The trial of John Scopes, the Tennessee teacher who taught evolution despite a state law banning it, ended in his conviction a century ago this week. Many who comment on the case cast it as a conflict between “science” and “religion.” Those elements were present. I prefer, however, to cast it as a conflict over anthropology — who is man? — where both parties got it wrong a hundred years ago. The fundamentalists who cheered Scopes’s conviction got it wrong because they read Scripture wrongly. Their sola Scriptura convictions, after all, tended to run towards the literal reading of Scripture. Which makes their error so strange.

Why, then, did they want a completed, developed, fixed world in six literal days. Nothing in the Bible stipulates that, particularly the “completed and developed” parts. Indeed, if we read the Bible fairly, it is evident to the author of Genesis 2 that Eden was not a ready-made lush paradise but one where the man should “work it and take care of it” (v. 15; see also v. 5). Genesis 1 affirms the same thing in different language: in giving man “dominion” (v. 28) over the non-human creatures of the world as part of being made in the divine image and likeness, it is clear man’s role is one of co-creation, i.e., carrying on the work of creation. So, if the Bible so clearly presents man as entrusted with a task — with “work” — even before sin enters the world, where did the Dayton, Tennessee, fundamentalists get their “completed” world from?

May I suggest perhaps from the classic Protestant vision of man as utterly depraved. If sin has so warped man that grace does not even so much change as “cover over” man’s iniquity, then there is an in-built Protestant bias about the corruption of whatever man touches. There’s no possibility of talking about human “co-creation” if your anthropology considers man utterly depraved. Obviously, then, neither will you accept that human works can accompany divine action. Not only would it be insulting to God but would add man’s work as ineffective at best, his tainting touch at worst. Better to have a world all fixed up and running according to divine plan by the end of day six.

One can then wonder whether, in fact, the Protestant antipathy towards man at least might have indirectly paved the way for deism, that concept of the universe that treated God as the divine clockmaker of a particularly efficient, self-correcting and self-executing watch called the universe. Whatever other theoretical flaws it might have (and its influence on the Anglo-American mind still exists), one might ask a follow-on question. The deists might have thought they had managed to remove from the picture a providential God who acts in history, but was the path to their marginalization of God paved by a Protestantism that marginalized man by deprecating human action, human works?

So, I would suggest the Biblical literalists who wanted Scopes convicted had a flawed concept of man and creation not because of what the Bible said but because the presuppositions of their theological anthropology bent them in the direction of a completed universe because co-creation would involve dread “human works.”

They were right in one respect: their recognition of the unique status of the human person. Part of the reason for their denial of evolution was the conviction that the human person is qualitatively, and not just quantitatively, different in God’s creation. Man is not just another “species” whose particular exceptionalness is but an expression of “species-ism.” After all, no other creature is willed by God for Himself, no other creature is made in the divine image and likeness, and until man the creation of no other creature is pronounced “very good.”

Those were legitimate considerations against an evolutionary theory that tried to smuggle in its own presupposition of philosophical anthropology: that man is nothing more than another “species,” another “being.” (They might not say “another creature” because creatures would involve a Creator, a concept their philosophical anthropology sought to deny.) Couple that with the metaphysical arguments some astronomers were pushing in the days of Copernicus and Galileo: that the displacement of the geocentric system by a heliocentric one “proved” man was nothing special, just a lucky monkey on the third rock from an insignificant yellow star on the galactic peripheries.

There’s no denying that there were advocates of the evolutionary theory (like of heliocentricity) that wanted to use it as a nail in the coffin of religion; see, there’s nothing special about you, you’re just a fortunate monkey near a commonplace star! At the core of this anthropological conflict is the debate about the human soul.

Of course, those who wanted to use evolution (or astronomy) as a way of denying the human soul clearly never met Clint Eastwood. As Dirty Harry pointed out, “A man’s got to know his limitations” — and so does science. However one might theorize how the biological dimension of the human person came to be, that cannot tell us anything about the existence and/or nature of the human soul.

That’s why science needs to stay in its lane and “know its limitations.” Science can theorize (and theories are not facts) about the biological and empirical, but it can neither extrapolate from those theories to the metaphysical nor reduce reality to the merely biological and empirical. Knowing one’s limitations means not making arguments your level of competence cannot address. And staying in one’s lane already implicitly recognizes a limit; you cannot talk about your “lane” unless you somehow know there’s a whole bowling alley outside your lane.

I have elsewhere argued that, in some sense, the Roaring 20s were the apogee of “scientism.” Remember, it was also the era of eugenics, and no doubt some of evolution’s greatest advocates would have happily wielded Judge Oliver Wendell Holmes’s famous line from two years later: “three generations of imbeciles are enough” (Buck v. Bell). (Today’s more genteel judges might call them “populations we don’t want too many of.” The point’s the same.)

Confidence in science began to wane, especially after World War II, for two reasons. First, the Nazis gave us “scientific killing” in the form of the Holocaust, not just through more “efficient” execution methods like gas but also through “scientific research” (i.e., experimentation) on concentration camp prisoners. Second, the advent of nuclear weapons and the potential destructive power of the atom bomb offered a kind of reverse to evolution: nature with science might take millions of years to produce human beings, but man with science could take 15 minutes to end them. People’s ambivalence to the possibilities of “playing God” modern science offers, especially at the beginnings and end of life, reinforces this. And, arguably, the doubts sown by contradictory responses and heavy-handed policies forged in the name of “science” during COVID managed to defrock the white coat as successor to the cassock for “authoritative” knowledge. Do Scopes and COVID represent the bookends of that era?

So, I suggest that both parties in Scopes — the fundamentalists and the hard “evolutionists” — were using the case to push flawed concepts of man. I’ve argued elsewhere (here and here) that the Catholic vision of the human person as co-creator under God navigates these two extremes and that we need to do that because the problem is not so much “science v. religion” as flawed concepts of man.

My arguments in this essay are theoretical; I welcome input from historians and others on whether I am drawing the right (or wrong) conclusions from Protestantism as well as extreme scientism. But the arguments, at first blush, seem plausible to me. Let’s further the discussion because it involves a critically important reality, one Pope St. John Paul II consistently returned to during his pontificate: the true dignity of man.