Less than 70 years after Charles Darwin published The origin of speciesthe small town of Dayton, Tennessee (United States), became the center of the American debate about human evolution, the interpretation of genesis and the broader feelings about Christianity.
On July 21, 1925 – exactly a century – the substitute teacher John T. Scopes was convicted of violating a state law that prohibited teaching evolution In schools. Its $ 100 fine (equivalent to $ 1,837 today) was annulled by the Tennessee Supreme Court. Both then, now, the widely publicized judgment has been portrayed as a microcosm of the alleged battle between “science” and “religion.”
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Scopes was defended by lawyer Clarence Darrow of the American Union of Civil Liberties (ACLU), who was religious agnostic. William Jennings Bryan, Protestant Cristiano and three times presidential candidate of the Democratic Party, defended state law and a literalist interpretation of the first chapters of Genesis.
During the trial, Darrow called Bryan to the stand as an expert in the Bible and proceeded to interrogate him about certain biblical texts and question his historical accuracy. That line of questions allowed Darrow to use the trial as an indirect struggle against Christianity itself. Although this part of the trial was dismissed by the judge for not being relevant for charges against Scopes, it is remembered for its impact on the debates of the twentieth century on human evolution and Christianity.
The play of 1955 and the 1960 movie Inherit the Wind (You will inherit the wind) They emphasized the narrative of “Science Vs. Religion”, effectively consolidating that perception in American culture.
The reality of the conflict at that time, however, was much more nuanced than “science” against “religion.”
He Dominico Priest Thomas Davenportphysicist and philosopher at the Pontifical University of Santo Tomás de Aquino in Rome, he told CNA – Ewtn News agency – that it would be “incorrect” suggesting that Catholicism was on the opposite side of evolutionary thought during the trial.
“The trial was … more a crisis and a conflict that involved American Protestants than Catholics, partly due to the broader philosophical, theological and writer tradition Thomistic Evolution.
Kenneth KempRetired Professor of Philosophy at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota, he said to CNA: “The judgment is used too often by anti -religious polemists as support for his idea that the relationship between science and religion is fundamentally conflictive.”
Kemp, author of two books on evolution and Christianity –The War That Never Was y The Origins of Catholic Evolutionism– He said it is important to learn “how easy it is to distort history at the service of ideology.”
“The ‘wars’ underlying Scopes’ judgment were not between science and religion, but rather a war between evolutionists and antievolutionists, with Christians on both sides, and another war between militant and Christian atheists, with evolutionist on both sides,” he said.
The Catholic Church and Evolution
Catholic scholars considered the possibility of human evolution since the mid -nineteenth century, approximately when Darwin proposed his theory, according to Kemp. At a conference he taught at the Thomistic Institute, he said that there were three different positions towards the end of 1800.
A position, he said, was that body evolution was simply a myth. The second posture was that the human body evolved from an ancestor similar to a ape, but that the human soul is created directly by God. A third intermediate position suggested that an ancestor similar to a ape evolved towards a preparatory stage, but that the final stage of the human body was formed by a direct act of God.
Some books that promoted the second vision were included in the list of prohibited books of the Vatican in the 1890s, but the Church avoided making any proclamation about evolution at that time. The Vatican Council I in 1870 avoided the issue despite the broad public debate.
At the time of the Scopes trial in the 20s, Kemp said at the conference, American Catholics “generally remained outside the controversy.”
In his conference, Kemp cited an article in 1925 in the America magazine that said that one side “wishes to establish Protestant fundamentalism as a state religion” while the other “points to no less than the overthrow of all Christianity.” A 1925 article in Commonweal characterized the trial as “the agitation of a noisy and heated debate between … emotional extremists”, referring to the lawyers of both sides.
The Vatican issued a proclamation on the subject 25 years after the Scopes trial, when Pope Pius XII published the encyclical The human race. The Pontiff declared that human body evolution was a permissible belief, provided that it is accepted that God directly creates the human soul and that all humans descend from Adam and Eve. A Catholic is not required to believe in evolution.
Approximately 62% of Americans who identify as Catholics believe in evolution today, according to a 2024 Gallup survey. This is higher than the American population in general, of which 58% believe in theory.
Much of the theological debate revolved around the text of the beginning of Genesis, but Davenport told CNA that Catholics must be careful by assuming that the passages “report a simple historical chronology”, but that they must “try to understand what the literary genre and the intention of the text was.”
According to Davenport, a lesson that a person must take from the Scriptures about the origin of man is that the creation of human beings was “very good” and a “special part of the order created.” Another is that humans are “partly like the body animal world, but partly separated from it.” A third is that humans “were not predetermined to sin, but fell on our own fault.”
Daniel Kuebler, a biology professor at Franciscan University, told CNA that the Church recognizes that there is a “material component” in humans, but that the process by which this happens “is something that the Church has not made definitive proclamations”, which allows belief in human evolution.
Part of the opposition to evolutionary thought, according to Kuebler, comes from the belief that evolution would suggest that “man is just a material being.” However, he said that this statement “goes far beyond what science can demonstrate.”
Kuebler argued that evolution alone “cannot explain the totality of man” and pointed out that the Church clearly teaches that humans have “a spiritual component: a soul that does not evolve.”
Opposition to human evolution today
A century after the Scopes trial, the belief in evolution has increased between Catholics and the general public. However, some organizations, such as The Kolbe Center for the Study of Creationoppose the concept of human evolution and continue to defend the creationism of six days and the position that God created humans in their current form.
Hugh Owen, founder and director of the Flask center “A non -profit Catholic organization,” he told CNA that his organization is faithful to Pius XII statement about evolution, because the Pontiff urged the faithful to consider the evidence for and against evolution. Owen said that the Kolbe Center says that laity have an “opportunity to see both sides”, something that many young Catholics not find.
Owen argued that the tradition of the Church and the Fathers of the Primitive Church are “completely on the side of creation in six days.” He said that he believes that it is important to defend this position because “an error about creation is always reflected in an error on God” and that “the character of God is at stake.”
However, there were some Church parents who did not believe in a strict creation of six days, such as San Agustín de Hipona. Owen argued that Agustín did not have access to an adequate translation of Genesis.
Owen acknowledged that many Catholic intellectuals at the time of the Scopes trial believed in human evolution. However, he pointed out some of the evidence that was used before and during the trial and that since then have been demonstrated fraudulent or inaccurate.
For example, two fossils that were believed showed an intermediary between the first humans and the modern man – the man of Piltdown and the man of Nebraska – were subsequently refuted. Some organs that were believed had lost their original function through evolution, he said, then it was discovered that they did have a current function.
Owen also pointed out the discredited theory of embryonic recapitulation, which suggested that embryonic development went through several stages that resembled ancestral species.
“It has been a gradual process, but there is no doubt that in the time of the Scopes trial many Catholic intellectuals had already been deceived to think that false evidence … They really demonstrated human evolution,” said Owen.
Kuebler, on the other hand, told CNA that there are two main evidence that leads biologists to abroxically believe that humans evolved from an ancestor similar to a ape. One is “a whole series of intermediate fossils that are not entirely human” and fossil records that show “an increase in brain size over time and upright posture.” The other is “the genetic evidence” that shows similarity to the chimpanzees.
Translated and adapted by the ACI Press team. Originally published in CNA.
Tyler Arnold
Tyler Arnold is a reporter of the National Catholic Register. He previously worked at The Center Square and has published in various media, including The Associated Press, National Review, The American Conservative and The Federalist.