CYKIAE Season 15 Part 34. And Christ Rose Yet Again – The Sudden Death of Atheism – The Scopes Monkey Trial – Dayton Tennessee – Survival of the Fittest.
It was the rise of mass public education that was going to make inevitable the clash between Darwin’s materialistic Theory of Evolution (excluding God from the role of the creator of all life, and especially human life) and the Christian religion in America, in that rather large courtroom in Dayton Tennessee in July 1925. Darwin’s materialistic explanation of how life evolved left, and was not intended by him, to leave room for God, no matter how hard some good Christians tried to say that it did. Darwin, the god of evolution deliberately left no room for the God of the Bible in his story.
Edward Larson made this clear in his book devoted solely to the Scopes Monkey Trial, The Summer for the Gods. He wrote:
Darwinian concepts in public secondary education touched more families, and more fundamentalists, as the new century unfolded. Relatively few American teenagers attended high school during the nineteenth century, and nearly none did so in the rural South, where such schools rarely existed and local authorities did not compel student attendance. The situation changed dramatically after the turn of the century. Census figures tell the story. The number of pupils enrolled in American high schools lept from about 200,000 in 1890, when the federal government began collecting these figures, to nearly two million in 1920. Tennessee followed this national trend, with its high school population rising from less than 10,000 in 1910 to more than 50,000 at the time of the Scopes trial in 1925. This increase resulted in part from tougher Progressive-era school attendance laws that forced more teenagers to go to school, and followed also from greater access to secondary education, as the number of public high schools increased dramatically during the early part of the century. Commenting on this trend with respect to Tennessee, Governor Austin Peay — who signed the state's antievolution bill into law — boasted in his 1925 inaugural address, "High schools have sprung up throughout the state which are the pride of their communities." This was certainly true for Dayton, site of that year's Scopes trial, which opened its first public high school in 1906. These new schools inevitably included Darwinian concepts in their biological classes, in line with modern developments in American scientific thought.
It was this in particular that drove William Jennings Bryan, the well respected hero of the left, but a very devout and leading Christian fundamentalist, to take the lead in the charge to keep evolution that preached that man had evolved from the ape, rather than being created by God, out of the science that children were being taught in schools.
Tag words: Darwin; Theory of Evolution; God; Christians; Edward Larson; The Summer for the Gods; public secondary education; Scopes; Governor Austin Peay; High schools; William Jennings Bryan; Nietzsche; God is dead; Jonathon Wells; Zombie Science; Alfred Russel Wallace; Overruling Intelligence; Stephen Meyer; The Return of the God Hypothesis; DNA; Robert Green Ingersoll; atheist; John Lennox; God’s Undertaker; The Origin of Species; Sir Julian Huxley; Douglas Futuyma; Big Bang Theory; Genesis; Georges Lemaitre; Arno Penzias; Robert Wilson; survival-of-the-fittest; Eugenics; Billy Sunday; Scopes Monkey Trial; JW Tutt; Kettlewell; Michael Majerus; Jerry Coyne; Icons of Evolution; NELSON QSCIENCE Biology Units 3 & 4;
