Scopes 100 Years Later

Richard Dawkins once quipped, “It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid—or insane or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that.” 

The seed of that sentiment was planted 100 years ago in July 1925, when John T. Scopes was tried and convicted in Dayton, Tennessee, for teaching evolution in public schools in violation of the state’s Butler Act. The media coverage of the trial—coupled with Inherit the Wind, a 1960 Hollywood film depicting religion as an enemy of open inquiry, helped establish belief in evolution as a litmus test for sorting out science-deniers from the smart set.

In 2008, that test was put to 10 Republican presidential candidates in a debate when the moderator asked, “How many of you don’t believe in evolution?” Without any clarification of the term and restricted to respond with a simple show of hands, three of the hopefuls “failed.” However, their response revealed nothing of the candidates’ true attitudes about evolution, much less science. That’s because “evolution” spans a range of origin-of-life theories, a fact acknowledged by the late John Paul II in a 1996 address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. 

Like the debate moderator, JPII didn’t define the term but called evolution “more than a hypothesis,” adding 

…rather than the theory of evolution, we should speak of several theories of evolution. On the one hand, this plurality has to do with the different explanations advanced for the mechanism of evolution, and on the other, with the various philosophies on which it is based.

Those “several theories” are reflected in public attitudes.

In February 2025, the Pew Research Center reported that 80 percent of U.S. adults believe in evolution: 33 percent believing that God had no role in it and 47 percent believing that God or a “higher power” allowed it or guided it; only 17 percent discount evolution altogether. The PRC also found that over 75 percent of Protestants and Catholics accept some form of evolutionary theory, contradicting the modern view of religious belief as a science-stopper.

One form of the theory is the “macroevolution” of Darwinism—that is, the non-intelligent, non-teleological mechanism of random variation, adaptation, and natural selection, whereby new and increasingly complex organisms gradually emerge from a simple primordial life form. As to how “matter went live” in the first place to create something to evolve, well, that’s yet to be worked out. 

Another form is “microevolution:” limited, small-scale changes in life forms adapting to environmental stresses through a process of genetic variation and inheritance. Microevolution explains why dogs, for example, even after millennia of intelligent intervention (dog breeding), are distinguishable from other life forms by their unique gene pool. 

Imagine, after a century and a half of scientific “evidence” since the publication of Darwin’s theory and a century of inclusion in educational curricula since Scopes, mud-to-man Darwinian evolution is supported by scarcely one-third of adults. You might chalk that up to the lack of transitional forms in the fossil record, the failure to empirically demonstrate the evolution of a one-celled organism into a two-celled one, or religious fundamentalism and science skepticism. Or maybe it is because of something more devastating.

In 1996, Bill Gates and a team of software engineers analyzed the chemical sequences of DNA and came away remarking, “Human DNA is like a computer program but far, far more advanced than any software we’ve ever created.” Let that sink in for a moment. 

If the most highly evolved thing on the planet, the human mind—using the collective imagination, creativity, and cognitive power of the brightest software engineers in the world—is unable to re-create the programming in DNA, then to conjecture it could have been cobbled together from a trial-and-error process of random variation and adaptation is nothing short of stupefying.

What we know, empirically, is that every computer code is the product of intelligence. So, if a code, or anything else, exhibits complexity far beyond the competency of human intelligence, the most reasonable assumption is a super intelligent origin. That’s the proposition of “intelligent design” (ID), an origin-of-life theory that aligns closest to the belief of up to two-thirds of adults, including the scientifically informed. 

In a book review on Darwinism, evolution popularist Daniel Dennett lamented: “I was disconcerted to overhear some medical students talking in a bar recently. One exclaimed: ‘How could anybody believe in evolution after learning about the intricacies of the DNA replication machinery?’” When a scientific theory is rejected by scientifically trained individuals, that’s bad, very bad, and Dennett knows it. (I’ll bet he had another drink, or two, before leaving the bar that night.)

ID makes no claim as to the source of the design, whether divine or extraterrestrial, only that there are features of the world that are best explained as the product of intelligence, like the irreducible complexity of biological systems or the computer-core-like information in the DNA molecule. For that reason, ID attracts a big-tent following that includes Christians, Muslims, and Jews, as well as atheists like the late Carl Sagan who believed in panspermia—a theory which maintains that “seeds of life” were scattered throughout the universe by super-smart extraterrestrials.

Young Earth Creationism (YEC), Old Earth Creationism (OEC), and Theistic Evolution (TE) all fall under the ID umbrella and conform to the Catholic Church teaching that “God created the world according to his wisdom. It is not the product of any necessity whatever, nor of blind fate or chance” (CCC 295).

For both YEC and OEC, “evolution” is the biblical “after-its-kind” propagation of life created by God with limited ability for small-scale adaptations to changing environmental conditions. The main distinction is that YEC is based on a literal seven-day creation, whereas OEC holds to a creation process over a much longer period of time. 

According to TE, a subcategory of OEC, the complexity and diversity of life are the results of a single creative act followed by Darwinian processes that are guided, or front-loaded, by God. 

Over seventy years ago, Pope Pius XII gave a nod to this proposition when, in Humani Generis, he acknowledged that although ensoulment comes directly and instantly from God, the human body might come from “pre-existent and living matter.” 

In TE, God can be either “interventionist” or “noninterventionist.” As the former, He creates the universe and the laws governing it (including evolution), tweaking it along the way to accomplish His purposes. As the latter, He withdraws from His handiwork, allowing evolution free rein. 

The noninterventionist Creator finds appeal in those who believe that Darwin redeems God by transferring the blame for “bad designs” and even the existence of evil to an unconscious evolutionary process. But as both Scripture and Church Tradition make plain, evil is not an artifact of poor craftsmanship or selfish genes but poor choices. Which means that the culpability for this sin-warped world falls squarely on us. 

As we approach the opening book of the Bible, we would do well to ask, “What is God trying to tell me here?” Is He trying to give me a scientific explanation for how and when the universe was formed? Or is He communicating the truth that “all that is” exists because He spoke it into being, ex nihilo? 

The big takeaway from Genesis is that the magnificent works of creation are not the products of some stepwise, glacial process of nature and necessity but of an unsparing outpouring of divine love and intent. As Pope Benedict XVI explained, “We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary.” 

Over twenty years ago, British historian Paul Johnson observed, “[T]he Darwinian brand of evolution is becoming increasingly vulnerable as the progress of science reveals its weaknesses.” If current public attitudes are any indication, no empirical finding, educational promotion, or scientific framing over the intervening time has made it any less so.