It was July 10, 1925.
Hundreds of reporters and tourists had descended on sleepy Dayton, Tennessee in the sweltering heat. They were there to watch the highly promoted “Monkey Trial” brought by the ACLU against the state of Tennessee when high school teacher named John T. Scopes set himself up for the ACLU as breaking Tennessee law to teach human evolution.
The discovery of “Nebraska Man” a few years before the Scopes evolution trial was fresh “scientific” evidence for Clarence Darrow, the brilliant atheist ACLU-supported lawyer arguing for evolution teaching - complete with artistic illustrations and evolutionary spin. Yet, a year after the trial, “Nebraska Man” was found to be nothing more than a pig’s tooth. So, while “Nebraska Man” and all the monkey-men illustrations got the front-page headlines, the pig tooth-truth got only a small footnote several years later.
One of the weaknesses exploited by Clarence Darrow against his legal opponent, the renowned orator, lawyer, and politician William Jennings Bryan, was that Bryan held to “the gap theory” – the theory that a large gap of time occurred between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2. Darrow argued that the “gap theory’s” inconsistency with Scripture meant that we could not trust Scripture. He used as an example Exodus 20:11, “For in 6 days God created the heaven and the earth”. And 1 Cor 15:21, “By man came death”, questioning all the death during the “gap” before Adam and Eve were created.
Part of Darrow’s strategy was this “straw man argument” (Scripture can’t be trusted) that he tore into and that Bryan fell into in subscribing to the gap theory.
Roger Baldwin, who co-founded the ACLU in 1920, was the ACLU director during the Scopes Trial. He was at the time a clear sympathizer with Soviet Communism, writing a book in 1928 called Liberty Under the Soviets. Both communism and humanism deny the existence of God, placing final authority in the hands of human institutions – ultimately the state. And both look to evolution, which they say is “true science", to undergird their claims to truth and power.
Like the Soviet Communists, secular humanists and many social progressives in our country have been working long and hard to censor the acknowledgement of God in public institutions and to remove any mention of scientific support for our Creator. For many years, this nation’s Christian heritage and traditions have been under legal attack and mocking media propaganda. This includes the ACLU’s actions at the Scopes Trial, and the subsequent 1960 fictionized film about it, Inherit the Wind, which sought to cement the propaganda victory for evolution in the minds of the public.
But God is not simply a “religious notion”, while evolution is “science”. God is clearly “evident through what has been made … so that we are without excuse” (Romans 1:20). And we can deny the devil a victory, and approach God by faith to obtain redemption from sin through His Son Jesus Christ!
- Mark Cadwallader, Board Chairman of Creation Moments
Photo: Clarence Darrow (left) and William Jennings Bryan (right) during the Scopes Trial in 1925, Brown Brothers, PD, Wikimedia Commons.
