Truth
The Scopes Trial
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Wednesday, 27 March 2002
Evolution: Contentious?
Darwin’s theory of evolution seems to be a much more contentious issue in the USA than in Europe. American Christian Fundamentalists found it necessary to try to defeat science through the law when they took John Scopes to trial in Dayton Tennessee in 1925. The freedom of scientists to discover about the world by proposing and testing hypotheses was challenged by religious and political bigots soaked in julep and old dogma. This opposition to evolution on religious grounds is proof that religion is still against science and is anti-intellectual.
Further proof is that the religious right will not let the case lie down. Like the case of Galileo and the case of the Inquisition, and the case of the Witch Hunts, Christian liars continue to try to amend history into something that suits them better. Christian gold, stolen over the centuries from poor widows, finances the publication of endless revisionist books, telling us that history is wrong because the enemies of the Church have distorted it! Because it was wrong, the Holy Joes demand the right to change it to what it should have been.
The fact that this is going on in these relatively enlightened days ought to be a clue to doubters about what went on when the Church had absolute power for a thousand years in Europe. The relationship between science and religion is that of truth and lies, but because the liars will not accept that Christianity is a superstition based on wishful thinking and fear of death, it perpetuates the clash and conflict with science, pretending, as it always does, to be the innocent party. One Christian apologist writes:
The entire evolution-religion conflict has been a tragedy for those who regard religious commitment as an essential part of what it means to be fully human and those who regard theology as a serious cognitive enterprise… Those who have been most vocal in defending science against this fundamentalist assault have often done so out of a general hostility to religion.Eugene E Selk
Selk tells us that the conflict is a tragedy for those who are fully human, namely those who believe the theologians, and those who defend science do it to annoy them! Selk cannot see his own bigotry, or freely accepts it as God given. Though the two positions seem inimical and that one must choose between them, Selk tells us “there is a great middle ground between these two.” This is, of course, more Christian blarney meant to stiffen the resolve of Christian doubters. Selk does not tell us where this middle ground is, and, frankly, it is not surprising because there can be none.
Science cannot accept that there are supernatural entities, because, if it did, scientists might as well leave their benches and find a pulpit. In practice, scientists, after 300 years of the scientific revolution, have been unable to find any evidence at all of anything supernatural. Indeed, every supernatural gap that Christians were convinced was the turn of the tide of reason eventually yielded to rational and natural explanation. The mystery that remains is why Christians even want to pretend otherwise, and stick to absurd ancient dogmas.
Fundamentalists
Before the Scopes trial, some US schools had started to teach Darwinism even in the same century that Darwin announced it in the “Origin of Species,” though they usually reminded the reader of Genesis at the same time. The fight against science in the public schools centered around evolution. Fundamentalism began with a series of booklets entitled The Fundamentals published between 1910 and 1915.
William Jennings Bryan throughout the 1920’s campaigned everywhere in the US against evolution being taught in public schools because it denied the Genesis story of creation. Bryan had been elected to Congress at the age of 30, and was a great orator. He was strongly against evolution, and powerful enough to have been chosen three times as Democratic candidate for president of the United States. He was defeated every time, but had been secretary of state in the Woodrow Wilson administration. He resigned when the US entered WWI. Apologists say he was a liberal who did not oppose evolution except when it came to the evolution of man!
When the Fundamentalist Movement grew in the early 1920s, the teaching of evolution in elementary and secondary schools was restricted, and high school biology textbooks began to talk about Darwinian evolution as “hypothetical” or “only a theory.”
Although Kentucky defeated the anti-evolution law by one vote, both Tennessee and Mississippi adopted it. In 1925, two fundamentalists, Billy Sunday and J Frank Norris, held an eighteen day crusade against evolution in Nashville. The result was that the Tennessee legislature passed a bill making the teaching of evolution in public schools in the State illegal. The American Civil Liberties Union immediately offered to defend anyone who challenged the law.
John Scopes was a single, twenty-four year old general science instructor and part-time football coach at the local high school. The re-writing of history is that Scopes was put forward as a ready volunteer just so that the town could get some useful publicity. This is Edward J Larson’s tack in a recent book, Summer for the Gods.
Larson wants his Christian readers to conclude it was all a plot and not the fault of the usual Christian innocents, but anyone rational will see that however the matter was brought to court is a side issue. The point was that Christian Fundamentalists wanted to impose their own outlook onto others in just the same way that Christians have throughout history, and so long as it was possible for a legal objection to be made it would have been. Most often in history any such objection against Christian laws would have meant death!
The Trial
So Scopes volunteered to be the test case, a warrant for his arrest was issued and a constable served the papers. A friend of Scopes, a local lawyer, promised to undertake the case. No one was unduly concerned. They felt they were defending liberty in the Land of the Free, and would succeed. Then, William Jennings Bryan offered to prosecute the teacher.
In the 1955 play and 1960 movie, Inherit the Wind, Bryan is a mindless reactionary swayed by the mob’s desire for blood, and Scopes is hauled out of the classroom and cast in prison. That is liberal propaganda, the Christians say, not mere dramatization, the same as movie moguls do all the time with no complaint from Fundamentalists or any other Christian when they approve of it.
Bryan’s involvement motivated Clarence Darrow, a successful labour lawyer, to defend Scopes. Darrow knew that religion was a confidence trick and regarded it with contempt, and saw science as the way of truth. The religious right, utterly unable to comprehend truth at all, suggest to their sheep that Darrow just wanted to get at religion. Clarence Darrow actually chose to oppose William Jennings Bryan because he wanted to defeat religious fanaticism.
Nor does the Christian right like to recognize that many Christians were opposed to the trial. Even in Tennessee, many Presbyterians and Methodists opposed it, and the Episcopal Bishop of Tennessee and the Dean of Fisk University, a black clergyman, asked the governor to veto the bill.
The revisionists have tried to character assassinate Scopes himself, suggesting he was not a young scientist committed to the advance of science and to science education. They seem to want to create an impression that he was in it as a lark, and was more interested in sports than science. Only after he was approached by his friends who wished to challenge the law, did he agree to be the plaintiff. He intentionally lectured on evolution and was then arrested. He then went off to play tennis.
This all seems to be scurilous trivializing and sneering, aimed at denigrating the whole issue to the gullible clappies. It ought not to need repeating that even if all of this is true, it is immaterial to the issue of the trial. The Scopes trial was a test case, and it would have been even better, perhaps, if the ACLU had put up a monkey to be tried. Whatever the reason Scopes wanted to participate in the case, the issue remained one of freedom before the authoritarian Christian right who want to tell everyone what to do. And, if Scopes was interested in football and tennis, how does he differ from most 24 year olds today? Even Christian 24 year olds have been known to be interested in sport.
When the trial opened in July of 1925, the town overflowed with reporters and spectators. Both Bryan and Darrow planned to call scientists as expert witnesses at the trial, but Bryan failed to find any scientists willing to testify, and so the judge refused to allow any expert witnesses on the grounds that the trial was not about proving the scientific theory of evolution true or false. He did allow written statements from scientists and the defense submitted 150 pages of such testimony.
Bryan decided to make the issue one of the local control of public schools. The taxpayers of Tennessee ought to have control over the curriculum. Nevertheless, Bryan gave long sermons about the dire moral consequences of evolution, such as in encouraging animal behavior. The main defense was that the anti-evolution statute was illegal because it established a particular religious viewpoint in the public schools.
After an eleven-day trial, the jury took nine minutes to find Scopes guilty, but the judge imposed the minimum fine of $100, which the ACLU paid. Five days after the trial, Bryan collapsed and died in Dayton. Had it been Darrow, the Christians would have said it was God’s wrath, but they did not conclude that God was angry that his own creative process of evolution was being tried in court by his own believers!
On appeal in 1926, the Tennessee Supreme Court reversed the conviction of Scopes, but on a technicality so that it created no precedent. The victory for the ACLU was therefore pretty pyrrhic. The verdict was guilty, and publishers began to delete all mention of evolution from science books. An anti-evolutionary law was passed in Arkansas, and then other states. By 1933, schoolbooks were empty of any significant science. Evolution did not appear in them. In the 1940s, a third of teachers were too scared to be identified with evolution or science. Scientific ignorance began to reign in the US. The educational system produced scientific dunces.
Fundamentalist Aims
It was Fundamentalism that benefited, starting its own colleges and publishing houses. Christianity espouses tenets that are anti-education, anti-science, anti-peace, anti-woman, anti-human sexuality and anti-life. The US atheist, Madelyn O’Hair, cites William J Bennetta, writing for the California Academy of Sciences, on the aims of Fundamentalism:
The religious right is fundamentalism’s political arm. It seeks objectives that are depicted in fundamentalist literature as being derived from, or consonant with, biblical prescriptions, and prophecies. Statements of these objectives vary considerably, but the principal goals are constant and prominent:
- a fundamentalist theocracy—that is, a government operated according to foreign policy based on nationalism and chauvinism reinforced by militarism;
- fundmentalist readings of the Bible;
- the economy of capitalism, more or less unrestrained;
- a social organization in which women would be subordinate to men and would focus their lives on reproduction;
- a system of education that would discourage analytical thinking in all realms except the purely technical ones;
- a system of science that would serve only to support commerce and to generate sophistic demonstrations that facts of nature conform to biblical narratives;
- theocratic suppression of cultural, intellectual, ethical, or sexual departures from the prescriptions of biblical authorities.
Only fear of losing the Cold War in the late fifties produced a slight reaction against the Fundamentalist madness that they want to force on to everyone as fanatical religionists always do, of whatever cult. Fundamentalism has continued to play a stronger and stronger role in American politics until today, premised on these principles. Pat Robertson used them to try to win the Republican nomination for the presidency of the United States, but failed. Rigging elections and fixing judges—as Christians do—Bush succeeded.
