When most people imagine evangelical Christianity and science in America, they picture conflict: the Scopes Trial, school-board fights over evolution, faith retreating before modern science. But that picture is largely a product of the twentieth century. For much of American history, evangelicals understood faith and scientific inquiry as deeply compatible — even mutually reinforcing.

In this episode, hosts John Fea, Dan Hummel, and Maggie Capra trace that longer, more complicated story with historian Ted Davis of Messiah University, one of the leading scholars of science and religion in American Protestant history. Beginning with the seventeenth-century idea that God authored “two books” — Scripture and nature — the conversation follows the relationship between evangelical faith and science through the early Republic, the arrival of Darwinism, the culture wars of the 1920s, and into the complex evangelical landscape of today.

Along the way, the hosts and Ted Davis explore why the “conflict” between evangelicals and science is both older and newer than we tend to assume — and why the real story resists the tidy narratives offered by both sides.

BONUS: The Full Interview on YouTube

John Fea sat down with Ted Davis for an extended conversation that ranges well beyond what we could fit into this episode. Watch the complete interview on our YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/OHTG1yY-6bY 

KEY THEMES

The “Two Books” Framework

For more than two centuries, educated Christians assumed God had authored two books — Scripture and nature — and that reading either carefully was an act of worship. Drawing on Francis Bacon’s The Advancement of Learning (1605), evangelicals embraced the pursuit of knowledge as a moral obligation oriented toward charity and human benefit rather than power or self-aggrandizement.

Progress, Postmillennialism, and the Antebellum Fusion

Early American Protestants fused Enlightenment ideas of progress with a postmillennial confidence that the Kingdom of God was advancing through human effort. Scientific and technological advances were understood as part of a divine plan — an outlook that made faith and science natural partners well into the nineteenth century.

The Rise of the “Conflict Thesis”

The idea that science and religion have always been at war is itself a historical product, popularized after the Civil War by writers like John William Draper and Andrew Dickson White. Notably, these were liberal or modernist Protestants; the original conflict was less science-versus-faith than a struggle over which “book” would define Christianity.

Defining “True Science”

By the 1920s, fundamentalists were not anti-science by their own lights — they held a “common sense” view of science rooted in the Scottish Enlightenment, in which only what could be directly observed counted as fact. Evolution, unfolding too slowly to observe, was therefore dismissed as conjecture. The same logic shaped resistance to higher criticism of the Bible.

Evolution, Germany, and World War I

The anti-evolution movement was politically entangled, not merely scientific. Evolution became linked in the American imagination with German militarism, a connection amplified by Vernon Kellogg’s Headquarters Nights (1917). For William Jennings Bryan, that link supplied a powerful political rationale for driving evolution out of public schools.

Faith and Science After World War II

The GI Bill, the neo-evangelical movement, and organizations like the American Scientific Affiliation opened space for devout Christians to pursue eminent scientific careers — Francis Collins, Ian Hutchinson, Katharine Hayhoe, and others. At the same time, a well-organized Young Earth Creationist subculture emerged, producing parallel institutions and a lasting polarization within the broader evangelical “tent.”

PEOPLE

· Ted Davis — historian of science and religion, Messiah University; episode guest

· Francis Bacon — 17th-century English philosopher; The Advancement of Learning (1605)

· Jonathan Edwards — colonial theologian; counter-Enlightenment strain of evangelical thought

· John Witherspoon — president of the College of New Jersey (Princeton); Scottish Enlightenment influence

· Samuel Miller — New York City Presbyterian minister and early Princeton Seminary professor

· James Ussher — 17th-century Church of Ireland bishop who calculated a creation date of 4004 BC

· John William Draper & Andrew Dickson White — popularizers of the “conflict thesis” after the Civil War

· William Jennings Bryan — populist politician, three-time presidential nominee, anti-evolution campaigner

· Asa Gray — Harvard botanist, Darwin’s first American champion, and a devout Presbyterian

· Vernon Kellogg — Stanford biologist and pacifist; author of Headquarters Nights (1917)

· B. B. Warfield — conservative Calvinist theologian at Princeton Seminary who engaged evolution

· Francis Collins, Ian Hutchinson, Katharine Hayhoe, Joan Centrella — prominent contemporary scientists of faith

· Bernard Ramm — neo-evangelical author of The Christian View of Science and Scripture

BOOKS

· The Advancement of Learning, by Francis Bacon (Henrie Tomes, 1605)

· A Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century, by Samuel Miller (T. and J. Swords, 1803)

· Headquarters Nights, by Vernon Kellogg (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1917)

· The Genesis Flood, by John C. Whitcomb and Henry M. Morris (Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1961)

· The Creationists, by Ronald L. Numbers (Harvard University Press, 2006)

· The Warfare between Science and Religion: The Idea That Wouldn’t Die, edited by Jeff Hardin, Ronald L. Numbers, and Ronald A. Binzley (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018)

· Science, Religion, and the Protestant Tradition, by James C. Ungureanu (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019)

· Process and Providence: The Evolution Question at Princeton, 1845–1929, by Bradley J. Gundlach (Eerdmans, 2013)

· Fundamentalism and American Culture, by George M. Marsden (Oxford University Press, 1980)

· The Christian View of Science and Scripture, by Bernard Ramm (Eerdmans, 1954)

· The Battle for the Bible, by Harold Lindsell (Zondervan, 1976)