Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion Read Online Free PDF

alternative view, that humanism based on science is the effective antidote, the light and the way at last placed before us.” 4
    Organized science has sought to defuse this controversy by affirming the comparability of modern evolutionary naturalism and a personal belief in God. The National Academy of Sciences, a self-selecting body of the nation’s premier scientists, had asserted as much in a glossy brochure distributed to teachers during the 1980s in reaction to the creation-science movement. Responding to the rise of intelligent design, the National Academy in 1998 widely distributed a new booklet reasserting that, while science is committed to methodological naturalism, it does not conflict with religion. They simply represent separate ways of knowing. “Science,” the booklet states, “is limited to explaining the natural world through natural causes. Science can say nothing about the supernatural. Whether God exists or not is a question about which science is neutral.” 5
    The eight-thousand-member National Association of Biology Teachers took a similar tack. In a position statement initially adopted during the 1980s in opposition to the creation-science movement and always controversial among theists, the association defined evolution as “an unsupervised, impersonal, unpredicted and natural process of temporal descent with gradual modification.” In 1997, responding to the intelligent design movement, the association’s leadership committee voted to delete the words unsupervised and impersonal from their statement. The group’s executive director explained, “To say that evolution is unsupervised is to make a theological statement,” and that exceeds the bounds of science. In other words, God could intelligently design species through an evolutionary process. 6
    The NABT’s move surprised many. A New York Times article described it as “a startling about face.” To Dawkins, such an approach represents “a cowardly flabbiness of the intellect.” 7 Johnson dismisses it as rank hypocrisy. If they agree on nothing else, Dawkins and Johnson agree that Darwinism and Christianity are fundamentally at odds—and, with their writings and talks, they help to stir popular passions over biology education much as Darrow and Bryan once did.
    With a solid majority of people in some areas believing in creation science and an added number accepting intelligent design, teaching the theory of evolution inevitably becomes highly controversial. In Kansas during 1999, for example, creationists on the state school board temporarily succeeded in deleting the big bang theory and what they called “macro-evolution” from the list of topics mandated for coverage in public school science classrooms. Six years later, they took the further step of adding an ID-friendly definition of science to their educational standards. In 2004, the school board of suburban Cobb County, Georgia, responding to the concerns of local parents and taxpayers, decreed that biology textbooks should carry a disclaimer stating that evolution is just a theory. A year later, the Dover, Pennsylvania, school board mandated not only an oral disclaimer akin to Cobb County’s written one but also recommended intelligent design as an alternative explanation of biological origins. In cases that made front-page news across the country and overseas, federal district courts struck down the Cobb County and Dover restrictions. Their rulings are the latest chapter in the long-running courtroom drama that opened with the Scopes trial.
    The Cobb County disclaimer, printed onto a sticker placed on the front covers of biology textbooks, stated, “Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered.” 8 Similar disclaimers have appeared in Alabama textbooks for years without sparking lawsuits and are under consideration elsewhere, but perhaps because