Biology Reference
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are the problems which present themselves anew with undiminished
interest to every man born in the world.” 26
While Bryan's assertion that the integrity of the Bible depended upon a
“correct understanding” of the human “line of descent” certainly reflects
his fundamentalism, Huxley's evolutionism reinforced this idea. If a scien-
tific figure of Huxley's stature would freely assert that patterns of evolution-
ary descent provided clues about the “goal” of human history, how could we
expect Bryan to suppose any less?
Closer to home, this supposition was being affirmed by one of Hux-
ley's former students, the eminent paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn
(1857-1935), who challenged Bryan's anti-evolution crusade in numerous
lectures and newspaper columns. Judging by the topic title under which
several of these messages were collected in 1925, The Earth Speaks to Bryan ,
one might expect to find an amassment of fossil evidence sufficient to crush
Bryan's quixotic attacks, but the Columbia University scientist and presi-
dent of the American Museum of Natural History offered nothing of the
kind. Osborn's answer to fundamentalism is evolutionism, not evolution-
ary science. The title, which paraphrases Job's “speak to the earth and it
shall teach thee” (12:18), reaffirms science's traditional role as a resource for
natural theolog y. 27 Osborn's goal is not to refute the scientific pretensions
of fundamentalism but rather to reassert the religious role of evolutionary
science. “Nature's firm foundations for religion and morals” are found in
evolutionary science, and he identifies this claim with the same Baconian
tradition that had made Bishop Paley's Evidences standard reading in his
own student days—a topic that even Huxley had “always kept . . . at his bed-
side for last reading at night.” 28
It is an evolutionism substantially like Huxley's that we find in Osborn's
topics. Although he affiliates himself with Christianity more directly than
Huxley ever did, his natural theology is just as unorthodox as that of his
British mentor. When he invokes St. Augustine to denounce Bryan's confla-
tions of science and revelation, he sounds the voice of a respected Christian
tradition, but such appeals to mainstream theology are only subordinate ele-
ments within what is, hermeneutically speaking, only a reverse fundamen-
talism. 29 In arguing that the Bible is only “an infallible source of spiritual
and moral knowledge,” he takes a position that many respected theologians
of that time would have invoked against Bryan. What makes Osborn's
position different is the fact that he does not honor the scientific correla-
tive of this precept. He asks the reader to reject the notion that scientific
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