January 21, 2005

Georgia School Board Proves Darwin Was Wrong

By BILL PRESS

I don’t know about you, but I thought the debate over evolution was over a long time ago — almost 80 years ago, in fact, when the Scopes Monkey Trial took place.

July 1925. Dayton, Tenn. It was one of the first battles in a cultural war that continues today. On trial was 24-year-old John Scopes, who admitted teaching evolution in the classroom. Leading the prosecution was William Jennings Bryan, who believed that any explanation for how man was created, other than the Book of Genesis, was the end of religion as we know it. “If evolution wins, Christianity goes,” huffed Bryan.

Defending Scopes was Clarence Darrow, who believed that man was surrendering his God-given intelligence by taking the Bible literally. For him, nothing less than the future of humankind was at stake. “Scopes isn’t on trial, civilization is on trial,” Darrow puffed in return.

The Scopes trial was the 1920s’ equivalent of our O.J. Simpson trial. Courtroom proceedings were carried live on the radio. On the last day of testimony, the judge moved the trial outside, onto the courthouse lawn, so that 5,000 spectators could witness Darrow’s cross-examination of Bryan, who had foolishly agreed to take the stand as an expert on the Bible.

Bryan melted as Darrow challenged him to defend, word-for-word, the creation account in Genesis, the story of Jonah and the whale, and other Old Testament legends. Under oath, Bryan could not. On God’s creation, for example, he admitted that six days, in fact, might well have been 6 million years. The Bible could not be taken literally. It was a victory for Clarence Darrow and Charles Darwin, both.

The debate over evolution in public schools should have ended right then and there — or, if not, in 1968, when the Supreme Court finally ruled that banning evolution and teaching creationism violated the First Amendment by endorsing one religion over another. But, no, the battle rages on today — in Cobb County, Ga. — where school board members, indeed, offer living proof that Darwin might have been wrong after all.

In 2002, the Cobb County School Board voted to require the posting of a sticker in all high school science textbooks, undermining the validity of evolution:

“This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered.”

Translation: “Hey, kids. You don’t have to believe all this science crap. It’s just a theory. You’ll find all the facts about creation in the Bible.” In other words, the sticker is nothing but religion disguised as a warning — which is why a federal judge declared the stickers unconstitutional and ordered them removed from textbooks.

The school board has voted to appeal what it calls “unnecessary judicial intrusion into local control of schools.” But they’re fighting a losing battle. In the end, I believe, most people of faith accept these basic truths.

— The Bible is not a scientific textbook. The earth is not flat. The earth is not the center of the universe. The sun does not literally rise. And flood waters never covered the earth to a depth of more than five miles. This is all part of biblical mythology, not scientific fact.

— Evolution is a proven scientific fact. There is simply too much evidence to ignore — in the plant world, the animal world and the origin of human beings. Evolution and the process of natural selection, in fact, are still going on before our very eyes — as scientists have observed among finches in the Galapagos Islands.

— There is no contradiction between evolution and belief in God. Evolution does not deny the existence of God; science is just trying to figure out what God has already accomplished. As long as you believe God kicked off the whole process, you don’t have to believe that He also created every banana slug, every redwood tree, or every species of bird, fish, insect, marsupial, or mammal, two-legged or four-legged. Genesis and evolution are not incompatible.

Still, biblical literalists will never give up. This is the same mind-set, remember, that condemned Galileo as a heretic. In confronting them, we could do no better than repeat Galileo’s own affirmation: “I do not feel obliged to believe that the same god who has endowed us with sense, reason and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.”