The Scopes Trial: Fact vs Fiction
The Scopes Trial (The State of Tennessee vs John Scopes) was a legendary trial (one of the most significant in American History), which took place in 1925. The case involved Tennessee's ban on the teaching of evolution - "The Butler Act." The law itself had just gone into effect of the same year. William Jennings Bryan, three-time Presidential candidate volunteered to assist the prosecution. The most influential attorney of that era, Clarence Darrow agreed to join with the ACLU for the defense.
Here is a brief description of the trial from History.com:
"In the courtroom, Judge Raulston destroyed the defense’s strategy by ruling that expert scientific testimony on evolution was inadmissible–on the grounds that it was Scopes who was on trial, not the law he had violated. The next day, Raulston ordered the trial moved to the courthouse lawn, fearing that the weight of the crowd inside was in danger of collapsing the floor.
In front of several thousand spectators in the open air, Darrow changed his tactics and as his sole witness called Bryan in an attempt to discredit his literal interpretation of the Bible. In a searching examination, Bryan was subjected to severe ridicule and forced to make ignorant and contradictory statements to the amusement of the crowd. On July 21, in his closing speech, Darrow asked the jury to return a verdict of guilty in order that the case might be appealed. Under Tennessee law, Bryan was thereby denied the opportunity to deliver the closing speech he had been preparing for weeks. After eight minutes of deliberation, the jury returned with a guilty verdict, and Raulston ordered Scopes to pay a fine of $100, the minimum the law allowed. Although Bryan had won the case, he had been publicly humiliated and his fundamentalist beliefs had been disgraced. Five days later, on July 26, he lay down for a Sunday afternoon nap and never woke up."
"In 1927, the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned the Monkey Trial verdict on a technicality but left the constitutional issues unresolved until 1968, when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a similar Arkansas law on the grounds that it violated the First Amendment ."
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/monkey-trial-begins
The myth
Many think of the well made classic movie "inherit the Wind", (1960) which was a tour de force by actors Spencer Tracey and Frederic March as an accurate depiction of the trial. The movie and much of the teaching (YES TEACHING) about the event itself have left us all with this fable about a bunch of feeble minded religious fanatics who wanted to persecute a poor coach/part time teacher for teaching Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. Dosen't that kind of send a tingle up everyone's leg? How many children have watched this movie and formed their opinions based upon this fictional propaganda?
The Truth
The instigation behind all of it was lo & behold - the ACLU. The ACLU wanted a test case to overturn the Butler Act.
I wonder if it's taught anywhere that the ACLU offered to pay the expenses of the prosecution?
I wonder if it's taught anywhere that the ACLU actually advertised for a volunteer?
"A local businessman read the ACLU’s ad in the Chattanooga paper looking for a teacher
who would confess to teaching evolution. Scopes was asked to confess to this charge and a
scheme was hatched, more for publicity than for the defense of academia. He was told his fine
would be covered and he would spend no time in jail"
https://www.bryan.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Scopes-Trial-as-Compared-to-Inherit-the-Wind.pdf
It was they who found John Scopes, football coach and science teacher. John Scopes would one day later admit that he wasn't sure he ever even taught evolution.
John Scopes
The legacy
Thus, we have gone down the path where we are at today. A place where evolution is correctly taught as science and creationism is incorrectly portrayed as counter science. Faith is not science and should not be taught as such. The question is whether it can be taught alongside science. Literature can be taught with the exception of one book. We teach "the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire" but not the Bible. I'm sure if we ever did the ACLU would challenge it.
What of the ACLU today?
For now the organization is cautious about getting controversies before the current Supreme Court, but they are active and complicit in other areas.
Article is LOCKED by author/seeder
Tags
Who is online
37 visitors
To be filed under "Truth to Power"
Be sure to read the real thing I just posted so people could get the real thing
Couldn't you make your picture any bigger?
"Those who trouble their own house will inherit the wind"". William Jennings Bryan may have won in court way back when but Clarence Darrow actually won in the court of public opinion. Now, the small c christian fundie evangelical know nothings of today want us all to go backwards educationally 100 years. That isn't going to happen, again. Is it? Let's hope not. Gilead Anyone?
You are perpetuating the myth.
And you are making up your own myth
IMO this is one of those "the ends justify the means" things
Amazing how this applies to trump and many evangelicals
"The instigation behind all of it was lo & behold - the ACLU. The ACLU wanted a test case to overturn the Butler Act."
So what? It was a bad law, as evidenced by it being later overturned by the Supreme Court as a violation of the first amendment.
"Faith is not science and should not be taught as such. The question is whether it can be taught alongside science."
What can be taught along side science are the facts about faith, it's definition, what it means to some people, it's use throughout history. You can also teach about specific faiths teaching the origins of Islam, Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism or any of the other thousands of faiths that have been invented by man throughout history. What would be very illegal and shameful would be to try and teach that any one of those faiths is somehow superior to any others, or that any of those faiths were fact based instead of faith based. This is the real issue with teaching any specific faith alongside science as it implies they somehow both have the same foundation in rigorous repeated testing an observation, which is obviously not true for any faith.
The Scopes trial was an embarrassment because the defender of faith made "ignorant and contradictory statements to the amusement of the crowd". He was not "forced" or "made to" make those ignorant contradictory statements, he made them because facts and reality trapped him in a corner and he was exposed as being incapable of defending his own faith.
"Science is a magnificent force, but it is not a teacher of morals."
It teaches facts which enable a true assessment of the human moral condition. For a very long time in most religions, marrying out of your race or faith was morally reprehensible. Science has taught us we are all humans and there is no "curse of Cain" or any other religious mumbo jumbo to get all worried about.
"It can perfect machinery, but it adds no moral restraints to protect society from the misuse of the machine. It can also build gigantic intellectual ships, but it constructs no moral rudders for the control of storm-tossed human vessel."
Of course it doesn't "protect society from the misuse" of a machine, a machine can't be good or evil, only the one using it can be defined that way. Isn't that what I always hear about how "guns don't kill people, people do"?
"It not only fails to supply the spiritual element needed but some of its unproven hypotheses rob the ship of its compass and thus endanger its cargo"
What "spiritual element" needed? Science is not trying to supplant spiritualism, it simply doesn't care about it because the idea of spirits is directly contradictory to how science explores the world.
Science uses the scientific method to explore and discover which "is an empirical method of acquiring knowledge that has characterized the development of science since at least the 17th century. It involves careful observation, applying rigorous skepticism about what is observed, given that cognitive assumptions can distort how one interprets the observation. It involves formulating hypotheses, via induction, based on such observations; experimental and measurement-based testing of deductions drawn from the hypotheses; and refinement (or elimination) of the hypotheses based on the experimental findings. These are principles of the scientific method, as distinguished from a definitive series of steps applicable to all scientific enterprises."
So science is in no way trying to figure out what is "good" or "bad", it's not trying to define evil or figure out how we are supposed to treat each other. It does however give us deep insight into what we are and what our impact is as a living organism and what physical or environmental threats we may encounter being a bipedal carbon water bag and attempts to develop better more efficient ways for human survival. Good and bad are subjective and you get differing interpretations around the globe, while science should always be objective, where anyone, anywhere, can repeat the experiment and get the same exact results.
The reality is, science never tries to replace God, it never tries to be God, it doesn't in any way disprove any God or gods. It's simply following facts to their logical conclusion using repeated testing and observation. Many faiths, on the other hand, do try and replace science, they do try to claim their God is science or doesn't have to abide by the laws of physics, and that their faith, when it comes into conflict with science, should always be proclaimed the winner. Why? Because of faith you see. If you really want to believe your faith supersedes science, then it does, for you at least. "Poof!", that easy, no testing and experimentation necessary. Heck, you can even believe we live on a flat planet under some kind of dome if you want, all it takes is a rejection of facts, science and everything we know about physics.
That's about the most valid argument I ever heard you make. My only serious disagreement is the "so what." I'm with freefaller on that one!
The title of the seeder's article is incorrect. It should be :
The Scopes Trial and Inherit the Wind; a Comparison
From the seeder's link:
Using the wrong title is a violation of the NT ToS.
Wrong! "The Scopes Trial and Inherit the Wind; a Comparison" was used as a resource in the article, but the article was mine. It gets my title.