In the early twentieth century the psychologist Sigmund Freud noted that science had already inflicted on humanity "two great outrages upon its naive self-love":  the first, associated with the sixteenth-century astronomer Nicholas Copernicus, "when it realized that our earth was not the centre of the universe, but only a tiny speck in a world-system of a magnitude hardly conceivable"; the second, associated with Charles Darwin, "when biological research robbed man of his peculiar privilege of having been specially created, and relegated him to a descent from the animal world."  Conceitedly, Freud went on to observe that "man's craving for grandiosity is now suffering the third and most bitter blow," this time at the hands of psychoanalysts such as himself, who were showing that humans behaved under the influence of unconscious urges.[1]

Freud need not have worried so much about the mental sufferings inflicted by modern science.  Copernicanism had indeed dislodged humans from the center of the cosmos, but in the Aristotelian world the center was the lowliest place in the universe; there is little evidence that humans felt diminished by being hurled into space.[2]  Psychoanalysis never achieved the prominence its founder dreamed of, so never caused the trauma he anticipated.  But what of Darwinism?  How much emotional distress did the revelation of ancestral apes cause humans?  How often did their encounters with evolution produce spiritual crises?  And what was the nature of the crises that occurred?  

Two of these queries can be dealt with quickly.  Darwin's indelicate announcement in The Descent of Man (1871), that humans had "descended from a hairy quadruped, furnished with a tail and pointed ears," indeed attracted considerable attention.  And some conservative Christians did express abhorrence at the prospect of relinquishing an honored position at the head of created beings only to be herded together "with four-footed beasts and creeping things," over which man had formerly had dominion.  Darwinism, complained one contemptuous critic, "tears the crown from our heads; it treats us as bastards and not sons, and reveals the degrading fact that man in his best estate--even Mr. Darwin--is but a civilized, dressed up, educated monkey, who has lost his tail."  There is no reason to believe, however, that such diehard creationists ever took human evolution seriously enough to be more than rhetorically distressed.[3]

More revealing of genuine concern was the fundamentalist A. C. Dixon's confession to feeling "a repugnance to the idea that an ape or an orang outang was my ancestor."  But even he promised not let the "humiliating fact" stand in the way of accepting human evolution, "if proved."  The Southern Baptist New Testament scholar A. T. Robertson put the choice somewhat more colorfully in stating his openness to theistic evolution:  "I can stand it if the monkeys can."  Despite lots of humor about routing "the biological baboon boosters" and shaking "the monkey out of the cocoanut tree," I have found no evidence that the prospect of having monkeys for uncles caused emotional distress anywhere near the level of that created by biblical and philosophical concerns.[4]

Somewhat more surprising, given the widespread assumption that evolution played a major role in the secularization of Western thought, is the relative infrequency with which evolution became implicated in the loss of religious faith.   Fairly typical of intellectuals who rejected Christianity was the experience of Charles Darwin himself.  By the time he returned to England from the voyage of the Beagle, he was entertaining doubts about the reliability of the Bible.  He tried to staunch these doubts, but, despite persistent effort, he reported in his autobiography that "disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate," causing "no distress."   Instead, he came to find Christianity revolting:

I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished.  And this is a damnable doctrine.

As these words suggests, and as the historian James R. Moore has shown, Darwin finally abandoned Christianity not primarily because of his developing views on evolution but for moral concerns awakened by the death of his kind but unbelieving father in 1848 and the passing of his favorite child, lovable, delightful ten-year-old Annie, two and a half years later.  How, reasoned the distraught father, could an omnipotent, benevolent God let such a perfect child suffer so much and die so young?  Too broken even to attend Annie's funeral, Darwin turned his back on God.[5]

A number of years ago the sociologist Susan Budd studied the biographies of 150 British secularists or freethinkers who lived between 1850 and 1950, hoping to test the prevailing view that "The effects of developing scientific knowledge, especially Darwinism, and of the higher criticism have been . . . mainly responsible for weakening belief in the literal truth of scriptural religion for some, and for forcing others to abandon belief in God altogether."  She discovered that only two of her subjects "mentioned having read Darwin or Huxley before their loss of faith." A few years back I examined the reactions of 80 prominent nineteenth-century American scientists to Darwinism and found no evidence to suggest that a single one of them severed his religious ties as a direct result of his encounter with evolution.[6]  It is no wonder that in writing the sensational Victorian novel Robert Elsmere (1888), in which the clerical hero experiences a crisis of faith and abandons Christianity, Mrs. Humphry Ward said nothing about Darwin or evolution.  Although she had initially intended to invoke the "converging pressure of science & history," she decided in the end that it would be truer to the times to feature only the latter.[7]

Even personal testimonies about the corrosive effects of evolution on religious beliefs cannot always be taken at face value.  The Victorian writer Samuel Butler supposedly told a friend "that the Origin of Species had completely destroyed his belief in a personal God."  But, as one of his biographers points out, "He had . . . already quarreled with his father [a cleric], refused to be ordained, thrown up his Cambridge prospects, and emigrated to New Zealand as a sheep-farmer before Darwin's book came out."  He quit praying the night before he left for the Antipodes.[8]

In this essay I want to explore the emotional experiences of some of the people who did suffer spiritual crises associated with Darwinism.  Most historians of evolution and Christianity--indeed of science and religion generally--have focused on intellectual issues and have largely ignored or downplayed experiential factors; they have treated spiritual and emotional crises as mere "decorative episodes" in the lives of their subjects. But, as Robert J. Richards has argued in one of the few historical studies to highlight the importance of psychological crises in the lives of scientists, emotions have often been as significant as ideas.[9]  To identify as clearly as possible some of the actual roles that evolution played in creating and resolving spiritual crises, I examine how four scientific   Americans, who together nearly span the spectrum of reactions to evolution, wrestled with the teachings of Christ and Darwin:  Joseph LeConte, George Frederick Wright, J. Peter Lesley, and George McCready Price.[10]

Joseph LeConte (1823-1901)

Joseph LeConte was arguably the most influential--and certainly one of the most interesting--American harmonizers of evolution and religion in the late-nineteenth-century America.  His widely quoted definition of evolution as "(1) continuous progressive change, (2) according to certain laws, (3) and by means of resident forces" served for years as a standard.  More of a popularizer than an original investigator, he took great pride in showing that "evolution is entirely consistent with a rational theism."  But this achievement did not come without a struggle; for decades he repeatedly "wrestled in agony . . . with [the] demon of materialism."[11]

Young LeConte grew up in an "intensely religious" community in rural Georgia. His pious Presbyterian mother died when he was a toddler; his father, a medically trained plantation owner and unbeliever, passed away when Joseph was fourteen.  The death of his father "outside the pale of the church" distressed him greatly and precipitated "a very great crisis," followed by a classic conversion to orthodox Christianity.  For a time, while attending the University of Georgia, he considered becoming a Presbyterian minister.  Instead, he studied medicine, then apprenticed himself to Louis Agassiz at Harvard's Lawrence Scientific School.  Early in his career he taught at both the universities of Georgia and South Carolina.[12]

About the mid-1850s LeConte first encountered the "dragon of materialism," in the form of August Comte's positivism, which held that only physical phenomena were knowable, that God-talk was meaningless.  As an ardent believe in the reliability of human reason, LeConte stood briefly on the "brink of the edge of materialism," only to pull back in horror when he recognized the full implications of this "degrading" philosophy, "which destroys [man's] spirituality, his immortality, every noble upward striving of his nature."  For the rest of his life, he shunned materialism, a term he used synonymously with atheism and agnosticism.[13]

In 1861 LeConte experienced a life-altering loss:  the death of his two-year-old daughter, Josie, from whooping cough.  During her last hours, he cuddled her small body, wracked by spasms.  So traumatic was her passing, it left him "prostrated" for several days.  Decades later he could still felt the raw pain:

Little Josie, dear little Josie!  I can not even mention her name without the tenderest emotions.  She was the most beautiful child we ever had, with that rare combination of flaxen hair and dark eyes.  Alas! We lost her just two years later.  The light, the sunlight, the spiritual light seemed to have gone out of my house.

As we have seen, Darwin's loss of his unbelieving, but Christ-like, physician father followed by the death of his favorite daughter had destroyed his faith in Christianity.  Virtually identical events produced in LeConte a lifelong obsession with immortality.  Late in life he was still reassuring himself of the impossibility "that the object of such love [Josie] can be other than immortal?" [14]

By the early 1870s LeConte had passed through the trauma of the Civil War and relocated at the new University of California.  In 1873, in a series of published lectures on religion and science, he announced that he had become a "reluctant evolutionist" of the theistic kind.  Adopting the age-old argument that God had revealed himself in "two divine books," Nature and Scripture, LeConte repeatedly alluded to the "distress and doubt" he had suffered as "one who has all his life sought with passionate ardor the truth revealed in the one book, but who clings no less passionately to the hopes revealed in the other": 

During my whole active life, I have stood just where the current runs swiftest.  I confess to you, that, in my earlier life, I have struggled almost in despair with this swift current.  I confess I have sometimes wrestled in an agony with this fearful doubt, with this demon of materialism, with this cold philosophy whose icy breath withers all the beautiful flowers and blasts all the growing fruit of humanity.  This dreadful doubt has haunted me like a spectre, which would not always down at my bidding.

He had come to reject the idea of "the creation of species directly and without secondary agencies and processes," but he believed that "the real cause of evolution" remained unknown.[15]

By the end of the decade he had evolved into a "thorough and enthusiastic," if somewhat unorthodox, evolutionist.  In what he regarded as "one of the most important" of his scientific contributions, he proposed in 1877 a theory of "paroxysmal" evolution, which correlated "rapid changes of physical conditions and correspondingly rapid movement in evolution."  That same year he gave the first of many talks sharing his insights into the relationship between evolution and religion.  Harmonizing religion and evolution, including the evolution of the human body, quickly became his great mission, his divine calling:  "It is, indeed, glad tidings of great joy which shall be to all peoples.  Woe is me, if I preach not the Gospel."  His efforts along this line culminated in the publication of his oft-reprinted Evolution and Its Relation to Religious Thought (1888).[16]

To mitigate the "difficulty and distress" of coming to terms with evolution, LeConte insisted on two conditions:  that it not promote godless materialism and that it not endanger his faith in immortality, "the most dearly cherished and most universal of all human beliefs."  Thus he claimed not only that evolution and materialism were entirely distinct but that there was "not a single philosophical question connected with our highest and dearest religious and spiritual interests that is fundamentally affected, or even put in any new light, by the theory of evolution."  On this point LeConte may have protested too much.  Although it is difficult at this late date to sort out what orthodox doctrines he ditched because of evolution and which ones he abandoned for other reasons, we do know that by the last decade of his life he had come to reject the idea of a transcendent God, the notion of the Bible as "a direct revelation," the divinity of Christ, the existence of heaven and of the devil, the efficacy of intercessory prayer, the special creation and fall of humans, and the plan of salvation.  Only the existence of an imminent, pantheistic God and personal immortality survived.  Yet despite toying at times with leaving organized religion, LeConte remained a nominal Presbyterian and an ecumenical Christian till the end.[17]

In his early years as a harmonizer LeConte insisted that because science could "say absolutely nothing" about the soul and immortality, the field remained "open for evidence from any quarter, and of any degree."  By the 1890s, however, he had concluded that science, particularly the doctrine of evolution, could indeed say something -- and something positive--about immortality.  "Do you not see," he asked fervently, "without immortality, the whole purpose is balked - the whole process of cosmic evolution is futile.  Shall God be so long and at so great pains to achieve a spirit, capable of communing with Him, and then allow it to lapse again into nothingness?"  Besides, there was always Josie to think about.  Even after Joseph's death his wife, Bessie, would write him letters on their birthdays and wedding anniversary.  "How happy you must able dear to be with so many loved ones," she wrote tearfully on one of these occasions; among those she mentioned was "our little Josie."[18]

LeConte's crises--especially those brought on by the loss of his daughter and his encounter with materialism--made it psychologically impossible for him to accept any nontheistic version of evolution, including Darwin's own.   At the same time these traumatic experiences facilitated his identification with the emotional and theological needs of other liberal Christians struggling with evolution and thus helped in his becoming the reconciler of evolution and religion par excellence.

J. Peter Lesley (1819-1903)

During the last quarter of the nineteenth century the distinguished geologist and sometime minister J. Peter Lesley ranked among the most prominent scientists in America who rejected Darwinism; yet his experience, which included spiritual crises and mental breakdowns, remains little known.  This is especially surprising since, unlike most antievolutionists, Lesley disliked orthodox Christianity even more than Darwinism and was among the first Americans to make the case for human evolution.

As a religiously devout youth, who memorized most of the Bible, he studied at the University of Pennsylvania in anticipation of entering the Presbyterian ministry.    But the first of numerous bouts of ill health, physical and mental, led to a postponement of his seminary studies, while he spent a few years as a sub-assistant on the Geological Survey of Pennsylvania, headed by Henry Darwin Rogers.  Hoping to become a missionary to rural Pennsylvania, he attended Princeton Theological Seminary for three years, then spent some time in Europe, exposing himself to German rationalism and higher criticism of the Bible.  He returned with his faith pretty much intact and began working as a colporteur among the poor German settlers in the hills of Pennsylvania.[19]

The strenuous labor undermined his health, and after two years he rejoined the geological survey.   By 1848, having received a ministerial license from the Presbytery of Philadelphia, he was pastoring a Congregational church in Milton, Massachusetts, near Boston, where he came under the influence of Unitarians, including his wife-to-be, Susan Lyman.  Under circumstances that remain vague, the Presbytery charged him with harboring "infidel" sentiments and "denying the Inspiration of the Scriptures."  He adamantly denied being an infidel but confessed to putting the truths of science above the teaching of the church.  In May 1849 the Presbytery withdrew his license to preach.  His "theological troubles" literally split the church and exacerbated his poor health.  In 1851 he left the ministry yet again and returned to the geological survey.  However, his behavior was so erratic and his temper so terrible that Rogers fired him, fearing that "insanity is evidently growing upon him." [20]  For years thereafter Lesley struggled to earn a living, working variously as a coal expert for the Pennsylvania Railroad, as secretary of the American Iron Association, and as librarian of the American Philosophical Society.[21]

Shortly after the end of the Civil War Lesley returned to Boston to deliver the prestigious Lowell Lectures, on "Man's Origin and Destiny, Sketched from the Platform of the Sciences."  His liberal wife, perhaps sensing the manic mood of her husband, urged him not to offend his audience by unduly criticizing religion.  Though he prided himself on always speaking the truth, he assured her that he had trimmed his language and made his "statements of the oppositions of Science and Religion as mild as possible."   Despite his promise, he began his lectures sounding like an American Huxley or Tyndall, arguing that "Jewish Theology and Modern Science . . . are irreconcilable enemies" and that Genesis is "a poem, not a text-book."   He dismissed theology as "science falsely so called" and blamed the "unchristian state of the theological and social sciences" for retarding the progress of science.[22]

Hearing such rhetoric, his auditors might have anticipated an early endorsement of Darwin's new theory.  But no.  Lesley professed to accept organic evolution only "if kept within the regions of variety."  Before admitting more extensive evolution--of genus, family, or class--he wanted to observe "nature in the very act of exchanging one species for another."  Even then he was confident that the evidence would show not one but four lines of evolutionary development, each corresponding to one of Georges Cuvier's divisions of the animal kingdom:  Radiata, Articulata, Mollusca, and Vertebrata.  Addressing Darwin, Lesley pointed out the resulting difficulties:

My dear sir, you have four times as much to do as you thought you had.  You must not only explain how a man came from a monkey,  and a monkey from a squirrel, and a squirrel from a bat, and a bat from a bird, and a bird from a lizard, and a lizard from a fish; but you must suggest some possible means of transforming a vertebrate fish out of a shell fish, or out of a jelly fish, or out of a lobworm or trilobite; then you must go on to show us how the first trilobite, or the first coral animal, or the first shizopod was obtained by your process of natural selection out of still earlier vegetable species.  Nay, you cannot even stop there.  You must explain the very first appearance of living tissue out of the inorganic elements of dead matter.

Darwinism, he concluded, remained "an open question . . . that ought to be no bugbear in the path of generous and truthful minds."[23]

Many early Darwinists, such as the Harvard botanist Asa Gray, accepted organic evolution in general but made a special exception for humans.  Lesley--uniquely, as far as I can tell--rejected organic evolution but argued that humans had descended from apes.  With Darwin, Lesley believed "that man is a developed monkey," but instead of one evolutionary track for humans he argued for three:  each descending from a different type of "manlike ape, viz. the orang, the chimpanzee, and the gorilla, the three principal divisions of the family of apes."  The only barrier to accepting such a human history, he maintained, was the "tissue of absurdity, called the biblical history of the origin of mankind."  No wonder he reported to his wife following this lecture:  "You can't imagine what amusement my flat-footed advocacy of the monkey origin of man occasioned.  There was no end to the jokes."[24]

Despite "threatening symptoms and occasional illness," Lesley had maintained a heavy work load.  But shortly after completing his Lowell lectures, he suffered from what a nephew described as a "completely broken down" nervous system, or what we would call severe depression.  According to an intimate friend, a "black cloud of cerebral exhaustion" came over him, and his "brain-battery" ceased to function.  A couple of years recuperating in Europe helped, but more years passed before he could put in a full day of work.[25]  In 1872 the University of Pennsylvania appointed him professor of geology and mining and dean of the "Scientific Department."  Two years later he replaced Rogers as the state geologist of Pennsylvania.  In the early 1890s his incapacitating depression returned, and this time he never recovered.  It is unlikely that we will ever know what role religious and scientific doubts played in his repeated breakdowns, though indirect evidence suggests that they were not insignificant.[26]

Although Lesley occasionally attended a Unitarian church with his family, he, like LeConte, had become a pantheist, believing that "God is Nature, and Nature is God."  He remained deeply spiritual but skeptical of, if not hostile to, virtually all theology and organized religion.   For him, the ideal religion was "simply Morality and Philanthropy."  Again like LeConte, he clung to the prospect of immortality.[27]

Late in life Lesley described evolution as "the prevalent epidemic scientific superstition of the day" and insisted in a letter to the editor of Science that he was "not a Darwinist, and [had] never accepted the Darwinian hypothesis so called."  Yet his early advocacy of the evolution of humans from apes--to say nothing of his scorn for traditional religion--left even those close to him confused about his true views.  His nephew found it ironic that during the 1860s and early 1870s, before the scientific community had reached a consensus, Lesley had seemed inclined toward Darwinism but never fully embraced it.  "Twenty years later, when the theory had gained almost universal acceptance even among theologians, he was fully decided, and would at times express complete disapproval of it."  Some friends attributed his late-life denunciations of evolution to "senile decay."  But Lesley had never found the evidence for Darwinism sufficiently convincing to join the evolutionist camp.[28]

Lesley's precarious mental health and his idiosyncratic response to evolution make it hazardous to venture any generalization based on his experience.  Because he lost his faith in traditional Christianity long before his encounter with evolution, it seems unlikely that his religious beliefs had much influence on his negative attitude toward  Darwinism.  And because his bouts of depression antedated the Origin of Species, his mental illness can hardly be blamed on the disturbing effects of evolution.  The most that can be claimed in his case is that Darwinism sometimes irritated his sensitive psyche. 

George Frederick Wright (1838-1921)

George Frederick Wright, a seminary-trained Congregational minister and amateur geologist, emerged in the 1870s as a leader of the so-called Christian Darwinists and a recognized expert on the ice age in North America.  As a young minister he read Darwin's Origin of Species and Charles Lyell's Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man (1863), which clashed with the views he had been taught as a youth, but his autobiographical writings do not reveal the extent to which these books may have precipitated a crisis of faith.  They do indicate, however, that he found in Asa Gray's theistic interpretation of Darwinism a compromise that allowed him simultaneously to embrace organic evolution and to retain his belief in a divine designed and controlled universe.[29]

Wright especially appreciated a passage in which Gray described "the popular conception" of efficient cause:  "Events and operations in general go on in virtue simply of forces communicated at the first, but that now and then, and only now and then, the Deity puts his hand directly to the work."  This view of God's relationship to the natural world appealed to Wright as an ideal solution to the problem of reconciling the respective demands of science and Scripture.  As he later wrote, it "allows us to retain our conceptions of reality in the forces of nature, makes room for miracles, and leaves us free whenever necessary, as in the case of the special endowments of man's moral nature, to supplement natural selection with the direct interference of the Creator."[30]

In making the case for the natural origin of species, Wright blunted the possible psychological shock of Darwin's theory by retaining such familiar concepts as God, miracles, and the special creation of humans.  He also repeatedly used language that seemed to restrict natural selection to the lower end of the taxonomic scale while attributing kingdoms and the broader taxonomic groupings to special creation.  According to Wright's paraphrase of Darwin's views, "The Creator first breathed life into one, or more probably, four or five, distinct forms," after which a process combining miraculous variations and natural selection split each "order" into families, genera, and species.  Wright thought the appearance of humans might legitimately remain outside the evolutionary process, writing that "the miraculous creation of man might no more disprove the general theory of natural selection than or ordinary miracle of Christ would disprove the general reign of natural law."  Like Gray, Wright derived great comfort from Darwin's inability to explain the origin of the variations preserved by natural selection, because this limitation seemed to open the door for divine intervention.  It "rob[bed] Darwinism of its sting," "left God's hands as free as could be desired for contrivances of whatever sort he pleased," and preserved a "reverent interpretation of the Bible."[31]

Because he believed that the inspired writers intended only to state the "fact of creation by divine agency"--not to provide a historically or scientifically accurate account of creation--Wright professed to see "no difficulty at all in adjusting the language of the first chapter of Genesis to that expressing the derivative origin of species."  But he remained too much of a biblical literalist simply to dismiss the story of Eden's creation from one of Adam's ribs.  And, though he readily accepted the natural evolution of the human body, he insisted on a supernatural infusion of the soul.  "No! man is not merely a developed animal; but the inventive genius displayed in the rudest flint implement stamps him as a new creation," he declared.  "The new creation, however, is spiritual rather than material or physical."[32]

As far as I can tell, Wright experienced little, if any, psychological trauma in absorbing this watered-down version of Darwinism.  A serious crisis of faith did not erupt till the early 1890s, and then from higher criticism, not evolution.  Wright's long-festering fears about the implications of higher criticism for an orthodox view of the Bible reached a critical level when he fell under the "spell" of the eloquent and controversial Charles A. Briggs (1841-1913), a Presbyterian theologian who rejected the inerrancy of the original scriptural autographs and questioned the Mosaic authorship of the first five books of the Bible.  "So violent has been the shock," Wright candidly reported, "that out of self-respect I have found it necessary to turn a little aside from my main studies to examine anew the foundations of my faith."  Wright emerged from this soul-searching convinced more firmly than ever in the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch and in a supernatural view of history.[33]

In the wake of this episode Wright turned sharply rightward.  He repudiated his earlier belief that Genesis was merely a protest against polytheism and embraced Arnold Guyot's widely held interpretation of the days of Genesis as cosmic ages.  Wright confessed that "in writing upon this subject at previous times I have dwelt, I now believe, somewhat too exclusively upon the adaptation of the document to the immediate purpose of counteracting the polytheistic tendencies of the Israelites and, through them, of the world."  The story of a six-day creation might not be literally true, but at least it was scientifically accurate.[34]

By this time Wright was also denouncing the evolutionists, such as Herbert Spencer and John Fiske, who rashly pushed beyond Darwin's "limited conclusions" to construct a system of cosmic evolution.  Wright frequently contrasted the modest, cautious Darwin, who had allegedly sought to explain only the origin of species and who had limited his theory of descent to no more than "all the members of the same great class or kingdom," with the impetuous--and often impious--souls who tried to explain the evolution of the entire world and who described development from "the first jelly speck of protoplasm to the brain of a New ton or a Gladstone" without any direct reference to the Creator.  This, he declared, was "Darwinism gone to seed in barren soil."[35]

Even as a spokesman for Christian Darwinism in the 1870s and 1880s Wright had excluded the origin of matter, life, and the human soul from the rule of natural law; by the late 1890s he was sounding more and more like a special creationist.  In discussing the origin of humans, Wright emphasized the great gap between "the highest animal and the lowest man," though he allowed that a divine miracle might have bridged the gap, thereby joining humans and animals.  The opening years of the twentieth century found him damning "the antiquated Uniformitarian geology of Lyell and Darwin" and arguing for "the traditional view that man originated, through supernatural interference, at a comparatively recent time, somewhere in Central Asia."[36]  

If Wright's identity as an evolutionist was in doubt at the turn of the century, it practically disappeared during the next two decades, when he joined forces with the leaders of the emerging fundamentalist movement.  Writing on "The Passing of Evolution" for The Fundamentals, the founding documents of the movement, Wright stressed the special creation of the earliest forms of plants, animals, and, most important, humans.  Man, he wrote, differed so greatly from the higher animals, it was "necessary to suppose the he came into existence as the Bible represents, by the special creation of a single pair, from whom all the varieties of the race have sprung."  Exactly how this "special creation" happened remained a mystery.[37]

Wright found his early encounter with Darwinism more exhilarating than spiritually threatening.  His modification of Darwin's theory, especially the limitations on the extent of natural selection, allowed Wright to preserve his belief in an active Creator God--and temporarily to escape a spiritual crisis.  But when theological danger appeared in the form of higher criticism, Wright found it theologically and psychologically soothing to abandon Christian Darwinism for fundamentalism.

George McCready Price (1870-1963)

George McCready Price, the founder of what in the 1970s came to be called "scientific creationism," was born in eastern Canada in 1870.  When his widowed mother joined the Seventh-day Adventist church, he, too, at the age of fourteen, embraced that faith.  Seventh-day Adventists not only commemorated a literal six-day creation by celebrating on the seventh day; they accepted as authoritative the "visions" and "testimonies" of the founder of the sect, Ellen G. White.  On one occasion she claimed to be "carried back to the creation and was shown that the first week, in which God performed the work of creation in six days and rested on the seventh day, was just like every other week."  White also endorsed the largely discarded view of Noah's flood as a worldwide catastrophe that had buried the fossils and reshaped the earth's surface.[38]

During the early 1890s young Price attended Battle Creek College for two years and subsequently completed a teacher-training course at the provincial normal school in New Brunswick, Canada.  While serving as principal of a small high school in an isolated part of the province, he read for the first time about the paleontological evidence for evolution.  To Price, the theory of evolution seemingly "all turned on its view of geology, and that if its geology were true, the rest would seem more or less reasonable."  On at least three occasions, he later recalled, he nearly succumbed to the lure of evolution, or at least to what he always considered its basic tenet:  the progressive nature of the fossil record.  Each time he was saved by sessions of intense prayer--and by reading Mrs. White's "revealing word pictures" of earth history.  As a result of this experience, he decided on a career championing what he call the "new catastrophism," in contrast to the old catastrophism of the French naturalist Georges Cuvier.[39]

Still, he puzzled over ways to interpret the evidence that apparently indicated the earth's antiquity, which at first glance seemed "so strong and plausible."  Only after poring over the standard geology texts and "almost tons of geological documents, government reports, memoirs, and monographs on special geological topics" did he discover "how the actual facts of the rocks and fossils, stripped of mere theories, splendidly refute this evolutionary theory of the invariable order of the fossils, which is the very backbone of the evolution doctrine."  This discovery not only resolved his intellectual crisis but determined his future course.  Believing that he had found a fatal flaw in the logic of evolutionary geology, he grew increasingly convinced that God wanted him "to enter this unworked field; accordingly I threw myself into it with all the energy I possessed, constantly asking and receiving special help from the guiding and enlightening Spirit of God."  Responding to this call not only satisfied his spiritual needs but also allowed him to fulfill his dream of becoming a writer.[40]

Price completed his first antievolution book, Outlines of Modern Christianity and Modern Science, in 1902, but instead of elation came desperation, as a sense of failure engulfed him.  In the spring of that year he abandoned teaching in New Brunswick to become an Adventist evangelist on Prince Edward Island.  His experiment in the pulpit proved disastrous, as did as brief stint as the administrator of small boarding academy.  Thoroughly discouraged and driven by guilt to earn a living for his wife and three children, he returned in the summer of 1904 to the one job that had brought him a measure of success:  selling religious books.  But as he pedaled his bicycle over the rough roads of eastern Canada, he continued to dream of a literary career, "the thing for which I am best fitted and which I thoroughly enjoy above everything else."  He had tried various lines of church work only to find "black, dismal Failure" mocking him at every turn.  By late summer he had grown so depressed by his situation that he was contemplating suicide.  However, out of consideration for his family he decided instead to leave church employment and head for New York City to try his hand at writing "hack stuff for the Metropolitan newspapers and magazines."  If life did not improve in the city, he planned to sell his watch, buy a revolver, and rid the world "of another useless, good-for-nothing man."[41]

In the city his circumstances only worsened.  Unable to find steady work, he suffered unspeakable privations--and the torment of knowing that his family was "destitute and almost starving" back in Canada.  Since his conversion to Adventism he had derived strength from his religious faith, but now in his neediest hour he quit even attending church.  His wife, fearing the worst, wrote to church headquarters in Takoma Park, Maryland, begging for help for her husband.  Moved by the family's plight, the president of the church personally offered the estranged worker a temporary construction job.  Price gratefully accepted the offer, noting that he was willing to go anywhere and do anything, "even if it means hard manual labor."[42]

By 1906 Price, still "heartbroken" over his failure in life, was living in southern California and working as a handyman at the Adventists' Loma Linda Sanitarium.  That year he published a slim volume entitled Illogical Geology:  The Weakest Point in the Evolution Theory, in which he confidently offered a $1,000 reward "to any who will, in the face of the facts here presented, show me how to prove that one kind of fossil is older than another."  In brief, he argued that Darwinism rested "logically and historically on the succession of life idea as taught by geology" and that "if this succession of life is not an actual scientific fact, then Darwinism . . . is a most gigantic hoax."[43]

During the next 15 years Price taught in several Adventist schools and authored six more books attacking evolution, particularly its geological foundation.  Although not unknown in fundamentalist circles before the early 1920s, he did not begin attracting widespread national attention until then.  Shortly after the fundamentalist controversy entered its antievolution phase, Price published The New Geology, the most systematic and comprehensive of his two dozen or so books.  In it, he restated his "great 'law of conformable stratigraphic sequences' . . . by all odds the most important law ever formulated with reference to the order in which the strata occur."  According to this law, "Any kind of fossiliferous beds whatever, 'young' or 'old,' may be found occurring conformably on any other fossiliferous beds, 'older' or 'younger.'"  To Price, so-called "deceptive conformatives" (where strata seem to be missing) and "thrust faults" (where the strata are apparently in the wrong order) proved that there was no natural order to the fossil-bearing rocks, all of which he attributed to Noah's Flood.[44]  Despite repeated attacks from the scientific establishment, Price's influence among non-Adventist fundamentalists grew rapidly.  By the mid-1920s the editor of Science could accurately describe Price as "the principal scientific authority of the Fundamentalists," and Price's byline was appearing with increasing frequency in a broad spectrum of religious periodicals.[45]

Price's success as an internationally known spokesman for creationism unquestionably fulfilled a craving for public recognition, though for the rest of his life he chafed at the failure of fellow fundamentalists to abandon their old-earth creationism for his "flood geology."  His uncompromising creationism remained on the fringes of fundamentalism until 1961, when John C. Whitcomb, Jr., and Henry M. Morris brought out their landmark book, The Genesis Flood, which launched the revival of young-earth creationism in the late twentieth century.  Designed as a defense of Price against his critics, it was, as one perceptive reader described it, "a reissue of G. M. Price's views brought up to date."  Flattered by the attention he was finally receiving, Price, then in his early nineties, uncharacteristically ignored the near absence of his name in the book.[46]

Among the four individuals we have been examining, Price seems to have suffered the most intensely as a result of entertaining evolution, largely because, as an Adventist, he had so little room for theological compromise.  For him, unlike for LeConte, Lesley, or Wright, the acceptance of evolution would have meant a virtually complete rejection of his religious faith, or so it seemed.  Yet his deepest psychological crisis, which prompted thoughts of suicide, apparently resulted more from his failure to find a satisfying job than from fear of succumbing to Darwinism.  In the end, his thoroughgoing rejection of evolution gave direction to his life and served as the foundation of a rewarding career.  

Fleeing Fundamentalism

Over a quarter-century ago the well-known science writer and skeptic Martin Gardner published a wonderfully evocative, quasi-autobiographical novel called The Flight of Peter Fromm (1973).  It tells the story of a young creationist from Oklahoma who fell hard for Price's flood geology.   In the late 1930s he packed up his copy of The New Geology and went to Chicago to attend divinity school.  As a died-in-the-wool fundamentalist, he joined the Moody Memorial Church and hung out with friends in the Chicago Christian Fellowship.  During his second year at the University of Chicago "his fundamentalism was dealt a mighty death blow"--not from any of his seminars in the divinity school but from a course he had decided to audit on historical geology.  When Fromm asked the professor, named Blitz, if all of the sedimentary rock could have been deposited during Noah's flood, the geologist was "dumbfounded."  He "didn't want to embarrass the kid by arguing with him in front of the class," but, nevertheless, he devoted "the rest of the hour going over all the evidence [he] could think of that proves sedimentation has been going on for hundreds of millions of years."  In so doing, he had driven the point of a geological hammer into the rock of Peter's fundamentalism.  He had opened the first tiny fissure through which the waters of modern science could begin their slow erosion.  Now the metaphor breaks down.  It may take a million years for a boulder to crumble.  A religion can crumble in a few centuries.  A man's faith can crumble in less than a year. . . . Peter threw away his copy of The New Geology.

Despite his growing distrust of biblical science and history, Peter continued to believe in the Bible as God's inspired word.  But he began sliding down the path of unbelief:  from fundamentalism to Roman Catholicism and eventually to a vague theism.  Finally, after the war, while preaching an Easter sermon at the liberal Midway Community Church in Hyde Park, he suffered a psychotic break and had to be taken from the pulpit to a nearby hospital--which is where the novel begins.[47]

Minus the mental breakdown, my own experience closely paralleled Fromm's.  Growing up as the son and grandson of Adventist ministers, I attended church schools from first grade through college and unquestioningly accepted the authority of both the biblical prophets and the Adventist prophetess, Ellen G. White.  Although I majored in physics and mathematics at Southern Missionary College, an Adventist institution, I do not recall ever doubting that God had created the world within the past six or seven thousand years or that virtually all of the fossil-bearing rocks had been deposited during the year of Noah's flood.  The first serious book I remember buying with my own money was Studies in Creationism, a defense of young-earth creationism by one of Price's disciples, Frank Lewis Marsh.  For years I felt nothing but sorrow for evolutionists, theistic and otherwise, who failed to recognize the "truth" about the history of life on earth.

Then, in the mid-1960s, I found myself at Berkeley studying for a doctorate in the history of science.  No godless professors challenged my beliefs, which I kept pretty much to myself.  But learning to read and think critically proved my spiritual undoing.  One night a friend of mine, Joe Willey, an Adventist graduate student in neurophysiology, and I attended a slide presentation on the famous fossil forests of Yellowstone National Park, where some two dozen layers are stacked one on top of the other.  The speaker argued that even using the most rapid rates of volcanic decomposition and tree-growing, the sequence of forests could not be explained in under 30,000 years.  It seems like a miniscule number today, but then it was huge.  For me, it challenged the divine authority of both Moses and Mrs. White.  My friend, Joe, and I wrestled with the implications of this knowledge for hours that night following the talk.  By early in the morning we had decided to trade in the teachings of inspired writers for the authority of science.  We knew we were making a momentous decision, but we had no idea where it would lead, intellectually or otherwise.  Despite repeated prayers for divine guidance, I quickly moved from young-earth creationism to old-earth creationism and then on to theistic evolutionism and finally to agnosticism.  The journey proved to be mostly liberating, but punctuated at times by episodes of fear, pain, and isolation.  Hopes of eternal life faded, and relationships with many Adventist friends and family members became frayed.[48]

I soon learned that I was not alone.  I discovered that a number of other conservative Christians had passed through equally trying circumstances.  One was J. Frank Cassel, a leader in the evangelical American Scientific Affiliation (ASA), who had graduated from a conservative Christian college, earned a Ph.D. in biology, and gone on to a successful academic career. His autobiographical testimony poignantly captured some of the emotional turmoil he and his friends in the ASA experienced coming to grips with the evidence for evolution in the 1950s:

First to be overcome was the onus of dealing with a "verboten" term and in a "non-existent" area.  Then, as each made an honest and objective consideration of the data, he was struck with the validity and undeniability of datum after datum.  As he strove to incorporate each of these facts into his Biblico-scientific frame of reference, he found that--while the frame became more complete and satisfying--he began to question first the feasibility and then the desirability of an effort to refute the total evolutionary concept, and finally he became impressed by its impossibility on the basis of existing data.  This has been a heart-rending, soul-searching experience for the committed Christian as he has seen what he had long considered the raison d'�tre of God's call for his life endeavor fade away, and he has struggled to release strongly held convictions as to the close limitations of Creationism.

The distress suffered by Cassel and his liberal friends elicited little sympathy from conservatives within the ASA, who thought the affiliation had, in the colorful phrase of one member, "gone to the apes."  In the opinion of the latter, the drift toward evolution was motivated not by intellectual honesty but by "the malignant influence of Ôthat old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world' (Revelation 12:9)."[49]

Before closing, I should note that occasionally Darwinism resolved as well as induced spiritual crises.  A good example of this is the experience of the psychologist William James, who suffered through a protracted crisis, accompanied by such debilitating depression that it pushed him to "the continual verge of suicide" and briefly through the doors of an insane asylum. Then he discovered in Darwinism what he interpreted as evidence that "mind acted irrespectively of material coercion."  This realization, the historian Robert Richards has suggested, "helped heal his emotional sickness."[50]

The life stories I have presented, whether representative or not, show the historical poverty and incompleteness of a purely intellectual account of science and religion.  Feelings count--often more than facts.  That is why even today we have so many varieties of evolutionists and why the majority of Americans still prefer to consider themselves "creationists" rather than "evolutionists" (with nearly half of them believing that "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so)."[51]