Back to School, Part V

Shortly after World War II Mochitsura Hashimoto was summoned to the United States to give testimony in the trial of Charles McVay. Hashimoto’s and McVay’s fates intersected just after midnight, July 30, 1945, when the Japanese submarine I-58, commanded by Hashimoto, sunk the cruiser, the USS Indianapolis, commanded by McVay.

The Indianapolis quickly sank and its distress signal went ignored by the different naval stations that received it. To make matters worse the Navy failed to notice the absence of the Indianapolis, even when it didn’t show up at the Phillipines. This left the almost one thousand sailors on their own to battle for their survival and their sanity, floating in the middle of the ocean. With little more than life preservers, they suffered from severe exposure, dehydration, starvation, salt water poisoning, dementia, hallucinations, and shark attacks. One sailor was saved by his canteen which kept him afloat under his back. When accidentally discovered four days later, the crew was down to only a few hundred survivors.

Robert Shaw’s memorable retelling of the story in the movie Jaws was brilliant (for Richard Dreyfus it was a rare moment in which he didn’t need to act) but it only begins to reveal the horror—a horror for which the Navy was responsible. Imagine how the country would react to such a story. We will never know because the Navy covered it up and instead wrongfully blamed McVay.





Imagine being court martialed by those who made the mistakes, and then having testimony brought by the one who sank your ship. But Hashimoto’s testimony was far from damning. In fact it might have exonerated McVay except that it was in Japanese, and it seems the translation was less than faithful. Hashimoto’s English was weak, but good enough for him to understand the sham. And he was in no position to complain. As he later explained, “I was then an officer of the beaten country, you know, and alone, how could I complain strong enough?”

McVay was convicted and would receive his share of hate mail from Americans convinced he was to blame. He eventually committed suicide and so was not there when the Navy cleared his name in 2000.

Hashimoto and McVay experienced first hand how, as the saying goes, history is written by the winners. Sometimes people make mistakes, and sometimes they make matters worse by covering it up with lies. And when the winners do this, the lies become part of the historical record. Shaw’s monologue, as good as it was, is riddled with thirty year old Navy lies.

History as told by the evolutionists

As with wars and politics, science also has a history that is sometimes tailored by the winners. The history of evolutionary thought is easily the most egregious example today. Evolutionists, beginning with Darwin himself, portray evolution as an obvious and compelling scientific theory that overcame ignorant theological resistance. Here is how one of today’s leading textbooks [George Johnson and Jonathan Losos, The Living World, Fifth Edition, McGraw Hill, 2008] turns history on its head:

Of all the major ideas of biology, evolution is perhaps the best known to the general public, because many people mistakenly believe that evolution represents a challenge to their religious beliefs. Because Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection is the subject of often-bitter public controversy, we will examine the objections of evolution’s critics in detail, to see why there is such a disconnect between science and public opinion.

This is how evolutionists view themselves and the world around them. They represent science and those who do not accept their dogma are the problem. There is a war between science and religion because, while they merely pursue good scientific research, religious opposition stands in the way.

Immediately after publication of The Origin of Species, English clergymen attacked Darwin’s book as heretical; Gladstone, England’s prime minister and a famous statesman, condemned it.

So the publication of Origins was met with harsh opposition and the religious fervor was not limited to the clergy. Leading figures, and even the prime minister, condemned Darwin’s scientific conclusions.

Civil rights groups used the case of high school teacher John Scopes to challenge the Tennessee law [banning the teaching of evolution] within months of its being passed in 1925. The trial attracted national attention—you might have seen it portrayed in the film Inherit the Wind. Scopes, who had indeed violated the new law, lost.

It would be difficult to imagine a more misleading version of the early history of Darwin’s theory and its critics. The evolutionary rendition is misleading not because it is all false, but for more subtle reasons. The worst lies are not those that are blatantly false, but those that twist the truth ever so slightly to achieve a completely different story.

Yes Gladstone and others opposed evolution, yes there was religious opposition in the early 1900s, and yes John Scopes was found guilty of teaching evolution. But these tidbits portray an entirely false history.

Gladstone’s skepticism was well informed and thoughtful. The polymath had been seriously contemplating the idea for twenty years before 1859. And while there certainly was less considered opposition, the response of mid century Victorians to the emerging evolutionary ideas was hardly the unified front portrayed by evolutionary histories. In fact Origins was an instant hit. It quickly sold out and was welcomed by many Anglicans including many in the clergy. Indeed there was as much scientific doubt as there was religious doubt about Darwin’s new theory.

Likewise religious reaction in America in the early 1900s was mixed. Yes there certainly was opposition, often ill-informed, but there also were leading thinkers such as BB Warfield and fundamentalists such as RA Torrey who believed in an old earth and were open to evolutionary ideas. Torrey did, however, have scientific doubts about evolutionary theory.

And the Scopes Monkey Trial is far more complex than the incredibly lopsided tale presented in Inherit the Wind. John Scopes was not a humble and tireless science teacher, and he was not hauled off to jail by an angry mob of fundamentalists led by a Reverend Jeremiah Brown for trying to enlighten his science students. And no he did not, in fear for his life, contact journalist Henry Louis Mencken for help in securing a lawyer.

This is the beginning of the myth of Inherit the Wind that evolutionists continue to propagate. The reality is that the ACLU (never mentioned in the script) placed an ad in the Chattanooga Times seeking a volunteer to test Tennessee law on the teaching of evolution in the public schools. Local boosters in Dayton saw this as a wonderful opportunity to put them on the map and recruited Scopes, a coach and part-time teacher, to break the law. He was never incarcerated but rather spent most of his time hob knobbing with reporters. There was no angry mob and no vitriolic preacher.

What the play did get right is that the Monkey Trial was actually a referendum on the creationism and the Bible. Technically John Scopes was found guilty of teaching evolution, but all of that was merely logistical. The reason why the Monkey Trial is important to evolution, and the enduring message from Dayton, was that the Bible and its creationism are passe. This was established in the showdown at Dayton when the two famous lawyers squared off. Clarence Darrow called William Jennings Bryan to the stand as a Bible expert and grilled him on its foolishness.

The exchange was entirely religious (can we really believe the story of Jonah? Surely god would never do such a thing) and the result was yet another proof of evolution. It was another great moment in evolution's long history of theological mandates for a strictly naturalistic origins.

Unfortunately evolutionists do not tell history from an objective perspective, but from the viewpoint that evolution must be true. Therefore opposition must be caricatured as naïve or nefarious. Skepticism must be religiously motivated.

But in fact evolution was motivated and justified by metaphysical mandates. These began centuries before Darwin and continue today. While the opposition to evolution is portrayed as an intrusion of religion into things scientific, in fact evolution itself is the better symbol of such an intrusion.

Evolution’s retelling of history is both mythological and hypocritical. But this is nothing new when history is told by the winners.