BONUS: Evangelicals, Science, & Ted Davis

Episode 8 of American Evangelicals only had room for excerpts of our conversation with historian of science Ted Davis. This bonus episode gives you the entire, unedited interview. Davis, a leading historian of science and religion, traces the relationship between American Christianity and scientific thought from the early republic through the Scopes trial and into the twenty-first century — challenging some common assumptions about evangelicals and science along the way. If you've already heard our episode on evangelicals and science, think of this as the director's cut: every story, historical detail, and insight that didn't make the final cut. Host John Fea conducted the full interview with Ted Davis. 

ABOUT OUR GUEST

Edward B. “Ted” Davis is Professor Emeritus of the History of Science at Messiah University, where he was a longtime colleague of host John Fea, and a Fellow of the International Society for Science & Religion. He is co-editor, with Michael Hunter, of The Works of Robert Boyle. His most recent book, Protestant Modernist Pamphlets: Science and Religion in the Scopes Era (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024), is a critical edition of ten rare pamphlets on science and religion published around the 1925 Scopes trial.

PEOPLE, BOOKS & TERMS MENTIONED

• Francis Bacon — English philosopher; The Advancement of Learning (1605) articulated the “two books” framework of scripture and nature.
• Robert Boyle — 17th-century chemist; his The Christian Virtuoso (1690/91) argued science strengthens rather than threatens Christian faith.
• Cotton Mather — brought Enlightenment science to America; author of The Christian Philosopher (1721), modeled on Boyle.
• Samuel Miller — New York Presbyterian minister and later Princeton Seminary professor; A Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century (c. 1803) attacked “infidel philosophy.”
• Asa Gray — Harvard botanist, correspondent of Charles Darwin, and traditional Christian who reviewed On the Origin of Species favorably in 1860.
• William Jennings Bryan — prosecutor in the 1925 Scopes trial; opposed evolution and, especially, theistic evolution.
• Vernon Kellogg — Stanford biologist and pacifist; Headquarters Nights (1917) linked evolution to German militarism and influenced Bryan.
• Bernard Ramm — Baptist theologian; The Christian View of Science and Scripture (1954) urged evangelicals to be open to science.
• John C. Whitcomb Jr. and Henry Morris — The Genesis Flood (1961), written partly in response to Ramm, launched the modern young-earth creationist movement.
• Francis Collins — geneticist who led the Human Genome Project to completion; prominent evangelical voice on faith and science.
• American Scientific Affiliation — an organization of evangelical scientists founded just before Pearl Harbor, which grew rapidly after World War II.
• Society of Catholic Scientists — founded by astrophysicist Stephen Barr as a Catholic counterpart to the American Scientific Affiliation.

🔗 LINK to episode 8

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2610661/episodes/19367017

Hosts:

JOHN FEA - Visiting Fellow in History, Lumen Center; Distinguished Professor of History, Messiah University

MAGGIE CAPRA - Visiting Instructor in American History, Beloit College

DAN HUMMEL - Director of the Lumen Center; Honorary Research Fellow, University of Wisconsin-Madison

This podcast is brought to you by the Lumen Center and STUDIO, both initiatives of the SL Brown Foundation. 

Find out more about our work:

• slbf.org/lumen-center
• slbf.org/studio

Produced by Daniel Johnson and Dave Conour

Edited by Dave Conour 

Transcript

Welcome & why we're releasing the full interview

SPEAKER_00 0:11

Welcome to this special bonus episode of American Evangelicals, a history podcast. In episode 8 of the series, you heard excerpts from our conversation with historian of science Ted Davis. But as we were putting the episode together, we realized there was simply too much fascinating material to fit into our normal format. So today, we're giving you the entire interview, exactly as it was recorded. Ted Davis is one of the leading historians of science and religion. He spent decades studying the relationship between Christianity and scientific thought. And in this conversation, he helps us trace this relationship from early Republic through Darwin and the Scopes trial and into the present day. He challenges some common assumptions about evangelicals and science and provides historical context that didn't all make it into our main episode. If you've already listened to our episode on Evangelicals and Science, think of this as the Director's Cup: a chance to hear the full conversation, complete with all of the stories, historical details, and insights that we simply didn't have time to include. Here's our unedited interview with Ted Davis.

Ted Davis's background and the Boyle/Locke connection

SPEAKER_02 1:19

We are really excited today to have Ted Davis on our program in this episode. I think he is the perfect person to discuss the topic of this episode, that is evangelicals and science. Apart from the fact of being a longtime colleague of mine at Messiah College and then Messiah University, Ted is an accomplished historian of science, specializing in science and religion. He is the co-editor, along with Michael Hunter, of the papers of Robert Boyle. For those of you who don't know Robert Boyle, he was a physical chemist who helped create the modern scientific laboratory and the papers that came out of that laboratory. I just actually learned before we started recording that the executor of Robert Boyle's will was John Locke, the political theorist. So a little bit of an interest there for those of you interested in American and British history. His most recent book came out in 2023 with Johns Hopkins University Press. It's entitled Protestant Modernist Pamphlets: Science and Religion in the Scopes Era. Check out that if you're interested in the whole evolution and religion controversies and discussions. I'm sure we'll be talking more about that here in a few seconds. We wanted you on here, Ted, because we often invite guests on the program when the three of us, Dan, myself, and Maggie, don't have a kind of real scholarly expertise in a particular area of the way in which evangelicals intersect with kind of other kind of cultural or intellectual discourses. So we're hoping that you can kind of set us up here on this and give us some things to think about as we move later in the episode to our sort of conversation about

Bacon's "two books": scripture and nature

SPEAKER_02 3:05

this. We love to start, you know, we try to go back as far as we can. We love to start in, you know, the late 18th, early 19th century, pre-Civil War, and get a sense of whatever topic we're discussing that uh that day, you know, what it looked like in early America. What, in your view, would be kind of a central theme uh on religion and science, evangelicalism and science, evangelicals and science in, say, the antebellum era, pre-Civil War era?

SPEAKER_01 3:34

I would say that the overriding conceptual framework was that God had written two books. One of these was the Book of Scripture, and the other the Book of Nature. Now, that trope goes all the way back to the patristics. We need not talk about that further here. But in the American context, it's, I believe, strongly influenced by Francis Bacon, uh, the famous 17th-century British philosopher. He wrote a book 15 years, in fact, before the pilgrims landed in Massachusetts, in 1605, called The Advancement of Learning. And in that book, he talks about how it's appropriate for a person to be learned, both in the book of nature and the book of God's Word and the Book of God's works, is how he puts it, both nature and scripture. He thinks that there should be, if you will, a there's a difference in what those books are are talking about and how they how they do it, but there can be some conversation between them is important, that we need to uh observe an endless progress, he says, of knowledge in both. Um and the purpose ultimately of that knowledge was charity, caritas. It's not power, as many people criticize Bacon for, it's caritas. He's explicit about that. And he thinks that the knowledge we gain from both of these books should not be used for ostentation or self-aggrandizement, but should be used for the charitable benefit of our fellow humans. So that's where Bacon's coming from. He has a strong moral impulse in this. And American science will have that from the beginning, this interest in using science practically to help people. But the conversation between two books can also happen. Bacon is cautious about this. He cautions us not to have them unwisely mingle together, is how he puts it. And some of the Americans, I think, do that. They unwisely mingle them together. But this influence that there's these two books, both divinely authored, and that we should read both of these and try to make as much progress as we can of knowledge in both of them. So for our ultimate benefit. He even thinks, of course, that knowledge of the book of nature can be used to help overcome some of the consequences of the fall. We can help restore some of the knowledge we lost when Adam fell.

SPEAKER_02 5:54

So Bacon is not an American, right? No. How right, yeah. But how then does this play itself out, this Baconianism, these two books? Like where do we see this? Where does it play out in kind of American religious circles, American educational circles? Can you give me an example of those who might be interested in using this, you know, the book of science and the knowledge obtained from the book of science for love or for charity or these kinds of things? You know, bring it into American context for

Baconianism in early American science and piety

SPEAKER_02 6:24

us.

SPEAKER_01 6:24

Yeah. Well, I think the primary place you see this happening is with an interest in um agriculture and making progress that way, which the English have in the 17th century and the Americans certainly have in the 19th century, and the benefits that medicine can bring, that sort of thing. The attitude that this is really useful knowledge and we should be using it wisely. Science should be practical. And science should also have the glory of God as its ultimate goal. That's what Bacon believed, and that's especially what his disciple Robert Boyle believed. Boyle is extremely important for understanding early American views of science and religion, eighteenth century views. For example, the year before his death, Boyle published a long work called The Christian Virtuoso. The word virtuoso then was equivalent, roughly, to our word scientist today. The word scientist didn't exist until the eighteen thirties. And so this word virtuoso, in Boyle's English context, meant what we would say scientist today. That work tries to emphasize that not only is science does science not pose challenges to Christians, it actually really helps Christians be better Christians by bringing knowledge of the world to them, and it helps us to glorify God when we learn about the marvels of nature. That's basically what the work is about. That work was profoundly influential on Cotton Mather. When Cotton Mather brought the Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution to America in the 1720s, was it, John? In The Christian Philosopher. The original title he had for that work was The Christian Virtuoso, because he believed he was essentially channeling Robert Boyle and taking this very pious attitude toward what science is and what it can be used for, how it can help Christians understand the world better and increase our own knowledge of God and our piety. So that's how Boyle saw it, and that's also how Mather saw it. He ended up using a different title for reasons I don't remember, but that was his original goal, to call it the Christian virtuoso.

Antebellum science as a pious enterprise

SPEAKER_01 8:33

Now that pious attitude is reflected in the antebellum, in many antebellum views of science. Not all. You have skeptics then, as we do now, but there was a main current in writing on the part of American authors to present science to people in science textbooks and also in theological writings to which scientists contribute from time to time, to present science as a pious enterprise that does not challenge the scripture. Even though, in the 17th century before Boyle, the early Copernicans, the people who believed the earth goes around the sun, were for at first thought of as challenging the book of Scripture, which appeared to speak about a stationary earth and a moving sun. Whereas Copernicus spoke the other way around, that the earth is moving around the sun, which is stationary in the center. But that was an episode that was really important in early 19th century America. Quite a few people write about how just as we mustn't make the mistake of saying that the Bible trumps something like Copernican astronomy, we mustn't also make the same mistake of letting the Bible trump early natural history, early geology, if you will. And that's that's I think one of the most important areas where science and faith interact in the antebellum period is in natural history.

SPEAKER_02 9:56

So Ted, does there, you know, you talked about just you in passing, you mentioned there would have been skeptics of this. But I'm thinking about also critics from the sort of other side of this debate. Were there, you know, were there kind of evangelical Christians in the antebellum period or even in the 18th century who would have crusaded in some ways against bringing, you know, too much science into uh, you know, this two books idea? Like where would you find the resistance to this, which I'm assuming is happening, right, in uh in in colleges and universities, textbooks and so forth, as you pointed out. But but where is there a kind of anti-intellectualism in the early 19th century, say that would be either fearful or oppose this kind of two books philosophy that you're talking about?

Samuel Miller and early resistance to the two-books idea

SPEAKER_01 10:45

Absolutely. At least they would have opposed one of the ways in which American scientists started using the two books idea. We can talk about that in a bit. Um the person I would pick out first here would be a New York City Presbyterian minister, Samuel Miller, who was a very learned man. He was a member, in fact, of the American Philosophical Society in downtown Philadelphia. For listeners who are familiar with downtown Philly, it still exists. The American Philosophical Society is about a block from Independence Hall. It was founded by John Bartram and Benjamin Franklin and others in Philadelphia and became effectively the first scientific society in North America. And it the word philosophical then meant what we now would say scientific, because natural philosophy was the closest equivalent to our word science as used in the modern sense. And so Samuel Miller was a member of that group. He was a quite learned man. And in 181, on the very first day of that of the 19th century, January 1st, 1801, Miller preached a sermon reflecting upon the century just completed. And about three years later, he published a massive two-volume work, more than a thousand pages, rather oddly called a brief retrospect of the eighteenth century. And he described the 18th century as the age of infidel philosophy. And of course, remember, philosophy really means something close to science today. And he says one finds in every age profane and vain babblings and oppositions of science, falsely so called. He, of course, is quoting 1 Timothy 620, and he's using that verse as a way of attacking secular science, if you will. So in Miller's opinion, never before the 18th century had there been so many deliberate and systematic attacks on revealed religion through the medium of pretended science, he says. And he says it was pushed to an atheistical length by some who assumed the name and gloried in the character of philosophers, that is, scientists. So it's false science being promoted. And he really means here early natural history, which begins to challenge the traditional biblical chronology of just a few thousand years for the existence of the earth. By about 1800, anyone really working actively in natural history is fully aware that the earth is a whole lot older than 6,000 years, and indeed that there have been creatures on the earth for a long time, longer than humanity. And that second idea gets greatly extended in the 19th century, as people begin to find more and more and more of these extinct creatures that existed and died before humans were ever around. So this notion of the deep time, as Martin Rudwick, a great historian of geology, has called it, deep time, that notion becomes well established by 1800 or not long very after that in America. And so I think that's what Miller is railing against here when he talks about this. Sometimes it's hard to tell exactly what his target is in a given time. But he was a very influential person. He became the second professor of theology at Princeton Seminary shortly after it opened in 1812, I believe. And so that's a current of thought that's out there. He's not just some Yahoo saying this from the backwoods. Um he's a highly learned, influential New York preacher who becomes a Princeton professor.

Darwin, Scopes, and the fight over scientific knowledge

SPEAKER_02 14:21

Let's fast forward by a hundred years or so, or more, a little more. Anybody who's talking about Christians or evangelicals and science, right, you know, has to discuss Darwinism, evolution. And you are an expert on this, I know, but what is, you know, this next phase, late 19th century, early 20th century scopes trial, right? Uh what are the big issues at stake here? And I know you could, you've written book, a book about this, but if we, you know, let's try to give the elevator pitch on this.

SPEAKER_01 14:52

I'll say at least two big things here that were issues. One is the nature of scientific knowledge itself. What actually counts as established knowledge in science? And of course, even today, a lot of people outside science, as well as sometimes inside science, are wondering this exact thing, epistemologically, what really counts? How do we know that scientists are telling us an accurate picture of the world? Well, in the 19th century, the dominant view among Americans, including scientists in America, was also Baconian in a different sense than we already described. Um, in the sense that if you can demonstrate something over and over again in your laboratory, it was an established matter of fact. And science consisted of established matters of fact, not of speculative hypotheses about how to explain these matters of fact or put them into a larger conceptual picture. So that that kind of simple Baconianism was popular in textbooks with science even into the 20th century. That was sort of the textbook picture of scientific knowledge. Some of the early fundamentalists pick up on this, like Harry Rimmer, you know, in the 1920s and 30s, he speaks about science as established organized knowledge, this type of thing. Whereas speculative hypotheses, such as the hypothesis that humans evolved from other organisms over time, that idea, you couldn't see it happening in front of you, with humans, at least. And so it was something that was very, very speculative in the opinions of many of the scientists in Darwin's own era. Actually, science is all about making hypotheses and bringing knowledge together in large theoretical pictures. That's been true since the time of Galileo, at least. And Galileo indeed was a pioneer of what we call the hypothetical deductive method. So he'd put forth hypotheses to explain physical phenomena and then try to draw conclusions that if this were true, then we ought to be able to see this. An example is if the Earth goes around the Sun rather than the other way around, and if Venus is closer to the Sun than the Earth is, and it also goes around the Sun, then Venus ought to have phases, just like the Moon. And it does through a telescope. Venus has phases like the moon. And that's a hypothesis that Venus would do that. Then you find the evidence is, well, that's what Venus has. It has phases, and that seems to count some for the truth of the hypothesis, even if it doesn't absolutely prove it. So that notion of hypothetical deductive science is well established by the 19th century, but it's still on the edges in some areas like biology. What Darwin ultimately wants to do is make biology just like physics. He wants to make it just like Newtonian physics and astronomy. This is why in the final paragraph of his book, The Origin of Species, he talks about gravitation. He talks about while the Earth has gone cycling on around the sun under the law of gravitation. What he wants to do is find similar laws in biology to explain biological diversity. So he wants to make biology more scientific by making it look more like astronomy and cosmology. That's what he wants to do. Make it more law-like. He's got Darwin basically has physics envy. So this is what he wants to do. So he wants to make it bring these grand hypotheses of Newton, gravitation, the laws of motion, etc., which can be used to explain so much about the physical features of the Earth and the universe. Darwin wants to do the same thing in biology. But his views are known to be controversial. By many biologists, Darwin doesn't think he's going to convince everybody in his own time. He says he looks with hope to the future, to young and rising naturalists who will be able to judge both sides of the question with impartiality, as he says near the end of the origin of species. So he knows it's going to be a persuasive thing he has to engage in, persuade people that the truth of the matter is not what we actually see in front of us, that actually it's over long periods of time, slow, gradual change has happened in plants and animals. So that seemed to challenge the basic notion of special creation, which is Aristotelian in some senses, fixity of species. Although not in other senses, since Aristotle didn't believe in a creator god, and he didn't do miracles. Aristotle thought species were fixed eternally. So did most nineteenth century biologists, and therefore they couldn't be changing over time in this speculative manner that you couldn't demonstrate right in front of you in a simple way. So it was a speculative hypothesis as seen by many Americans. This is sometimes called the common sense tradition in American philosophy, the tradition from the Scotsman Thomas Reed in the 18th century, that only what we can commonsensically see in nature is actual scientific fact. So that's one thing driving the opposition to evolution. It's not easy to see it. It's become much easier to see it in bacterial populations in the 20th century, but that's a different thing. Nobody knew about that then.

Bryan, evolution, and the danger of theistic evolution

SPEAKER_01 19:52

The other piece is theistic evolution. For Bryan, evolution was false. This is William Jennings. It was speculative. William Jennings-Bryan. Right. William Jennings-Bryan, though, believed all that Baconian stuff about science, and so did many of his friends and many Americans, ordinary Americans, did. But in addition, Bryan believed that what was called theistic evolution, a term Bryan uses all the time and always with derision, that particular term has referred since at least the eighteen seventies to efforts to mingle evolution in biology with traditional Christian theology. And by the 1920s, often with non-traditional Christian theology. Theology that even denied the divinity of Jesus, the resurrection, the inspiration of Scripture, and the transcendence of God. There's very many forms of this theistic evolution that evolved, if you will, over the years, especially on the liberal side, these theologically very liberal views of God and nature that are often tied closely with evolution. But Bryant thinks evolution is not only false, but theistic evolution is even more dangerous because it pretends to be Christianity. And he says theistic evolution, he says, is the anesthetic that deadens the pain while the patient's faith is being removed.

Asa Gray: reconciling Darwin with orthodox faith

SPEAKER_01 21:17

That's how he puts it. So theistic evolution is bad news. Now there had been in the 19th century some very important, I would say, conservative Protestant leaders, theologically conservative, people who believed in the truth of the Bible, the miracles of Christ, the divinity of Christ, the resurrection, things like this, who had also thought evolution was true. A few of the prominent names, the most prominent, would be Asak Ray, a botanist at Harvard, an exact contemporary of Darwin, who reviews Darwin's Origin of Species very favorably the year after it comes out in 1860. In the American Atlantic Monthly, I think it was, he reviewed it. And he he Thought it was consistent with higher views of design. But I don't want to go too far with that. I simply want to point out that Asa Gray was an eminent scientist who was a traditional Christian. As a young man, Gray was a religious skeptic. And then he went to medical school in New York, and he took rooms with a new school Calvinist named John Tory, who was a botany professor. And the Tory family, their lives, their words, their ideas deeply influenced Asa Gray. He converted to New School Presbyterianism from skepticism, and indeed remained a new school Presbyterian the rest of his life, even though there was not a new school church in Cambridge, where Harvard is, and so he attended a congregational church, which was closer to where he was coming from. But he was, you know, he was this devout Christian, but he had a different view of theology, if you will, than many other traditional Christians in America. Let me quote something from him. In 1880, Gray gave two lectures to the divinity students at Yale. And here is what he said. He said, I accept Christianity on its own evidence. And I'm yet to learn how physical or any other science, here he means natural science, using the Greek word physis, learn how physical or any other science conflicts with it any more than it conflicts with simple theism. I take it that religion is based on the idea of a divine mind, capital D, capital N, revealing himself to intelligent creatures for moral ends. And Gray says that revelation, meaning scripture, culminated, he says, in the advent of a divine person, capital D, capital P, who being made man, manifested the divine nature, capital D, capital N, in union with the human. And this manifestation constitutes Christianity. That's how Gray put it. And the incarnation, he goes on to say, was the crowning miracle, attended by other miracles that he also accepted. So in that way, Gray was able, I would say, consistently to affirm his acceptance of Darwin's ideas alongside his faith in Christ. Even a very traditional faith, to quote him again, whose essential contents were briefly summed up in the Apostles and Nicene Creeds. So there you have a classical Christian, Asa Gray, who's the first Darwinian in the United States. He knows about Darwin's ideas before anybody else in America because he corresponds with Darwin for several years before they're published and applies them to his own ideas about botany in North America. How is it that we have so many plants in North America that look like look similar to East Asian plants? He wants to know what the answer to that is. And he finds the answer in Darwin. So, you know, we have that. But by the 1920s, Gray and any others prominent leaders who had endorsed

Evolution, Germany, and the road to Scopes

SPEAKER_01 24:55

evolution and Orthodox faith in the 19th century, anybody else like that is dead. B.B. Warfield is dead, Gray is dead, there's others out there as well. But those folks are all dead. And here you suddenly have the appearance of this German idea. The idea in the 19th, in the 20th century, in early 20th century, evolution becomes associated with Germany more than with England because of the fact that the world's leading authority on evolution as a worldview is Ernst Heppel, a German biologist. And they associate that with Germany, and they also associate it with Germany because during World War I, there were publications in America promoting the idea that evolution was used by German thinkers to undergird their idea of military conquest. That ultimately World War I was based on practical Darwinism, if you will. It's the law of nature that Germany should dominate. And it's just natural then for Germany to want to do that. So that idea was promoted by some Germans, and especially it was promoted in America by a great biologist from Stanford, Vernon Kellogg. Vern was an evolutionist. He was also a pacifist. And when America was not yet involved in World War I, which it means before 1917, he went to Belgium and France with his former student, Herbert Hoover, who of course was a Quaker, and was involved in relief efforts, humanitarian relief efforts in Germany and Belgium. Kellogg was billeted at the headquarters of the German High Command. He had been educated for his doctorate in Germany. He was fluent in German. He spoke to these officers, many of whom had been university professors, and he presents a persona of these people, a collective persona of them, in a book called Headquarters Knights in 1917. The foreword was written by Theodore Roosevelt, urging Americans to be aware of this idea. And he says in there that the Germans basically are cutthroat Darwinians. That's what World War I is about. And he's really, his pacifism is being challenged by this. He ends up confessing that he thinks it's going to take actual force to stop them, that arguments alone aren't going to do it. So Brian reads this book, and that really lights a fire under him to get going against the teaching of evolution in America. He's never believed evolution's true. He's thought it's anti-Christian from the get-go, but now he's got a huge political reason to want to oppose it. And he wants to get it out of the schools. So he takes advantage of this idea and trumpets this all over the place. A lot of other fundamentalist leaders do the same thing with this idea.

Post-WWII shifts: the religious views of elite scientists

SPEAKER_02 27:36

That's some really good context, Ted, for the evolution. You know, we don't normally think about these larger political and diplomatic foreign policy kind of questions as we think about all of this. Let's fast forward now to sort of post-World War II. You know, if you were to think about evangelicals and science after World War II to the present, what are some of the important developments, important themes that we should consider if we're studying the relationship between these two things?

SPEAKER_01 28:04

I'll say two things to contextualize what's coming next. One is that back in the time of the Scopes trial, almost every elite American scientist. When I use that term, I'll define I'll let the scientists themselves define it. Um there was a biographical dictionary of American scientists in the 20th century called American Men of Science. Even though some of them were women, they were all called men of science. And that's the term we would choose today, would be scientist, but their their biographies, very short forms of their biographies were there. And if you were starred with an asterisk next to your name in that publication, then your peers had voted you eminent in a poll taken by the the editors of this publication. And so they actually listed men of science of eminence had a star next to their name. Starred scientists, if you will. That's not true anymore for what's now called American Men and Women of Science, but it was true a hundred years ago. Of those scientists, most of those people have religious views that are not known to us. My book partly focuses on the religious beliefs of that group of people, because some of them end up writing letters to Shaylor Matthews, the dean of the Divinity School at the University of Chicago, about their views of science and religion and their views of Christianity generally. I won't detail here the context in which those letters arise, but there are dozens of such letters. And then there were popular publications by some of those individuals, enough that I was able to determine with that very limited scope of people, that nearly every eminent scientist whose views are now known from that period, almost all of them were either agnostic or atheist or liberal Protestant, by which I mean modernist Protestant. They did not believe in the divinity of Jesus, they did not believe in the resurrection, they didn't believe in the inspiration of Scripture, they didn't believe the Apostles and Nicene Creeds, unlike Asa Gray, who had. So that's just an apparent historical fact at the moment, subject to refutation by other scholars. Very, very few of those people, almost none of them, were Roman Catholic, of these eminent people. Catholics hadn't really entered the mainstream of science yet, only a small number were Jewish. Nearly all were either agnostic, atheist, or modernist Protestant. Orthodox Protestants, small O, almost non-existent in that

The GI Bill and the rise of the American Scientific Affiliation

SPEAKER_01 30:35

group. That all changes in the 70s, 80s, 90s, and now into the 21st century. What are the things that bring that about? Well, one of the things that brings it about is World War II, I believe. Specifically the GI Bill, which enabled so many Americans who otherwise wouldn't have been able to go to university to do so. And that included a whole lot of evangelicals. I have no idea how many, but they were, you know, a rising tide lifts all boats. And so lots of people went to university that had previously would not have done it. A number of these people from the evangelical community get high-level science educations and begin to see that these science wars of the past, if you will, weren't very productive, and that there's really nothing wrong scientifically with evolution, for example. And there's nothing wrong with the ancient universe and the ancient earth. And they rise to eminent positions in science and they keep their religious faith along the way. And so there's a new group of people coming out after World War II. And many of them get together in organizations such as the American Scientific Affiliation. That's an organization founded right before Pearl Harbor, that grows much more rapidly in the 50s and 60s and into the 70s, and brings in quite a few of these eminent scientists who are traditional Christians, but who are also leading scientists.

Evangelical scientists working today

SPEAKER_01 31:55

Most famous example in that group would be Francis Collins. Everybody pretty much knows who he is. And of course, he's an adult convert from atheism to believing in Jesus as his savior and has risen from the dead, traditional Christian views, traditional evangelical views. And he also was highly eminent in science, as the indeed the person who brought the Human Genome Project to completion, among many, many other things that he did, important things that he did in his career. He's among the most highly cited scientists in the world. His citation index is something like 250, which is an enormously high number. And people who are who know what that means will know what that means. But there's many others as well. For example, Ian Hutchinson of MIT, British born, but an American. He was a Methodist lay reader, and he sings in a church choir with a beautiful voice. And he also is the leader of the Plasma Physics Project at MIT, from which he's recently retired. But he's one of the most eminent people in the world in his field. Also, his equivalent at Princeton, Bob Caeda, also in nuclear physics. And Bob is a very traditional Christian. And you have people of this kind, or someone in astrophysics, like Joan Centrella, one of the premier gravitational wave experts in the world. She is an adult convert to Christianity who led a Bible study when she was at Drexel University, and then also when she continued for NASA as a scientist. People like this, or Catherine Hayhoe, distinguished climate scientist, whose husband's an evangelical pastor in Texas. You know, you have people like this out there, in large, large numbers out there today. No one like them existed in the public sphere in the 1920s. So that things have changed dramatically since World War II. Partly because I think Protestantism has changed dramatically since World War II as well. There are far more churches today in which a person can hold different views of creation than they would have been allowed to hold back in the 1920s, in churches that actually believe and teach the Bible.

Ramm's 1954 book and the reaction that produced The Genesis Flood

SPEAKER_01 34:00

So that's partly where the change has occurred, but also it's partly among the scientific community itself.

SPEAKER_02 34:05

You said that there was more than one thing that you wanted to mention about post-1945. What was the other aspect?

SPEAKER_01 34:10

The other is a famous book from 1954. It was written by Baptist theologian Bernard Rahm, who has been described in reference works as one of the two or three most important evangelical theologians of the 20th century. I don't know enough about that to have an opinion about that, but those who do know enough, some of them at least think that's the case. Rahm wrote about 20 books, but the one I'm thinking of here is called The Christian View of Science and Scripture. That particular book was an old earth creationist book with an openness to theistic evolution, but full of frontal attacks on backward views held by the fundamentalists of his own youth. He often refers to them as the hyper-orthodox. And he's especially concerned about the gap theory, a view that would have been acceptable in the 1830s and 40s in the antebellum period for good reasons, but by the 1930s and 40s really had no validity at all scientifically and was still very popular among fundamentalists. And so Rahm wanted people to move toward a much more open engagement with science and to go back to the attitude of the early 19th century people, the so-called Concordists, who wanted to read scripture and nature together. And his view, his book was enormously influential in evangelical circles. And one of the reactions against it was the Genesis Flood in 1961, written by Henry Morris and John C. Whitcomb Jr., which is the Bible of young earth creationism today. That book was written directly in response to Bernard Rahm, which was uh, you know, the fundamentalists Morris and Whitcomb believed that Rahm was far too liberal in his approach to the sciences. Even though Rahm himself was not an evolutionist and did not actually endorse theistic evolution, he simply didn't demonize it in his book. But this book was influential on that whole generation of scientists I spoke to you about. Most of the people I've met in American scientists, Christians born before 1960, knew Rahm's book very, very well and referred to it when I asked them about how their ideas had formed.

SPEAKER_02 36:14

So

Closing thoughts: evangelicalism beyond a single view of origins

SPEAKER_02 36:15

what I'm hearing you say, if I'm if I'm understanding this from my own knowledge of evangelicalism, I think in the broader tent of American evangelicalism, broadly defined, you are going to find, like you wouldn't associate evangelical Christianity necessarily with an opposition to evolution. That would be a false dichotomy. You would find, you would certainly find young earth creationists and gap theory uh advocates and so forth within evangelicalism today, but we should not define evangelicalism just based on those views. There are many of these people doing very, very good science that also embrace evangelical faith. Is that fair to say?

SPEAKER_01 36:56

Yes, it is. Or I'm more confident, even though evangelical faith is part of that picture for many of them. I'm more confident in saying Orthodox Christianity is small O. That is, they would recite the Apostles and Nicene Creeds without crossing their fingers. And of course, there's a lot of Roman Catholic scientists today, far more than there were a hundred years ago, by percentage of the scientific community, who also believe in Orthodox faith and science. There's even an organization recently founded called the Society of Catholic Scientists, that's a conservative Catholic group. And it was founded by an astrophysicist at the University of Delaware, a longtime friend of mine, Stephen Barr. So, you know, this organization goes that's a parallel organization to the American Scientific Affiliation, which is primarily, almost entirely Protestant scientists. It'd be nice if these two groups would become one, but I doubt that will happen just because of church politics, if you will. But there it is. Many of these people in that society are also eminent people, including Nobel laureates in both organizations.

SPEAKER_02 37:54

Ted, this has been incredibly helpful. It's setting up the context. It's going to give us a lot to talk about. I could talk to you for another hour about this stuff. I have so many questions, but we're limited here. Maybe at some point I'd like to actually have you back on uh my podcast, the Way of Improvement Leads Home podcast. And maybe we could flesh some of this stuff out a little bit more. But uh thanks so much for your time and thanks for bringing your knowledge to bear for us as we think about the relationship between evangelicals and science.

SPEAKER_01 38:24

Well, John, I thank you. I'm delighted to be able to get into uh people's heads who normally wouldn't look at anything I've ever written. So thanks very much. Thanks.

SPEAKER_00 38:37

Thanks for listening to this special bonus episode of American Evangelicals, a history podcast. We hope you enjoyed hearing the complete conversation with Ted Davis. His depth of knowledge and generous storytelling helped shape one of our favorite episodes in the series, and we're grateful he was willing to spend so much time with us. If you're making your way through the series for the first time, be sure to check out episode eight on Evangelicals and Science, where this interview is woven into the larger story of American evangelicalism with our historians. And if you've been with us throughout the series, thank you for joining us for this behind the scenes look at one of the conversations that helped bring the podcast to life. As always, thank you for listening, for sharing this podcast with others, and for helping us explore the complex history of American evangelicalism.