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Summary
Summary
This rhetorical study of the various language strategies and competing worldviews involved in the 140-year argument between Biblical creationists and Darwinian evolutionists focuses on the 1860 Huxley/Wilberforce debate, the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial, and the 1981 Arkansas Creation-Science Trial.When Darwin published his Origins of Species in 1859, he initiated a debate about the origin of human life and the role of God in human affairs scarcely equalled in world history. Smout traces the response of Biblical creationists to Darwinian evolutionists. Looking carefully at the stories told and the tactics used by both sides, he analyzes all available accounts of the original debate culminating in the 1860 Huxley/Wilberforce debate, the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial, and the 1981 Arkansas Creation-Science Trial. Professor Smout argues that both sides in the controversy use various language strategies to persuade the culture as a whole to see the world that they see and to enact their position as public policy.As Smout illustrates, the problem is that both sides rely on an inadequate conception of language as a namer of timeless realities rather than as an instrument used by human communities to achieve their goals. He attempts to articulate a better view of language and to show how it might help solve intractable arguments such as this. He argues that we should see language as a tool that shapes what we see, and definitions of terms as political acts rather than statements of fact made by disciplinary experts. An important analysis for students and scholars in rhetoric, history, religion, and sociology.
Author Notes
KARY DOYLE SMOUT is Associate Professor of English at Washington and Lee University. Among his earlier publications are contributions to American Speech , Legal Writing , and Composition Studies .
Reviews (1)
Choice Review
These two books highlight the intellectual, social, and political tension that Darwinism wrought between organized religion and the scientific community. In When All the Gods Trembled, Conkin (Vanderbilt Univ.) focuses on Darwinism's impact on American intellectuals. His thesis is that the 1925 Scopes trial was the climax of a "crisis in faith" caused by the Darwinian revolution. Since then, he argues, there has been a decline in traditional religious beliefs among American intellectuals, which in turn has contributed to the public's collective disillusionment with intellectualism. The key issue here is who were those early intellectuals and did they, in fact, abandon creation in favor of evolution? In contrast, in Darwinism Comes to America (CH, May'99) Ronald L. Numbers argues that the Scopes trial was no watershed and that historians have made more out of it than the trial really accomplished. Numbers also provides evidence suggesting that the scientific community never really abandoned religion. Conkin's book is interesting and written with flair; however, it cites many older references and fails to mention the 1991 Arkansas creation science trial. Nevertheless, When All the Gods Trembled does a fine job of identifying the specific elements in the Judeo-Christian tradition that evolutionary theory tended to undermine. General readers and all academic levels. In The Creation/Evolution Controversy, Smout (Washington and Lee Univ.) examines both the Scopes trial and the 1991 Arkansas trial (McClean v. Arkansas Board of Education). Both trials are portrayed as power struggles between science and religion. Smout's perspective is heavily influenced by a "rhetorical account of language" (poststructuralism), which views reality as a linguistic construct forged out of communally based power relationships. The two trials are seen as political attempts by scientific and religious communities to "interpret" key cultural terms for the larger community; hence, science and religion are reduced to alternative forms of discourse. Most contemporary philosophers of science in the realist tradition will find this approach to be overly simplistic, in that it suggests that scientists merely invent reality out of thin air. Other philosophers will argue that the "rhetorical account of language" ignores both the predictive function of science and its pragmatic value. General readers, and upper-level undergraduates and above. While both of these books are recommended reading, neither of them really does justice to the full range of the historical, philosophical, and scientific issues posed by evolutionary science. R. F. White College of Mount St. Joseph
Table of Contents
| Preface | p. ix |
| 1 Introduction | p. 1 |
| 2 Beginnings of the Creation/Evolution Controversy | p. 13 |
| 3 Bryan and the Scopes "monkey" Trial | p. 45 |
| Notes | p. 94 |
| 4 The Arkansas Creation-Science Trial | p. 103 |
| 5 Conclusion | p. 179 |
| References | p. 193 |
| Index | p. 207 |
| About the Author | p. 210 |