The particular case in question is a 1930 debate between evangelist Harry Rimmer (1890-1952), the leading antievolutionist in America after the death of Bryan, and Samuel Christian Schmucker (1860-1943), a biologist with a national reputation as a populizer of evolution. We tell the story of that debate, sketch the lives and beliefs of the two principal characters, and argue that Rimmer's fundamentalist antievolutionism and Schmucker's evolutionary theism were competing varieties of folk science. Each man practiced folk science by using what he took for science in support of his own world view; each variety of folk science came with its own set of assumptions about knowledge, purpose, and the nature of God; and each was appreciated by a different segment of the population, one popular and the other more elite.

Rimmer and Schmucker both believed that religion and science ought to agree. They also believed that modern science had seriously undermined traditional religious beliefs among the youth of their day, but they disagreed how to respond to this state of affairs. Schmucker called for "a restatement of our religious faith in terms of our present thinking" and affirmed the importance of cultivating a sense of divine immanence for developing a new spirituality. But in his attempt to unite modern science and modern theology, he stripped God of transcendence and humanity of an inherently sinful nature. Rimmer, on the other hand, sought to show that "true" science and a literal Bible were always in agreement, but this could be done only by reigning in the scope of scientific theories and "discovering" modern scientific information in various Biblical passages. Sharing Bryan's deep suspicion of speculative hypotheses, Rimmer insisted that science dealt only with "facts" rather than "guesses." Thus, where Rimmer achieved harmony by taking hypotheses out of science, Schmucker achieved it by taking transcendence out of theology.