Attack of the Fundamentalists 2: Deep Time, Darwin, and Denial

An Eclectic Humanist

Damn you, Darwin!

This episode picks up the challenge to religious authority posed by modern science, focusing specifically on the emerging knowledge of the age of the Earth in the 19th century and, most importantly, on Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. While a literal reading of the Old Testament suggests an age of about 6,000 years for both the Earth and the Cosmos, and while the Genesis creation myth presents animals being created in specific and stable “kinds,” by the end of the century, neither position would remain viable. And while many in the religious community found, and continue to find, ways to accommodate their faith to the growing body of knowledge presented by the various sciences, many, on the other hand, chose and continue to choose to reject both the conclusions and the methods of modern science in favour of a retreat into the comfortable and increasingly counter-factual certainties of myth. By the first quarter of the 20th century, this retreat from reason and evidence had already become a salient and politically powerful feature of American Christianity, as shown both by the Revivalist Movement and, most dramatically, by the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial, which marked the first high profile showdown between the competing discourses of modern science on the one hand, and a newly energized Christian fundamentalism on the other. These twin trends of intellectual retreat and political advance would continue throughout the 20th century, as we will see in the next episode, to define much of the character of what we now refer to as the religious right.