Stump: Welcome to Language of God. I’m Jim Stump. I’m here with a bit of a history reflection, with the help of a couple of others. This month marks one hundred years since a remarkable convergence in the dialogue between science and faith. In the year 1925, on different continents, two very different dramas were unfolding. One of them, you’ve likely heard about—the Scopes “Monkey” Trial in Dayton, Tennessee. The other might be new or at least unfamiliar to you—the quiet censure of a Jesuit priest, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, by Catholic authorities in France. On their surface, these events were very different: one was a noisy public courtroom showdown in the American South, the other a hushed ecclesiastical reprimand in Paris. But they were both conflicts about the same thing: What do we do when new scientific ideas confront traditional beliefs? In both cases, 1925 saw Christians wrestling with evolution—Protestant Christians in America and Catholic Christians in Europe—and at least some of those Christians came to very different conclusions. So today I want to reflect on those two moments from a century ago. Not just to recount the history (though we’ll do a bit of that), but to see what they might teach us now about how we approach scripture, how we regard scientific expertise, and how we might find a better way to navigate the tricky territory where faith and science meet. First, let’s set the stage for the Scopes Trial. Kellogg Ray: The Scopes Trial was 100 years ago, in July of 1925 and Tennessee was the first state in the union to pass a law that banned evolution. And so the Scopes Trial was basically a setup from the get go. Stump: This is Janet Kellogg Ray. She’s done some deep research into the Scopes Trial which resulted in her book, The God of Monkey Science, which we talked about on this podcast back in 2023. We connected again to talk a little about the centennial of the trial. Kellogg Ray: So like I said, it was in Dayton, Tennessee, and it was crowded. The courtroom quickly became crowded, and it was summer, and of course, there was no air conditioning, so they moved the trial outdoors. And this—I would have loved to time travel to see this, because the whole atmosphere became far more fair ground than the hallowed ground of a courtroom. So there were vendors selling sodas and hot dogs and souvenirs. Little girls were walking around with monkey dolls. And you know, I love this photo of a chimp that was dressed in a suit drinking a Coca Cola in the local drugstore. So they really played up the monkey theme. Stump: But there was still a trial. Kellogg Ray: The trial was about trying a high school teacher named John Scopes who was accused of violating Tennessee's Butler act. Stump: The Butler act made it illegal to teach “any theory that denies the divine creation of man as taught in the Bible”. And Scopes—whether by chance or design—had taught from a chapter on Darwinian evolution in the state-approved textbook. That led to his being charged, and the stage was set for a showdown between fundamentalist and modernist viewpoints, between biblical literalism and the scientific account of human origins. The choice of attorneys guaranteed it would be a show. Kellogg Ray: So the prosecuting attorney was William Jennings Bryan, and he was a multiple time presidential candidate. Never won. He was a larger than life hero, especially to many rural Christians. You know, I like to think that if he was alive today, he would have his very own and very popular Prime Time cable news talk show. Stump: Bryan was a “man of the people” and genuinely believed Darwin’s theory was a grave threat to faith, to the moral fabric of society, and even to democracy. He travelled around speaking to groups and stoking fear of the coming Social Darwinism, eugenics, and a loss of biblical authority. His arguments didn’t really engage the science. Kellogg Ray: Bryan's arguments were all about cultural issues. Brian argued that evolution undermined religious faith. He argued that it undermined religious practice and it undermined morality. Brian is famous for saying, “if we tell students they are nothing but apes, we shouldn't be surprised if children and adults act like animals.” Stump: On the defense side was Clarence Darrow, a famous trial attorney and agnostic, known for defending unpopular causes in the name of upholding the rule of law. But Darrow saw the anti-evolution law as an assault on intellectual freedom and scientific truth. He was determined to humiliate the fundamentalist stance as anti-scientific. The trial ran for about eleven days in that hot July of 1925. Darrow’s strategy was to turn it into a debate about science and the Bible. He brought expert witnesses—professors who could testify to the evidence for evolution—but the judge ruled most of that testimony irrelevant (since the law itself wasn’t on trial, just Scopes was). So in a dramatic and unprecedented twist, Darrow called Bryan himself to the stand as an “expert witness” on the Bible. Bryan didn’t have to agree to this — he was the prosecuting attorney, afterall. But he cheerfully did, and what followed was one of the most famous cross-examinations in American legal history. Darrow grilled Bryan on the literal truth of the Bible: Was there really a fish that swallowed Jonah and then spit him out after three days? Could Joshua really make the sun stand still in the sky? Bryan was unflustered and the two traded barbs that had nothing to do with the legal case before them. The other prosecuting attorney asked for it to be stopped, but Bryan said, “they did not come here to try this case. They came here to try revealed religion. I am here to defend it and they can ask me any question they please.” When Darrow came to the age of the earth and whether the earth was created in six 24-hour days, Bryan admitted that maybe the “days” in Genesis weren’t 24-hour days after all—that they might have been longer periods. He didn’t think it was important and said God could make the earth in six days or six years or six million years. All this made for great theatre, but had no effect on the outcome of the trial. Kellogg Ray: Scopes, the high school teacher, John Scopes, was easily convicted, and it didn't take long. I think it might have, you know, I think it was just a matter of minutes. It was not ever intended to be a trial that could be won. Stump: Scopes was fined $100 (which Bryan actually offered to pay for him). The trial ended without a definitive legal resolution of the big issues—in fact, the conviction was later overturned on a technicality by the state supreme court. But on the cultural level, the Scopes Trial marked a turning point. It was seen as a humiliation for American fundamentalism in the national press. H. L. Mencken, the famous journalist covering the trial, skewered the anti-evolution crowd as backward yokels. Bryan himself died just five days after the trial, exhausted and possibly broken-hearted. Many historians note that after 1925, conservative Christians began to retreat from the mainstream public square. The term “fundamentalist” itself, which once simply meant a defender of The Fundamentals of the faith, took on a more negative connotation of anti-intellectualism. Church historians sometimes pinpoint the Scopes Trial as a watershed moment for American Christianity: the big northern Protestant denominations started declining, while more separatist, fundamentalist churches and Bible colleges grew in their own parallel culture. In other words, a lot of those Christians who felt burned by the Scopes Trial didn’t disappear—they just withdrew into their own subculture where evolution could be ignored and the Bible’s authority protected. That’s the subculture I was born into. Now, hold that thought for a moment and shift your attention across the Atlantic, to France in 1925. There was no circus-like trial going on there; in fact, few people at the time even knew what happened. But in retrospect, it was just as significant for the conversation on science and faith. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French Jesuit priest, was 44 years old in 1925. He wasn’t on trial in a civil court, but he was under scrutiny by his religious superiors. Teilhard was a remarkable figure: Haught: I like to say, first of all, he was a scientist. He was a great geologist, a paleontologist, and therefore an evolutionist. And he was also, it's the point of interest, a Jesuit Catholic priest. And he was one of the most important geologists of the Asian continent from the period of the 20s into the early 40s. Stump: That’s John Haught, a theologian at Georgetown University who has specialized in science and religion, and has written extensively about Teilhard. Teilhard was a theologian and priest by vocation, and by all accounts a man of deep spirituality. But he was also professionally trained as a geologist. Haught: Since the time he was a kid, he loved rocks, and so it was kind of natural that he would want to study geology. He was always looking for something solid to put his life on and as well as his spirituality on and the rock or pieces of iron symbolized for him the solidity that he was looking for in his spirituality. Stump: Trying to reconcile his faith with the science of evolution could have caused some instability, but he fully embraced it as truth and wanted to see what that meant for Christian theology. Teilhard was excited by evolution. He saw in it not a threat to faith, but a new illumination of how God might be at work in creation. Over the 1920s he was writing essays and giving lectures exploring big ideas: that the universe is evolving toward an ultimate point of unity he called the “Omega Point” (which for him was identified with Christ), that matter and spirit are two sides of the same cosmic evolution, and that original sin—the doctrine of humanity’s fall—might need to be reinterpreted in light of our evolutionary origins. It was heady, creative stuff—the kind of theological imagination that could thrill some people and deeply worry others. And in the Catholic Church of that era, plenty of people were worried. Haught: When he talked about this with his fellow Jesuits, most of whom were not scientists, he caused somewhat of a stir. Stump: Just a couple decades earlier, the Church had gone through a crackdown on what it called “Modernism”—a movement among some Catholic theologians to update and liberalize doctrine. Pope Pius X in 1907 had effectively squashed overt Modernism, and by 1925 the Vatican was decidedly cautious about maverick ideas, especially anything touching on the origins of humanity. So it came to pass that in the spring of 1925, Teilhard de Chardin was quietly summoned by his Jesuit superiors. They had caught wind of some of his writings on original sin and evolution. Haught: Some of his superiors got hold of them and read them and got very alarmed and thought this stuff was just too adventurous for the time. Stump: In these writings, Teilhard apparently questioned the traditional idea that all humans descended from a single Adam and Eve and fell from grace in one moment. This was (and according to some, still is) a cornerstone of Catholic doctrine—it’s tied to the theology of the Fall and the need for Christ’s redemption. Teilhard wasn’t denying the need for redemption, but he was speculating in ways that made the authorities nervous. The Superior General of the Jesuits, Włodzimierz Ledóchowski, ordered Teilhard to stop teaching in Paris and to sign a statement retracting or qualifying his more controversial ideas. Essentially, he was told: you can keep doing science, but don’t publish these new theological ideas, at least not without approval. And as a loyal Jesuit, Teilhard obeyed—albeit with a heavy heart—and signed a document to that effect on July 1, 1925, and the superior general Ledóchowski acknowledged this with a letter sent back to Teilhard on July 21, 1925—the exact same day the Scopes Trial concluded in Tennessee. Learning more of Teilhard’s story has caused me to reflect on my own. There are some striking similarities for those of you who know something of my own situation. I too was part of a religious community that feared evolution would undermine what they believed was true, and like Teilhard I was given the ultimatum of no longer publishing work related to evolution, or else I’d have to leave the community. But there the comparison ends, because I did leave, while Teilhard chose to submit. I’ve wondered how things might have gone differently in our communities if those decisions had been reversed. But I think it worked out OK for me, I’ve had a very fulfilling career at BioLogos since then. And there is some sense in which it worked out OK for Teilhard — or at least we can affirm that God works all things together for good. By 1926, Teilhard de Chardin was effectively in exile. He was sent off to China on paleontological expeditions—mostly to get him out of the limelight in Europe. Haught: Which is not the place you like to send people who dig up old bones and rocks, because while he was there, he became one of the top two or three geologists of the Asian continent. Stump: He spent most of the next 20 years in China, participating in some incredible scientific work, including being part of the team who discovered and described Peking Man, a very important Homo erectus fossil. But all the while he was writing down his visionary ideas in private. His major works, like The Phenomenon of Man, wouldn’t see publication until after his death because the Jesuit order and the Catholic censors wouldn’t allow him to publish what they deemed to be speculative theology. In short, Teilhard was silenced—gently but firmly. Haught: Disappointment, misunderstanding and exile are the punishments that he received. And it was punishment because he did not want to spend his whole life in China. Stump: It was the first in a series of ecclesiastical censures for him: even after he returned to Europe, the Vatican would later issue formal warnings about his writings — as late as 1962, seven years after his death, the Holy Office cautioned against his works. He died in 1955, on Easter Sunday, in New York City—with relatively few people knowing what he had been working on. Only later would his writings explode into public view and gain a wide readership. So, in 1925 we have these two snapshots: Scopes in Tennessee, representing American Protestant biblical literalism bristling against evolutionary science; and Teilhard in France, representing a Catholic theological innovator being stifled by his Church for trying to integrate evolutionary science with faith. They were very different events in tone and publicity—one broadcast to the world, one behind closed doors—yet they were parallel in time and subject. Two big Christian traditions—Protestant and Catholic—each facing the question of evolution, and each in their own way essentially saying, “Careful now, this new science might be dangerous to our faith.” It’s fascinating to compare what exactly each side was afraid of. For the mostly Protestant folks behind the Scopes Trial (people like William Jennings Bryan and the lawmakers in Tennessee), the fear was that teaching evolution would undermine the authority of Scripture and the faith of the next generation. Kellogg Ray: So Bryan's entire argument in a trial about science was that evolution would be—it's not that evolution was incorrect, but that evolution would be the downfall of culture. Stump: The Bible—particularly the early chapters of Genesis—was being treated as a science textbook of origins. If evolution was true, that meant the Bible must be false. For Bryan and company, it seemed intolerable to allow that thought. They also feared a collapse of morality: Bryan often argued that if you replace the biblical doctrine of humans created in God’s image with humans as accidental products of natural selection, you erode the sanctity of human life. On the Catholic side, interestingly, there wasn’t as much anxiety about the Bible per se. By 1925, the Catholic Church had for a long time allowed non-literal interpretations of Genesis—historically, Catholic scholars like St. Augustine had suggested Genesis might be figurative in some ways. The bigger issue for Catholics was Doctrine and Authority. Haught: It had been a very cozy little picture of the world. And we humans had a special place. There were lines of discontinuity that separated us from the animals and from plants and so forth, and made us also distinct from God. And we lived with that worldview, that cosmic hierarchy that goes back to Aristotle and Plato for centuries. So this was what was at stake, primarily, more than scripture. Stump: Teilhard’s ideas potentially upended theological doctrines like the nature of humans and especially original sin. If humans weren’t all literally descended from one innocent pair who fell, how do we understand the universality of sin and the need for salvation through Christ? That’s a deep theological question. The Church was saying, in effect, “Don’t mess with that doctrine, it’s too important and too delicate to go rethinking, even if you’re excited about evolution.” Another difference was institutional structure. In the Protestant world, there was (and is) no single authority to declare what all Protestants should believe about evolution. Instead, debates played out in local communities, churches, and, in this case, state legislatures and courts. Kellogg Ray: We've tended to isolate ourselves. We have our own universities, our own publishing groups. We have our own, you know, radio shows. And so there is a tendency to want to, in Protestantism, to talk to our own, to speak to our own, to write for our own. And so I think there is that potential to really emphasize this control over even our schools. Stump: Historian Molly Worthen has pointed out that evangelicals didn’t have solid hierarchical institutions to help them navigate new intellectual challenges, unlike Catholics who had mechanisms (however slow) for doctrinal deliberation. Because of that, fundamentalist Protestants often responded to evolution with grassroots activism—passing laws like the Butler Act, holding revival meetings, writing pamphlets, or just forming their own schools that taught creationism. The Scopes Trial itself was essentially a public collision of two cultural forces with no higher arbiter to step in (aside from the courts, which eventually did rule on these issues decades later). The Catholic Church, by contrast, had a very clear hierarchy. In 1925 that hierarchy decisively stepped in to say what was acceptable or not. The advantage of that approach was that it maintained unity—there wasn’t a public schism or spectacle; relatively few Catholics even knew about Teilhard’s censures at the time. The disadvantage was that it suppressed exploration and arguably delayed a healthy reckoning with the science of evolution. Teilhard was proposing a both-and approach—a way to be fully Christian and fully accept evolution—but his superiors feared it might cross into heresy or confuse the faithful. So the Church’s method was institutional caution: essentially, “Better to halt this now and stick to known doctrines until we’re absolutely sure.” And to be fair, the Catholic Church did eventually come around on evolution in a more official way. By the mid-20th century, especially with Pope Pius XII’s encyclical Humani Generis (1950), the Church acknowledged that evolution could be compatible with Christian faith, at least regarding the human body (they still hedged on the soul and the direct creation of human spiritual nature). Later, in 1996, Pope John Paul II famously said that evolution is “more than a hypothesis,” signaling that the science of evolution should be taken seriously by Catholics. Today, many Catholic scholars openly build on Teilhard’s ideas, even if the Vatican never gave him a full rehabilitative stamp of approval. Meanwhile in the Protestant world, what was the legacy of the Scopes Trial? In the immediate aftermath, as I mentioned, a lot of fundamentalist Christians turned inward. Bryan College was founded in Dayton soon after, named after William Jennings Bryan—a college where, unsurprisingly, evolution was not taught for many decades. Anti-evolution laws like Tennessee’s Butler Act actually stayed on the books in some states for a long time (Tennessee only repealed it in 1967!). The conflict did not disappear. If anything, it went into a cold war for a few decades and then re-emerged in different forms: creationism and evolution faced off again in the public schools in the 1960s (with court cases like Epperson v. Arkansas in 1968 striking down anti-evolution laws). Then in the 1970s and 80s there was the rise of so-called “scientific creationism,” trying to get equal time for creationist views in school science classes. That was struck down by courts in the 1980s. And then in the 1990s and 2000s, the fight morphed into the Intelligent Design movement, which was again litigated in the famous Dover trial of 2005. So in a very real sense, the Scopes Trial was just the opening skirmish in a century-long American tussle over science and religious belief in the public square. We still feel its impact today. You could even say we’re still arguing about how to teach evolution in 2025, at least in cultural terms, even if the legal issues are mostly settled. Just look at the ongoing popularity of creation museums and the persistence of young-earth creationist ministries; the battle over how Christians should understand creation isn’t over. Kellogg Ray: What I'm seeing today is that the Scopes decision 100 years later, we're still seeing the fallout of that, and we're still seeing the implication that local and state school boards, as well as state lawmakers, can make decisions about science education based on opinions and perceived impact on culture. Stump: It’s eye-opening to realize how much a 1925 courtroom drama continues to echo in our cultural psyche. As Janet highlighted, the Scopes Trial narrative—this perceived showdown of Science vs. Scripture—left a mark on generations of Christians. In many churches and communities, a reflexive distrust of certain scientific ideas became almost part of the DNA, passed down like a family story: “Remember what happened when those secular scientists tried to tell us we came from monkeys!” Even if many details of the trial faded, the symbol of it fueled a false dichotomy for a long time—the notion that one had to choose between believing the Bible or accepting evolution. And when people feel forced into that choice, a lot of devout folks understandably choose the Bible. What’s been changing, especially in recent decades, is a growing realization that maybe that’s a false choice altogether. It doesn’t have to be either/or. We’ll come back to that thought in a minute, because it ties both of our 1925 stories together. Let’s return again to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and draw out his legacy a bit more, especially for those less familiar with his name. Teilhard spent the late 1920s and 1930s in China doing scientific work. He continued to correspond with friends in Europe about his theological ideas, but he remained obedient to his superiors’ ban on publishing theology. One can only imagine his internal struggle: here was a man brimming with ideas that he felt could revitalize Christian belief in an age of science, yet he had to practice restraint and patience. Haught: His dissertation director Boole said, “why don't you just leave your great geologist and paleontologist. You'll get a job anywhere you'll teach anywhere you want to Sorbonne or whatever.” Teilhard however, was deeply committed to his Catholic faith. He would have felt very estranged if he had left the company of all these people who had shaped his own thought and spirituality. And above all, I think this is important, given him a passion for the truth. The truth is a transcendental value. It's identifiable with God. Stump: Some of his letters from this period show a mix of frustration and faith. He trusted that, in time, truth would win out and the Church might understand what he was trying to say. It wasn’t until after World War II that Teilhard was allowed to return to Europe, and even then, he still couldn’t publish his major works openly. So he died in 1955 with most of his writings still unpublished. But his friends made sure that his work saw the light of day and it created a sensation. Books like The Phenomenon of Man (which lays out his grand vision of evolution as a spiritual process guided toward Christ) and The Divine Milieu (a more devotional work) found a huge audience in the late 1950s and 1960s. Teilhard became something of a hero to many Catholics who were looking for a way to embrace science without letting go of their faith. He also, it must be said, had (and has) critics—both religious and scientific. Some traditional Catholics thought his theology was heterodox or New-Age-y; some scientists thought he was too mystical and not rigorous. But love him or not, Teilhard’s influence in the discussion of science and faith is there, and maybe ought to be stronger. He introduced concepts that have become part of modern Christian thought—like the idea of the “Cosmic Christ” permeating evolution, or the idea that creation is an ongoing process (not a one-and-done event in the past, but something God is still bringing toward completion). It’s interesting to hear how Teilhard’s once-controversial ideas have gained respect in today’s theological landscape—in large part because the world has changed. The Catholic Church that silenced Teilhard in 1925 is not the Catholic Church of 2025. In the span of a century, we’ve seen Vatican II, we’ve seen multiple Popes who are friendly to science, and we’ve seen Catholic thinkers building on Teilhard’s foundations to articulate a theology that fully embraces an evolving universe. It’s a reminder that institutions can learn and change—albeit slowly—and sometimes the seeds planted by a “prophet” or pioneer like Teilhard only bear fruit much later. So, what themes emerge when we hold these two stories side by side? When I reflect on the Scopes Trial and Teilhard de Chardin’s exile together, a few lessons really stand out. 1. The Danger of False Dichotomies. Earlier I mentioned the false choice of science versus faith, and how it took root after the Scopes Trial. Teilhard’s life, by contrast, was a testament to rejecting that dichotomy. He fundamentally saw science and faith in harmony—“both/and” rather than “either/or”. In his view, the natural world unfolding through evolution and the truth of Christ were not in competition, but two facets of the same reality. On the Protestant side, unfortunately, the Scopes era rhetoric was very much “either/or”—either the Bible is true or evolution is. That stark framing did a lot of damage, I think, to people’s ability to wrestle honestly with tough questions. When we treat the relationship between science and religion as a zero-sum game, our understanding of science and our understanding of God both suffer. We end up with bad science, or bad theology, or both. The Scopes Trial, as dramatic and entertaining as it was, kind of locked in the idea of a war between science and faith (the New York Times back then called it “the great duel between science and religion”). Teilhard, on the other hand, saw that “war” metaphor as misguided—a product of narrow thinking. He wrote about breaking down the artificial walls between the sacred and the secular, between the physical and the spiritual. It’s a false dichotomy, he would say, to think we must choose either scientific truth or spiritual truth. Reality is one, truth is one. That’s a lesson we’re still absorbing, but it’s never been more important. 2. Epistemic Humility. That’s a fancy term but it basically means being humble about what we know—or what we think we know—whether in science or theology. Both 1925 episodes illustrate the need for humility. Think about Bryan and the fundamentalists at Scopes: there was a kind of overconfidence that they had all the answers and were obviously interpreting the Bible correctly, and that any challenge to their interpretation must be crushed. There wasn’t much openness to reexamining like “well, maybe Genesis isn’t trying to teach science?” or “maybe we don’t have the full picture.” To be fair, on the flip side, some of the scientists and skeptics were equally arrogant, delighting in how foolish they could make the Bible look, treating all people of faith as backwater rubes. A little humility on both sides could have led to more dialogue and less showdown. In Teilhard’s case, I see both the Jesuit leadership and Teilhard himself practicing humility, in different ways. Teilhard demonstrated personal humility in the face of institutional authority: he didn’t storm off in a huff when censured; he submitted and continued his work patiently. Agree or not with the decisions, that shows some character. The Church authorities in 1925 perhaps could have exercised more intellectual humility—acknowledging that they didn’t yet have all the answers on evolution and original sin, and that maybe this bright priest was onto something worth listening to. Instead, caution won out (understandably, but perhaps at the cost of stifling a fruitful idea). Today, with the benefit of hindsight, the Church has implicitly acknowledged that Teilhard’s instincts weren’t heretical ravings but genuine attempts to grapple with truth. A dose of humility reminds us that we might be wrong, whether we’re interpreting Scripture or scientific data or doctrinal formulas. Especially at these intersections of new knowledge and old belief, we should tread carefully, open to correction. 3. Institutional Caution vs. Prophetic Imagination. I wrestle with this one. Both stories pit an institution trying to preserve something against an individual (or a movement) pushing for change. In Scopes, the “institution” was more cultural—the traditional church folk of the South trying to preserve the old-time religion in schools. In Teilhard’s story, the institution was the formal Church hierarchy defending orthodoxy. In both cases, their caution came from a sincere place: a concern about losing truth or undermining moral order. Sometimes that kind of caution is warranted! Not every new idea is a good one or is true. Institutions have a responsibility to guard the truths and values entrusted to them. But there’s a flip side: institutions can also overreact and cling too tightly to their culturally determined understandings, even when change is needed. Bryan and the anti-evolution crusaders thought they were protecting faith, but in the long run their refusal to engage with science arguably weakened the credibility of the church in many educated people’s eyes. The Catholic magisterium thought it was preventing error, but it might have also slowed Catholic theology’s ability to speak to a scientific age. Meanwhile, the more prophetic voices—whether that’s Darrow in his own way at Scopes, or Teilhard in the Catholic sphere—were trying to enlarge the conversation. Darrow wanted society to trust science education; Teilhard wanted his Church to embrace a bigger cosmic vision of Christ. In hindsight, each had a point that was worth hearing. There’s a balance here: change for change’s sake isn’t the goal, but neither is preservation for preservation’s sake. The challenge is discerning when to hold fast and when to risk something new. For us today, that might mean our churches and institutions should neither reflexively reject new scientific findings nor uncritically accept every trendy idea, but approach these things with both caution and openness. A kind of faithful flexibility, if you will. 4. Finally, reflecting on these centenaries makes me appreciate how far we’ve come—and how far we still have to go. In 1925, the discourse was often science versus religion. In 2025, I like to think we have more people and resources pointing to science and religion in harmony. Organizations like BioLogos (shameless plug!), or the many scholars—Protestant, Catholic, and others—who have built on both Bryan’s concerns and Teilhard’s vision to say: We don’t have to pick sides. You can love God and accept evolution. You can affirm both the inspiration of Scripture and the insights of genetics and paleontology. In fact, if God is the author of all truth, then honest scientific discovery should ultimately enhance our understanding of the Creator. That’s a theme Teilhard would absolutely endorse. And I suspect even Bryan, if he could have seen a way for evolution not to destroy his core convictions, might have come around—remember, he wasn’t anti-science across the board; he was grappling with how to uphold human dignity and morality. The task for Christians in the aftermath of these events has been to show that our dignity and morality can be grounded in an evolutionary view of life—that evolution doesn’t have to mean we are “just advanced monkeys” or that life is purposeless. Teilhard’s whole project was to show purpose in evolution, to see divine purpose drawing creation upward. 100 years later, we’re still learning that lesson. There are new frontiers now—genetics, artificial intelligence, transhumanism, climate science—where these questions of science and faith continue to intersect. And as they do, the ghosts of 1925 are still kind of with us. We can repeat the patterns of the Scopes Trial—turning it into a clash of absolutes and shouting matches (or legal battles)—or we can seek the path that Teilhard symbolized—the patient, imaginative work of integration, even if it’s initially met with skepticism by the establishment. My hope is that the next time a major scientific development comes along that challenges our theological comfort zones, we remember these two stories. We remember to avoid the easy-out of a false dichotomy, to practice humility in the face of the unknown, and to maybe listen to the prophets in our midst who are trying to expand our horizons rather than reflexively silencing them. As we wrap up, I find myself grateful for both the cautionary tale of the Scopes Trial and the inspirational tale of Teilhard de Chardin. From Dayton, 1925, we learn how not to handle a science-faith conflict—turning it into a public brawl where each side digs in and caricatures the other. From Paris, 1925, we learn a more nuanced lesson: that even within a faith community, new understanding can be suppressed for a time, but truth has a way of resurfacing. Teilhard’s ideas, once buried, ended up inspiring people he never lived to meet. There’s a line often attributed to him: “Truth has nothing to fear from time.” Indeed, it might take a long time—a hundred years, maybe more—but truth and goodness have a way of emerging, even if through winding paths. So, here’s to a hundred years of hindsight. May we have the wisdom to do better in our time. May we carry forward the best of our traditions—the reverence for God’s Word that our fundamentalist forebears held, and the zeal for God’s world that Teilhard de Chardin embodied—without falling into the traps of fear and false choice. The conversation between science and faith continues, and we’re participants in it. Let’s approach it with courage, curiosity, and humility. Thanks for listening to this reflection on Language of God. And special thanks to our guests, Janet Kellogg Ray and John Haught, for adding their wisdom to this episode. As always, you can find more resources on today’s topic at the BioLogos website. Credits Language of God is produced by BioLogos. BioLogos is supported by individual donors and listeners like you. If you’d like to help keep this conversation going on the podcast and elsewhere you can find ways to contribute at biologos.org. You’ll find lots of other great resources on science and faith there as well. Language of God is produced and mixed by Colin Hoogerwerf. That’s me. Our theme song is by Breakmaster Cylinder. BioLogos offices are located in Grand Rapids, Michigan in the Grand River watershed. Thanks for listening.