William Jennings Bryan Quotes

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.

The school board had been pressured by religious fundamentalists throughout the state of Georgia to affix these stickers to all textbooks as there were no textbooks that met curricular standards that did not teach evolution. As soon as they started this practice, a suit was filed in the Federal District Court which found the practice violated both the Federal and Georgia State Constitutions ({586989}). The only reason that the stickers had been used was to try and placate those religious fundamentalists of the community who were opposed to the teaching of evolution. See {586968} for a quote from the legal opinion.

The Science Guy

This is a very good quotation showing the point of view of religious fundamentalists that if there is no fixed statement of ethics and morality as with the word of God as revealed in the Bible, what then makes anything right or wrong and the world exists in a moral behavioral vacuum. Other religionists hold that the morality is in the metaphors and philosophy of religion and not in the literal words of scripture. Still others argue that morality and religion itself is dynamic and is constantly changing. Then there are those who build their view of morality on philosophy but which is not based on a deity—Ethical Culturalists for example {592791}. Also, there are the pragmatic evolutionists who argue that cooperative behavior has evolved in man and cultural rules—morality—is also transmitted by culture and systems of law.

Conflict between religion and evolution does not exist in most churches. There are exceptions of some orthodox Jews, fundamentalist Christians and Muslims. However, in this case the highest prelate of the American Episcopal Church not only sees no conflict but urges that evolution be taught in schools.

In 1877 Wasburn was dropped from the List of Ministers by the Unitarian Church. He had become very critical of organized and orthodox religion of all kinds. He felt that literal interpretations of the Bible harmed religions as it made a mockery of God to claim His truths were the anachronistic and demonstrable falsehoods of the Book of Genesis. Today most Christians and Jews do not take the Old Testament Literally and in this sense Washburn was one of the early religious reformers of America. There is still a significant number of fundamentalist Christians and orthodox Jews who still believe in the literal truth of everything in the Bible.

This humorous essay was written less than a decade after Darwin published his first treatise on evolution. Here a witty American essayist and critic is giving an insight into the thoughts of the many people who either were scandalized by the concept of human evolution or honestly could not grasp such a new intellectual set of concepts. Many of the great scientific intellectual breakthroughs spread with stunning rapidly—usually amongst scientists, but in the case of evolution to most intellectuals and men of letters, they could use Darwin’s framework and observe evidence of evolution all over. So here, less than 10 years from the inception of evolutionary theory among English scientist, we have American non-scientific literati reading articles in the general (albeit sophisticated) Atlantic Monthly with a semi-serious, semi-comical, analysis of the thinking of people who resisted what had become in just a few years obvious truth to America’s leading intellectuals (except for most of the leading intellectual theologians who would take longer to accept evolution, but, with the exception of the extreme fundamentalists, most did.

Actually no school teaches that. What they did teach when covering Evolution was that some modern apes (chimpanzees and bonobos) and humans were both descended from a common ancestor. The Congressman was at that point an evangelical Christian fundamentalist, Later, DeLay was convicted and sentenced to jail for money laundering and illegally spending and raising campaign funds. He was also reprimanded by the House Ethics Committee for unethical methods of fund raising for other earlier actions.

While many people in America say they do not “believe in” evolution almost all of them do not know what evolution is much less understand what it is that they think is false. There are very few people who have studied evolution who reject it as being without merit in explaining life forms and their history. Almost all who are against it are religious fundamentalists who take the Judeo-Christian Bible literally. For their particular religion, evolution is a false doctrine, but there are many major religions in America for whom evolution is no problem. For example, Quakers, Unitarians, Congregationalists, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Reform Jews, Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox just to list some. Creationism, of which the quote author is an advocate, is an excellent religious solution to the contradiction between Evolution and the literal word of the Bible, but it is such terrible science, that it is not even considered science or taught in science curricula.

Bryan participated as a prosecutor in the infamous Scopes Trial in Tennessee where a school teacher was convicted of a crime for discussing the idea of evolution in a high school classroom. This view of opposition to Evolution was actually considered too liberal by many other Biblical Fundamentalists. They were just as distressed about the other animals as well as man. Evolution explicitly contradicted the literal story of Biblical creationism and therefore was blasphemy.

The Creation Museum makes the Christian Fundamentalist Case for their alternative view of the creation of the earth and man. In the process, they make claims that are proven incorrect every day in science, like the earth is only about 6000 years old {641849} , and all the species on earth were then separately created in their immutable form with no evolutionary process. There are many deeply religious Christians who do not take the Bible literally and have no problem with evolution as the mechanism which God selected to create and develop life. The Roman Catholic Church, for example, does not maintain that the Bible is literally true and Evolution did not account for the development of life on earth. The major difference between most modern scientists, philosophers, and theologians, is that some believe that God of other Supreme Being had nothing to do with the evolution and development of life forms and those who believe that Evolution was the mechanism that God created and used. See {641848} for an example of the former.

In the middle of the 19th century, there was an Anglican English Bishop by the name of Usher who was the first person to perform this “Biblical” analysis. Even then the absurdity of this claim was demonstrated over and over again with the science of the time. Most religious fundamentalists believe that the word “day” was really an unspecified period of time which might have been billions of years. Other religious theologians argue that the entire Genesis story was a metaphor and not meant to be taken literally. Today we know that our universe is over 18 billion years old, and the overwhelming proportions of the different animals and other life forms that have existed are long since extinct, while a few, like horseshoe crabs, are many millions of years old. New species are being created constantly. Even man, one of the more recent life forms, was well developed, had communities, and had spread over the world more than 6,000 years ago. We have archeological evidence of human life that goes back 10s of thousands of years. None-the-less, there are a number of American citizens who actually believe the 6,000 year claim, and they are entitled to their opinion regardless of how absurd it may seem to others. That is the great strength of a liberal democracy. Absurd seeming beliefs must be protected and respected. However, views that are so variant from known scientific reality may not be allowed to interfere with the teaching and public education to advocate a particular theological view and especially under the rubric of science.

There are many scientists who disagree with Johnson’s very unusual logic. They point out that it is certainly possible that God initially did not have had humans in minds, and when they evolved, decided that they were worthy of salvation history and then interfered to the extent of a virgin birth. Others would point out that just because man cannot exactly foresee the exact future pattern of evolution, does not men that a Supreme Being could not have initiated the mechanism that he/she knew would result in salvation history. The Pope and the Catholic Church see no inconsistency between Darwinism and the salvation history. Then there are those non-Christians who do not believe that God ever did introduce salvation and there are many more of them than there are Christians. Then, it is possible that God just set things in motion and had more important things then micromanaging evolution on our one planet in a universe of billions of billions. Last there are those who do not believe that there is or has been a God. Of course there is the possibility that Johnson is right, and religiously he may be, but that is not subject to scientific analysis.

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}

of the Intelligent Design strategists

This is an important quotation for several reasons. First, it demonstrates the extreme diversity of religion in America. To Swaggart, Evolution is a “Satanic Theory”. However, to most American religious leaders, Evolution, per se, is not problematic. The Roman Catholic Church has no trouble with Evolution; Catholic Universities teach Evolution as a basic part of their science curricula. Jews have no theological problems with Evolution. None of the main-line Protestant Churches have any theological opposition to Evolution per se. Yet there are other Protestant denominations who find that Evolution is in contradiction to a literal interpretation of the Bible and hence do not accept it. Second, it shows the extreme level of vituperation and disrespect that is given differing points of view by some of the extreme fundamentalists who do not have the traditional American religious tolerance for differing belief structures. Here Swaggart accuses the hundreds of millions of Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Buddhist and other clerics and laypeople who see Evolution as a well-established explanation of much of science, of being not only atheists but atheists in league with the Devil. A third factor is that this quotation is an example of a Minister telling people what is or is not science and scientifically demonstrated. If a scientist without any religious training of study were ever to render judgments on theology, most of us would laugh and see it as ridiculous. However when a cleric like Swaggert, untutored and ignorant of even basic science, makes scientific pronouncements, he (and many other fundamentalists) find that reasonable.

“Ichneumonidae" is the scientific name for a parasitic wasp that lays its eggs inside a live caterpillar and the baby wasps eat the capillary from the inside out. Darwin found it hard to reconcile why if God designed each of these species (the religious belief at the time), was there so much unnecessary cruelty in some animals. Surely, he thought God could have designed them to survive and thrive without so much cruelty. He acknowledged that God might have set a process in motion, but the development and evolution of each species he concluded was random within the scientific laws that governed. Darwin knew exactly what the effect of his publication of his findings and conclusions about evolution would have on the orthodox religious leaders of the time. Most of them were of his own upper class socioeconomic strata and he had studied theology. He delayed his publication for a quarter of a century while he muddled though, not the science, but the effect on the religious leadership and their consequent attacks on him for being an atheist. Asa Gray was a leading American scientist who was also a devout Christian.