Darwinism and Christianity

Abstract

* There were eight days in July of 1925, as Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan confronted one another in a court in Dayton, Tennessee, when the issues between Darwinism and Christianity appeared to be clean-cut. At that time one could take his stand on one side or the other of a Zoroastrian conflict between light and darkness, truth and error. The immediate issue was whether or not the Tennessee law forbidding the teaching of evolution in the public schools could be enforced against a biology teacher by the name of John Thomas Scopes. The larger issue, as we civilized folk saw it, was whether or not the superstitions of religion might put a limit to the free inquiries of science; or, as the Judge saw it, whether or not Dayton was another Nazareth, still daring with a provincial valor to champion against all the hosts of Satan the eternal Word of God. We civilized folk knew how to laugh at Bryan and to laugh with Darrow. It was comical to watch Bryan repeat again that old saw about the Rock of Ages' being more important than the age of rocks. We did not at the moment recollect Nietzche's teaching: O my brethren, is not everything at present in flux? Have not all railings and gangways fallen into the water? Who would still hold on to 'good' and 'evil' ? As for Clarence Darrow, we did recollect a public discourse of his when, fresh from his triumph in the Leopold-Loeb case, he argued that one reason we have so many criminals is that we have too many laws. As when a drunkard is always bumping into lamp-posts, part of the fault lies in too many lamp-posts. So you see, it is society that is to blame, more than the individual.