"July 2015 marked the 90th anniversary of the Scopes trial, which was a pivotal event in the creation/evolution debate. Looking back, it’s important to remember that the trial debate included not only whether evolution is true, but also what effect teaching evolution might have on young minds.
William Jennings Bryan, the chief spokesman against evolution, was concerned that teaching
evolution would undermine the biblical foundation for moral teaching. He said that Darwinian teaching would give children ‘ … a doctrine that refutes not only their belief in God, but their belief in a Savior and belief in heaven, and takes from them every moral standard that the Bible gives us’.
Opposing Bryan, Clarence Darrow and his pro-evolution associates held that evolutionary teaching would prove harmless to children, and that morality could be learned outside of the Bible. One of Darrow’s associates (Dudley Malone) said that Bryan was ‘filled with a needless fear … We have no fears about the young people of America. They are a pretty smart generation’.
Since then, evolutionists have had their way in American public schools, and their experiment has had time to run its course. Has anything happened to show whether Bryan or Darrow was more correct?
To answer this, let’s first look at one more point from the Scopes trial—a point that deserves more notice than it usually gets. To argue that evolutionary teaching could warp morality, Bryan produced the court record of the famous Loeb–Leopold murder trial of 1923. The case involved a shocking and senseless murder by two young men from rich families, done for no apparent reason. Darrow himself had defended Loeb and Leopold. At their trial, Darrow had admitted their guilt, but he argued that Loeb and Leopold were not fully responsible for their action. Rather, Darrow tried to blame their crime on the evolution-based philosophy they had learned at university and on their alleged evolutionary past!
Of course, Darrow used different words to make his claim, but in essence he blamed evolutionary thinking for the murder. He claimed that Loeb and Leopold were influenced by the teachings of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), the German philosopher much admired by Hitler. Nietzsche, in turn, derived his philosophy of God and ethics directly from Darwinian principles. He thought that Christian morality must be replaced by a new evolutionary ethic, which would turn traditional moral values upside down. Virtues like truthfulness, love, and compassion are actually bad because they interfere with the survival of the fittest, according to Nietzsche. Strength, deceit, cruelty, and cunning are proper Darwinian virtues instead.
Darrow knew that Loeb and Leopold had sought to realize the ideal of Nietzsche’s ‘superman’. This supposedly superior being was to be the goal and product of human evolution. The superman would be able to make up his own ethics, practice them in the world, and be accountable to no one else. In effect, the superman would ‘become like God.’ It’s evident that Nietzscheism is the natural conclusion of Darwinism—God is either dead or impotent and so man must be king, with no real ethic but the strong dominating the weak and making their own rules. Darrow recognized that these ideas could lead directly to lawlessness and murder, yet he still strove to spread his ‘gospel’ of humanism based on evolution. For a brief moment, Bryan exposed this hypocrisy for all to see.
This tragic case was the 1998 Columbine high-school massacre, which saw two well-to-do young men of good family and social status suddenly open fire on their classmates and teachers, killing 12 and wounding 23 before killing themselves. Why did they do this? Darwinism certainly played a major role in their thoughts and actions, although the prominent role of evolution was never reported by the mainstream media. One of them, Harris, wore a shirt proclaiming ‘Natural Selection’ on the fateful day, and made other Darwinian allusions to his planned murderous deed. Just like Loeb and Leopold, Harris also expressed his determination to be a law unto himself, unrestrained by the opinions or morals of anyone else. He wrote in his diary, ‘My belief is that if I say something, it goes. I am the law … Feel no remorse, no sense of shame’. This is an exact reproduction of evolutionary Nietzscheism, the logical outgrowth of Darwinism, enthroning the self and denying any Supreme Being from acting as Lawgiver. And, just as Bryan predicted, the soil from which this lawlessness grows is the unopposed teaching of evolution.
Worse yet, the Columbine massacre was not an isolated event; there have been many more such violent school incidents in recent years. As a result, stringent policing of many schools is now needed. If we could take today’s news of deadly school violence back in time and interject it into the Scopes trial debate, how strange it would seem to the trial participants!
It should also be pointed out the biology textbook that John Scopes was said to have used to teach evolution (Hunter’s Civic Biology, widely used in the early 1900s) advocated racism and eugenics,11 two doctrines strongly implicit in Darwinism.
According to the textbook, the civilized Caucasian race of Europe and America showed the highest level of evolution, and ‘inferior’ races of humans (such as Negroes and Orientals) should be treated as unfit:
William Jennings Bryan, the chief spokesman against evolution, was concerned that teaching
Opposing Bryan, Clarence Darrow and his pro-evolution associates held that evolutionary teaching would prove harmless to children, and that morality could be learned outside of the Bible. One of Darrow’s associates (Dudley Malone) said that Bryan was ‘filled with a needless fear … We have no fears about the young people of America. They are a pretty smart generation’.
Since then, evolutionists have had their way in American public schools, and their experiment has had time to run its course. Has anything happened to show whether Bryan or Darrow was more correct?
To answer this, let’s first look at one more point from the Scopes trial—a point that deserves more notice than it usually gets. To argue that evolutionary teaching could warp morality, Bryan produced the court record of the famous Loeb–Leopold murder trial of 1923. The case involved a shocking and senseless murder by two young men from rich families, done for no apparent reason. Darrow himself had defended Loeb and Leopold. At their trial, Darrow had admitted their guilt, but he argued that Loeb and Leopold were not fully responsible for their action. Rather, Darrow tried to blame their crime on the evolution-based philosophy they had learned at university and on their alleged evolutionary past!
Of course, Darrow used different words to make his claim, but in essence he blamed evolutionary thinking for the murder. He claimed that Loeb and Leopold were influenced by the teachings of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), the German philosopher much admired by Hitler. Nietzsche, in turn, derived his philosophy of God and ethics directly from Darwinian principles. He thought that Christian morality must be replaced by a new evolutionary ethic, which would turn traditional moral values upside down. Virtues like truthfulness, love, and compassion are actually bad because they interfere with the survival of the fittest, according to Nietzsche. Strength, deceit, cruelty, and cunning are proper Darwinian virtues instead.
Darrow knew that Loeb and Leopold had sought to realize the ideal of Nietzsche’s ‘superman’. This supposedly superior being was to be the goal and product of human evolution. The superman would be able to make up his own ethics, practice them in the world, and be accountable to no one else. In effect, the superman would ‘become like God.’ It’s evident that Nietzscheism is the natural conclusion of Darwinism—God is either dead or impotent and so man must be king, with no real ethic but the strong dominating the weak and making their own rules. Darrow recognized that these ideas could lead directly to lawlessness and murder, yet he still strove to spread his ‘gospel’ of humanism based on evolution. For a brief moment, Bryan exposed this hypocrisy for all to see.
This tragic case was the 1998 Columbine high-school massacre, which saw two well-to-do young men of good family and social status suddenly open fire on their classmates and teachers, killing 12 and wounding 23 before killing themselves. Why did they do this? Darwinism certainly played a major role in their thoughts and actions, although the prominent role of evolution was never reported by the mainstream media. One of them, Harris, wore a shirt proclaiming ‘Natural Selection’ on the fateful day, and made other Darwinian allusions to his planned murderous deed. Just like Loeb and Leopold, Harris also expressed his determination to be a law unto himself, unrestrained by the opinions or morals of anyone else. He wrote in his diary, ‘My belief is that if I say something, it goes. I am the law … Feel no remorse, no sense of shame’. This is an exact reproduction of evolutionary Nietzscheism, the logical outgrowth of Darwinism, enthroning the self and denying any Supreme Being from acting as Lawgiver. And, just as Bryan predicted, the soil from which this lawlessness grows is the unopposed teaching of evolution.
Worse yet, the Columbine massacre was not an isolated event; there have been many more such violent school incidents in recent years. As a result, stringent policing of many schools is now needed. If we could take today’s news of deadly school violence back in time and interject it into the Scopes trial debate, how strange it would seem to the trial participants!
It should also be pointed out the biology textbook that John Scopes was said to have used to teach evolution (Hunter’s Civic Biology, widely used in the early 1900s) advocated racism and eugenics,11 two doctrines strongly implicit in Darwinism.
According to the textbook, the civilized Caucasian race of Europe and America showed the highest level of evolution, and ‘inferior’ races of humans (such as Negroes and Orientals) should be treated as unfit:
‘ … if such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading. Humanity will not allow this, but we do have the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways of preventing intermarriage and the possibilities of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race.It’s ironic that the play/movie Inherit the Wind, which exaggerated and misrepresented the victory of humanism at the Scopes trial, accused Bryan and the creationists of causing unnecessary trouble. (The title is based on Proverbs 11:29, which says ‘He who troubles his own house will inherit the wind.) The shoe is really on the other foot; history is showing that it is the evolutionists who have troubled their own house, filling their own schools and society with violence and immorality." CreationMinistriesInternational
