One hundred years ago, John Scopes was convicted of violating Tennessee’s ban on teaching evolution. His trial—enshrined in popular mythology as a victory of enlightened science over benighted religion—left more behind than just a courtroom verdict. It helped entrench a cultural conceit: that science alone has access to truth, while moral and spiritual claims belong to the dustbin of myth.  “Inherit the Wind,” a play loosely based on the trial, took enormous liberties with history, turning a complex legal and educational debate into a morality play in which religious belief stood in for bigotry and ignorance.

One must remember that, a hundred years ago, there was great optimism that “science” would lead humanity to ever more glorious vistas.  The Roaring 20s was a time of Pollyanna sanguinity: after the scar of the “Great War” (World War I didn’t get that name until there was a II) people were so convinced man had learned his lesson that, by the end of the decade, they even signed a treaty declaring war forever banned.

In some ways, Scopes was a convenient punching bag because the opponent was so convenient: fundamentalist Bible Belt Protestants that insisted on reading Scripture absolutely literally.  A cursory reading of “Inherit the Wind” shows how Clarence Darrow made mincemeat out of that approach.

But we also have to remember the intellectual milieu of the times.  This was an era of philosophical belief (an oxymoron there) in logical positivism.  According to that school (whose influence spread far beyond its adherents), the only things that were real or “meaningful” were those that could be empirically verified, i.e., weighed, measured, put in a test tube, scientifically tested.  If you could measure it and quantify it, it mattered; if not, it was opinion, bias, prejudice, but certainly not real … or at least anything that really mattered.

You can see how this mindset vested the white lab coat with authority once held by the cassock.  The “scientist,” free of doctrinaire limits, was the only person who grappled with the things that matter.

The last gasp of that white coat reverence might have been COVID.  At first, many Americans deferred to what “the science” said.  Then they began to wonder whether “the science” was, in fact, as clear and certain as its spokespersons claimed it was.  By the end of the affair, a significant number of Americans, exhorted to “believe the science!” (another oxymoron) didn’t.

They’re not 21^st century William Jennings Bryans.

Science matters and can tell us valuable things … as long as it stays in its lane.  But there are two other facts for which we must account: its lane is limited and there is a lot of reality outside its lane that does not (and should not) submit to logical positivism’s focus on the empirical.

First, the lanes of science.  Science might theorize how man evolved.  It cannot say why he exists (or dismiss that question as meaningless).

Science can tell us how to blow up the world many times over (though once should suffice).  It cannot say why we ought not to do that.

Science has enabled us to edit genes, reproduce artificially, kill the unborn, and execute the elderly.  It has perfected those techniques, in some cases to be painless but, in most, to be efficient (at least in terms of the consumer’s desired outcome).  It cannot tell us whether we should do any of those things or what are their true costs.  That, arguably, is the problem of secular bioethics: it often gives us procedural rules (“make sure the patient gave ‘informed consent’”) but few substantive ones.  It’s why, as long as the “patient” signs off, the secularist bioethicist has no problem if he amputates his leg to remove gangrene or his genitalia to “correct” his sex, to consume a test drug to cure cancer or poison to end his life.

Second, the limits of science.

Logical positivism reduced the “real” to the measurable.  As the Bard of Avon noted, however, “there are more things in heaven and on earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy.”

Let’s take two: justice and love.  Justice is not always measurable.  It’s not even a question of when injustice reaches historic proportions: like a feather quilt cut open in a windstorm, retrieving all its contents is impossible.  But justice cannot be always achieved, even in the most individual case.  How do you restore “what is due” (the measure of justice) when a life is taken?

Finally, love.  Love is not measurable: “I love you enough.”  Love is not verifiable: there’s no cobalt thiocyanate to turn blue in the presence of love as in the presence of cocaine.  Love cannot be weighed: “Give me 10 pounds of caritas (sliced thin)!”

Is love then not real?  Is it “meaningless?”  Do you want to live in a world that dismisses it as “unscientific” and, therefore, publicly irrelevant?

A century after Scopes, science continues to serve us best not as an idol, but as a tool—one subordinate to the higher truths of justice, love, and the sanctity of life.