Existential Threats: American Apocalyptic Beliefs in the Technological Era

By Lisa Vox

Americans have long been enthralled by visions of the apocalypse. Will the world end through nuclear war, environmental degradation, and declining biodiversity? Or, perhaps, through the second coming of Christ, rapture of the faithful, and arrival of the Antichrist—a set of beliefs known as dispensationalist premillennialism? These seemingly competing apocalyptic fantasies are not as dissimilar as we might think. In fact, Lisa Vox argues, although these secular and religious visions of the end of the world developed independently, they have converged to create the landscape of our current apocalyptic imagination.

In Existential Threats, Vox assembles a wide range of media—science fiction movies, biblical tractates, rapture fiction—to develop a critical history of the apocalyptic imagination from the late 1800s to the present. Apocalypticism was once solely a religious ideology, Vox contends, which has secularized in response to increasing technological and political threats to American safety. Vox reads texts ranging from Christianity Today articles on ecology and the atomic bomb to Dr. Strangelove, and from Mary Shelley's The Last Man to the Left Behind series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, demonstrating along the way that conservative evangelicals have not been as resistant to science as popularly believed and that scientists and science writers have unwittingly reproduced evangelical eschatological themes and scenarios in their own works. Existential Threats argues that American apocalypticism reflects and propagates our ongoing debates over the authority of science, the place of religion, uses of technology, and America's evolving role in global politics.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: May 12, 2017
• ISBN: 9780812294019

Book preview

EXISTENTIAL THREATS

EXISTENTIAL THREATS

AMERICAN APOCALYPTIC BELIEFS IN THE TECHNOLOGICAL ERA

LISA VOX

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Copyright © 2017 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Name: Vox, Lisa, author.

Title: Existential threats : American apocalyptic beliefs in the technological era / Lisa Vox.

Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016049309 | ISBN 9780812249194 (hardcover : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: End of the world. | End of the world—Forecasting. | Eschatology. | Eschatology—Forecasting. | Americans—Attitudes—History—20th century. | Christianity and culture—United States—History—20th century.

Classification: LCC BT877 .V69 2017 | DDC 306.0973—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016049309

For Ford

CONTENTS

Preface

Chapter 1. Secularizing the Apocalypse

Chapter 2. Race, Technology, and the Apocalypse

Chapter 3. Postnuclear Fantasies

Chapter 4. Spaceship Earth

Chapter 5. The Politics of Science and Religion

Chapter 6. Postapocalyptic American Identity

Chapter 7. Post-9/11 Despair

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

PREFACE

I grew up during the Reagan era in a Southern Baptist stronghold—the suburbs of Memphis—where dispensationalist premillennialism bathed my childhood in apocalyptic anxiety. I worried about being left behind long before Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins wrote their series of novels under that title. In college and graduate school at the turn of the millennium, I discovered the extent to which nonevangelicals found it difficult to take such ideas seriously, which surprised me because I knew so many people for whom those ideas constituted a compelling reality. But my surprise was also because the dispensationalist concepts of the Rapture, societal decline, and an Antichrist never seemed that far afield from American culture to me, either as a child living in that milieu or as an adult working in the academy. I became interested in explaining the power of conservative evangelical beliefs about the end-times and understanding how they came to be. This book is the result. Existential Threats explores how dispensationalist premillennialism emerged alongside a scientific understanding of the end of the world during the late nineteenth century and how these two allegedly competing visions of the world have dominated American cultural conversations about the future since 1945.

During my 1980s childhood, fearing a nuclear war with the Soviets and worrying about the rise of the Antichrist didn’t seem contradictory, though the adult purveyors of those two visions viewed each other with disdain. When we look at the history and development of the two worldviews, their similarities outshine their differences. Apocalyptic writers and commentators have acknowledged the similarities between dispensational premillennialism and scientific apocalypticism at times, but by the new millennium, proponents of each saw the other as knowingly dealing in false ideas.

The end of the Cold War in 1991 was supposed to end conflicts over big ideas, proving that secular democratic capitalism was, as the political scientist Francis Fukuyama put it, the end of history. What a shock for secular Westerners that the even older wars of religion were not over. When 9/11 awakened the West to religiously fueled rage from the East, premillennialists incorporated the emergence of Islamic terrorism into their worldviews far more easily since they believed that the final battle of Armageddon would be the ultimate religious conflict. Liberal Americans struggled to balance a fear of Islamic terrorism with their ideals of tolerance and diversity. Some liberals, like conservatives, have since concluded that Islam itself is incompatible with Western ideals, but more often they have decided that a faulty reading of Islam or fundamentalist versions of religion in general is the problem.¹ At its most extreme, this argument says rid the world of supernaturalism and we will all live happily together Star Trek–style on Spaceship Earth until the computers become sentient and either kill us or translate our spirits from our bodies into 0s and 1s for eternity.

Does that last bit seem far-fetched to you? Conservative evangelicals are not the only ones confronted with doubt or even ridicule for their beliefs about the destiny of humankind. Though we lack a scientific understanding of human consciousness, prominent figures in science and technology, such as Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Steve Wozniak, have warned that the development of artificial intelligence could lead to human extinction. Musk labeled smart computers as our biggest existential threat on a list that most recently includes climate change, species extinction, pandemics, and asteroid impacts.²

Judging the likelihood of such scenarios is not the goal of my work. I do not treat science as a mere social construction, nor do I deny the reality of existential threats like climate change facing us today. Rather, my narrative describes how over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Americans interpreted scientific and technological threats to humanity through an eschatological framework by using the languages of science and religion.

The eschatological ideas monopolizing twenty-first-century American culture originated in the late nineteenth century. The theory of evolution as articulated by Charles Darwin provided the underpinnings for one scenario, while the other emerged among the conservative evangelicals who adopted a systematic version of Bible prophecy known as dispensational premillennialism. Contemporaries advanced the notion that these two understandings of the world diametrically opposed each other, a view that American scholars formally proclaimed in two histories: John William Draper’s History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science in 1874 and Andrew Dickson White’s History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom in 1896.³ These two works promoted the idea that there was an unbridgeable rift between religion and science that dated back centuries.

Modern scholars have largely rejected this thesis, sometimes called the conflict thesis. Ronald L. Numbers, a historian of science who has written on the American historiography of this idea, complains that the warfare metaphor has disguised the complexities of the relationship between religion and science while unfairly maligning the former. Historians have shown that the usage of the terms science and religion to indicate discrete categories of human activity disguises how Westerners historically conducted investigations into the natural world and God in concert.⁴ Over the course of the 1800s, a wide range of partisans debated the origins of life as well as the ages of the Earth and the universe. As participants in these debates staked out their positions, especially regarding the role of God in these matters, they sought to differentiate themselves. Our inheritance from those disputes includes a vocabulary with terms like objectivity, technology, and the scientific method in addition to a categorization of bodies of knowledge and associated activities as distinct from one another, such as science, religion, theology, and technology.

Americans don’t live as if science and religion are separate, nonoverlapping spheres, as the Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould characterized the science-and-religion relationship in 1999.⁵ Neither do most people stagger around awkwardly in a permanent state of cognitive dissonance because they hold beliefs, at times contradictory, drawn from a variety of religious, scientific, and cultural sources. Perhaps, then, we should show no astonishment that an American history of ideas about the destiny of humanity since the late nineteenth century reveals similarities between scientific and religious visions of the End. This holds true even for science devotees who increasingly believed conservative evangelicals were dangerously antiscience and for conservative evangelicals who, by the end of the twentieth century, promoted the charge that scientists and their sympathizers actively deceive the public about threats like climate change.

That dispensational premillennialism in particular offers insight into understanding how scientists developed their own views about the future is a testament to what we can learn from subjecting both to the same historical analysis. For their part, far from challenging or failing to respect science, premillennialists have integrated scientific conclusions into biblical interpretations. Hewing to an older paradigm stressing that a lone scientist can conduct investigations into nature that prove Truth, dispensational premillennialists have continuously bolstered their biblical interpretations with reference to scientific figures, ideas, and works. Nor have scientific apocalypticists only engaged issues that fall strictly into the territory of what repeated experimentation and observation can determine. As they faced the threats they feared would cause the end of the world, scientific apocalypticists addressed matters such as the most ethical way to live and the purpose of human existence. When there appeared to be conflict between the two apocalyptics, scientific apocalypticists were the ones who initiated it by painting premillennialists in an unflattering light. In the 1990s, more premillennialists began to question the science behind environmentalism, but they did so in the context of both scientists and the wider public contesting the idea of infallible scientific authority.

In an analysis of nonfiction, novels, short stories, and films produced between the nineteenth century and the present day, I uncover rhetorical and thematic similarities between dispensational premillennialism and scientific apocalyptic beliefs, showing they are concerned with the same fundamental questions about the meaning of life and the fate of humankind. Science did not necessarily produce different, more realistic, or more rational responses to global problems; rather, both fields offered similar scenarios and solutions to man-made, existential threats emanating from technological developments for much of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The way Americans face existential threats today is indebted to the related histories and similarities between religion and science.

In the nineteenth century, the scientific apocalyptic was new and less like a religious apocalyptic at that time than at any other period since. Initial scientific apocalyptic musings wondered how nature could effect the end of the world. Soon, however, scientific apocalypticists wondered how humans could cause the end of the world or of the species; as they speculated on a man-made apocalypse, they adopted premillennial language and scenarios. Each apocalyptic during this period described a perpetual sense of crisis because of an impending catastrophe caused by human action. That the rhetoric of both religious and scientific apocalyptics was analogous is not a coincidence. Conservative evangelicals purposely incorporated science into their visions of the End. While scientific apocalypticists did not always consciously duplicate the way premillennialists envisioned the End, they did not have a language of crisis of their own. As scientific apocalypticists tried to warn humans about the dangers facing them and push the solutions that they thought were necessary to lessen such hazards, they tended to imagine scenarios and use language similar to what dispensational premillennialists used.

Science fiction has been key in the development of the scientific apocalyptic since the late 1800s. It fleshed out the apocalyptic by exposing what is only implicit in much popular science writing: that humanity is deserving of judgment, and only a worthy remnant emerging from a worldwide disaster will survive to build a better world—just as premillennialists believed would happen during the end-times. The historian James Gilbert has written about the relationship between science fiction and religion: Frequently stories contained prophecy, revelation of things to come, secret knowledge, myths about origins and ends, the paranormal, and salvation imposed from beyond—all of which addressed the sorts of questions that religion traditionally answered.⁶ Gilbert maintains that science fiction counted among its readers professional scientists who appreciated that science fiction could deal with the implications of their discoveries and theories from a partisan perspective.⁷ As we shall see, American science fiction writers after 1945 assumed the mantle of prophecy, while scientists themselves sometimes wrote fiction in an advocacy role.

In addition to science fiction writers, the scientific apocalyptic included scientists who wrote books aimed at laypersons about the fate of humanity (and the world) and popular science journalists who wrote to warn Americans that they needed to change their way of life. All scientific apocalypticists, from scientists to science fiction authors, engaged the same basic questions about the purpose of life that premillennialists did. Michael Shermer, a science historian writing in 2006, argues, Science matters because it is the preeminent story of our age, an epic saga about who we are, where we came from, and where we are going.⁸ In telling this epic saga, scientists and science fiction writers presented remarkably similar stories to the ones that conservative evangelicals told.

The endpoints of the stories that each provided to make sense of the world and ease the fears of worried Americans differed from one another. Premillennialists’ answer to all problems facing humanity was Jesus Christ, whose return was the event all of human history led up to. Christ would stop humans from destroying each other in a nuclear war and would cleanse the Earth of pollution. Meanwhile, scientific apocalypticists, despite using the language and formulae of premillennialists, looked at the same problems facing the world and proposed political, technological, and, toward the end of the twentieth century, vaguely spiritual solutions. Both felt that humans were guilty of terrible acts (and feared that humanity would not restrain itself in the future from even worse acts involving nuclear war or damage to the environment). For premillennialists, Christ could change an individual’s heart to make him or her more mindful of the environment; accepting Christ was also the only way to live through any final nuclear or environmental crisis. Scientific apocalypticists envisioned a fundamental flaw within the human species itself, akin to original sin. Without a messiah to save individuals, science fiction writers came up with various salvation plans, including purging the species through nuclear war, but also imagined that humans might simply pollute their surroundings to the extent that all life would simply perish. Since 9/11, this fatalism has suffused the scientific apocalyptic, bringing it even closer to the perspective of premillennialists who have washed their hands of the world.

As the scientific apocalyptic developed alongside dispensational premillennialism in the United States, these theories responded to the same societal trends. Despite their similarities, the two apocalyptics consciously characterized themselves as constituting opposing worldviews by the end of the twentieth century. Chapter 1 describes how dispensational premillennialism, imported from Britain, began making inroads among evangelicals during the same period that witnessed the emergence of the scientific apocalyptic among the British and Europeans in the wake of On the Origin of Species (1859). Both were initially minority viewpoints in the United States. Postrevolutionary Americans had entered the nineteenth century having embraced the empirical and political ideals of the Enlightenment as well as the emphases on personal salvation and evangelism of the Great Awakening. Even after the Civil War, Americans were confident in the human capability for progress, but racial superiority helped broker the peace between Yankee and Confederate.⁹ By the turn of the century, most white Americans agreed with Europeans that Western nations were spiritually, culturally, and racially better suited to lead the rest of the world.

Chapter 2 demonstrates how the development of the scientific apocalyptic and the spread of dispensational premillennialism proceeded apace up until World War II, despite this optimism. Americans prided themselves on their technological accomplishments, but, whether evangelical or not, there was also a growing foreboding about the future of the United States and the world. Christian and secular-minded British and Europeans alike shared in this mounting fear that the world was in a state of decline with destruction perpetually threatening, and Americans engaged this viewpoint in fiction and nonfiction.

The idea that human history was not a never-ending story of progress eventually gave way to apocalypticism among scientists and science fiction writers on both sides of the Atlantic with the invention of the nuclear bomb in 1945. Chapter 3 focuses on how the bomb became the first existential threat to penetrate the public consciousness, captivating both religious and scientific apocalypticists in the United States. As scientific apocalypticists learned to live with the perennial threat of destruction, the scientific doomsday became as ingrained and commonplace as that of premillennialists.

In Chapter 4’s chronicle of environmentalism, atomic fears led naturally to environmental ones and the incorporation of environmental disasters into the scientific apocalyptic occurred within the religious apocalyptic. Fame and profit accrued to both religious and scientific apocalyptic writers and observers during the 1970s, accompanying a decline among Americans in their faith in government, national destiny, and scientific authority.

By the 1980s, the period covered in Chapter 5, the politicization of evangelicals had happened alongside the politicization of nuclear and environmental threats, and scientific and religious apocalypticists had begun to address one another overtly while still sharing assumptions about the state of the world. Chapter 6 covers the interregnum between the Cold War and the War on Terror, when nuclear anxiety receded in favor of environmental worries. Though dispensational premillennialists started to question the science behind the environmental threat, scientists and their supporters joined the rest of the country in worrying that science, without a spiritual transformation, could not solve the world’s problems.

From 9/11 to the present, as I portray in Chapter 7, scientific and religious apocalypticists have produced an incredible amount of fiction and nonfiction, flooding all forms of media with apocalyptic fantasies. Even as Americans have become aware of the differences between dispensational premillennialism (minus the details) and a scientific understanding of how the world will end, the two still share language and scenarios as well as assumptions about the future. The result is a distinctive American apocalypticism that enthralls a divided country in the context of mounting doubts over the War on Terror, continued American power, and the fate of humanity in a warming world.

Recognizing the entanglement of religious and scientific understandings of the world should encourage more empathy from people who place themselves firmly in one camp or the other. Though the media continues to speak of red states pitted against blue, history can show the common ground that even the extremes of those two perspectives occupy. When we look at the history and evolution of scientific apocalyptic beliefs as well as of dispensational premillennialism, we could impose a simplistic story of good versus evil on the one hand or of ignorant superstition versus rational intellect on the other. Neither narrative would capture adequately how and why Americans have responded to modern-day existential threats in ways that recall both the book of Revelation and On the Origin of Species.

CHAPTER 1

SECULARIZING THE APOCALYPSE

Westerners did not seriously consider that the world could end without a supernatural cause until scientists offered a convincing explanation for a naturalistic origin of the world. Creation stories help societies make sense of their existence, but an account of the beginning of the world and the origins of humankind would be incomplete without an account of its ending.¹ Until the late nineteenth century, the dominant assumption in the West for over two thousand years had been that a supernatural force created humanity and would similarly act as the instrument of the world’s destruction. Prior to the late nineteenth century, intellectuals who rejected a supernatural model of creation struggled with the project of offering alternative models of the world’s beginning or posited an infinite universe, often in order to strengthen atheistic beliefs. Scholars have debated to what degree these alternative models anticipated the theory of evolution.² The lack of a secular explanation for what would happen to the world in the future corresponded to the lack of a solid account of how the world might have come into being without God.

In 1859 Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection provided the basis for the widespread acceptance of evolution, but Darwin’s theory also unintentionally furnished a naturalistic creation story, bolstering religious skepticism. With an established scientific origins story, Westerners began to theorize that the world could end (or at least humanity could become extinct) without any assistance from God or possibly even due to human misadventure. Darwin’s theory constituted an important intellectual shift, as scientists increasingly left theological concerns out of their work completely and argued that science and religion attempt to answer different questions.³ The American scientific apocalyptic emerged from the British and European discussions of Darwinism’s implications for human destiny.

The historian Jacques Barzun’s observation that "the Origin of Species was greater as an event than as a book" emphasizes the importance that Darwin’s work had in its long-term impact as a synthesis of biological and geological studies, far beyond what Darwin and his supporters could have ever predicted.⁴ Though Darwin avoided talking about the origins of life itself, his work also had clear theological ramifications. Darwin was sensitive to that but worried far more about the critical response of other scientists, mostly geologists and paleontologists, to his work.⁵ When he finally published in 1859 after a lengthy delay, the impetus was the news that another scientist, Alfred Wallace, had come to similar conclusions and was about to scoop Darwin.⁶

Darwin had a preview of a possible reaction to his Origin of Species in 1844 when a naturalistic history of the world by an anonymous author appeared in England. Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation took the reader from the formation of stars and planets to the origins of humankind, arguing for the development of all things according to the action of natural laws. Victorian elites widely read and discussed the book, and, at the behest of the author, inexpensive editions came out in the hopes of broadening the audience even further. The controversy surrounding its author (Robert Chambers, a publisher and phrenologist, as it was finally revealed in 1884 after his death) aided its popularity as Victorians made a game out of identifying the probable author within their circles. Those sympathetic to the work suggested it had many scientific faults, but the most vehement critics saw it as an outright attack on Christianity.⁷

Despite the book’s invocation of a Creator, Chambers’s argument was seen as consistent with the supposed materialism, or atheism, of the French Revolution.⁸ Though most Enlightenment thinkers were Deists, their naturalistic philosophies and anticlericalism had often been read as evidence of atheism. In particular, Baron d’Holbach’s The System of Nature (1770) promised to free men from supernatural beliefs by showing how reason could explain the workings of the universe.⁹ In d’Holbach’s account, matter was eternal, and all processes related to matter could be attributed to its properties. D’Holbach’s System of Nature represented an extreme view among the philosophes themselves, but the attacks on the clergy and Maximilien Robespierre’s project of secularizing France in the 1790s resulted in the loss of such fine distinctions. The severe reaction against the French Revolution in England meant that science that smacked of atheism not only threatened the Anglican establishment but also had a political dimension that threatened the stability and order of society.

The debate over the 1844 Vestiges, as the historian James Secord has demonstrated, provoked conversations across Britain about a host of issues, including the propriety of women in science, the ability of the masses to grasp science, as well as the role of God in creating life. Darwin studied Vestiges for arguments he needed to address in his own evolutionary treatise, and his observation of the controversy surrounding the 1844 book also made him determined to avoid the charge of having written a popular, rather than scholarly, treatment.¹⁰

After Darwin, Western scientists could dismiss neither evolution nor natural selection without serious consideration. Origin’s reach extended well beyond the realm of biology. Contemporary scientific debates about naturalistic processes in geology and physics coalesced around Darwin’s publication. Geologists found the idea of progressive and gradual change problematic, while physicists objected to the time scale implied by natural selection. In these debates, scientists did not always directly invoke either a Christian God or a Creator, but God’s existence formed a powerful subtext.

Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, published in three volumes in the early 1830s, had influenced Darwin’s thinking on the age of the Earth, the process of change, and the use of present-day examples in nature to speculate about the past. Lyell’s work established uniformitarianism in geology as opposed to the catastrophism that assumed that disasters punctuated the Earth’s past and were responsible for geological formations like mountains. Catastrophism was consistent with biblical creationism and the Flood myth. For Lyell, unconcerned with the biblical account, slow and steady changes, such as the action of water in forming valleys, marked the Earth’s geological past. But Lyell also rejected the idea of transmutation, or the idea that the simpler forms of life had led to more complex forms, as a violation of the uniformitarian principle that the same forces had always been at work and were directionless.¹¹ On that reading, species were essentially unchanged from their first appearances. By 1859, Lyell had dispelled the sway catastrophism had over geology, but he had also posed powerful arguments against evolution as incompatible with uniformitarianism.¹² When he finally accepted evolution in the early 1860s, it was a theistic version that did not apply to humans.¹³

While Lyell struggled with accepting transmutation, physicists like William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin), who had articulated the principles of thermodynamics in the 1840s and 1850s, rejected natural selection on the grounds that it required the Earth to be far older than it could be. In the 1830s, Lyell did not attempt to date the Earth and cautioned against the tendency to assign limits to the amount of time the universe or the Earth had been in existence.¹⁴ In the first edition of Origin of Species, Darwin, like Lyell, also avoided naming a specific age but suggested that it had been three hundred million years since the Weald, or a plain, in southern England had lost its trees. Thomson found these apparently limitless dating schemes untenable.

Thomson, along with Rudolf Clausius, had elaborated the second law of thermodynamics, or the idea that heat flows toward cooler objects in an irreversible process, in the early 1850s.¹⁵ Clausius named the process entropy in an 1865 article that also contained his classic statement of the second law of thermodynamics that the energy of the universe is constant. The entropy of the universe tends towards a maximum.¹⁶ Scientific detractors to the idea of entropy actually rejected it because it was compatible with a creationist account, arguing instead that the universe was actually infinite.¹⁷ Not until the 1880s did a godless heat death start to capture the popular imagination in England and the United States. For Thomson, his studies on heat loss meant that the universe must have had a beginning and an end, and he could use his suppositions about the dissipation of energy to date the world in the wake of Darwin’s publication.¹⁸

During the 1860s, Thomson published articles that criticized Darwin on the basis that the world could not be as old as Darwin needed it to be for natural selection to have performed its work. In 1862, Thomson estimated that the sun was between one hundred and five hundred million years old and the Earth between twenty million and four hundred million years old, based on the length of time it must have taken for those bodies to cool. By 1868, he had landed on a probable age of the Earth as one hundred million years old, based on what the shape of the Earth suggested about the decline in rotational speed over time. None of these estimates were enough for a slow, evolutionary development of life. Thomson continued refining his arguments and revising the age of the Earth downward for the rest of the century, garnering increased support from geologists and physicists.¹⁹

Many of the biologists who disagreed with Darwin’s assertion that natural selection was the driver of evolution also concluded that it defied God’s immanence. The theory of natural selection, insofar as it provided a reasonable explanation as to how life could have evolved without a Creator, was a plausible alternative to the account of creation in the book of Genesis.²⁰ For believers in this alternative creation story, the removal of God from the origins of humanity left the future of the human species open to an arbitrary and unplanned series of events, similar to that which had resulted in the evolution of human life.

After Darwin published Origin of Species, evolution largely became the accepted explanation in the scientific community for how life had developed, but the social and theological implications of evolutionary theory troubled many scientists in the nineteenth century. The notion that humans had evolved from apes prompted questions about human nature. Such questions could undermine the rule of elites by challenging their birthright or could deny an innate moral sense to humans.²¹ In the first edition of Origin, Darwin wrote, I must premise, that I have nothing to do with the origin of the primary mental powers, any more than I have with that of life itself.²² But the intensity of that statement paled before others, such as his closing remark: Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.²³

Though Darwin did not directly discuss human evolution until 1871 in The Descent of Man, it did not take much creativity to conclude that natural selection had worked upon humans just as it had on animals. Doubts about natural selection persisted until the 1930s and 1940s. One of the main obstacles to the acceptance of natural selection among scientists was a continued view of evolution as progressive.²⁴ In the decades after Darwin first proposed natural selection, non-Darwinian theories of evolution had upheld progress as inherent within the process and did not require as long of a time scale for their operation flourished.²⁵

By the end of the 1800s, neo-Darwinian became the label for scientists who explained evolution through the transmission of characteristics produced by natural selection.²⁶ Darwin himself did not attribute evolutionary change to natural selection alone, and at times he leaned toward aspects of Lamarckism, or the idea that when a member of a species acquired a characteristic through use (or disuse), it could be inherited.²⁷ Lamarckism, which came from the evolutionary theories of a French natural historian published in 1800, was consistent with a progressive worldview because it suggested that, as they adapted to their environments, organisms became increasingly complex.²⁸ Alongside a continued regard for Lamarckism arose another rival interpretation to natural selection. Believers of orthogenesis attributed evolution to a built-in tendency or drive toward progress and ever greater perfection, according to the evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr.²⁹

Although Darwin rejected the idea of a deity directing evolution toward a particular goal, he did see evolution as progressive, culminating in Homo sapiens.³⁰ His belief in progress lent credence to the notion that evolution was teleological. While Darwin’s bulldog, the English biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, tried to avoid talking about evolution as though it inexorably led to superior forms of species, Darwin himself tended to talk about the perfection of species, juxtaposed civilized races to savages, and upheld women as evolutionarily inferior to men.³¹

Theistic evolution, the concept that God directed evolution, was a popular way for people in the late nineteenth century to satisfy their desire to see design in the development of life. The biologist Asa Gray in the United States argued that God could have injected commands into the blueprints for organic development so that evolution would proceed according to His divine will. Theistic evolution, however, was not always an adequate answer to the theological questions that arose from evolution.

The Democratic politician and creationist William Jennings Bryan in 1922—three years before the Scopes monkey trial—asserted that the widespread acceptance of evolution could result in feeling that existence was pointless even if evolutionists retained a belief in God as Creator. To Bryan, evolution deprived humanity of a personal God by removing the supernatural and miraculous from everyday life.³² Bryan concluded that placing God at such a far remove could lead to agnosticism or atheism.³³ However, even for evolutionists who avoided such spiritual pitfalls, in Bryan’s opinion the lack of a personal God still could deprive a life of meaning. Bryan wrote, Darwinism offers no reason for existence and presents no philosophy of life; the Bible explains why man is here and gives us a code of morals that fits into every human need.³⁴

Eroding the idea that humans were created in God’s image, evolution triggered doubts about the practicality of social progress, especially in one individual’s life given the age of the Earth, and about the presence of a design for humanity (since even theistic evolution suggested that God had long stopped intervening in earthly events).³⁵ Theistic evolution largely faded among evolutionary theorists by 1900, but it was indicative of the continued craving for design and progress in evolution.³⁶

When Bryan referred to Darwinism, he alluded not to the theory of natural selection but to evolutionary theory as a whole. In fact, it would have been remarkable if Bryan had challenged natural selection; while evolutionary theory largely overcame opposition by the 1870s, the theory of natural selection encountered resistance even from many professional scientists until the 1940s.³⁷ The discovery of Mendelian genetics at the turn of the twentieth century at first presented a challenge to neo-Darwinism, but in the 1930s and