Even 100 years ago, opposition to evolution was never about the Bible

If you’re a fan of Knight and Rose Show, then you’ll have noticed that we have skipped a few weeks without publishing a show. And this is not our fault! Rose and I have recorded a couple of shows, and sent them off to our sound guy. But the sound guy is busy gallivanting all over the world, climbing mountains and running marathons! So, let me try to keep you entertained with a new post.

So, there was a recent issue of Salvo magazine that was mainly concerned with the 100th Anniversary of the Scopes Monkey Trial, which occurred in Dayton, TN. Because Rose and I are huge fans of Salvo magazine, we decided to ask the Executive Editor of Salvo to come on and tell us about it. Her name is Terrell Clemmons. I’ve met her in real life and blogged about her a few times before, too. So I hope you will get that episode, soon.

Anyway, the issue #73 of Salvo is filled with interesting articles, but one of them stood out to me: this article by Richard Townsend. He’s done a bunch of research about the Scopes Trial and about William Jennings Bryan. In the movie, “Inherit the Wind”, Bryan is portrayed as an idiotic Biblical literalist. But, just like Darwinism, the facts are very different from the myths.

Here’s the article from Salvo #73.

It says:

Bryan was one of the most famous Americans of the early 20th century. He ran for president as the Democratic Party nominee in 1896, 1900, and 1908, losing all three elections, but gaining a large, loyal constituency that never lost its devotion to him. He was influential in national politics from 1890 until his death in 1925. It is hard for people living in the 21st century to grasp how influential he was and how effectively he advocated for his beliefs.

And here was his reason for wanting to be the prosecutor at the Scopes Trial:

For Bryan, [World War 1] displayed a danger associated with the prevalence of materialistic thinking associated with Darwin’s theory. The beliefs that everything happened by chance and that death determined the most-fit species’ survival had led, at least in part, to grotesque violence. Those factors changed Bryan’s ambivalence into action. He saw Darwin’s theory to be the causal force driving societal decay; it had to be opposed.

Actually, the theory of evolution was very significant for many of the aggressive tyrants of the 21st century. They seemed to latch on to the ideas of different “races” of people struggling against each other for survival. Definitely, the German and Japanese leaders were influenced by Darwinian evolution, and embraced Social Darwinism. Both regimes took the concept of “survival of the fittest” and applied it directly to their militaristic aggression.

But, this was the part of the article that I liked best. When you watch propaganda movies like “Inherit the Wind”, you don’t get the facts. These movies are shown in public schools, by unionized public school teachers. They have an agenda, and their agenda isn’t to tell the truth to children. Far from being a young-Earth literalist, William Jennings Bryan had 4 scientific reasons for doubting evolution. Read below, and ask yourself, have these been resolved by the scientific progress of the last 100 years? Or are they even bigger problems now (for the naturalist / materialist) than they were before?

1. Origin of life:

Bryan saw this as a major hurdle, one Darwin brushed aside with a rhetorical flourish as he theorized a “warm little pond.” Bryan was not convinced.

Those who reject the idea of creation are divided into two schools, some believing that the first germ of life came from another planet and others holding that it was the result of spontaneous generation. Each school answers the arguments advanced by the other, and as they cannot agree with each other, I am not compelled to agree with either.6

Bryan clearly did not agree that the case was closed on the origin of first life.

We did an episode on the origin of life with Dr. Fuz Rana, President of Reasons to Believe.

2. Genetics and Morphology:

Little was known about how genetics worked in Bryan’s lifetime, but Mendelian genetics had morphed into the neo-Darwinian synthesis incorporating genetic mutation with natural selection. The “neo-Darwinian synthesis” terminology became standard usage after Bryan’s passing, but the concepts were being circulated in his lifetime. Bryan didn’t buy it and used a watermelon illustration to explain his doubts.

I was eating a piece of watermelon some months ago and was struck with its beauty.… One [seed], put into the ground, when warmed by the sun and moistened by the rain, takes off its coat and goes to work; it gathers from somewhere two hundred thousand times its own weight, and forcing this raw material through a tiny stem, constructs a watermelon. It ornaments the outside with a covering of green; inside the green it puts a layer of white, and within the white a core of red, and all through the red it scatters seeds, each one capable of continuing the work of reproduction. Where does that little seed get its tremendous power? Where does it find its coloring matter? How does it collect its flavouring extract? How does it build a watermelon?

Until you can explain a watermelon, do not be too sure that you can set limits to the power of the Almighty and say just what He would do or how He would do it. I cannot explain the watermelon, but I eat it and enjoy it.9

Bryan’s argument was that a watermelon seed contains “power” (which we now know to reside in the genetic code) to build a specific fruit, another watermelon. The structure of the plant and its fruit are the morphology (shape and structure) of the vine that produces the watermelon. And Bryan knew that the process was unexplained.

We did an episode about biological information with Dr. Casey Luskin, from the Discovery Institute.

3. Chemistry and Evolution:

One early idea about nature’s ability to generate new complex features was that the chemistry of life naturally tended toward such complex coding. Bryan doubted that was the case. He wrote this comment in his planned closing argument, later published after his death:

Chemistry is an insurmountable obstacle in the path of evolution. It is one of the greatest of the sciences; it separates the atoms, isolates them and walks about them, so to speak. If there were in nature a progressive force, an eternal urge, chemistry would find it. But it is not there. All of the ninety-two original elements are separate and distinct; they combine in fixed and permanent proportions. Water is H2O, as it has been from the beginning. It was here before life appeared and has never changed; neither can it be shown that anything else has materially changed.12

In short, Bryan said that there was no chemical imperative to life.

We talked about chemical evolution in our episode with Dr. Fuz Rana.

4. No Definitive Proof of Origin of Any New Species:

Bryan discussed the problem of an organism’s deviating from the tendency toward stasis—the continuity of features and body plans found in previous generations of a species. He suggested that no evidence had been presented to validate the claim of new species arising naturally. He cited a letter in which an acquaintance had claimed that “nearly all scientists seemed to accept Darwinism.”14 Bryan countered that “many evolutionists adhere to Darwin’s conclusions while discarding his explanations.… [They] accept the line of descent which [Darwin] suggested without any explanation whatever to support it.”15 To paraphrase, Bryan said there was no convincing evidence to support Darwin’s theory of species arising through materialistic, undirected means.

We did an episode on the fossil record with Dr. Gunter Bechly, also of Discovery Institute.

In our podcast, we’ve met with guests to talk about each of these problems with the Darwinian naturalistic / materialistic origins theory, and what we found was that in each case, the progress of science made the problems worse for naturalism / materialism. So, far from the progress helping the naturalist / materialist, it’s actually made it worse for them. The simplest self-relicator got MORE complext. We found MORE statis and MORE biological big bangs in the fossil record. Things got worse… for the Darwinists.

Anyway, read the article, maybe check out the rest of the issue, and if our sound guy ever comes back from vacation, then you can finally get the episode that we did on this topic! Like, share, comment and subscribe, in the meantime. We talked a lot more about the Social Darwinism angle in the podcast.