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By Root 246 0

Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, the teenagers who abducted fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks and clubbed him to death with a chisel in what they had thought would be the “perfect crime.” After the boys confessed to the murder, Darrow agreed to take the case, employing a defense to shift the penalty from death to life in prison. His was a deterministic view of human behavior. “Man is in no sense the maker of himself and has no more power than any other machine to escape the law of cause and effect,” Darrow opined. The boys were not ultimately responsible for the murder because human volition is a fiction: “each act, criminal or otherwise, follows a cause; that given the same conditions the same result will follow forever and ever.”6 Darrow claimed that Leopold and Loeb were themselves victims, and their trial served as a platform for Darrow to argue the larger case that our actions are the product of environmental influences.7 Now Darrow was defending evolution in Dayton, and Bryan foresaw the future in which lawyers could argue that we are all just products of our brute animal heritage, “coerced by a fate fixed by the laws of heredity,” and thus not morally culpable for our actions. Bryan would not stand for it: If evolution were accepted, it would “destroy all sense of responsibility and menace the morals of the world.”

This was the “Great Commoner” who engaged great causes, the man who famously defended labor and attacked the gold standard by declaring, “you shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.”8 Of course Bryan saw the teaching of evolution as a war between science and religion:

Evolution is at war with religion because religion is supernatural, it is therefore the relentless foe of Christianity which is a revealed religion. Let us, then, hear the conclusion of the whole matter. Science is a magnificent material for force, but is not a teacher of morals. It can also build gigantic intellectual ships, but it constructs no moral rudders for control of storm tossed human vessels. It not only fails to supply the spiritual element needed, but some of its unproven hypotheses rob the ship of its compass and thus endanger its cargo.

Soaring prose from a towering man, but he claimed a false war between science and religion. Accepting evolution does not force us to jettison our morals and ethics, and rejecting evolution does not ensure their constancy. We should not press down upon the brow of education this crown of religious thorns; we should not crucify science upon a cross of religious gold.

The Search for Truth

“Darwin’s bulldog,” Thomas Henry Huxley, proclaimed that the Origin of Species was “the most potent instrument for the extension of the realm of knowledge which has come into man’s hands since Newton’s Principia,” and lamented to himself “how extremely stupid not to have thought of that!” Ernst Mayr asserted that “it would be difficult to refute the claim that the Darwinian revolution was the greatest of all intellectual revolutions in the history of mankind.” Stephen Jay Gould called the theory of evolution one of the half dozen most important ideas in the entire history of Western thought. Richard Dawkins inquired what common ground we could find for conversation with an extraterrestrial intelligence, and answered “evolution”—because it is “a universal truth” that is common throughout the cosmos.9

If the theory of evolution is so profound and proven, why doesn’t everyone accept it as true? One source of resistance is the confusion over the verbs “accept” and “believe.” I use the verb “accept” instead of the more common expression “believe in” because evolution is not a religious tenet, to which one swears allegiance or belief as a matter of faith. It is a factual reality of the empirical world. Just as one would not say “I believe in gravity,” one should not proclaim “I believe in evolution.” But getting hung up on the idea that one is supposed to “believe in” evolution just as you “believe in” God is just one brand of resistance