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DEBATE
Dissecting Darwin and the Scopes Monkey Myths
By Gailon Totheroh
CBN News Health & Science Reporter
CBN News Science Reporter Gailon Totheroh analyzes the Hollywood myths and the lasting impact of Scopes in the debate between science and religion.
Seventy-seven years ago this month, the famous Scopes monkey trial was winding down. Biology teacher John Scopes was accused of violating a Tennessee law that said
you could not teach that people came from apes.
But what started out as a misdemeanor case, soon became packed with Hollywood myths that generated one of the most recognizable trials of the past century. Before
it was all over, religion had been demoted and denigrated, and science was exalted as savior of the human mind.
In 1960, the film "Inherit the Wind" ridiculed an anti-evolutionary pastor and his friends as they led the charge into John Scopes' science
classroom. "Darwin's theory tells us that man evolved from a lower order of animals — from the first wiggly protozoa in the sea — to the ape — and finally to man," Scopes
was teaching his class.
In fact, the movie portrayed Scopes as the brilliant hero, while the town was filled with ignorant and intolerant Christian believers.
One scene from the movie occurred as follows:
- Preacher: Do we believe the Word?
- Crowd: Yes!
- Preacher: Do we believe the truth of the Word?
- Crowd: Yes!
- Preacher: Do we curse the man who denies the Word?
- Crowd: Yes!
- Preacher: Do we call down hellfire against the man who has sinned against the Word?
- Crowd: Yes! [a crazed man is the focus of a wide-angle lens]
- But the preacher and his congregation were Christian-bashing fictions of Tinsel Town.
Today we are told we are ignorant if we don't believe the latest news out of Africa about a fossil skull — that science has discovered our most ancient
ancestral cousin.
A French scientist recently announced, "It's the oldest human."
But the final conclusion, even by some evolutionists, was that the skull was not actually the missing link, but just a gorilla skull. Phillip Johnson, author of Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds,
says we should question every evolutionary announcement.
"We shouldn't take individual claims, this fossil or that fossil, proves this or that seriously," he said, "because they're all the result
of bias and prejudice in the evaluation of evidence, by ideologues who have never considered that they might not be right in their big theory."
And evidence is the name of the game for Johnson, a retired criminal law professor from U.C. Berkeley. He says Hollywood really butchered the facts of the Scopes
trial.
The teacher was not arrested in front of students. Actually, the school year was over. And Scopes was no victim of Bible believers. He volunteered to be arrested
to help the American Civil Liberties Union get the law tossed out.
And although the movie portrayed the city fathers as upset and angry, they actually were not. They are the ones who came up with the idea of having the trial as a
way to put Dayton, Tennessee — or Hillsboro in the movie — on the map.
The heart of the debate, Johnson says, pits those who believe God is the eternal Creator versus those who embrace system that sees atoms and molecules as the
source of life. "The whole system makes no sense when you step back and look at the logic of it. It's a mind-bending philosophy, you see, that is the latest project in getting God out of
reality," Johnson said.
Public Broadcasting, normally an advocate of evolution, recently ran a show critical of the Scopes myths, including an eyewitness who met the movie's producer.
In the PBS segment, the eyewitness described his conversation with the producer: "’What did you think of the film?’ And I said I didn't like
it. I thought it was awful. And he says, ‘What do you mean? What did you not like about it?’ I said, it wasn't like that at all."
Johnson says the show was only 40 years too late to correct the Hollywood myths that indoctrinated a generation. Inherit the Wind is still shown in classrooms to
show how evil religion is in squelching everything scientific and progressive.
And Hollywood did feel the need to give the younger generation a booster shot of evolution by remaking "Inherit the Wind" for TV in 1998, and again
making the Scopes prosecutor look bad.
On the NBC version, William Jennings Bryan badgers the witness saying, "What did he say about the holy state of matrimony — to compare it with the
breeding of animals? Don't you want the good people of this town to understand what happened to his mind so that they can bring him back to his senses?! Come on, tell it! Tell it! Tell it all!"
But this scene never happened either.
Benjamin Wiker, author of Moral Darwinism which indicts Darwinism for its destructive impact on society, says PBS overlooked something. It did not mention the racist content of the actual biology text from which Scopes worked.
But the movie does mention a book. Clarence Darrow, as played by Spencer Tracy, informs a student, "Charles Darwin's Theory of Evolution and the
Descent of Man. That's right, Howard, that's the very book he read to you in your classroom."
No, Howard, the actual book the classes used was called A Civic Biology. In it, you will find that alcoholics, lawbreakers, the mentally challenged and
other so-called "parasites" should be stuffed away in asylums, separated by gender, so they do not breed. After all, the author Hunter tells us, "If such people were lower animals, we
would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading."
But Hunter was just echoing the very teachings of the master, Charles Darwin, Mr. Evolution himself.
Darwin predicted "the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races." By savage races, he
especially meant black Africans.
Wiker says if Darwin were alive, he would likely applaud the AIDS virus for speeding up the evolutionary process in wiping out millions of African children.
And though Hollywood portrayed prosecution lawyer William Jennings Bryan as pompous and a glutton, the popular three-time Democratic presidential candidate joined
the prosecution team to oppose just that kind of Darwinian bigotry — what today we would call "hate speech."
That philosophy is sometimes called social Darwinism, and Bryan detested that mentality. German militarism believed in it — helping ignite World War I
— and so did the heartless version of capitalism.
Johnson explained, "Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, they loved Darwinism because it said they were right to amass all the money in the world, you know.
And if other people didn't have as much money, it was because they were inferiors."
And don't forget the Führer, Adolf Hitler. "German militarism, generally, and Hitler in particular, got their inspiration from this kind of
thinking," Johnson noted. Hitler's Mein Kampf was published the year of the trial.
But Johnson says the movie and the evolutionists want everyone to think evolution is a factual and wonderful philosophy that really is not against your religion.
"You can believe in a watchmaker God who made the laws in the first place and then went away and doesn't bother us any more. That should satisfy you. So,
it's various ways of trying to give you counterfeit in place of the real gold of the doctrine of creation by God," Johnson explained.
That is perhaps why the movie deceptively ends with defense attorney Clarence Darrow holding Darwin and the Bible, as if they balanced one another with no conflict.
There is so much more to the Scopes Trial than the standard story of science vs. religion. Until the full story comes to light, the mythical view of the monkey
trial, far from the actual courtroom conflict, will continue influencing personal and policy decisions.
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