Clarence Darrow Quotes
This is the first case of it’s kind since we stopped trying people for witchcraft.
Clarence Darrow, 1857-1937, Attorney and author, Description of the Scopes Monkey trial, July 1925
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A teacher had been arrested and threatened with jail because he had taught Darwin’s Theory of Evolution in a high school science class. The ACLU paid for famed attorney, Clarence Darrow, to defend Scopes in the famous trial that exposed the ignorance and bias of the schools that prohibited teaching about evolution as it contravened the Protestant fundamentalist Biblical version of the creation of humans. While the ACLU had a major victory, even today many school systems—mostly in the South—still prohibit such teaching and while no teacher can be jailed, they can be fired for not following the curriculum of the local school board.
Most people think that the Spanish Inquisition was the locus of witch burning, but it was not. Germany was.
Ms. Holloway had led the majority of the board that had voted to revise the education standards of Kansas to exclude evolution. She was defeated in the Republican primary election afterward. See Sue Gamble {602752}
Professor Clark wrote this historical description of witchcraft and the Inquisition in contemporary verbiage as we would discuss the solution to serious problems of today. His overall point is that when society fears something, it establishes and institution to cope with the object of the fear, and the institution itself creates more fear as this is the way it “succeeds.” A more recent historical example was when Congress created House and Senate Committees to cope with the problem of communists infiltrating and undermining our important institutions. This had not been a problem until Senator Joseph McCarthy and a few others claimed that they had found thousands in our military, state department and other government agencies. In the final analysis, while there were NO witches, there were only a few former communists in government and most were fiction and imagination. Yet society went through a Red Scare that in some ways paralleled society’s problem with witchcraft.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910
This quotation is important and memorable for several reasons. First, the Congressman is one of the relatively few highly educated Americans who believe in the literal interpretation of the Bible. Most Christians and Jews do not interpret the ancient scripture literally. Most Christian and Jewish religious organizations, including the Roman Catholic Church, have no problem at all with evolution and the big bang theory. As a matter of fact, the scientist who developed the mathematics to explain the big bang was a Catholic Priest. Even some religious people who do not believe that that evolution is not an accurate interpretation, rarely claim that the Earth is only 9,000 years old. It is actually over 13 Billion years old. An anti-scientific view of the world is certainly within an American’s right, but the fact that this congressman was assigned by The Republican Party leadership to be a Member of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology given his belief structure is amazing, If the earth were only 9,000 years old, there is no way the global positioning satellites could tell us where we are, our nuclear arsenal would be unstable and dangerous, radiation medicine would not help anyone get well just for a few examples. A second noteworthy aspect is that the Congressman is not just stating that the millions of scientists and science teachers are wrong—in error. He accuses each and every one of them of acting as agents of Satan and that their motivation in studying and doing science is to undermine his and others faith in God and that none of them has any belief in or desire for a personal Savior. It is rare that this type of un-American behavior is found in a member of Congress who claims that any person who disagrees with his religions views or has different Biblical interpretations is an agent from Hell. The founding fathers created the First Amendment to cope with and even tolerate the few who had the extreme and unrealistic views of this Congressmen.
Dayton was the location of the infamous scope’s trial where a high school teacher was criminally convicted for teaching about evolution in his science class.
What he thought was conceivable in the 1970’s seemed almost certain to come to pass 30 years later. Scientists had already altered the evolution of various plants and animals, and the complete human genome had been sequenced. The question will be not whether man will be able to control and modify his own evolution, but how should this be done and who should decide it. We have realized that man has already—unintentionally—altered the evolution of many species from passenger pigeons which are now extinct and the dog which coevolved with humans. Arguably, man’s development of the ability to control his own evolution is an evolutionary development itself. One great question for society is whether it is better to alter evolution unknowingly or in a planned, relatively controlled manner. For man to participate in the design of human evolution will be the nightmare of the Creationists who insist that evolution is too complicated to be somewhat of a random process and that there must be a designer who they assume is God. When man becomes the designer, that will be very disturbing. For most theologians, there will be little difficulty with the notion that God chose the mechanism of evolution and chose humans to give the intellect and knowledge to implement and design the evolutionary process.
Clarence Seward Darrow was an American lawyer who became famous in the early 20th century for his involvement in the Leopold and Loeb murder trial and the Scopes "Monkey" Trial. He was a leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union, and a prominent advocate for Georgist economic reform.
