THE FIRST public confrontation between Seventh-day Adventists and the champions of evolution occurred in San Francisco on the evenings of June 13and 14, 1925. The site of the debates was the capacious Native Sons' Hall on Van Ness Avenue in the heart of the world-famed city by the Golden Gate.The proceedings were formal and dignified, in strict adherence to the rules of debating.
The story behind this unusual event in Adventist history began the previous year on September 25, 1924, when William Jennings Bryan visited Mountain View, California, to deliver his famous oration "It Is Written," a stout defense of Creation against evolution.Bryan appeared in Mountain View, then a village of no more than 2,500 people,under the sponsorship of the Seventhday Adventist Pacific Press Lyceum Bureau, chaired by Milton C. Wilcox,book editor at the Pacific Press and former editor of the Signs of the Times.
The appearance of the famous "Orator from the Platte" was a feather in the cap of the Pacific Press. Bryan lectured in the auditorium of the Mountain View High School, the largest in town. To help pay the lecture fee of $250, admission was charged 75 cents for reserved seats, 50 cents for general admission. So great was the public's desire to hear Bryan that all tickets were sold far in advance of his coming.
The Pacific Press board appointed a committee to go to San Francisco to accompany the eminent speaker on the thirty-six-mile trip to Mountain View.The appointees consisted of a Presbyterian minister, a local newspaper publisher, the manager of the Pacific Press,the chairman of the Lyceum Bureau,and myself. But when the great day arrived to convoy Bryan from San Francisco, the other four pleaded "too busy."I, it was assumed, wasn't busy; so at the last moment my friends, the F. D.Nichols, borrowed an automobile from a relative and drove with me and my wife,Eleanor, to meet Bryan.
When our car arrived at the Pacific Press, Bryan took me aside and asked if there would be any time for a shower or bath. He had been traveling for two nights and a day by train and needed to change his shirt, collar, and cuffs. It was September, and there were no air-conditioned railway cars in 1924.
I took our guest to the Pacific Press Boarding House and arranged with the matron for Bryan to have a room with bath. As the noon hour was approaching, he asked me to open his suitcase,get out a clean shirt, wash his celluloid cuffs and collar, and help him dress after his bath. All this I did. It was an honor to be valet for so distinguished a man,and I have long cherished the memory of that experience.
Most San Francisco Bay newspapers covered Bryan's lecture; thus the event came to the attention of Dr. Maynard Shipley, a San Franciscan who was president of the Science League of America. The League had recently been formed by hundreds of American scientists in hopes of combating the burgeoning opposition to the teaching of evolution in public schools.
Asa Oscar Tait, editor in chief of the Signs of the Times, and his two young associates, Nichol and myself, decided to follow up the Bryan lecture with a barrage of articles featuring such ardent champions of Creation as George McCready Price and Harold W. Clark,both science teachers in Seventh-day Adventist colleges. By this time the evolution controversy was fast heating up across the entire nation.
Somehow, one or more of these anti-evolution articles came to the attention of Shipley, who promptly telephoned the Signs office to suggest a public debate with the editor. Tait promised to talk it over with his associates and superiors and reply within a few days.After some hesitation on the part of our administrators it was voted to proceed with arrangements to debate Shipley.
We conferred with Shipley as to the exact wording of the two questions to be debated. We were very happy when he accepted our suggestion for the first question, "Resolved: That the earth and all life upon it are the result of evolution." This placed the burden of proof upon him. We had no obligation to prove Creation and therefore could use all our time searching for weaknesses in the evolution theory. We decided to use only the testimony of reputable scientists in order to show that advocates of evolution were far from agreed as to the how,when, and why of their theory.
In formulating the second question for debate, the three of us quickly agreed on the wording, "Resolved: That the teaching of evolution should be debarred from tax-supported schools." Too late Nichol and I realized that the locution"as fact" should have followed the word"evolution." Whether or not Shipley was aware all along that we had made ourselves somewhat vulnerable by this omission, we never learned.
Interest Grows
Following the announcement of the two debates for mid-June, public interest grew amazingly. It was immediately evident that Native Sons' Hall, although one of the largest in San Francisco,could never accommodate more than a minor portion of those wishing seats.
The timing of the debates, scheduled for June 13 and 14, proved to be most propitious. Only a month earlier John Thomas Scopes, a science teacher in Dayton, Tennessee, had been arrested for violating a recently enacted State law prohibiting the teaching of evolution in public schools. Tennessee was the first to pass such a statute, but soon several other southern States began agitating for a similar law.
Scopes's trial was set for July 10, and for weeks in advance stories about the forthcoming "Monkey Trial" dominated front-page news. Our debates, coming as they did less than four weeks before Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan squared off for their historic encounter, rode the crest of a mighty publicity wave.
On the very weekend of our debates the Hearst newspaper chain of 17 dailies featured the creation-evolution controversy in its Sunday magazine. On one page of the center spread was Bryan writing on "Why the Bible Narrative of the Creation of Man Must Be Believed."Opposite was an essay by Prof. Fitzroy Cooper on "Why the Bible Narrative of the Creation Cannot Be Literally True."
On Saturday evening, June 13, Nichol met Shipley to debate whether or not"the earth and all life upon it are the result of evolution." Shipley began with a brief discussion of the natural origin of the earth. Then, having confidently disposed of that issue, he went on to the origin of life. "What I propose to prove here," he said, "is that there has been in operation on this earth an orderly evolution of living beings, be the cause of this developmental process what it may. I propose to adduce facts which prove conclusively that living forms evolved on this planet by natural processes instead of having been separately created by magic, full blown, out of the air, the earth or the waters."
Shipley devoted considerable time to a detailed description of how the fins offish developed into legs and how their air bladders turned into lungs when they crawled out of water onto land.Then came birds, mammals, marsupials,and finally the earliest primates allover 500,000 years ago. This process of evolution, he argued, was attested to by geologists, zoologists, and comparative anatomists, "the only persons competent to judge such matters."
Throughout his recital of the processes of evolution Shipley made frequent thrusts at Bryan and others who believed in the Genesis account of creation. "There is no place in modern science for fossil thoughts nor for crystallized ignorance," he said in tones of asperity.
Origin of Man
The climax of his presentation focused on the origin of man. Contrary to popular opinion, he said, evolutionists did not teach that man had descended from the anthropoid apes found in zoos and museums. Rather, both had come from a common ancestral form. In his peroration Shipley concluded that the "law of evolution is as fully established as the law of gravitation."
In the address that followed, Francis Nichol surprised and astounded us all with his intimate knowledge of facts and arguments contradicting evolution.One would have thought he had long been a student of morphology (comparative anatomy), embryology, and geology the sciences described by him as "the three-legged stool" supporting evolution. He began by making two allegations: first, that the evidence for evolution as stipulated by Shipley was at best circumstantial and unacceptable in a court of law; second, that the theory of evolution was first given to the world by philosophers and metaphysicians, not by scientists, and thus originated from speculation, not facts.
To underscore the uncertainty of the morphological evidence in favor of human evolution, he listed phrases gleaned from a book, The Evolution of Man, written by a group of Yale University professors: "may be," "may perhaps," "is possible," "more likely," "presumably," and so forth. The same expressions of uncertainty could be found in Darwin's Origin of Species, he claimed.
Nichol found the evidence from geology no more satisfactory. Not only did the various forms of life show remarkably little change as they came up through the strata, but new species almost always appeared suddenly. In attempting to explain the absence of transitional fossil forms, evolutionists were guilty of reasoning in a circle.They cited the geological record as evidence for evolution, while at the same time calling upon evolution to account for the fossils missing from the geological column.
Nichol's coup de grace to the evolutionary theory was his charge that its defenders espoused Darwin's hypothesis as a matter of faith, not as a proven scientific fact.
In rebutting Nichol, Shipley categorized the first chapter of Genesis as a fairy story of magical occurrences. Referring to Nichol's assertions about the confusion in geology, he claimed that it was "nothing compared with the confusion of mind I have in trying to get head or tail of what he was trying to talk about." According to Shipley's count, Nichol had made thirty-eight different points, too many for him to answer in a single evening,
Nichol, in turn, emphasized that anti-evolutionists were not opponents of science. "We have a very high regard for true science; and because of this high regard, we oppose the attempt of evolutionists to attach the label of 'science' to their unsupported guesses. The evolutionists, not the Fundamentalists,are bringing the word 'science' into disrepute." He closed with an appeal to the judges to "render a decision that the case for evolution is not proved."
Sunday evening, June 14, Shipley and I debated whether or not "the teaching of evolution should be debarred from tax-supported schools." Whereas the first debate had dealt with evolution from a scientific viewpoint, my debate carried the discussion into the realm of education, morals, and religion. As previously agreed, I spoke in the affirmative."
One of the chief reasons why we oppose the teaching of evolution in the tax-supported schools of our country,"I explained, "is because evolution is subversive of the religious convictions of many who send their children to the public schools." The teaching of evolution thus violates the American principle of the separation of church and state just as surely as would the teaching of the Genesis story.
Religious Views Affected
I then discussed the religious views affected by the teaching of evolution."In the first instance," I said, "evolution is contrary to the belief of many concerning God." It "denies a personal God, and says God is but a force or energy or thought which pervades the cosmos." In addition, it presents a radically different view of Jesus Christ than that held by millions of parents who send their children to public schools. According to Darwin's disciples, Christ could not have died for the sins of men, because sin is nothing but the "hang-over from our animal ancestry, the remnants of the tiger and ape in us."
It seemed to me that one of the largest issues in the debate was who should control the American public school system, a majority of citizen voters or a few so-called experts in evolutionary theory.
In presenting the negative side of the evening's debate, Shipley flatly declared that Nichol and I were doing precisely what the religionists had done in the days of Copernicus and Columbus.
He went on to describe those of us who opposed the teaching of evolution in public schools as "sincere but . .. misguided citizens" who would place the country's educational system under mob rule. To take control of the schools away from those specially trained in pedagogy and science and turn it over to ignorant laymen was "anti-American," he said.
When Shipley concluded his speech, I used my time for rebuttal to respond to a remark he had made about the number of books Nichol and I had brought to the debate. "It looks as if they had brought the public library over here to night," he had said. "That is true, we do have a lot of books here," I admitted,"and if you will open them, you will find that we have read every one of them,and made our notations in the margins,proving that we have studied them thoroughly. There is not a Fundamentalist book in the pile, either; every one of them is from an evolutionary author.. ..Another reason why we brought these books tonight is because from this platform last November, David Starr Jordan declared that the Fundamentalists are so ignorant they never read books.He even made the assertion that 'William Jennings Bryan never read abound book in his life, not even the Bible, about which he likes to talk so much.' We thought that perhaps if we exhibited here tonight a few dozens of these scientific books which we have read, Mr. Shipley would not dare to say no Fundamentalist ever reads anything."
In his rebuttal for the negative Shipley read a prepared statement emphasizing the educational value of the theory of evolution. "We must conclude, then,"he said at one point, "that the theory of evolution should be taught in our schools not only because it certainly leads to the discovery of new facts, but because of the value of this discipline as an ethical agency. ... No one with any religion worthy of the name would suffer from the discovery that God works through natural processes like the law of evolution," he argued.
With Shipley's eloquent peroration,the 1925 San Francisco debates on evolution came to an end. All that remained now was the judges' decision.
The Decision
The Honorable D. A. Cashin, Associate Justice of the Appellate Court of California, announced the results:
"On the first proposition, submitted and debated last night, on the merits of the debate, and not on the merits of the controversy, the decision of the judges is for the negative.
"On the proposition tonight, on the same principle, our decision is for the negative. The vote for each proposition,it is appropriate for me to state, was a divided vote."
On split votes of two to one Francis Nichol had won and I had lost.
The morning following the debates the San Francisco Examiner carried ad roll headline reading: "San Francisco Debate on Evolution Ends in Tie: Judges Decide That, as Presented by Speakers,Theory Untrue, Should Be Taught."
Condensation of an article originally appearing in The Adventist Heritage published by Loma Linda University Libraries (Winter, 1975). Used by permission.
