Contributor: Kyle Smeby

In the summer of 1925 John Scopes was put on trial for teaching the, then illegal, theory of evolution. Eighty years later certain christian groups are still fighting to take evolution out of our schools. Over those 80 years the debate has changed but it has always been a battle that takes place in the rift between science and religion.

What follows is the first of a three part series of articles on The History, The People and The Rhetoric in this fight over the origins of our species.

Of God, Men and Monkeys: The History

Darwin is by no means the first scientist whose ideas ran afoul of established religious powers. While many believe the conflict between science and religion was initiated by Catholicism we can look back to the trial of Socrates, a Greek from Athens, to find an earlier precedent. While we owe more to Socrates in the fields of rhetoric and philosophy than science, some of the charges leveled against him sound similar to those denouncing today's scientists:

"Socrates is guilty of criminal meddling, in that he inquires into things below the earth and in the sky, and makes the weaker argument defeat the stronger, and teaches others to follow his example."

"Socrates is guilty of corrupting the minds of the young, and of believing in deities of his own invention instead of the gods recognized by the state."

After all whether it comes to teaching evolution, creationism or intelligent design in the classroom what are we talking about if not, corrupting the minds of the young, weaker arguments defeating the stronger and believing in deities instead of gods recognized by the state? The trial against Socrates was conducted on behalf of the goddess Athena. But his was only the first of a series of trials meant to somehow protect impressionable minds from those that would lead them astray from socially acceptable ideas.

The trial of Galileo, made famous again in Dan Brown's best seller Angels & Demons, is one of the Catholic Church's most famous fights with science over the validity of the Copernican heliocentric model of our solar system and it's alleged contradiction of the bible. Catholicism, however, was not the only branch of Christianity that denounced the heliocentric universe. The heliocentric vs. geocentric debate took place during the protestant reformation and both Luther and Calvin denounced any theory that contradicted the Earth as the center of the universe. By the 18th century, however, the scientific evidence supporting Copernicus was too difficult to disprove as the clout of scientists such as Isaac Newton grew. So the church simply found a new way to interpret the scriptures¹ to support an Earth that rotated around the sun. Unfortunately Galileo had died under house arrest by 1642. His body was moved to sacred ground in 1737, Pope Benedict XIV authorized the publication of Galileo's complete scientific works in 1741, and in 1992 Pope John Paul II declared Galileo's denunciation an error due to "tragic mutual incomprehension."

While the Catholic Church had a few other minor skirmishes with science in the years following Galileo's death they have in fact become one of the today's most scientifically progressive religions. In 1891 Pope Leo XIII officially founded the Vatican Observatory which today employs 13 professional astronomers studying such topics as dark matter and galaxy formation.² More relevant to us however is the modern Catholic Churches stance on evolution. Pope Pius XII declared in 1950 that there was nothing contradictory between scripture and evolution, "in as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter -for the Catholic faith obliges us to hold that souls are immediately created by God." In other words the body of mankind may have descended from other animals, but their souls are still imbued by God. Pope John Paul II would take this one step further in 1996 describing, "evolution as more than a hypothesis." The Pontiff went on to say:

"It is indeed remarkable that this theory has been progressively accepted by researchers, following a series of discoveries in various fields of knowledge. The convergence, neither sought nor fabricated, of the results of work that was conducted independently is in itself a significant argument in favor of the theory."

Now it was sciences turn to play the antagonist. While noted evolutionist Stephen J. Gould enthusiastically endorsed the Catholic Church's stance, his colleague Richard Dawkins did not. Dawkins called Pope John Paul's 1996 speech, "disingenuous doublethink." In his essay entitled, "You Can't Have it Both Ways" Dawkins mocks the pope asking:

"In plain language, there came a moment in the evolution of hominids when God intervened and injected a human soul into a previously animal lineage. When? A million years ago? Two million years ago? Between Homo erectus and Homo sapiens? Between 'archaic' Homo sapiens and H. sapiens sapiens?"

Dawkins is demanding incontrovertible scientific evidence of a soul. In so doing we come full circle. The church demanded Galileo reconcile his science with their faith. The atheist scientist crusades to make the faithful reconcile their faith with his science. Neither one is possible nor does either party have the right to demand reconciliation.

The majority of us go about our day-to-day lives unconscious of the fact that we have already reconciled science and religion. It's not until a self-righteous religious fanatic or smug intellectual atheist appears on TV that we bother to think that we can't reconcile them. Who are these people and what is their motivation for continuing the debate over evolution in the classroom?