America Meets Darwin

Although Darwin never visited the United States, his theory was escorted into the country by his friend the botanist Asa Gray. In Gray’s review of Origin of Species in the Atlantic Monthly, he declared that Americans should no longer rely on a literal reading of Genesis for answers to biology’s questions. After all, physicists were not content with simply being told that God created the heavens and Earth; they were beginning to work out how the solar system had evolved from a dusty cloud. “The mind of such an age cannot be expected to let the old belief about species pass unquestioned,” Gray wrote.

Like their European counterparts, most American scientists accepted evolution by the end of the 1800s, although some of them had their doubts about the particulars of natural selection. As far as historians can tell, reading Darwin caused none of them to give up their religion. Gray himself was a devout Christian, and he argued that divine guidance might somehow channel the course of natural selection.

While some American Protestant leaders were hostile to Darwinism when it first came to this country, they didn’t speak out against it. As long as scientists were expressing doubts about the theory, they were content to stay on the sidelines. But by the end of the 1800s, as those scientific doubts faded away, Protestant leaders began to speak out. They saw Darwinism as not just wrong but dangerous. Only if God had directly created mankind in His image was there any basis for morality. Darwinism seemed to render mankind nothing more than an animal. If we were the product of nothing more than natural selection, how could we be God’s special creation? And if we were not, then why should people adhere to the Bible?

Their moral objections overshadowed any scientific ones. Most American Protestants at the turn of the century considered the Bible to be, for the most part, literal truth, but few actually believed that the planet was created in six days a few thousand years ago. Some believed that the first line of Genesis–“In the beginning God created the heavens and the Earth”–referred to a vast length of time, in which matter, life, and even fossils were created. God then destroyed that pre‑Adamic creation and constructed an Edenic restoration in 4004 B.C., the age calculated by Bishop Ussher. In this restoration, God created a new set of animals, and plants, and the rest of life in six actual days. Such a cosmology could accommodate an old universe and an old Earth, complete with its extinct life and ancient geology, by fitting all of it into a capacious “beginning.”

Others argued that the word day in Genesis was a poetic expression that didn’t specifically mean 24 hours. They interpreted the six days of creation as six vast gulfs of time during which God brought the world and life into existence. An ancient Earth with a long biological history was no threat to them. No matter how old the world was, what mattered was that God–not evolution–had created life, and humans in particular.

Even at the end of the nineteenth century, Darwinism was only a distant threat to conservative American Christians, the preoccupation of scientists in a few American universities. But by the 1920s the controversy over Darwin had turned from a slow simmer to a rapid boil.