beyond the scopes of direct examination

My usual reading habit is to start a book and continue reading until I am done. That means I read most books in 2 or 3 days. As you know from my earlier posts in evolving to mexico and in hot water with Clarence Darrow, I have been reading Edward L. Larson's Summer of the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion for the past three weeks. This has been a month of interruptions.

The book is not new. It was first published in 1997, and won a Pulitzer Prize. I picked up the book because I liked Professor Larson's most recent book: A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, America's First Presidential Campaign.

Let me simply recommend the book. I realize I am treading on some very soft ground here. Blogs that deal with politics and religion have a tendency to attract a far more combative readership. However, Professor Larson does make some very interesting points. Let me share a few of them with you. If there is any interest, we can discuss them. Otherwise, we will simply follow the sage advice of Forrest Gump: "And that is all I'm going to say about that."

For those of you who would like a little refresher of the Scopes trial: in 1925, the Tennessee Legislature passed a law that forbade any state-funded educational institution in Tennessee to teach "any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals." The popular myth, assisted by the play and movie Inherit the Wind, is that a young biology teacher named John Scopes stood up to the law and taught Darwin's evolutionary theory to his students. For his bravery, he was arrested, tried, and convicted in a trial where attorney, Clarence Darrow, destroyed the fundamentalist views of the prosecutor, former presidential candidate, William Jennings Bryan.

Professor Larson puts the trial into its historical and context and explodes most of the myth, giving us a story that is far more interesting than the cartoon version most of us thought to be true.

• The Scopes trial was a set-up. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) advertised for a teacher to volunteer as a plaintiff. A local businessman met with the school board and convinced the town to find a volunteer to create such a show trial that visitors would come from all over -- and help the local economy.
  
• Scopes was not a biology teacher. He was a math teacher and coach who substituted as a biology teacher. He was not even certain that he had taught evolution to any student in the few months before the trial was set up.
  
• William Jennings Bryan supported antievolutionary laws, not because he thought science was factually wrong. He was concerned with the moral and philosophical underpinnings of the theory of evolution. His fear was that the theory would offer support to the forces of imperialism, militarism, and capitalism. After all, Bryan was a pacifist, progressive, reformer.
  
• He also feared that any philosophy, such as evolution, that defined the world solely in material terms, would negate the very essence of faith. He could not reconcile the fact that parents could raise their children in one philosophy, and then have the philosophy undermined by mandatory public education.
  
• Bryan's greatest fears, of course, came to pass with the rise of communism and fascism, both of which based their philosophical underpinnings on philosophical materialism, and frequently cited Darwin's theory in support of their social theories.
  
• Being the populist he was, Bryan supported the right of the majority who paid taxes for public education should have the right to determine what is taught in schools, rather than elite scientists.
  
• The ACLU, who paid for the defense, wanted the main defense to be academic freedom.
  
• Clarence Darrow, who horned his way into the case, wanted to put all religion on trial by attacking fundamental Christianity.
  
• Inherit the Wind was written as an allegory about McCarthyism, not about antievolution laws. The playwrights freely rewrote the historical record to fit their allegory. As a result, most Americans know the Scopes trial only through the play and the movie.

The book is a concise discussion of the cultural issues surrounding science, education, and religion in the early twentieth century, and the impact of that discussion on American society. Even after 80 years, Americans are as divided on this issue as they were then. Recent polls indicate that only 20% of the American public believes in evolution (not merely human evolution) without any divine intervention; 40% believe that evolution occurred, but with divine guidance; 40% believe in a strict reading of Genesis -- that God created the earth without an evolutionary process.

You can see now how Darrow, Bryan, and Scopes have managed to push me out of the rest of my life for the past three weeks.