Did Darwin Kill God Page #3

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with what is now thought to have been cholera,

and shortly before she passed away,

was brought here,

to the Spa Town of Malvern.

Nick Spencer has been finding out

about how her death affected Darwin.

She died of a fever, which lasted

for about two weeks or so.

Darwin was with her for the

second week. He rushed from Downe,

where he was with Emma,

his wife, who was pregnant.

He wrote to her, saying, "You

wouldn't recognise our daughter. "

"She's wasting away, couldn't take food, pinched features

- she's not the girl we knew. "

What impact did her

death have on Darwin's faith?

It's the thing that wields the knife.

It's fair to say, by the time of her death,

he's definitely a believer in God, a theist

- that has a Christian flavour.

But the suffering he sees in Annie's death

and the sense of injustice and futility

is the thing that really

finishes his Christian faith.

Her death shows that, whilst we must

remember Darwin the scientist,

we must remember Darwin the father.

Suffering in the world is a constant

challenge to people of faith.

The arrival of the evolution made

this no harder, or easier, to bear.

The Origin of Species is not the great

atheistic treatise it is often claimed to be.

When it was published,

eight years after Annie's death,

Darwin talked about the impossibility

of this wonderful universe

being conceived by blind chance,

believing that there must be

an intelligent mind behind it all.

He presented his work

as beginning and ending with God.

Near the end of his life,

he declared, "It seems to me absurd

"to doubt that a man may be an

ardent theist and an evolutionist. "

In this light, it's unfair to proclaim

Darwin as the father of modern atheism.

Britain was actually more religious at the end

of the 19th century than it was in the 1830s.

Within 20 years of Darwin publishing his

theory, it was generally accepted in England.

Darwin had not killed God,

so why today, do we think

they are at loggerheads?

Well, the war had not yet begun,

and would not start

for another 60 years.

The first big battle in the war

between evolution and Christianity

took place where

the front line remains today,

the American Bible Belt.

AMERICAN COUNTRY STYLE MUSIC

What's surprising is it had little

to do with science and religion,

and everything to do

with politics and morality.

Until the early 1920s, the common view

in America was the same as in Britain.

The theory of evolution had

been accepted - in the media,

and in educated society at least.

So when, 60 years

after Darwin published his theory,

America was hit by a huge

anti-evolutionary crusade,

everyone was somewhat taken aback.

And it all started here,

in Dayton, Tennessee.

On a hot day in July 1925,

this courthouse became a

battleground between liberals

fighting for the freedom of ideas, and

Christians defending their sacred Bible.

Touching the country's psyche, the Scopes

trial was a defining moment in American history.

Fundamentalist Christianity was

on the rise in the American South,

and a group in Tennessee

had passed a law banning the teaching

of the theory of evolution in schools.

'A young instructor, John Scopes,

disobeyed the law and stood trial.

'The whole world looked

on in amazement as the Bible

'went into court against

the theories of Darwin. '

Leading the prosecution against Darwin

- William Jennings Bryan. GAVEL BANGS

'William Jennings Bryan cried,

'"I am more interested in the rock

of ages than in the age of rocks. "'

Bryan was part of the growing right-wing

fundamentalist Christian movement,

but what is less well-know, is that

he was also a devoted socialist.

He hated social Darwinism, a new

ideology used by right-wing politicians

to justify the stronger members

in society crowding out the weak.

He saw the embracing of the survival

of the fittest everywhere

and he also thought that Americans were losing

their Christian morality because of Darwinism.

Bryan was a left-wing politician

with right-wing religious views.

These elements came together

in his condemnation of Darwinism.

Opposing the fundamentalists

stood Clarence Darrow,

the defender of Scopes,

and the theory of evolution.

'Clarence Darrow,

'battling as always for freedom said,

'"If today you can make it a crime

to teach evolution in schools,

'"tomorrow,

you may ban books and newspapers. "'

Darrow despised the power that religious

figures wielded in American law and education,

and branded religion as the cause of

much of what was wrong in the world.

Darrow did not stop there.

He thought that rational science

and a theory of evolution

was a better basis for morality

than Christianity.

That's a morality based on survival of the fittest

- the strong triumph over the weak.

If that's how evolution was to be taught, no

wonder the Christians of Dayton were nervous!

Neither side made any attempt

to see whether or not

evolution was at odds with Christianity,

both assuming the two were incompatible.

And that would set an adversarial tone which

would cloud the debate in the years to come.

John Scopes was found guilty of teaching

evolution and lost the court case.

But the real conclusion of the day

was that Darwinism and God

were now, indeed, at war.

The trial made the conflict between

evolution and Christianity nationwide,

and spread the idea evolution and freedom

of expression were locked in a battle

against the restrictive dogma of religion, creating

the impression if you believed in evolution,

you had to give up your

Christian faith and moral code.

It left no room for a Christian

to believe in evolution.

Looking back at the trial today,

it's intriguing to find

the creationism of the time

was not the creationism of today.

It was actually

rather more sophisticated.

Prosecutor William Jennings Bryan

did not take the Genesis account

of the world's creation

in six days at face value.

On the contrary. For him, each of the six days

in the Bible were vast geological periods of time.

The staunch opponent of evolution did not

believe the world was created in six literal days.

What Bryan practised was Old Earth

creationism,

which accepted that

the earth was millions of years old.

The creationism that is at odds with

evolution today did not exist in the 1920s.

It would not arrive

for another 40 years.

# God said to Abraham kill me a son

# Abe said, man,

you must be puttin' me on

# God said no... #

For 2000 years, Christianity had looked

beyond a literal reading of the Bible,

but the biggest break from

this tradition took place in 1961.

# Well, Abe said where do

you want this killing done?

# God said out on highway 61... #

By the 1960s,

America had changed radically -

and for fundamentalist Christians,

for the worse.

Sex outside of marriage,

experimentation with drugs,

openness towards abortion and divorce

- these were seen as symptoms

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