266 Roberts
to become more scientifi c and more philosophical through attention to
all, instead of to some, of the facts.”^26
If the “Baconian” conception of science embraced by conservatives
was suffi ciently broad to include theology within its purview, it proved to
be suffi ciently narrow to justify their imposing strict limitations on what
passed muster as “science” in the investigation of nature. Those Christians
commonly insisted that some theories put forward under the banner of
modern science were unduly speculative. William Jennings Bryan assailed
Darwinism on the grounds that it “is not science at all; it is guesses strung
together.” Conservatives such as Bryan employed their defi nition of sci-
ence to reject the notion that all physical events could be described in
naturalistic terms. Convinced that “science can not grasp all the processes
of the universe,” they concluded that it was necessary to invoke the su-
pernatural activity of God to bridge “many impassable gulfs” in explaining
the workings of nature.^27
During the 1920s, militant conservatives calling themselves “funda-
mentalists” used their conception of science as a springboard for attempt-
ing to ban the teaching of human evolution in the public schools. Those
efforts, which yielded legislation in fi ve states and many local school dis-
tricts, led to increased interest in the topic of religion and science. Some
commentators unsympathetic to the conservative agenda invoked the
now- familiar image of confl ict in making sense of the cultural landscape.
The journalist Frederick Lewis Allen, for example, described “the confl ict
between religion and science” as “one of the most momentous struggles
of the age.” For such people, convinced that religion contributed noth-
ing of real worth for humanity, there seemed to be little reason to try
to end hostilities. The British biologist C. H. Waddington, for example,
maintained that science alone could “provide mankind with a way of
life which is, fi rstly, self- consistent and harmonious, and, secondly, free
for the exercise of that objective reason on which our material progress
depends.” Logical positivists insisted that the methods of science consti-
tuted the only valid way of verifying claims about experience. Theological
statements might seem to be about experience, but they were unverifi able
and hence meaningless.^28
Although such denigration of religion did not refl ect the attitude of
the vast majority of Anglo Americans who addressed the relationship be-
tween science and religion during the fi rst half of the twentieth century,
commentators in that period increasingly leaned toward the notion that
science and religion dealt with different, albeit complementary, areas of
human experience. Catholic Neo- Thomists, for example, emphasized that
whereas scientifi c problems focused on description, theology addressed