George Frederick Wright and the
Evolving Harmony of Science and Revelation
I gave this talk on February 13, 2009 at the conference Evolution and Religion: Towards a History of an Evolving Relationship at Clemson University. It is a drastically abbreviated version of my 2007 thesis “George Frederick Wright and the Harmony of Science and Revelation.”
At the Scopes trial in 1925, Clarence Darrow asked William Jennings Bryan about scientists who shared his beliefs. Bryan named two. The first was George McCready Price, a Seventh-day Adventist and young-earth creationist. Bryan described the other only as “a man named Wright, who taught at Oberlin,” and remembered little of his ideas. Bryan once wrote that “theistic evolution is an anesthetic: it deadens the pain while the Christian’s religion is being removed.” Had he known more about the man named Wright, he would have disapproved of much of his work.
George Frederick Wright was a Congregationalist minister, theologian, and geologist who lived from 1838 to 1921. In his writings of the 1870s and 1880s, Wright was a theistic evolutionist who reconciled Darwinism with his Calvinist theology. At the turn of the century, however, Wright began to criticize evolutionism. His criticism peaked in 1912, when he contributed an antievolutionist article to The Fundamentals, a prominent series of evangelical tracts.
Wright’s ideas about Darwinism and Christianity changed dramatically over the course of his life, not only because he became more concerned about the place of orthodox Protestantism in America, but also because evolutionary and theological thought themselves evolved. In 1880 Wright perceived a number of similarities between Darwinian and Calvinist orthodoxies. By 1910 the roles of Darwinism in evolutionary theory and Calvinism in Protestant theology had diminished, and the common ground Wright staked out had eroded. It was in this new environment that Wright became an antievolutionist.
Wright had grown up surrounded by the evangelicalism of the Second Great Awakening. He enrolled at Oberlin College in Ohio in 1855, and was deeply inspired there by the sermons of the great evangelist Charles Finney. Finney had practiced law before becoming a minister, and had an original evangelical style that emphasized persuasion through emotional pressure and logical argument. As a result of Finney’s focus on evangelism, natural theology held an important role in Oberlin theology. Arguments for Christianity from observable phenomena could foster belief.
God’s intention according to Finney was “the good of being in general,” and even those aspects of nature which seem harmful actually served this end. In the case of animal predation, for example, Finney concluded that “in this way a greater amount of animal life, and consequently of bestial happiness can be secured than would be otherwise possible.” Wright became Finney’s first biographer and a prominent apologist for his theology, defending it against challengers like Charles Hodge, best known now for his antievolutionist book What Is Darwinism?
After graduating from Oberlin’s seminary, Wright served as a minister for ten years in Vermont. As James Moore wrote in The Post-Darwinian Controversies, “Wright was probably the only minister on either side of the Atlantic who, while fulfilling his clerical duties, read the Bible through in the original languages, translated Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, studied the philosophical works of Mill, Hamilton, and Noah Porter, and read appreciatively the Origin of Species and Lyell’s Antiquity of Man. And doubtless he was the only minister anywhere who found the time, while engaged in such pursuits, to become an authority on the glacial geology of the region.”
In addition, Wright published his first article, on “The Ground of Confidence in Inductive Reasoning,” while in Vermont. He provided a new justification for induction, based on Finney’s principle of “the good of being in general.” Everything had a purpose, but these purposes were often beyond the understanding of humans. Furthermore, much was adapted to the moral rather than the material needs of humanity. Even an adaptation as mundane as human teeth could have moral purposes; Wright deemed it uncertain “whether [teeth] were chiefly designed to assist the stomach in digestion, or for purposes of moral discipline through their liability to disease and decay.” Wright’s theory made the “good of being” the final cause of everything, and all other causes proximate, the realm of science rather than theology. He pointed out that this made the Darwinian controversy scientific rather than theological, while also indicating a point of similarity between science and religion. “The evidences of Christianity are inductive like those of science,” Wright concluded.
In 1872 Wright moved to Andover, Massachusetts, near the intellectual communities of the Andover Theological Seminary and of Boston. He became friends with the eminent Harvard botanist Asa Gray, a devout Presbyterian and longtime friend of Charles Darwin. Wright had been reading Gray’s unsigned articles on Darwinism and Christianity with admiration, and was delighted to meet his previously anonymous mentor.
We can enter Wright’s thoughts at this time through a letter he wrote to Gray in 1875. He expressed his concern that the loudest voices in the Darwinian controversy were those of anti-Christian evolutionists and antievolutionist Christians, and that both sides depicted Christianity and Darwinism as incompatible. As Wright described it, “the infidel class of Darwinian expositors have had the ear of the public entirely too much, and have needlessly added to the alarm of orthodox people.” As a solution, he planned to contribute a series of four articles to the Bibliotheca Sacra, a theological journal edited by an Andover seminary professor. These articles appeared in the journal between 1876 and 1880.
The first, a presentation of Darwinism for theologians, was entitled “The Divine Method of Producing Living Species.” In it, Wright depicted theories of origins as a spectrum ranging from Louis Agassiz’s numerous instances of creation per species to the Darwinian view that—in Wright’s words—“the Creator first breathed life into one, or, more probably, four or five, distinct forms.” The judgment at hand concerned not whether organisms had developed by special creation or evolution, but the relative roles of the two processes. Wright sent Darwin himself a copy of the article, and Darwin wrote back, describing it as “powerfully written and most clear.”
In his third article in the series, on “the True Doctrine of Final Cause or Design in Nature,” Wright argued that an evolutionary natural theology could support belief in God just as well as one based on special creation. “In any case of secondary causation,” he wrote, “we do not care, so far as the argument for the existence of an intelligent designer is concerned, at how many, or at what points, the various elements of design entered.” Darwin only pushed the work of the designer further into the past; he did nothing to weaken William Paley’s argument that design in nature provides evidence for the existence of God.
Wright borrowed his argument here from Gray’s 1860 review of The Origin of Species. Adopting Paley’s famous analogy of a “watch on a heath,” Gray proposed that the proper analogue to an evolving organism was “a watch which sometimes produces better watches, and contrivances adapted to successive conditions, and so at length turns out a chronometer [and] a town-clock.” Darwinism suggested not a world without design, but a world planned with great foresight. The fact that life had survived wild geological and climatic changes, argued Wright, “makes a demand for a Contriver who is omniscient as well as omnipotent.” These were, of course, two attributes of God prominent in Calvinist theology.
Wright further emphasized this providential conception of God by returning to his theme of general design from his paper on induction. The true doctrine of final causes according to Wright was a holistic one, in which the purpose of every object—including every organ of every organism—was linked to the purpose of the universe as a whole. Among the many ends of the universe was its comprehensibility to humans, its reasoning inhabitants. Wright argued that the greatest good of all was that of understanding God’s plan through his works. This was the project of both scientists and theologians. As he put it poetically, “‘we be brethren,’ all of us, gathering pebbles along the shore of the same illimitable ocean.”
Wright’s Calvinism came to the forefront in his last article in the series, “Some Analogies between Calvinism and Darwinism.” In it, Wright staked out the common ground on which Darwinism and Calvinism converged. He maintained not only that the two doctrines were compatible, but that they shared central themes and logical structures. Wright especially emphasized that theological objections to Darwinism applied also to Calvinism, and thus that the Darwinian “may shelter himself behind Calvinism from charges of infidelity.” He drew five analogies between the two doctrines; I’ll restrict myself to three of them.
First, Wright pointed out that neither Calvinism nor Darwinism was universally progressive. Darwinism, wrote Wright, “comprehends extinction of species and organs as well as their production, and degradation as well as advancement.” Calvinism posited spiritual regressions in the fall of Adam and Eve and in the continuing sinfulness of humanity. The observation that Darwinism was not strictly progressive demonstrated that it corresponded with Calvinism rather than with liberal Christianity. Indeed, many liberal Christians believed that evolution guaranteed the progressive development of humanity.
Second, Calvinism and Darwinism shared the concepts of heredity and common human ancestors. The doctrine of original sin stated that, as Wright wrote, “corruption was transmitted from Adam to all his descendants.” He implicitly contrasted Darwinism with Agassiz’s belief in multiple human origins, which he had found incompatible with Christianity.
Third, Wright observed that both Darwinism and Calvinism invoked “the reign of law.” Darwinians of course believed that species developed through natural processes rather than miracles. Similarly, Calvinists believed that God had largely depended on humans, rather than miracles, to disseminate Christianity. “It is no more inconsistent with the goodness of God that he did not interfere with organic life by special creation for many million years before the appearance of man,” wrote Wright, “than that he has interfered so little by miraculous manifestations with the spread of the gospel.”
Many of the analogies Wright drew between Darwinism and Calvinism represented objections to liberal Christianity as well as orthodox antievolutionism. “If Calvinism is a foe to sentimentalism in theology,” he wrote, “so is Darwinism in natural history.… We may conclude that, not improperly, Darwinism has been styled the ‘Calvinistic interpretation of nature.’”
During the same years in which he wrote these articles, Wright conducted geological research, tracing the glacial boundary of the ice age. When the glacier began to melt it deposited debris, forming a terminal moraine of gravel at its southern extreme. In 1875 Wright traced gravel ridges in New England and concluded that they were formed by glaciation, rather than by the ocean as previously thought. By 1884 he had traced the moraine from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River. The United States Geological Survey supported Wright in his research, and in 1890 he published a report on the glacial boundary in the form of a USGS bulletin.
In 1892 Wright was granted an endowed chair at Oberlin in the Harmony of Science and Revelation. The same year, he published Man and the Glacial Period, a presentation of his geological findings. At a time when most experts believed that humans had arrived in North America since the retreat of the glaciers, Wright argued from archeological evidence that humanity had been here longer. Wright also maintained that there had been only one ice age. This sparked a conflict with Thomas Chamberlin, the head of the glacial division of the USGS.
Chamberlin and his fellow USGS geologist W. J. McGee began a campaign of public criticism against Wright. In his most famous of several reviews, McGee described Wright as a “betinseled charlatan” and accused him, wrongly, of plagiarism and of lying about his credentials. He also took offense at the foray of a theologian into science, referring pointedly to “the Reverend Professor Wright.” Many scientists rallied to Wright’s defense, including James Dwight Dana, perhaps the most respected American geologist of his day. Despite this support, Wright began to develop a cynicism about the institution of science which would pervade his later works.
This was not the only incident to contribute to his divorce from the scientific establishment. With the deaths of Darwin in 1882 and Gray in 1888, evolutionism became less rooted in its orthodox past. As his absolute devotion to both science and religion became less tenable, Wright adopted a new role.
He began to criticize evolutionism in 1900 with a Bibliotheca Sacra article on “The Evolutionary Fad.” The primary target of his criticism was not Darwinism, however. “The theory of evolution which is coming to prevail in the magazines and lighter literature of the period, and which is so seriously affecting theological thought,” wrote Wright, “is of the Spencerian variety, whose proof depends upon deduction, rather than induction.”
Wright objected to almost every element of Herbert Spencer’s philosophy: inevitable human progress, a romantic reverence for nature, and a system of deduction from universal abstractions. Indeed, he had written a similar critique of Spencer before, in 1889. Then, though, Wright had been a loyal Darwinian attacking Spencer’s rival theories. By 1900 his defense of Darwinism was no longer without exception, and Wright devoted several pages to criticisms of Darwin as well.
Wright’s central critique was of Darwin’s gradualism, which required a very old earth. The popularity and controversy of the Origin continued to draw scientific attention to the age of the earth. Wright relied most on the calculations of Lord Kelvin, who had concluded based on its temperature that the earth’s crust was about 24 million years old, too young for Darwinian evolution.
In part because scientists like Kelvin were skeptical of Darwinism, populist antievolutionist literature flourished during the first years of the twentieth century. Wright began to contribute to this literature, which was different in its rhetoric and readership from the academic theology of the Bibliotheca Sacra. His first major contribution was the introduction to a book entitled The Other Side of Evolution by the Presbyterian minister Alexander Patterson. Here Wright again focused his attack on Spencerism.
The doctrine of Evolution as it is now becoming current in popular literature is one-tenth bad Science and nine-tenths bad Philosophy. Darwin was not strictly an Evolutionist, and rarely used the word. He endeavored simply to show that Species were enlarged varieties.… Herbert Spencer, however, came in with his sweeping philosophical theory of the Evolution of all things through natural processes, and took Darwin’s work in a limited field as a demonstration of his philosophy.
Wright brought his analyses of evolutionism back to the academic forum of the Bibliotheca Sacra with two articles in 1909. In one he returned to his favorite topic of “Calvinism and Darwinism,” concluding that evolutionists had tragically rejected Calvinism for fatalism.
The other article, “The Mistakes of Darwin and His Would-Be Followers,” was essentially a revision of “The Evolutionary Fad.” This time, though, Wright focused his attention more on Darwin and less on other evolutionists, making his criticisms more acute. Furthermore, he failed to acknowledge one important change in circumstances since 1900. The discovery that radioactive elements emit heat had influenced geochronology. By 1909, the scientific debate had shifted from whether the earth was older than Kelvin said to how much older it was. Wright’s omission suggests that may not have been familiar with new developments in geology.
Wright sent a copy of the “The Mistakes of Darwin” to A. C. Dixon, the pastor of the Moody Church in Chicago, who was editing The Fundamentals. These tracts are now best known as some of the earliest documents of the American fundamentalist movement, but they represent an early stage of its development. Among the great curiosities of The Fundamentals was the role of Wright, who still held some loyalty to Darwin but was soon called upon by Dixon to write an article on evolution.
“The Passing of Evolution” was published in the seventh volume of The Fundamentals in 1912. Wright borrowed from his earlier essays on “The Evolutionary Fad” and “The Mistakes of Darwin,” but adapted to the emerging discourse of proto-fundamentalist antievolutionism. He borrowed quotations from books like The Other Side of Evolution and adopted a stronger position of biblical literalism, writing that humans “came into existence as the Bible represents, by the special creation of a single pair.”
Wright argued that even if evolutionary processes could account for speciation, they might not account for the more historically distant origins of higher taxa. It took “an indefinitely larger stretch of the imagination” to believe that families or orders originated by evolution than to believe that species did. In denying the recursive extension of evolutionary theory to broader taxa, he denied Darwinism its historical depth.
Wright remained a Darwin partisan, but he did so only through selective memory of the naturalist’s writings. His skepticism about common descent had deepened, for example, so he claimed that Darwin hadn’t believed in it. To contrast Darwin with the neo-Darwinians he himself opposed, Wright claimed that “Darwin denied the inheritance of acquired characteristics,” which was simply false. Indeed, the most positive thing he had to say about Darwin was that he had possessed a virtuous uncertainty which other evolutionists lacked.
Here ended Wright’s gradual evolution from reconciliationist to combatant. His antievolutionism, like his Christian Darwinism, was subtle, but Wright retained enough of his earlier evolutionary ideas that it often seemed merely confusing and contradictory. His earlier synthesis had been built on Calvinism, a theology which lost its influence even before his death. As the church historian Frank Hugh Foster, a friend and Oberlin colleague of Wright, wrote in 1906, “it had endured more than 150 years; it had become dominant in a great ecclesiastical denomination; it had founded every Congregational seminary; and, as it were, in a night, it perished from off the face of the earth.” Darwinism too was eclipsed at the turn of the century, if only temporarily. The fall of these two great doctrines was accompanied by the erosion of the common ground Wright had staked out between them.