual scientific theory, or is it just an attempt at rebranding the Fundamentalist Christian religious doctrine of Creationism to try and sneak it into public school curriculums right under The Founding Fathers’ stupid enlightenment noses?’

After hearing a great deal of expert testimony from angry scientists, and attempts by the defendants to argue that they were just trying to encourage critical thinking, the Court came down firmly in favour of the Plaintiff. 

Evidence in their favour involved things like the “Wedge Document”, from the Center for Renewal of Science and Culture, that very conveniently described their plan to use Intelligent Design as a “wedge” to “defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural, and political legacies” and “to replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God.”

And then there was the textbook referred to in the required statement, Of Pandas and People, which was published by the Creationist thinktank the Foundation for Thought and Ethics. It wasn’t as subtle as it probably should have been. “What kind of intelligent agent was it?” it said at one point. “On its own science cannot answer this question. It must leave it to religion and philosophy.”

Indeed, the Philosopher of Science Barbara Forrest pointed out in her testimony that Of Pandas and People was simply a reworking of an earlier Creationist textbook, Creation Biology. Comparing drafts from before and after the Louisiana case, it was clear that the words ‘creationism’ and ‘creationist’ had been systematically replaced with ‘intelligent design’ and ‘design proponent’, and at one point the hybrid “cdesign proponentsists” remained. A “missing link”, as Forrest described it.

So creationists in state legislatures and school boards weren’t going to be able to legally compel schools to teach Intelligent Design either.

But Creationism didn’t go away, by any means. Plenty of Americans are some form of creationist, and the perception that there’s serious scientific controversy about the basic fact of evolution is very widespread.

The actual number of Creationists in the US seems to have been declining since the late 90s. Polling by Gallup had 47% of Americans believing that “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so” in 1999 decreasing by 10 percentage points to 37% in 2024, while “Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in this process ” has gone up from 9% to 24% in the same interval. As can be expected, it’s heavily politicised, as it was a century ago. Pure creationists accounted for 55% of self-identifying Conservatives compared to just 18% of Liberals. It’s also divided between Christian denominations, with pure creationists accounting for 51% of Protestants compared to 32% of Catholics (I’m intrigued by the 16% of those who identified their religion as ‘None’, who nonetheless apparently believe God created humans a few thousand years ago). American Catholics prefer (at 46%), the third option of “Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process”. Theistic evolution like this has been a bit steadier than Creationism overall, and has gone down from 40% to 34% since 1999. 

But the problem with all these numbers is that they can vary wildly depending on quite small nuances in how you word the question. For one, there are nuances in what people actually believe. For instance, the creationist option in the Gallup survey says specifically that humans were created by God in the last 10,000 years. A day-age or gap creationist, or even someone who believed that evolution is correct as concerning all other life forms, just not humans, would check that box, just the same as a full-on Young Earth Creationist would. On top of that, there’s a problem of people not reading survey questions properly, and going off vibes instead. For example, a 2009 survey from the National Centre for Science Education had 18% of respondents answering yes to “The earth is less than 10,000 years old”, while “God created the universe, the earth, the sun, moon, stars, plants, animals, and the first two people within the past 10,000 years.” - which, if people were actually reading the questions properly and answering reliably, ought to be a subset of people who believe that the earth is less than 10,000 old - got a full 39% of respondents, more than twice as many, saying yes.

A 2013 article from the NCSE estimated, based on results from various surveys, that a maximum of only about 10% of Americans are actually full-on Young Earth Creationists. Debates about evolution are often presented as if everyone is either a Young-Earth Creationist or an Atheist - and that’s quite a convenient framing for Young-Earth Creationists. But at least in America, both those groups put together are a minority. What actually seems to be more common is a range of views in between. There are coherent, nuanced opinions ranging from day-age and gap creationists to intelligent, well-informed religious people who accept the mainstream scientific consensus on Evolution but believe that God has some role in the process. Then there seem to be quite a lot of confused people who’ll give contradictory answers to questions depending on exactly how you word them. 

And I think those confused people are quite relevant to another point that comes out of this - and that’s how people seem to be able to choose their beliefs based not on whether they’re actually convinced by evidence either way, but based on moral and political views, and tribal loyalties. This was very obvious in William Jennings Bryan’s rhetoric, where he talked relatively little about actual evidence against Evolution, and focused much more on the theory’s supposed moral implications. And in things like the Scopes Songs written in the aftermath of the Scopes Trial, you see Creationism treated as a marker of rural, Southern, conservative identity, more than a set of sincere, evidence-based beliefs.

And that brings us to the end of this series. Thank you for listening to Science: A Peculiar History. You can donate to help support the podcast at buymeacoffee.com/joebath.

You can find the podcast almost anywhere you get podcasts. You can find transcripts, images and sources for past episodes on the website, scienceapeculiarhistory.co.uk. If you have any questions, comments, corrections or suggestions, you can message any of the podcast’s social media channels, email admin@scienceapeculiarhistory.co.uk, or use the contact form on the website.