Natural Law and Scopes

The Scopes Monkey Trial was not only a challenge between evolution and creationism by having its base in the anti evolution laws that were migrating their way into law in the southeastern parts of the United States. But, also a challenge for states rights and the defense of individual liberty. Even though this trial that took place in the eastern Tennessee town of Dayton in 1925. It still provokes the debate of science, religion, public education and the policies of today's government with it's secular progressive tilt away from natural law to relativism and the post modernist.

Regardless of ones stand on the scientific truth at the moment or theory of man's evolution from primate in to a complex being with the ability to create and expose ideas from a realm of theory and ideas. These ideas spawned a continuel play on modern thought and their possible effects on mankind, and its unintended consequences. Absolutism meets a relative reality. In the halls of a matrix of possibilities, there lies a gambit and a gauntlet, morality and ethics. Based on the long standing empirical historical evidence toward the guidance of natural law. The price of secularism as a quasi religion riding the coat tails of dialectical conceptual relativism has descended upon our modern world.

Even though Clarence Darrow made it a point to belittle William Jennings Bryan during this trial pushed through by the ACLU with the literary help of east coast newspapers, and the prosecution's exploitation of one teacher named John Scopes. Scopes insisted on teaching Darwinian evolution and thus breaking the anti evolution law of Tennessee at the time. Even though it was a misdemeanor with a possible moderate fine, it turned into the modern foundation of the 20th centuries continuous attack on person liberty and the natural rights of man held as inalienable put forth in our constitution.

Planning to put Bryan in the hot seat, Darrow put the burden of proof on Bryan as to the science of the bible. William Jennings Bryan, at one time was considered a friend of the progressive movement, a populist in America in the latter part of the 19th century. He had a friend in the press, secular education, angry at Wall Street. he even defended the common man and he was known as the commoner thought the trial.

As Bryan, an outstanding stump speaker and fiery orator opted the challenge the Copernican explanation of the universe, he took the populist tone of the fundamentalist Christian in 1925, especially in the south. The 1920's at that time in America was where the theory of the evolution of man was taking hold in secular academia and most public schools. With the discovery of a small piece of a human skull in Piltdown Common in Sussex, the English geologist Charles Dawson set in motion a possible link or missing link to the evolution of mankind. Ironically, the fragment was located only 30 mile from Charles Darwin's country home. The discovery took place in 1909, the 50th anniversary of Darwin's Evolution of species. Of course, science and the press took off with the evidence that would once and for all kill the debate of the origin of man.

Here the debate arrives in 1925 in a court room in Dayton, TN. After all the hoopla, the trial begins, after the discovery and presenting each sides witnesses. The moment is at hand with Darrow directing his questions at Bryan on the witness stand. Firing questions at Bryan the exchange begins. Darrow's angle attempts to pick apart Mr. Bryan's defense of the time frame of the creation of the universe in 6 days...while resting on the seventh or sabbath. Darrow as today's modernest directed his scepticism at the so called miracles in the bible, thus undermining fundamentalism directly by ridiculing such so called literal evidence as simplistic and easily scientifically debunked.

Clarence Darrow then unleashed a flurry of attacks on Bryan's attempted rationalization of of certain biblical passages challenged by Mr. Darrow. The questioning went into the realm of the actual time frame in the creation of universe via the fiat of god. Why did god stop the earth instead of the sun, was the sun created on the fourth day, there was four periods without sun and so on. Bryan did the best he could in answering the questions based on his understanding of biblical periods describing the creation of the universe. Finally, Bryan settled for his belief in these biblical events, even if he could not explain it...he would still except it as truth.

After the trial the defense took the case as a victory for evolutionary science and the prosecution a win for the court upholding the original charge. The unintended consequences of the secular progressives was the birth of the modern christian movement. It's roots expanded over the centuries, adopted from Judaism in which our laws, morals, ethics and the concept of the individual and the personal relationship with god. For you wheel of life Sophisto's outside the rings of such time tested ethos, as the struggle of good and evil as not just an interpretation, but a reality outside of Nietzsche's boundaries...is god dead?

The Scopes Monkey trial gives us a unique introspective and historical insight to the struggle between liberty as conjoined in natural law and the law of relativism's. Coffee house verbal revolution in 18th century Britain, pales to the birth of the secular movement, the French Revolution....Hegel never had it so good. Far from Hume, Smith and the others of the Scottish enlightenment...the Sophistos find their truth in argarian fields of dreams, friends of all that is nature, population reduction, market statism, economic equality ad nauseum. Where does it end...it does not, the use of language, the nudging of liberty from the individual to the collective, state control of quid pro quo ...The post modernist Sophist's Sophisto's cavalier defense of their relativism as a world view, lies in the misinterpretation of Einstein's theory of relativity, as a gateway to their version of a bookend reality.