Harry Emerson Fosdick, “Evolution and Mr. Bryan,” Popular Religion Leaflets, American Institute of Sacred Literature (1922). Available at https://archive.org/details/evolutionmrbryan00fosd/page/n5/mode/2up.

The editor of The Times¹ has asked me to reply to Mr. Bryan’s statement on “God and Evolution.” I do so, if only to voice the sentiments of a large number of Christian people who in the name of religion are quite as shocked as any scientist could be in the name of science at Mr. Bryan’s sincere but appalling obscurantism.

So far as the scientific aspect of the discussion is concerned, scientists may well be left to handle it. Suffice it to say that when Mr. Bryan reduces evolution to a hypothesis and then identifies a hypothesis with a “guess” he is guilty of a sophistry² so shallow and palpable that one wonders at his hardihood³ in risking it. A guess is a haphazard venture of opinion without investigation before or just reason afterward to sustain it; it is a jeu d’esprit.⁴ But a hypothesis is a seriously proffered explanation of a difficult problem ventured when careful investigation of facts points to it, retained as long as the discovered facts sustain it, and surrendered as soon as another hypothesis enters the field which better explains the phenomena in question.

A Hypothesis

Every universally accepted scientific truth which we possess began as a hypothesis, is in a sense a hypothesis still, and has become a hypothesis transformed into a settled conviction as the mass of accumulating evidence left no question as to its substantial validity. To call evolution, therefore, a guess is one thing; to tell the truth about it is another, for to tell the truth involves recognizing the tireless patience with which generations of scientists in every appropriate field of inquiry have been investigating all discoverable facts that bear upon the problem of mutation of species, with substantial unanimity as to the results so far as belief in the hypothesis of evolution is concerned. When Darwin,⁵ after years of patient, unremitting study, ventured his hypothesis in explanation of evolution—a hypothesis which was bound to be corrected and improved—one may say anything else one will about it except to call it a “guess.” That is the one thing which it certainly was not. Today, the evolutionary hypothesis, after many years of pitiless attack and searching investigation, is, as a whole, the most adequate explanation of the facts with regard to the origin of species that we have yet attained, and it was never so solidly grounded as it is today. Dr. Osborne⁶ is making, surely, a safe statement when he says that no living naturalist, so far as he knows, “differs as to the immutable truth of evolution in the sense of the continuous fitness of plants and animals to their environment and the ascent of all the extinct and existing forms of life, including man, from an original and single cellular state.”

The Real Situation

When, therefore, Mr. Bryan says, “Neither Darwin nor his supporters have been able to find a fact in the universe to support their hypothesis,” it would be difficult to imagine a statement more obviously and demonstrably mistaken. The real situation is that every fact on which investigation has been able to lay its hands helps to confirm the hypothesis of evolution. There is no known fact which stands out against it. Each newly discovered fact fits into an appropriate place in it. So far as the general outlines of it are concerned, the Copernican astronomy⁷ itself is hardly established more solidly.

My reply, however, is particularly concerned with the theological aspects of Mr. Bryan’s statement. There seems to be no doubt about what his position is. He proposes to take his science from the Bible. He proposes, certainly, to take no science that is contradicted by the Bible. He says, “Is it not strange that a Christian will accept Darwinism as a substitute for the Bible when the Bible not only does not support Darwin’s hypothesis, but directly and expressly contradicts it?” What other interpretation of such a statement is possible, except this: that the Bible is for Mr. Bryan an authoritative textbook in biology—and if in biology, why not in astronomy, cosmogony,⁸ chemistry, or any other science, art, concern of man whatever? One who is acquainted with the history of theological thought gasps as he read this. . . .

Luther and Bryan

One has supposed that the days when such wild anachronisms could pass muster as good theology were past, but Mr. Bryan is regalvanizing into life that same outmoded idea of what the Bible is, and proposes in the twentieth century that we shall use Genesis,⁹ which reflects the prescientific view of the Hebrew people centuries before Christ, as an authoritative textbook in science, beyond whose conclusions we dare not go.

Why, then, should Mr. Bryan complain because his attitude toward evolution is compared repeatedly, as he says it is, with the attitude of the theological opponents of Copernicus and Galileo?¹⁰ On his own statement, the parallelism is complete. Martin Luther¹¹ attacked Copernicus with the same appeal which Mr. Bryan uses: He appealed to the Bible. He said: “People gave ear to an upstart astrologer who strove to show that the earth revolves, not the heavens or the firmament,¹² the sun and the moon. Whoever wishes to appear clever must devise some new system, which of all systems is, of course, the very best. This fool wishes to reverse the entire science of astronomy, but sacred Scripture tells us that Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, and not the earth.”¹³

Nor was Martin Luther wrong if the Bible is indeed an authoritative textbook in science. . . .

Are we to understand that this is Mr. Bryan’s science, that we must teach this science in our schools, that we are stopped by divine revelation from ever going beyond this science? Yet this is exactly what Mr. Bryan would force us to if with intellectual consistency he should carry out the implications of his appeal to the Bible against the scientific hypothesis of evolution in biology.

The Bible’s Precious Truths

One who is a teacher and preacher of religion raises his protest against all this just because it does such gross injustice to the Bible. There is no book to compare with it. The world never needed more its fundamental principles of life, its fully developed views of God and man, its finest faiths and hopes and loves. When one reads an article like Mr. Bryan’s one feels, not that the Bible is being defended, but that it is being attacked. Is a cello defended when instead of being used for music it is advertised as a good dinner table? Mr. Bryan does a similar disservice to the Bible when, instead of using it for what it is, the most noble, useful, inspiring, and inspired book of spiritual life which we have, the record of God’s progressive unfolding of his character and will from early primitive beginnings to the high noon in Christ, he sets it up for what it is not and never was meant to be—a procrustean¹⁴ bed to whose infallible measurements all human thought must be forever trimmed.

Origins and Values

The fundamental interest which leads Mr. Bryan and others of his school to hate evolution is the fear that it will depreciate the dignity of man. Just what do they mean? Even in the Book of Genesis God made man out of the dust of the earth. Surely, that is low enough to start, and evolution starts no lower. So long as God is the Creative Power, what difference does it make whether out of the dust by sudden fiat or out of the dust by gradual process God brought man into being? Here man is and what he is he is. Were it decided that God had dropped him from the sky, he still would be the man he is. If it is decided that God brought him up by slow gradations out of lower forms of life, he still is the man he is.

The fact is that the process by which man came to be upon the planet is a very important scientific problem, but it is not a crucially important religious problem. Origins prove nothing in the realm of values. To all folk of spiritual insight man, no matter by what process he at first arrived, is the child of God, made in his image, destined for his character. If one could appeal directly to Mr. Bryan he would wish to say: let the scientists thrash out the problems of man’s biological origin but in the meantime do not teach men that if God did not make us by fiat then we have nothing but a bestial heritage. That is a lie which once believed will have a terrific harvest. It is regrettable business that a prominent Christian should be teaching that.

Danger of Materialistic Teaching

One writes this with warm sympathy for the cause which gives Mr. Bryan such anxious concern. He is fearful that the youth of the new generation, taught the doctrine of a materialistic science, may lose that religious faith in God and in the realities of the spiritual life on which alone an abiding civilization can be founded. His fear is well grounded, as everyone closely associated with the students of our colleges and universities knows. . . .

. . . But Mr. Bryan’s association of this pessimistic and materialistic teaching with the biological theory of evolution is only drawing a red herring across the red trail. The distinction between inspiring, spiritually minded teachers and deadening, irreligious teachers is not at the point of belief in evolution at all. Our greatest teachers, as well as our poorest, those who are profoundly religious as well as those who are scornfully irreligious, believe in evolution. The new biology has no more to do with the difference between them than the new astronomy or the new chemistry. If the hypothesis of evolution were smashed tomorrow, there would be no more religiously minded scientists and no fewer irreligious ones.

The Heart of the Problem

The real crux of the problem in university circles is whether we are going to think of creative reality in physical or in spiritual terms, and that question cannot be met on the lines that Mr. Bryan has laid down. Indeed, the real enemies of the Christian faith, so far as our students are concerned, are not the evolutionary biologists, but folk like Mr. Bryan who insist on setting up artificial adhesion between Christianity and outgrown scientific opinions, and who proclaim that we cannot have one without the other. The pity is that so many students will believe him and, finding it impossible to retain the outgrown scientific opinions, will give up Christianity in accordance with Mr. Bryan’s insistence that they must. . . .

. . . He proposes, too, that his special form of mediaevalism¹⁵ shall be made authoritative by the state, promulgated as the only teaching allowed in the schools. Surely, we can promise him a long, long road to travel before he plunges the educational system of this country into such incredible folly, and if he does succeed in arousing a real battle over the issue we can promise him also that just as earnestly as the scientists will fight against him in the name of scientific freedom of investigation, so will multitudes of Christians fight against him in the name of their religion and their God.