Brief Introduction

I want to begin by remembering three important events that occurred when I was a young adult, events that symbolize the ideological shift that occurred in the second half of the twentieth century.

The first event was the Darwinian centennial of 1959, commemorating the hundredth anniversary of the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species. The celebration was held at the University of Chicago, where I entered law school shortly thereafter. Chicago was a particularly appropriate place to have the Darwinian centennial, because it was associated with other seminal events in modern science: the first atomic reactor was built there under Stagg Field, and in 1952 the famous Miller-Urey experiment had given scientist confidence that the Darwinian principle of materialistic evolution could be extended back to the ultimate beginning of life.

 So in 1959 the mood at the Darwinian centennial was one of triumphalism. Darwinism had gone through a rocky period when there was much dispute about the mechanism, but then the neo-Darwinian synthesis had come to the rescue with its mathematical population genetics. Neo-Darwinism seemed like the ultimate truth, a biological theory of everything.

Julian Huxley, grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley and brother of Aldous, was the most prominent speaker. He declared that supernatural religion was finished and that a new religion of evolutionary humanism based upon science would become the worldwide creed. We might say he proclaimed the death of an aged tyrant called God and then credited Charles Darwin with supplying the murder weapon.

 The second event to recall was the 1960 Stanley Kramer movie of Inherit the Wind, starring Spencer Tracy as the agnostic lawyer patterned after Clarence Darrow. It was one of the great propaganda masterpieces of all time. In the context of presenting a distorted account of the notorious Scopes trial, the film portrayed the moral side of the Darwinian triumph over Christianity.

     Inherit the Wind is a simple morality play in which the Christian ministers are evil manipulators and their followers are bumpkins who sing mindlessly in praise of "that old-time religion." In the movie it appears that the theological content of Christianity amounts to threatening people with damnation if they dare to think for themselves. The overthrow of this caricature provides a liberation myth, which goes with the triumphalism of the Chicago celebration. The movie teaches that the truth shall make us free, and the truth, according to science and Hollywood, is that biblical religion is an oppressor to be overthrown.

 The film embodied a stereotype that has dominated public debate over evolution ever since the Scopes trial. As far as the media are concerned, all critics of Darwinism fit into what I call the Inherit the Wind stereotype. No matter how well qualified the critics are and no matter how well grounded their criticisms, the reporters assume that they are Bible-thumping fanatics challenging scientific fact in order to impose political oppression. The review in Nature of Michael Behe's Darwin's Black Box (Free Press, 1996) fits squarely in that tradition. Behe made solid scientific arguments demonstrating the existence of irreducible complexity in biochemical systems, arguments that the reviewer did not dispute on scientific grounds. Instead the review began and ended with irrelevant attacks on fundamentalists who want to substitute the book of Genesis for science. Like Marxism, Darwinism is a liberation myth that has become a new justification for ordering people not to think for themselves. 

The third event in my trio is the 1962 school prayer decision of the United States Supreme Court, Engel u. Vitale. The school prayer involved in that case came not from the Bible Belt but from the state of New York. The school authorities wanted to approve a prayer that would unite Christians and Jews, and so the prayer was not distinctively Christian. It read: "Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers, and our Country." The phrase "under God" had recently been added to the pledge of allegiance, and so the educators had good reason to suppose that Americans of all races and creeds believed in honoring our common Creator. 

I am not concerned here with the merits or demerits of school prayer but with the question of what unites us as a people and what we regard as divisive. Before 1962 the United States were unified by the concept that people of different races and religious traditions all worship their common Creator, the God of the Bible. By 1962 that had been reversed. The 1959 Centennial proclaimed that a blind material process of evolution is our true creator. In 1962 the Supreme Court decided that even a very general evocation of God was a divisive sectarian practice, warning that government endorsement of religion is inherently associated with religious strife and oppression. 

These three events symbolized a tremendous change in the ruling philosophy in the United States. Science now teaches us that a purposeless material process of evolution created us; the artists, poets and actors teach us that biblical morality is oppressive and hateful; and the courts teach us that the very notion of God is divisive and so must be kept out of public life. The pledge of allegiance may say that we are "one nation, under God," but we have become instead a nation that has declared its independence from God.