If a recent discussion on creationism in the Tennessee Senate has a precedent, it is not to be found in Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species, the genesis text on evolution. Nor is it to be found in the Bible. It rests, instead, in the pages of Douglas Adams’ comic science-fiction novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

A group of scientists construct a computer named Deep Thought and ask it to provide the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. After 7.5 million years of calculations, the computer exclaims, “Forty-two!” The scientists are outraged by this seemingly nonsensical answer. “I think the problem, to be quite honest with you,” the computer responds, “is that you’ve never actually known what the question is.”

Raymond Finney, a Republican state senator from Tennessee’s Eighth District, apparently disagrees. Not only does the retired physician from Maryville know what the question is, he read it into the public record on Feb. 21, in a controversial piece of proposed legislation known as Senate Resolution 17:

Is the universe and all that is within it, including human beings, created through purposeful, intelligent design by a Supreme Being, that is a Creator?

It was the first of several questions that Finney wanted presented to the state Department of Education, with a reply expected by Jan. 15, 2008. In Finney’s view, the questions would help settle the most incendiary ongoing issue in contemporary education, the teaching of intelligent design vs. evolution. Over the past century, the issue has become a conflict of Balkan proportions in Tennessee and elsewhere in the U.S.

But the 11 months provided by SR-17 wouldn’t give the Department of Education much time to reason through the problem. Finney decided to help them out. Hence the next question:

Since the universe, including human beings, is created by a supreme being (a Creator), why is creationism not taught in Tennessee public schools?

Finally, just in case someone asked for concrete proof of a Creator’s hand—some initials on a mountaintop, a date in a cornerstone, anything—Finney’s third question covered all the bases:

Since it cannot be determined whether the universe, including human beings, is created by a supreme being (a Creator), why is creationism not taught as an alternative concept, explanation, or theory, along with the theory of evolution in Tennessee public schools?

Finney doesn’t explain how teaching a Christian version of creationism somehow inevitably follows from our inability to determine if the universe was created. And it is very much a biblical, Judeo-Christian concept that most Americans mean when they refer to creationism. They aren’t suggesting that we also teach the Oceanic idea that the world was born from a clamshell. They omit to mention that the Pangwe of Cameroon considered the first human being to be the creator god’s version of a tailless lizard, or that Amma, the creator god of the Dogon people of Mali, allegedly crafted black people from sunlight and white people from moonlight.

No matter. The instant SR-17 made the local news—and then the national news, and then the international news—it rekindled a flame war that many Tennesseans wish would go the way of the dodo. If you push the button labeled “TENNESSEE” in the mind of biologists in Warsaw or Nairobi, Sao Paulo or Helsinki, their mental screen will light up with the words “SCOPES TRIAL.” Because of the prosecution of a high school science teacher in Dayton in 1925—a media circus shamelessly engineered by Dayton boosters to promote their city—our fair state has the honor of being considered the epicenter of assaults on science education.

There is, of course, the small consolation that Tennessee is not alone in the ongoing wrangle. Sen. Finney’s Three Big Questions, after all, aren’t going to lead to the next Scopes trial. In 2005, that dubious honor went to the town of Dover, Penn., where a now-famous legal showdown took place between Bible-thumpers and monkey-huggers. The players in the drama, which was often reminiscent of Tennessee’s historic courtroom battle, included angry school board members on both sides, outraged parents clutching Gospels and Constitutions, worried teachers, harried students and news media from all over the world.

The debate over creationism vs. evolution may have waxed and waned during the past century, but it has never died. As dependably as the cycles of the cicada, evangelists or lawmakers will spontaneously combust into a new assault against their old secular foes. Suddenly constitutional lawyers will emerge from hibernation, blinking in the camera light, and find themselves on Channel 4 explaining how the architects of the American Constitution—religious skeptics such as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin—made the separation of church and state a key aspect of the document that is supposed to protect all our liberties.

Why does the argument over creationism (or its flavor of the week, “intelligent design”) resume every few years, with both sides entrenched even more deeply than before? And why does it seem to recur so regularly, not just in America as a whole, but specifically in Tennessee? One must return to the very point of contention: the beginning. And who better to ask than the great-great-grandson of the man whose name is synonymous with evolution theory—and to some, the enemy of all that is holy.

Early in our bright new millennium, an American tourist visiting England was caught spitting on a grave in Westminster Abbey. There, among the hallowed remains of Isaac Newton and Charles Dickens and Elizabeth I, this Christian fundamentalist had spied the final resting place of a man he considered the right hand of Satan. When confronted by a shocked tour guide, the tourist demanded to know why a man as evil as Charles Darwin was buried in a church.

Early in our bright new millennium, an American tourist visiting England was caught spitting on a grave in Westminster Abbey. There, among the hallowed remains of Isaac Newton and Charles Dickens and Elizabeth I, this Christian fundamentalist had spied the final resting place of a man he considered the right hand of Satan. When confronted by a shocked tour guide, the tourist demanded to know why a man as evil as Charles Darwin was buried in a church.

Many people gasped when they heard about the expectorating tourist. They know Darwin as the most insightful biologist and quite possibly the greatest scientist who ever lived—the man who unified the study of nature. But Matthew Chapman merely laughed.

“Spitting on Darwin’s grave,” says Chapman, who will be in Nashville April 18 for a Davis-Kidd book signing, “is no more or less of an intelligent reaction to a huge body of evidence you don’t like than any other reaction.”

To hear Matthew Chapman tell it, he is the ultimate irony: a direct descendant of Darwin who is proof of man’s regression. Charles Darwin begat a son named Francis. And Francis begat a daughter named Frances. And Frances begat a daughter named Clare. And Clare begat a son named Matthew. Born in 1950, he grew up wary of—and finally antagonistic toward—his family’s intellectual history. Like many descendants of the famous and accomplished, he felt weighed down by expectation. Chapman jokes that the Darwin family has been devolving ever since Charles—each generation growing not only less intellectual and less accomplished but even shorter.

“Then we get down to me,” Chapman says. “I’m in the movie business.”

After accumulating the usual résumé of those who wind up writing for a living—working various non-intellectual jobs to pay the bills, including running the lighting in a nightclub—Chapman gradually found himself almost forced to examine the work of his distinguished ancestor. When he moved to the U.S. in the 1980s (he became a U.S. citizen a few years ago), he was astonished to find that his family’s intellectual legacy—taken for granted back home and in scientific circles in the rest of the world—is fiercely contested here. So he began to read Darwin’s work and read other scientists on evolution. In time he started paying attention to creationist assaults against evolution.

Unlike his modern-day descendant, Charles Darwin would have made a terrible public defender of his work. A man who suffered from crippling shyness, plagued with both genuine illnesses and hypochondria, Darwin deliberately secreted himself in a small village several miles south of London. He left the arguing to other people—including the man who became known as “Darwin’s bulldog,” the fearless biologist Thomas Huxley.

In 1876, decades before the Scopes trial, Huxley visited Nashville. His sister had married an American who fought on the Confederate side and it was his first opportunity to see her in years. As he spoke at standing-room-only public venues and toured the still Methodist-run Vanderbilt University, which had been founded only a year before, Huxley was given the red-carpet celebrity treatment. (See “Entertaining the ‘Devil’s Disciple,’ ” Sept. 11, 1997, in the Scene archives.)

On his last night in Nashville, Huxley spoke at one of the South’s grandest public venues, the exotic Masonic Hall on Fifth Avenue—just a brisk walk from Capitol Hill, where SR-17 would come into being. That night, the theater’s more than 700 seats were filled; standing visitors crowded the aisles. After opening comparisons between English and Middle Tennessee topography, Huxley described the view of nature that underlies all of modern biology, a view that he himself was helping to formulate at the time—the view that creationists would fight a few blocks away 131 years later.

“During that vast time,” Huxley said, “the population of the earth has undergone a slow, constant and gradual change, one species giving way to another….”

The lingering reverberations of that view had begun to captivate Chapman. In 1998, a publisher who had read some of Chapman’s screenplays—his credits include the Bruce Willis thriller Color of Night and the John Grisham adaptation The Runaway Jury—approached him and invited him to write a book. Chapman decided to visit Dayton, Tenn., to write about the Scopes trial, its legacy and how the town had changed in the three-quarters of a century since its one moment of fame. The result was a compassionate and perceptive book about the American South, seen with the fresh viewpoint of an outsider: Trials of the Monkey: An Accidental Memoir, which appeared in 2001. It begins as a visit to Dayton and evolves into both a personal memoir and a voyage into creationist thinking.

“I find it interesting to note that when the Scopes trial took place,” Chapman says, “evolution had been taught in the public schools for many years without much controversy. I think the re-emergence of creationism in the culture yet again is a kind of sign that there is something wrong and people are afraid. Whenever people are afraid, they retreat into primitive interpretations of the world—because it’s comforting.”

Chapman has witnessed firsthand how intense the debate has grown ever since. Late in 2005, he got an assignment from Harper’s to cover the “intelligent design” trial then coming up in Harrisburg, Penn. Chapman thought the trial might contribute useful material to one of his works in progress, a documentary about creationism in contemporary America. Instead, he ended up with raw material for a book—and a ringside seat for a circus that revived all the old Scopes hostilities for the 21st century.

The book’s title, 40 Days and 40 Nights, refers to the length of the Dover trial. But the allusion to the biblical flood proved apt. All the conflicts that have bedeviled Tennessee for 80-odd years spewed forth in a deluge in Pennsylvania: challenges to the Constitution and the separation of church and state; fears about the banishment of God from the schoolhouse; arguments about the primacy of faith or fact. Once again, like magnetized filings, both sides fell predictably into line.

The book’s title, 40 Days and 40 Nights, refers to the length of the Dover trial. But the allusion to the biblical flood proved apt. All the conflicts that have bedeviled Tennessee for 80-odd years spewed forth in a deluge in Pennsylvania: challenges to the Constitution and the separation of church and state; fears about the banishment of God from the schoolhouse; arguments about the primacy of faith or fact. Once again, like magnetized filings, both sides fell predictably into line.

The trial was officially Tammy Kitzmiller, et al. vs. Dover Area School District, et al., Case No. 04cv2688. Kitzmiller, a divorced mother of two children in the Dover school system, learned that the school board had forced her daughter’s ninth-grade biology class to present intelligent-design (ID) material alongside an already watered-down text. The teacher objected, but the board stood firm.

Kitzmiller sued. Ten other plaintiffs, six women and four men, all parents of Dover students, joined the suit. They argued that, in insisting that materials on creationism be made available to students—in direct opposition to the school’s biology teachers, who defended the scientific consensus regarding evolution—the school board was violating the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

The Establishment Clause is the first clause, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,” which is followed by what is commonly called the Free Exercise Clause, “or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” (Historians point out that the authors of the Bill of Rights were responding in this amendment to the establishment of the Church of England as the official religion of the nation from which the colonies were rebelling.) The two parts together comprise the religion clauses of the First Amendment, which goes on to forbid government abridgment of free speech, free press, right of assembly or right to petition the government for redress of grievances.

The plaintiffs contended that the school board was attempting to force its beliefs upon students and teachers. The defendants argued that they simply required the teacher to make other materials available—in this case, a book called Of Pandas and People. Chapman’s book unravels the tangled history of secretive attempts by the head of the school board, Alan Bonsell, to force creationism into the classroom, if not officially into the curriculum. Other creationists were not secretive at all. Bill Buckingham, a retired Dover cop and corrections officer who wore a pin of a cross wrapped in an American flag, stood up in a school board meeting about science textbooks and said, “Two thousand years ago someone died on a cross for us! Isn’t it time we take a stand for him?”

Many local and national religious leaders opposed the school board’s efforts. The punchiest statement of opposition came from the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Lynn described intelligent design as having “as much to do with science as reality television has to do with reality.”

In the end, the case was decided by John E. Jones III, a 2002 Bush appointee. On Dec. 20, 2005, the judge ruled in a 139-page decision that “the religious nature of ID would be readily apparent to an objective observer, adult or child,” and that “the evidence at trial demonstrates that ID is nothing less than the progeny of creationism.”

Jones explained that ID violated scientific ground rules by invoking “supernatural causation” and pointed out the many ways in which ID’s attacks on evolutionary biology had been refuted in clear detail by scientists. “Accordingly,” he declared, “we find that the secular purposes claimed by the Board amount to a pretext for the Board’s real purpose, which was to promote religion in the public school classroom, in violation of the Establishment Clause.”

The ruling decided the case, but it settled nothing. Of the creationists on the board, one Dover school board member told Chapman, “These people are convinced that evolution—and they have said this to me—is a hoax, that science has evidence debunking it, but they suppress it.” And one of the parents remarked, “The fact that we have a school board of people who really hate education is beyond belief.”

As an influential movement with its own political rhetoric, contemporary creationism is a uniquely American phenomenon. Its roots go far back in American history, and some historians even specialize in the study of it. Edward J. Larson is probably the foremost among such scholars. His history of the Scopes trial, Summer for the Gods, won a Pulitzer Prize in history in 1998.

As an influential movement with its own political rhetoric, contemporary creationism is a uniquely American phenomenon. Its roots go far back in American history, and some historians even specialize in the study of it. Edward J. Larson is probably the foremost among such scholars. His history of the Scopes trial, Summer for the Gods, won a Pulitzer Prize in history in 1998.

Larson became a historian of (among other topics) creationism because it combined his interest in science, social history and religion. He is particularly interested in the way anti-evolution rhetoric rises and falls and rises again in American fundamentalist movements. Consider the era before the Scopes trial.

“When you look back before 1920,” Larson says, “you find a lot of proto-fundamentalists and evangelicals working out various sorts of accommodation with evolution. Of course, they involved the kind of accommodation that the Catholic Church and most moderate and mainline Christians continue to make today—that, in some way, evolution was God’s means of creation, either by designing the laws of creation or creating the human soul and indwelling it in an evolved ape.”

Larson argues that in the last few decades a number of evangelical Christians and other fundamentalists have deliberately chosen to push the issue of creationism “vs.” evolution because it is a unifying political banner. “It’s a matter of rhetoric,” he says. “If you get articulate people pushing an issue, they make it a front-burner issue.” Larson wonders just how much creationism is really what he calls “an intrinsic, natural issue” among fundamentalist Christians.

“I mean, the divinity or resurrection of Christ might be an intrinsic, natural issue that they would fight moderate and liberals views on,” Larson says. “But why would they fight on this issue? It takes somebody who gives meaning to it by tying it to larger cultural concerns ranging from crime to atheism, as [Scopes prosecutor William Jennings] Bryan and others did back in the Twenties.”

Contrary to the either/or claims of many creationists, Larson points out, there are numerous religious biologists in America, some of them even evangelical Christians, who do not try to deny the evidence for evolution. Francis Collins, the former head of the Human Genome Project, recently published a book entitled The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief. As a Christian himself, he writes that “science is not threatened by God; it is enhanced.” And he adds, “God is most certainly not threatened by science; He made it all possible.”

Contrary to the either/or claims of many creationists, Larson points out, there are numerous religious biologists in America, some of them even evangelical Christians, who do not try to deny the evidence for evolution. Francis Collins, the former head of the Human Genome Project, recently published a book entitled The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief. As a Christian himself, he writes that “science is not threatened by God; it is enhanced.” And he adds, “God is most certainly not threatened by science; He made it all possible.”

What Collins never does, however, is pretend that evolutionary evidence does not exist or deliberately misrepresent it, as many creationists have done. Nor does he propose that religious beliefs ought to accompany science classes—the pathway that SR-17 attempts to pave.

“So is the issue of creationism still alive and kicking in Tennessee?” asks Hedy Weinberg, director of the Tennessee chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. “Yes, it is, because we have a state senator—not that far from Dayton—still wanting to challenge the professional educators to teach creationism in a public-school science class.”

As the only national organization whose full-time job is defending the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, the ACLU invariably becomes involved when creationists attempt to violate the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause and force religion into a science class. Concerning SR-17, Weinberg says, “Finney’s proposed resolution flies in the face of the separation of church-state doctrine. Public officials cannot be required to share their religious beliefs with the government and that is what Finney is asking the commissioner of the Department of Education to do. What would come next?

“No one,” Weinberg adds flatly, “argues that there is not a place for teaching creationism in a class focusing on the origins of humankind. If public schools wanted to provide an elective—really an anthropology course—on the range of the stories, the myths, the religious beliefs that guide people when they think about how humankind was formed, there’s a way to speak to that.”

But the movement usually wants to challenge evolution and require a specifically biblical story to be taught alongside the scientific evidence, which is a mix of religion and science that seems to do little good for either.

Creationists evidently don’t realize that their views were in the science classes, or what passed for science classes, for hundreds of years. When Charles Darwin entered school, Western science was still enslaved to a single religious account of natural history. Only very slowly and reluctantly did the biblical creation account move to the religion department, where it wouldn’t have to be pummeled every day to provide empirical evidence it does not have available.

For that matter, much of the bedrock knowledge now taken for granted about the universe was once denounced by religious leaders as heretical—a danger to our souls, the nation and maidenly virtue. Just think of all those smug policy wonks of the Inquisition refusing to peer through Galileo’s telescope.

Somehow the idea that we are kin to all creatures on Earth, that we all grew up together over a long period of time, is presumed to be less morally inspiring than our having been molded from dirt by a divine potter. Many creationists paint the last 150 years of history, since the publication of The Origin of Species, as the Dark Age of humanity, presumably contrasted with the God-fearing era of brotherly love that resulted in the Crusades, the Inquisition and the Salem witch trials. To evolutionists, it is beyond ironic that people who are attempting to force others to study their beliefs are claiming that any resistance to their demands constitutes religious oppression.

One of the inspirational aspects of Matthew Chapman’s book 40 Days and 40 Nights is the way it explores the quiet heroism of concerned parents and teachers, many of them practicing Christians, who, in the face of public name-calling (including accusations of atheism), resisted the forcing of religious views into science classes . If any reconciliation is to be found in the clash between creationists and evolutionists, perhaps it lies in the lyrics of Chris Smither’s recent song “Origin of Species,” which cheerfully accommodates both a scientific and a religious view of nature:

“God said ‘I’ll make some DNA

They can use it any way they want

From paramecium right up to man….

I’ll just sit back in the shade

while everyone gets laid

That’s what I call intelligent design.’ ”