Was This the Greatest Trial on Earth? Part Two

DR. CRAIG: I'm intrigued by your comment in the article^[1], Josh, that it was almost a historical accident that evolution and modernism became bundled together and fundamentalism with anti-evolution. Can you unpack that further?

DR. SWAMIDASS: The reason why, and it makes sense when you look at the history how it happened but it didn't have to happen that way, and I think the key individuals I point to is B.B. Warfield and also James Orr. B. B. Warfield is at Princeton. He's the one arguing against Briggs. He's kind of the father of fundamentalism. He writes about evolution, and he's open to it. He's tentatively open, and of course they didn't have the evidence behind it that we have today. He has really no problem at all with God using evolution to create over long periods of time to create animal and plant life. The one place where he has reservations – it's like a pause – when it comes to human evolution and particularly the narratives about Adam and Eve. He doesn't know how to make sense of that, but he thinks there's got to be some way, and he wants to see that resolved first. But he's open to it. Then the other person is James Orr. James Orr is a famous Scottish theologian who wrote, I think, more of the fundamentalist essays than anyone else. There's The Fundamentals – they started out as pamphlets. There's around, I think, around 80 of these essays that are published eventually in 1915 by Biola University. They're called The Fundamentals. They're kind of the foundational documents of the fundamentalist movement. And there's James Orr there, and he writes an article that deals with origins and what matters there. Now, of course, there is an anonymous anti-evolution article in The Fundamentals, too, but there's James Orr who's far more important and he talks about evolution. He takes a view that's very, very similar to B. B. Warfields’. He just sees zero theological problems with an ancient Earth, with God using evolution to create life – animal life and plant life. But the question that he has – a place where he wants to press into it, and he doesn't want to swallow evolution whole – is when it comes to historical Adam and Eve because of what it seems that Scripture is saying about that. They're not the first  . . . They are, I'd say, really a key place as leaders of the fundamentalist movement, and that's where the direction really could have gone if not for Bryan and the trial. Bryan and the trial really changes it, and makes it something where now this really becomes the sixth fundamental. It is not merely affirming a historical Adam, it becomes rejecting evolution.

KEVIN HARRIS: Josh, back to your article for a moment, quote,

On paper, the Scopes Trial was a victory for Bible-believing Christians. But it also marked the beginning of Christian cultural isolationism—which eventually cost us our voice of influence in contributing to moral and ethical discourse in the public square.

You're pointing out as conservative Christians were either expelled from or left institutions they formed their own institutions and became more isolated. When do you think this started to turn around?

DR. SWAMIDASS: Let's start talking about what actually happened first with that, and then how maybe it's turned around because it has turned around actually. I would say in a great deal in my generation actually. But that clash between Darrow and Bryan on the stand, it's hard to overestimate the influence that had historically. It became somewhat of a Rorschach Test for who you are. It tells how you responded to it. Christians that were these fundamentalists, these people that frankly I would identify at that time because I'm going to go with the side that affirms the resurrection of Jesus, right? We would look at that and we would say, wow, Bryan was our champion there. He was faithful in this public sphere, really declaring the Gospel in this way. He became a martyr. He actually ends up literally dying a week after the trial, kind of cementing this as such an epic moment where this is his real last public act in an important way of really standing for a faithful Christianity. What Darrow succeeded in doing though for a separate set of observers is cementing fundamentalism as backwards, incoherent, not thoughtful, an idiotic approach to the world that doesn't make sense with itself and isn't really in touch with science or anything that matters. He really wanted to humiliate Bryan on the stand. Now, Bryan stood strong and wasn't humiliated, but a lot of people walked away with Darrow's narrative of it, and it gets cemented in things like Inherit the Wind. This goes deeper because what happens is in reaction to that cultural split, Christians at that time that were faithful followers of Jesus, most of them really withdrew or were kicked out of every major institution. This happened at Princeton Seminary in the 1930s. It happened in just about . . . at that time, before this, there were faithful Christians at every major academic institution that were openly Christian. There were divinity schools attached to places like Harvard and all these other places. But that changes really in the coming decades, and they all become taken over by a modernist and then purely secular and even atheist approach. Fundamentalists end up starting our own institutions. That's close to when . . . Biola was already formed, but it's kind of in this moment that things like Bob Jones University get formed. All these other institutions that are in parallel essentially to these secular institutions start to form, and they just get fed up of being treated that way and kind of form their own separate institutions. It really ends up isolating, and you really end up having these two worlds – the Christian world and then kind of like the secular, public world at large where there are Christians but just because someone says they're a Christian there doesn't mean that they're going to affirm these really fundamental beliefs that we think are important. Now, how did that change, you asked? Well, it took a long time because that's the problem, I think, with when we kind of delegate our thinking and our approach to these cultural issues to big high-profile political clashes. They don't always get worked out in the best way, and they have a huge political impact, a huge institutional impact that lasts for decades, and we get stuck with the conclusions of those in ways that really can be deeply harmful. What happens, I think, is this slow movement that God really did to really restore it through the work of scholars, including you, Bill Craig, I think, in important ways of kind of really trying to not just do pastoral work, but actually engage with the best science that's out there, do solid academic work out there. That was the generation before me in important ways, right? But then in the '90s and in the early 2000s there was, I would say, this change that happened in a large number of campus ministries and also ministries like the Harvey Fellowship by the Mustard Seed Foundation is another really key one, though they're certainly not the full story. Also the Veritas Forums, though they are not the full story, where they started to very intentionally cultivate this view among Christians that – you know what? – you can be a faithful follower of Jesus in academia, and not only that, God might be calling you there. I was one of those Christians that got that call to go to secular academia and be a faithful Christian there. And all of my training was in secular institutions. But God really called me in this way that I deeply felt to be a faithful follower of Jesus there in a very missional sense. And that happened, and something has really revived there to now we're 30 years downstream of when I was an undergraduate. I think it's fair to say that there are really hundreds of public Christians in secular academia now in really every field from the sciences to the humanities and law and medicine. In terms of non-public Christians that are faithful there, maybe even thinking about joining the public conversation, I don't think there's good estimates but I wouldn't be surprised if it was thousands. And that's something that just did not exist when you were in undergrad, Bill. Right?

DR. CRAIG: Yeah. I think that although we don't have time to talk about it, we want to give credit to those early pioneers in the late 40s and 50s. People like Carl F. H. Henry, Harold Ockenga, Harold Lindsell, Billy Graham — who broke this cultural isolationism and began to re-engage with the academy. We're standing on their shoulders today.

DR. SWAMIDASS: True. Yeah. I would also add Bernard Ramm to that, too.

DR. CRAIG: Yes. Bernard Ramm.

DR. SWAMIDASS: So when we talk about evangelical now, it really ends up being this mediating place between fundamentalism of the past and kind of the modernists. We're trying to kind of re-synthesize a middle ground that doesn't abandon these institutions of higher learning, recognizes that there's some at least bounded legitimacy to science, and there might be ways to engage with things like evolution or the Big Bang in ways that are productive. We don't want to swallow that whole like the modernist did, but we also don't want to isolate from and just take a hard no-pass on it as happened with the fundamentalists as a result.

DR. CRAIG: Yeah. In my field, the, I think, turning point came around 1967 when Alvin Plantinga published his book God and Other Minds. Plantinga was just a philosophy teacher at a little Christian college in Michigan – Calvin College. And yet it became evident to everyone that here was a man who was writing with the same caliber and on the same field with the best secular philosophers. In Plantinga’s train has followed a renaissance of Christian philosophy that is ongoing today. This has really transformed the face of the discipline that I'm involved in and that I'm so grateful to be a part of. It's wonderful to be alive and working in this discipline today as opposed to back during those dark days of the 1930s and 40s and 50s.

DR. SWAMIDASS: I think you guys as philosophers, because of Plantinga, are much farther ahead than really any other field. I think we're kind of really at the cusp of that in many fields now. It's far bigger than just philosophy now, but we're just a lot farther behind. But I think that's a great way to tell the story, too. I just want to emphasize one point. This is in many ways been very accidental. It is kind of going against what the cultural forces set in play 100 years ago. It's really a movement. It has been several things in several places in several institutions where people are just recognizing that God actually has not abandoned the university. He has a place and a role for us here.

DR. CRAIG: Yes.

DR. SWAMIDASS: And giving us these counterintuitive calls. At least for me, it didn't make sense to me. And I even look at your career, Bill, it doesn't make sense. It’s not like there were a lot of people doing what you've done, but somehow God put that in your mind to do and he made it possible in a way that has just been happening with a large number of people.

DR. CRAIG: In your article, Josh, you write, and I quote,

In the years since the Scopes Trial, anti-evolutionism became tightly linked, or “bundled,” with orthodox Christianity in the American church. That is, until the evangelical movement began disentangling questions of science from the essential gospel truths to allow for more thoughtful and faithful engagement with both.

How are they becoming disentangled? Do you think that the influence of Young Earth Creationist ministries is declining now?

DR. SWAMIDASS: The story is a little winding. Actually, most fundamentalists 100 years ago were not Young Earth Creationists. That was kind of like a weird Seventh Day Adventist belief. They were all Old Earth Creationists. There were these famous debates about whether or not to take them as six literal days or day-age within an Old Earth Creationist framework because most fundamentalists actually took them as literal days in a gap theory framework. It includes even Bob Jones Sr., who is just this bastion of Young Earth Creationism now at Bob Jones University. Bob Jones Sr. was a gap theorist. He thought the Earth was old. But it was really in 1960 that Young Earth Creationism really takes off and becomes really dominant in fundamentalism. So that's very recent. So there's a bit of a winding path. It goes from Old Earth Creationism to there. But that's actually also when, in the 1960s, the evangelicals arise with Billy Graham and John Stott in particular. There is this thoughtful re-engagement. And part of the divide was honestly over segregation. The fundamentalists at that time were solidly pro-segregationists, and so all of that stuff was linked together into a political bundle. But the evangelicals are like, "Well, maybe this segregation thing isn't actually what God wants for us. Maybe we should integrate." And that was a key thing that was important actually to Billy Graham, for example.

DR. CRAIG: Yes.

DR. SWAMIDASS: But then also they were saying – are there some better ways to think about evolution? Bernard Ramm had written this book that was important that actually was part of what provoked the Young Earth Creationist resurgence, too, because they were responding to his book. But then John Stott writes about this as well. He has this cautious openness to it. Once again with the caveat of the historical Adam. And, likewise, Derek Kidner who is at Tyndale House writes during this time this very influential commentary on Genesis. He's a theologian, but he makes space for the possibility of evolution, too, with the caveat of a historical Adam and also the special creation of Eve. And so that starts to create the space to start thinking about it. But it wasn't really until when I was in my PhD that there becomes a major public proponent of a faithful evangelical view alongside evolution. And that would be with The Language of God and Francis Collins in 2006 when that book comes out. And that was like a breath of fresh air when I read it because I was like, "Oh, wow. This guy is talking about Jesus rising from the dead, referencing C. S. Lewis. And he certainly believes that Jesus rose from the dead, and he came to faith from being an atheist. And yet he also sees legitimacy with a historical Adam and Eve.” And he quotes C. S. Lewis, and C. S. Lewis deals with this issue too. He can come to terms with evolution with the caveat of a historical fall – referencing a historical Adam and Eve as well. And then Francis Collins in that book – this is before BioLogos kind of takes its very anti-Adam and Eve turn – that book was actually very friendly to the idea as well. So that created kind of like this space for a lot of us to start thinking about this. When BioLogos forms later, it really goes down a more of a neo-Modernist path. It takes a very anti-Adam and Eve approach, and that starts to create lots of problems for evangelicals. That's actually where we fit into the story too, right Bill?

DR. CRAIG: Yes.

DR. SWAMIDASS: That's maybe a story for later in this conversation, but the consistent thing you can kind of see through this entire history is that Christians, when we're thinking slow and carefully (not politically), we can make space for evolution, as long as we can affirm the things we believe Scripture is telling us about Adam and Eve.

DR. CRAIG: Well, Josh, by way of summary, what are some of the lessons that you think we can learn from this controversy surrounding the Scopes trial?

DR. SWAMIDASS: Oh man! Once again, there's a lot to talk about here. I just say that history does matter. We should look at this. It explains a lot of weird features of why things are the way they are now. I'd also say, too, that there's this tendency we have to oversimplify in cultural wars and politics of kind of bundling things together tightly that may or may not be a good fit. We need to be very cautious about that. I don't presume to have any control over what happens in the public political discourse. We, as Christians, should not be looking to that as our guide. We need to have space for more nuanced conversation that's more thoughtful, that recognizes shades of gray and makes finer distinctions and really doesn't let that discourse define the things that we're going to say are important to us as we think theologically and also in the church. I think that's really important. And I think finally, I'd say, too, that the one thing at a meta-level that's very similar about that time 100 years ago and now is that faithful Christians, or evangelical Christians as you might call them, are really in the middle of a massive theological identity crisis. That was true back then. That's true now to the point that many evangelicals aren't even sure if they want to call themselves evangelicals as Americans, and we're not really sure what to do with all these new theological challenges and who we are. We've forgotten our history, too, which makes it worse. We are at a really critical moment. This is the sort of moment where new bundles form and can have an impact for a very long time for generations to come, even maybe the next century. We need to think carefully about how we steward our voice, how we think about this, and what sorts of bundles we are going to really allow to come into place to hope that we actually do things that are going to really support the Gospel and make the Gospel more clear in our generation and the generations to come, too, and not bind it to things that are really not essential.

KEVIN HARRIS: Gentlemen, as we wrap up today, it's always been pretty evident that Adam and Eve have always been lightning rods for these controversies. It was then; it is now. Both of you have written and published on this. How has your work contributed to this long conversation? Let's hear from both of you as we wrap up.

DR. SWAMIDASS: I'd like to hear from Bill first on that question.

DR. CRAIG: OK. I needed to study the historical Adam and Eve in preparation for my volume on the doctrine of man in my Systematic Philosophical Theology. And so I tried to bracket what modern science tells us about human origins and to just look at the narratives of Genesis and the teaching of the New Testament. And I became convinced that the Bible does commit us to the historicity of this founding pair of the human race. But it seemed to me that the narratives of the primeval history of Genesis are describing real events and real people but in the figurative and metaphorical language of myth, and therefore should not be read literalistically. In particular, I don't think that they commit us to saying that Adam and Eve lived just a few tens of thousands of years ago. In my book, In Quest of the Historical Adam, I defend the historicity of a founding pair of the human race but I place them very deep in the primordial past, somewhere around 750,000 or more years ago where they are the universal progenitors of Neanderthals, Denisovans and Homo sapiens – all of the human beings that have lived on this planet.

DR. SWAMIDASS: What I would say as to why our two books are really important in this long conversation is that if you look at this long conversation the basic assumption that everyone has had is that science and particularly evolution seriously challenges our beliefs about Adam and Eve to the point that we probably have to abandon them if we're going to agree with what science is telling us. Even among the people who were trying to make space for evolution as faithful Christians, this is what their struggle was because they couldn't figure out how to fully make sense of it. I think, Bill, where our work is really critical is I think it might really be putting a twist in the story and putting that to rest in saying that actually there's quite a large range of ways that this is entirely consistent with evolution to think about an orthodox, faithful way of reading it – Genesis and a historical Adam and Eve. I mean, you might read it more literalistically, you might read it more mythologically, but this idea of there being a historical fall has really no tension and conflict with science. Maybe that was a fundamental misturn in the conversation to begin with. And so I think that's what has really collapsed the difficulty and the conflict in this conversation now where even Young Earth Creationists are often acknowledging that there are faithful ways to affirm evolution even if they don't think that's what actually happened because they're looking at work like ours and recognizing, “OK, that is actually being accepted as good science, and it's actually ticking off all of the really critical things that we really need to see theologically.”

DR. CRAIG: Josh, thank you so much for being on our podcast today. Your work has been tremendously stimulating, not only to me, but to the Christian church in general, and we're so grateful for what you're doing and your willingness to have this conversation with us today.

DR. SWAMIDASS: Thank you for having me.

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