Inherit the Flatulence
In Dayton Tennessee, in the summer of 1925, a biology teacher was arrested by an angry mob for teaching evolution. A court case ensued whereby an agnostic lawyer named Clarence Darrow came to the teacher’s defense. William Jennings Bryan was a radical religious lawyer for the prosecution. The prosecution was mean-spirited and cruel while the defense was generous. Darrow destroyed Bryan when he took the stand and therefore religion was discarded by all smart people for the brave new world of materialistic philosophy. Right? Well, besides the place and the date, actually dead wrong on all counts.
The teacher, Scopes, did not have a degree in science and his job at the school was to coach the football team. He was, however, a substitute teacher for two weeks while the biology teacher was sick. However, he did not teach evolution during those two weeks, although the textbook used did describe evolution. He was not arrested by an angry mob. He was arrested, ultimately, by warrant sworn out by representatives of the ACLU who were looking for a test-case to oppose a state law (the Butler Act) forbidding the teaching that man originated from lower life forms. He never spent the night in jail, or even went to jail at all. The town of Dayton was selected after some businessmen saw an ad in a paper that the ACLU had placed and decided that a controversy that would bring in visitors from around the country would be good for the local businesses.
Clarence Darrow, a militant atheist since childhood, fresh from attempting to defend Leob and Leopold when they put their atheistic philosophy into practice by murdering a human in cold blood simply for the pleasure of doing so, thought that this case would be a good way to put Christians in their place. William Jennings Bryan was religious, albeit a Presbyterian—not exactly a snake-handling fundamentalist sect. He was a Democrat, Secretary of State to Woodrow Wilson, supported the progressive income tax, supported the women’s suffrage movement, was nominated for President three times as a Democrat, and proposed more regulations and controls on business. Not exactly a good representative of the religious right. Had he not opposed the militant secularists—today’s liberal Democrats—he would be hailed today as a hero and said to have been before his time on many issues.
The town, and the prosecution, was kind to a fault to the defense. A citizen’s club threw a welcome dinner for Darrow. Members of the prosecution and Scopes actually went for a swim one day over the lunch recess. Unlike in the Hollywood film, there were no hell fire and brimstone preachers present and there was no gospel singing and there were no girl friends of Scope put on the witness stand. The court did observe the tradition of opening session with a prayer—which the Supreme Court still does today—and one of the prayers was to be said by a Rabbi…now there is some back woods hillbilly small mindedness for you.
If one truly is correct, then a good examination of all opinions and evidence from both sides can only be a good thing. If one dispenses their view and their evidence, and then moves to suppress any testimony from the other side then at best it speaks of a lack of a lack of fair play, and at worst, it indicates that there is something to fear from the evidence of the other side. Bryan did take the stand as an expert on religion—something that he was not, to be fair—and was examined by Darrow. Unlike the play or the Hollywood adaptation, Bryan did generally defend his positions well. The reason that Bryan agreed to take the stand was so that he would then be able to examine Darrow the next day, as an expert on atheism derived of materialistic evolution, and expose the moral relativism inherent in atheism. The biology book in question did teach evolution, and taught eugenics as well—and eugenics makes perfect sense, indeed, it is an inevitable conclusion of materialistic evolution. If man evolved then there is no reason for man to have evolved equally, and should not evolution be helped along by weeding out the weak? Realizing the danger of being put on the stand, Darrow immediately turned in a guilty plea to the judge after questioning Bryan. Thus the trial ended. Bryan was not cross-examined by the prosecution, and Darrow slithered his way out of being examined by Bryan. Furthermore, Bryan was prevented from making a closing statement to the jury. Darrow, the supposed proponent of free thought, wanted the right to question without being questioned himself.
The defendant was found guilty--when the ‘defense’ attorney insisted that he was--and Scopes was fined a token sum, which Bryan offered to pay. Scopes was never fired from the school and went back to college and then worked for an oil company—so much for the idea that he was a teacher looking for the truth as he was hardly a teacher at all and apparently did not care for the profession. The case was overturned on a procedural technicality by a higher court. The ACLU was broken hearted that the case did not make it up to the Supreme Court as they had wished.
Scopes was found guilty of breaking the law, fined one hundred dollars, and the case really did not go anywhere after that. Why the fascination with the case? It was declared by the self-proclaimed enlightened intellectuals that Darrow defeated Bryan on the witness stand, and therefore religion was overturned in a court of law. How this can be concluded is beyond me—the verdict was guilty; religion was not on trial to begin with; Darrow’s defeat of Bryan was highly exaggerated; Bryan was not a Bible scholar anyway; and Bryan was questioned--but could not ask questions and was never cross examined—hardly a fair debate, in fact, not a debate at all. By this non sequitur logic one could disprove the theory of relativity, or even the law of gravity, by brow beating a high school physics student on a witness stand.
But what if one does agree that materialistic evolution and religion were to fight to the death in a debate to decide the question once and for all? The Scopes trial was not a debate, as has been mentioned previously. But what if Darrow had debated a religious expert on a level playing field? Actually, he did. Enter G.K. Chesterton, an Englishman who penned many books regarding religion (including a defense of orthodoxy, a biography of St. Thomas Aquinas and of St. Francis, a reply to H.G. Wells’ materialist book History of the World, and books applying Christian principles to the problems of his day) during a prolific writing career. During a speaking tour in America, a debate was arranged in 1931 between Darrow and Chesterton in New York City. According to The Nation (February 4, 1931):
…Mr. Chesterton's argument was like Mr. Chesterton, amiable, courteous, jolly; it was always clever, it was full of nice turns of expression, and altogether a very adroit exhibition by one of the world's ablest intellectual fencing masters and one of its most charming gentlemen.
Mr. Darrow's personality, by contrast, seemed rather colorless and certainly very dour. His attitude seemed almost surly; he slurred his words; the rise and fall of his voice was sometimes heavily melodramatic, and his argument was conducted on an amazingly low intellectual level.
Ostensibly the defender of science against Mr. Chesterton, he obviously knew much less about science than Mr. Chesterton did; when he essayed to answer his opponent on the views of Eddington and Jeans, it was patent that he did not have the remotest conception of what the new physics was all about. His victory over Mr. Bryan at Dayton had been too cheap and easy; he remembered it not wisely but too well. His arguments are still the arguments of the village atheist of the Ingersoll period; at Mecca Temple he still seemed to be trying to shock and convince yokels.
Mr. Chesterton's deportment was irreproachable, but I am sure that he was secretly unhappy. He had been on the platform many times against George Bernard Shaw. This opponent could not extend his powers. He was not getting his exercise.²
According to Chesterton As Seen by His Contemporaries, complied by Cyril Clemons, Webster Groves: International Mark Twain Society, 1939, pp. 66-68:
Mr. Joseph J. Reilly attended a debate at Mecca Temple in New York City, between Chesterton and Clarence Darrow, which dealt with the story of creation as presented in Genesis.
It was a Sunday afternoon and the Temple was packed. At the conclusion of the debate everybody was asked to express his opinion as to the victor and slips of paper were passed around for that purpose. The award went directly to Chesterton [by a vote of 2,359 to 1,022]. Darrow in comparison, seemed heavy, uninspired, slow of mind, while G.K.C. was joyous, sparkling and witty.... quite the Chesterton one had come to expect from his books. The affair was like a race between a lumbering sailing vessel and a modern steamer. Mrs. Frances Taylor Patterson also heard the Chesterton-Darrow debate, but went to the meeting with some misgivings because she was a trifle afraid that Chesterton's "gifts might seem somewhat literary in comparison with the trained scientific mind and rapier tongue of the famous trial lawyer. Instead, the trained scientific mind, the clear thinking, the lightning quickness in getting a point and hurling back an answer, turned out to belong to Chesterton. I have never heard Mr. Darrow alone, but taken relatively, when that relativity is to Chesterton, he appears positively muddle-headed."
Although the terms of the debate were determined at the outset, Darrow either could not or would not stick to the definitions, but kept going off at illogical tangents and becoming choleric over points that were not in dispute. He seemed to have an idea that all religion was a matter of accepting Jonah's whale as a sort of luxury-liner. As Chesterton summed it up, he felt as if Darrow had been arguing all afternoon with his fundamentalist aunt, and the latter kept sparring with a dummy of his own mental making. When something went wrong with the microphone, Darrow sat back until it could be fixed. Whereupon G.K.C. jumped up and carried on in his natural voice, "Science you see is not infallible!" Whatever brilliance Darrow had in his own right, it was completely eclipsed. For all the luster that he shed, he might have been a remote star at high noon drowned by the bright incandescent are light of the sun. Chesterton had the audience with him from the start, and when it was over, everyone just sat there, not wishing to leave. They were loath to let the light die!
So, a fair debate was held, and Darrow—and materialistic evolution—was made a pitiable laughing stock. The smart set had proclaimed that the supposed victory over Bryan was the defeat of religion…wonder if, when informed that Darrow and his theory was smacked down face first into the mat in one round by Chesterton, that they will proclaim that in a fair rematch, materialistic evolution was defeated in the end? Of course not, because they care nothing of the truth. What they want is their wish fulfilled that they answer to no one, that they may do as they will, and that the world be their playground where they—the smart and strong—force their wills on others.
Why the obvious distortion of the facts in the stage play and in the movie Inherit the Wind? Why the distortion if not outright slander? Why not simply present the facts as they were and let the viewers decide? Why not end the play, and the movie, with a scene of the dismal failure of Darrow at the New York City debate? Why not? Because the fear is not that people will not think for themselves, but that they will.
Colleges, which are supposed to be forums of learning and free inquiry, were not a product of humanistic or enlightenment movements; the old ones were all (Yale and Harvard included) originally started by Churches. It was Thomas Aquinas, a monk, who convinced his peers to read Aristotle--not to suppress it; and for that he was recognized as a…Saint. He said that any truth found therein was good and would be found to be wholly compatible with religion. How odd for the anti-free thinking Church to promote just that.
Much has made of the Roman Catholic Church’s supposed opposition of the Copernican model of the solar system, but in reality Copernicus’s theory was promoted—not suppressed—by a Bishop and a Cardinal of the church and Copernicus’s manuscript was freely published with a dedication to the Pope. The trouble came after Copernicus died. Galileo pronounced that the theory was a fact. The proofs that he supplied were based on shoddy science, even though the Copernican system was correct. At Galileo’s first inquest, Cardinal Bellarmine said “I say that if a real proof be found that the sun is fixed and does not revolve round the earth, but the earth round the sun, then it will be necessary, very carefully, to proceed to the explanation of the passages of Scripture which appear to be contrary, and we should rather say that we have misunderstood these than pronounce that to be false which is demonstrated.” The Roman Catholic Church basically said, if you are going to proclaim as fact something that some would see as a conflict with scripture, then have sufficient proof, and until then call it a theory. In the mean time he was well received in Rome and was even given a pension, essentially an endowment for science, by the Pope. Later, Galileo broke his promise not to present the Copernican system as fact without sufficient proof to back up the claim. As a result he was placed under house arrest. The houses included his own, the houses of friends, etc. He was not cast into a dungeon. Ultimately, he got into trouble for reneging on his word, after which he received token punishment. No one today would suggest that any Church be allowed to arrest anyone, but the point is that the whole Copernican controversy is largely myth. The Church at the time ultimately sought the truth and plainly stated that science and scripture were completely compatible. No where in scripture does it say that the planet Earth is the dead center of the cosmos; that was an assumption that people read into scripture, not out of it.
St. Augustine had postulated that while God did create the Heavens and the Earth and Man, since then some new plants and animals had emerged from natural processes. Evolution—as a mechanism to slowly change plants and animals to one degree or another—was hardly new when Darwin came onto the scene, having missed the the Bishop St. Augustine’s scoop by a millennium or so; what was new was the idea that man had evolved from monkeys and that everything had evolved by selective breeding resulting in adaptations. Although modern evolutionists now claim a “common ancestor” or whatever, Darwin did claim that men evolved from monkeys, and therefore Man was not formed by a God. The origin of the universe could, under this circular logic, not have been from a God since God did not exist since he had not made Man either. The selective breeding part came from Darwin observing pigeon breeders, and how they could influence the color, size, etc. of pigeons. The problem was that while they could breed a brown pigeon, or a tall pigeon, or a white pigeon, they could not breed a pigeon into a cat, or into a caterpillar, or into a cumquat tree. A Monk named Mendel discovered the rules of genetics a few years later, and they have not been broken since—traits can be inherited but not invented out of thin air. Many theories abound as to how evolution was supposed to circumvent the species barrier, such as random mutations, but there is no hard evidence for any of them. They change with such frequency that it would be hard for a text to stay current with the latest explanation of a theory that many want so hard to be fact.
There was no, and is no, evidence to back up the evolution of homo sapiens from lower life forms—and certainly not life so low as slime or bacteria. Some proponents of materialistic philosophy shout that science must be taught. Quite right, but the lack of science is what is concerning. Science is what can be proved, preferably by experimentation, and only as a last resort that which must be inferred by observation and then only referred to as a theory. Only one who started with the premise that there was no creator would conclude that evolution from nothing occurred. At best, materialistic evolution can only be a scientifically disinterested conjecture to support a peculiar philosophy. To teach materialistic evolution in schools is to endorse this peculiar philosophy. The original intent of the Scopes trial was to test the Butler Act, which prohibited the teaching of human evolution in public schools. The act was not repelled until the late 1960’s. Strange how, when some states prohibited the teaching of evolution that such great advances in science were made, like going to the moon...indeed, the country had better luck getting into space when evolution was not taught than it does now that it is.
It is telling that one could claim to invent a perpetual motion machine and people would shrug, although it is impossible for a scientist or an engineer to believe such things, i.e., there is a practical importance to dispelling the notion of perpetual motion as it is contrary to the laws of physics and could retard the scientific education of prospective scientists and engineers. But oppose evolution, especially human evolution, and wrath from all sides will pour out, although there is no practical importance of the theory of evolution in science and engineering. Have any new life-saving drugs been discovered by using the theory of evolution? Louis Pasteur (creater of the first vaccine and pastuerization) was a religious man. Has a new branch of science and math been discovered by careful use of the theory of evolution? Sir Issac Newton (the discoverer of basic phsysics and calculus) was a deeply religion man. What of medicine? Lister, the father of antiseptic surgery, was a religous man. What of genetics? Mendel was a monk. In science and engineering, evolution is irrelevant. Infact, if the contributions of those who did not subscribe to human evolution were to be discarded, science as we know it would be a mere shadow of its present self. The theory of evolution is only relevant to a philosophy of materialism. There are web sites, magazines, conferences, etc. dedicating to denouncing any opposition to materialistic evolution. Say that the bogeyman is loose, and no sane person locks their closet door. Say that a burglar is loose, and sane people lock their front door. Fierce resistance is not offered to that which is clearly fantasy; it is offered to that which is feared to be real.
The Church is happy to be questioned, and except for some wishy-washy clergy, the Church is even happier to answer; the problem is that the materialists want to question it without allowing it to answer. To that end, Darrow was the narrow-minded bigot. He had made up his mind as a child that atheism was the one true answer, no doubt influenced—like all free thinkers—by his father who too was an atheist, and then sought to convince others of that while silencing critics with legal manipulations. But why should that surprise anyone? If there is no God, and therefore no morality, then the end justifies the means. Lie, cheat, whatever…it makes no difference so long as the correct answer is the end. Inherit the Wind was not a triumph of freethinking; the only freethinking allowed were Darrow’s thoughts that had been given to him in the cradle. The play and the Hollywood propaganda film were just the icing on the cake.
Why the title of this essay? What have we inherited from materialistic evolution? It freed people not of antiquated religion, but of morality. If it is all just a bunch of atoms that formed by accident, if this is all there is or was or ever will be, then the best one can do is to either make their mark on society in a flash of glory or just do what ever makes one happy. The sophisticates expect that to be in a stroke of artistic creativity, or altruistic endeavors, or what have you. How some choose to make their mark or to enjoy themselves is instead with a hail of gunfire in a crowded school, by forced famines, or by canisters of Cyclon B. So what have we inherited? Not a brisk, clean force of nature as one may describe the wind; but rather a foul, manufactured rotting mass that corrupts all that has the misfortune of being downwind. That is one inheritance that I will not accept.
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