This July marks the 100th anniversary of the Scopes “Monkey Trial.” It has been called the case of the century, and a turning point in U.S. history. According to popular legend, the Scopes trial was a showdown between ignorant religion and enlightened, scientific progress. A 1955 stage play and a 1960 movie that followed, both titled Inherit the Wind, memorialized in the public mind images of bigoted, backward hicks and yokels clashing with open-minded, educated, forward-looking progressives.
The trial, the play, and the movie have fostered the perception that science and religion are in conflict, and that any person with a smidgen of smarts should reject the Bible and embrace “science.” This false perception, the shadow of the monkey trial, has darkened our world, and created an atmosphere of hostility against persons of faith. It has degraded humanity into accidental mutations of monkeys, who are themselves accidental mutations of pond scum.
In this post we will review the facts of this bizarre case, which was concocted as a publicity stunt, featured fake science, and contradicts what we now know about the wonder of human beings. We will highlight modern science that disproves the evolutionary worldview.
In early 1925 Tennessee passed the Butler Act, which prohibited teaching human evolution – that human beings are descended from a lower form of life – in Tennessee public schools. The ACLU advertised for someone to challenge the Act. A coal plant manager in Dayton, Tennessee saw the article and, the next day, at a gathering of town leaders at the drug store, proposed a trial in Dayton to attract attention and boost the town’s sagging economy. The town leaders asked John Scopes, a first-year science teacher and high school football coach, to volunteer as defendant. Scopes was not a biology teacher, but he had filled in for the regular biology teacher for two weeks. He said after the trial he skipped the evolution section in the textbook.
Clarence Darrow offered to defend Scopes. Darrow was the best-known defense attorney in America, in part because the year before he represented two rich teenage boys from Chicago, Leopold and Loeb, who had killed their neighbor, a younger boy, for the fun of it. Darrow shocked the public by having his clients plead guilty, and then in the sentencing phase arguing to the judge for several days, with no jury and no prosecuting attorney, that his clients could not help themselves; they were a product of their evolutionary heritage!
William Jennings Bryan was a Christian, a famous orator, and had run for president on the Democrat ticket three times. He desired a radical redistribution of wealth. He argued against human evolution because, if it were true, there would be no justification for his social programs.
The textbook that the ACLU was defending was sickening. It directly taught that whites were superior to blacks. At that time the leading proponents of human evolution were hard-core racists. This belief that humanity is descended from apes has spawned many of history’s worst chapters, including the brutality of European colonists towards native races, and the holocaust.
Because of the subject, and the fame of Darrow and Bryan, the sleepy town of Dayton was turned upside down and packed with throngs of people and reporters. Darrow seized the opportunity to ridicule Christianity before the world.
The circus lasted 12 days in sweltering heat. The jury took nine minutes to find Scopes guilty. The judge fined Scopes $100, which was later reversed, because under Tennessee law judges could not impose a fine greater than $50.
One of the pieces of “evidence” in the trail was a worn tooth that evolutionists claimed belonged to “Nebraska Man,” a supposed ape-like predecessor of human beings. It was actually a pig’s tooth.
One hardly knows where to begin in describing the firehose of modern science that disproves any delusion that human beings are descended from apes. There is the discovery of DNA, and that all life, from plants to bugs to human beings, runs on advanced digital computer code. There are the published conclusions of the ENCODE Project, 400 top scientists worldwide, that this code is probably fully functional (disproving the “junk DNA” myth) and has at least two layers of information. As a former mathematician, I am blown away by computer simulations using a software program called Mendel’s Accountant, which accurately mimics what happens to DNA when you introduce random mutations. ALL simulations show a decline in function over time. It’s like taking a book and adding typos.
For a delightfully humorous look at the Darwinian delusion (yes, this is a biased recommendation) I would point you to Chapter 5, “Doubting Darwin,” of my latest book, a graphic novel, The God Proofs. As one reviewer wrote, “This book destroys Darwin.”
I am often asked how it can be that, with all of what we now know of the wonder of human beings, and the impossibility of getting technology by chance, most of our so-called “intellectual elites” persist in the Darwinian delusion. I think our world is hell-bent (pun intended) on denying God. There have been multiple high-level scientific conferences admitting that Darwin’s theory of unguided evolution cannot generate the fantastic amount of information necessary to build a human being. But Darwinists have blind faith that somehow, someday, that problem will be overcome.
Untold millions of people lose faith and hope because of this false perception that we are descended from monkeys, and that you don’t need God to create a human being. Suicide, drug addiction, and mental illness are rampant. The long shadow of the Monkey Trial continues to darken our world.
Doug Ell