I’ve been reading A. C. Grayling’s most excellent book titled The GOD Argument — after all, I don’t have to agree with the man’s opinions to admire his talent as a writer — and a realization suddenly struck me, sort of like a bolt of lightning.
Another article I’ve been working on and will publish soon discusses the some of the more interesting topics in Grayling’s book, in much greater detail.
For the remainder of this article, I’d like to focus attention on just one particular thing Grayling said in his book that I found to be very questionable.
Then I plan to connect my observations on this comment to my own personal moment of revelation, that “lightning bolt” moment I mentioned in the first paragraph.
Beginning on page 108, Professor Grayling wrote:
Since the humiliating defeat of the literal six-day creationist lobby in the Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925 in Tennessee, religious groups have become increasingly sophisticated in their efforts to promote the idea that the universe and life in it were made by an intelligent agency, just as a carpenter makes a table; except that whereas a carpenter has his planks and nails to hand when he starts, the mega-carpenter did not have any materials ready beforehand, but made them too, from nothing.
When I first read the passage above, I thought, huh?
That paragraph is clearly giving the reader the distinct impression that the Scopes Monkey trial was an overwhelming victory for the Darwinian theory of evolution, and nothing less than a crushing defeat for young earth creationism.
The problem with the impression the paragraph created is that it simply isn’t true.
Scopes lost.
True, the conviction was later overturned on a technicality. But make no mistake about it, John Scopes and Darwin’s theory of natural selection clearly lost that 1925 court case — no matter what Hollywood, and revisionist historians, might have you believe.
The movie Inherit the Wind helped create the popular misconception the courtroom defeat was merely symbolic in nature, but Hollywood was playing fast and loose with the facts. The film was not an accurate portrayal of what actually happened in the aftermath of the trial.
Rather than the “humiliating defeat of the literal six-day creationist lobby” suggested by Grayling, The State of Tennessee versus John Thomas Scopes decision had a chilling effect on critical thinking that lasted for more than three decades.
Publishers removed all references to Darwin from American science textbooks after Scopes was convicted, and kept his theory of natural selection out for the next thirty-three years.
Only creationism was taught in school.
It wasn’t until 1958, when the National Defense Education Act was passed, that Darwin and evolution theory became the accepted curriculum in biology class.
In all fairness to Professor Grayling, his mistake is somewhat understandable.
Just about everybody has heard of the Scopes Monkey Trial and in contrast, virtually no one has ever heard of the NDEA.
However, that doesn’t make his error entirely excusable. It seemed like a pretty important detail for an academic scholar to have gotten completely wrong.
Scopes most certainly did not bring Darwin into the classroom. The NDEA did that, and even then only after the U.S. government became afraid of losing the race to conquer outer space, and ultimately the Cold War, to the Soviet Union.
His conviction via the Butler Act was a travesty of justice — though not because the teaching of evolution was specifically banned by law, but because it set a bad precedent by making critical thought illegal.
This was when a ‘Eureka’ moment temporarily left me thunderstruck.
My reaction to the glaring mistake of Professor Grayling was not unlike the reaction some of my critics of my book have had, as they have objected to my interpretation of Darwinian theory, as it must be defined in order to fit within the context an existential Big Picture.
My critics have vociferously complained about the errors contained in my text as if they affected the overall point being made — for example, when I mistakenly wrote that ‘clade’ was a new term biologists had introduced to replace the word ‘species.’
What I should have said was the term was new to me. The mistake seemed relatively minor, in my opinion. But some of my critics would have you believe that a trivial mistake such as that invalidated everything else I had to say.
And it occurred to me that while Professor Grayling had messed up with some of the details, his overall point remained quite valid.
It is illegal in America to teach anything other than evolution theory in science class today.
Just as creationists succeeded in their opposition to Darwinian theory in the Scopes Monkey Trial, the biology professors of today have also discriminated against creation science and intelligent design, under the pretense that Darwin is science and creation is not.
God and science are not mutually exclusive, however.
We have not been given the luxury of being able to choose between “science” or “nature” over a supernatural God.
As I’ve explained in Counterargument for God, the only true alternative to a creator God is serendipity, or extraordinary good luck. If you think there’s a third choice, you simply don’t have a clear view of the Big Picture that includes life, the universe, and everything.
It’s very important to remember that life cannot evolve until it exists.
By disallowing critical examination of Darwin’s theory through the ruling of a scientifically illiterate judge in the Dover decision, the advocates of neo-Darwinian theory became guilty, and just as successful with discouraging critical thought as the overzealous creationists had been during the Scopes Monkey Trial.
Their fierce opposition to creation science has kept God out of schools, and excluded from science class in particular. If you don’t think it has had a negative effect on society, you should listen to what notorious cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer had to say about evolution theory and creation science.
There have been serious consequences from these secular efforts to use science in trying to convince the masses that God does not exist.
Furthermore, if Darwin’s theory were truly an indisputable fact, it ought to be able to hold up under intense scrutiny.
But if you dare question Darwin, you run the risk of being called a science-denier.
I meant to respond to this the other day when you posted it but I had just returned from a week out of town and had too much to catch up on.
The issue of evolution has long been a source of irritation for me, both from the ignorant fools who deny it outright, and the equally ignorant academics and left-wing atheists who react ferociously if not mindlessly to anyone who questions them. That leaves a very few people with whom I can have a reasonable discussion.
The fact of evolution has never been in doubt for me. I had eight years of Jesuit education, and one of the most prominent Jesuits in their history is Pierre Theilhard de Chardin, a highly respected theologian and a world-renowned paleontologist who wrote extensively on evolution. There was never, in my mind, any conflict at all between religion and the theory of evolution. We studied Darwin’s works in history, philosophy and theology classes.
A Harvard “intellectual” was on c-span a few years back; the man taught a course on cultural development, with the expected conclusion that only by “freeing” the world of religion could mankind’s full intellectual potential be realized. Then he came out with his ultimate argument against the existence of God, citing the different religions in the world as proof that he couldn’t exist. My jaw dropped in disbelief. A sophomore in my high school could have demolished that argument in about two minutes. But what he said next left me convinced that he was a man who understood nothing. When pressed to identify the source of human existence, he replied “Evolution”.
Evolution is an abstraction; it has no existence per se. Evolution doesn’t DO anything. It is a word we use to describe a series of events, identifiable processes, that bring about certain results. As such “evolution” has no purpose, no direction, no moral or intellectual content, and can never be used as a prime cause of human behavior. The best example we have of this is the saga of the British Beech Tree moth. In the early 1800s, the moth was a very light grey, to exactly match the color of the beech tree bark in central and northern England. But then came the industrial evolution, and the massive use of coal; gradually, the bark darkened until, by the late nineteenth century, it was a very dark grey. And so was the moth, which had gradually changed with the tree. This is, for the deniers of an evolutionary process, such as the fundamentalists, a huge problem, for the entire evolutionary process, which normally takes thousands if not millions of years, occurred over three generations.
But “evolution” did nothing. The actors in this change were men, and birds, and moths, and the trees themselves. The men burned the coal which released tons of ash, which darkened the tree bark, revealing the moth to its predators the birds, who quickly ate all the lighter moths, who then began turning out darker offspring which survived to pass on their genes, and so on. Incontrovertible proof that the process exists, But also, indisputable evidence that evolution does not exist as an entity. How could it, when, in almost every change that comes about, there are different actors and different results? But some –not all– Evolutionists insist on treating evolution as an entity with a –to them– progressive purpose, Even the titles of some of the works on the philosophy of evolution reveal this bias: Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution, among others, argues that evolution is a force with both direction and, as the words imply, will.
All of the above really means that the results of the Scopes Trial were almost irrelevant. I agree that the public perception is greatly skewed –as it is whenever Hollywood sets out to display historical events– but in the end the theory of evolution could not long be kept out of our schools. The same year as the Scopes Trial, Bergson was the most influential writer in Europe, and his works, for better or worse, not only dominated European thought but had crossed the Atlantic and were prominently featured in many university curriculae. The danger now is that the intolerance of the scientific community is such that no debate on how “evolution” works is permissible. That is dangerous, scientifically and culturally. Scientists, by and large, are the least educated group in society, mistaking a mastery of a limited field of endeavor for education.
By the way, one of the questions I pose to an evolutionist is to explain the Australian Blue Bower Bird. Google it, and I think you’ll see why I pose it as a question.
Natural selection is not accidental. But, as you point out, before natural selection can occur the selections have to EXIST. No matter how they try to spin the matter, god-less evolution means all life came from a series of accidents. That means that the world originally had no organic matter, and then by a series of accidents cells eventually came about, and then more series of accidents lead to all the life we have today. Hawkins says, “Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators.” Whatever replicators are, they are not alive and thinking.