Since the Age of the Enlightenment, the institution of religion has had to contend with the opposition of science regarding the issues of the origins of the world and of the human species. Up until around the end of the 17th century, the church was the authority on how the world and everything in it had come to be. However, with the great intellectual revolution came thinkers such as Galileo, Copernicus, Bacon, Descartes, and many others who challenged the biblical assumptions with empirically deduced scientific theories. The Catholic Church had a nasty habit of persecuting such ideological dissent toward creationism, calling it heresy and thereby somewhat suppressing a complete upheaval of the Scriptures. For many centuries to come, the scientific research grew and developed into theories like the Big Bang and evolution, though primarily in places where such progress was tolerated. The state of Tennessee in 1925 was not such a place. In the town of Dayton in Tennessee, a high school biology teacher was found to be in violation of a recently passed law, the Butler Act, because he taught the theory of evolution in his classroom. The debate that ensued has yet to be resolved, what with the modification of creationism into the theory of intelligent design. The argument in favor of creationism was solely based in scripture, though it had to be changed in light of its revamping, whereas the argument for evolution has only been strengthened by continued scientific discoveries.
In Dayton, Tennessee in May of 1925, John Scopes was prompted by the American Civil Liberties Union (the ACLU) to defy the Butler act, a law that was passed earlier that May. The Act declared it unlawful “for any teacher in any of the Universities, No...
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The Tennessee vs. John T. Scopes trial was a high school biology teacher who went against the state of Tennessee for supposedly teaching students about the theory of evolution however, teachers were not aloud to teach this subject due to the Butler Act. This law was passed by the state of Tennessee stating, “forbidding the teaching in public schools of any theories that denied the story of creation as found in Genesis. This act was written because of the increasing alarm of many fundamentalist Christians who feared the challenge that science and evolutionary theory presented to a literal interpretation of the Bible”("The Scopes Trial, 1925."). Scopes was appointed to go against the grand jury, with the trial being highly publicized throughout
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Americans who followed the Scopes Monkey Trial either supported either evolution or the bible. Because Christianity had a great deal of influence over the lives of many Americans, many conflicts arose between these two conflicting ideologies as science progressed. Supporters of the bible were perceived to be the majority group, and evolutionism was not as widely supported at the time. That societal context shows how controversial Scopes truly was when he challenged Christian doctrine. Furthermore, “fossils were being discovered that provided factual evidence for human evolution which threatened the reputation of the fundamentalists. Conservative Christians began to gather in order to defend their beliefs which sparked the fundamentalist movement.”4 Even research in the new social sciences, such as psychology and anthropology, undermined Christianity and the existence of God. Modernists believed that the fundamentalists were desperate, zealously trying to save Christianity from a continuous flow of new scientific discoveries. The Butler Act of 1925 made teaching creation outside of a biblical context in schools illegal. The American Civil Liberties Union, formed in 1920, hoped to challenge the Butler Act, and they found an opportunity by using John Scopes as a candidate to represent them in the Monkey Trial. The trial eventually
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On March 13, 1925 an act was passed by the state of Tennessee stating, “That it shall be unlawful for any teacher in any of the Universities, Normals and all other public schools of the State which are supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of the State, 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.” This act written by Rep. John Washington Butler, calling for a ban of the teaching of evolution, was written after Butler read a speech by ex-Secretary of State and leader in the anti-evolution movement William Jennings Bryan titled “Is the Bible true?”.
The Scopes Trial, formally known as The State of Tennessee vs. Scopes but given the nickname “The Monkey Trial”, has been credited as starting the popular legal dispute between evolution and creationism in the court, and its impact in the 20’s was immeasurable. The interpretation of the case is just as popular, if not more, than the actual result of the case. The worldwide attention and media coverage the case received produced many opinions. Scholar’s opinions range from describing the case as an irrelevancy and a good show to describing it as a “Watershed in American religious history” (Ronald L. Numbers, 1998, p. 76).
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Where we come from is a question as old as mankind itself. There are countless numbers of religions, each with their own twist on the origins of earth and mankind, but one of the most highly visible debates would be creationism vs. evolution. Depending on where your beliefs lie, the Earth has been around somewhere in the neighborhood of 6,000 years to 4.5 billion years. One would tend to believe that this vast difference in time would make it impossible to have 2 “theories” that are so widely accepted. However this debate gives you just that. Each argument has its variations, however it comes down to either God created the Earth and all things in it as they are now or that life today has evolved from a single one-celled organism.
Monastersky, Richard. (2004). Society Disowns Paper Attacking Darwinism. The Chronicle of Higher Education, Vol. 51, Iss. 5, A.16.