back to the dark ages

The Mr. and I subscribed to Netflix recently, and one of the nice things about it is that you can watch a movie instantly from their website. I’ve hooked up the laptop to our HD tv (it has a PC monitor input) so it’s like watching it on DVD.

The other day he made me watch Inherit the Wind, about the Scopes Monkey Trial. He Made Me, in that he chose it this time, but it’s certainly something I’m interested in. Briefly, it’s a fictional retelling of the true story of a man who was prosecuted for daring to teach evolution in his biology classroom, when a Tennessee law strictly forbade it. The movie had shades of McCarthyism in it, with themes such as “how can you tell me what I’m supposed to be thinking?” Seriously, believe in the Bible if you like, I’m not concerned that you do, but don’t tell me that I have to believe in it. In the Scopes Monkey Trial, the prosecutor was not allowed to bring Science into the picture, since the trial was about whether or not Scopes broke an existing law forbidding anyone to teach anything but Creationism as it was taught in the Bible. So Darrow started questioning the scientific truth (as it were) of the Bible, which makes for the movie’s most interesting scenes (Where did Cain get his wife? If the very first day of the world was October 24, then did that day have day and night? Really? God didn’t create light until the fourth day.) Scopes lost since he clearly violated the existing law, but only had to pay $100.  This law and others like it were subsequently declared unconstitutional.
So this of course gets me going. My carpoolmate had just read a book about the Dover trial on Intelligent Design, so I went looking on Wikipedia for that and found a nice long article with a link at the bottom for the PBS documentary on the trial. Sure enough, it was available on Netflix, so I made the Mr. watch it with me last week.

This case actually allowed the science of “intelligent design” and evolution to be debated in court, which made for interesting dialogue as well. But the two important points that I took out of the documentary/trial were: the re-introduction of a supernatural being into science, and the proof that there was a concerted effort to re-name Creationism as Intelligent Design so that ID looked like a science and not like a religion.

Second point first. For those of you still following along, our constitution demands the separation of church and state, so you cannot teach religion (i.e. creationism) in schools. Since the days of the Scopes trial, this constitutional tenet had been upheld. So a number of leading thinkers in the Christian arena came up with their “science” of Intelligent Design, where something similar to evolution happens but it is guided/performed by a supernatural designer. They were careful to not use the words Creationism, God, or the Bible, so as to make it seem like ID was a science, not a religion. The proof in the trial that ID was deliberately created to be a science and not a religion but with religion as the push was provided by testimony by Barbara Forrest (I gotta read me one of her books or articles…).

But the point that leaves me the most disturbed was smaller, when the prosecutor pointed out that if you define Intelligent Design as a science, complete with the unknown supernatural Designer (i.e. God), then astrology would also be considered a science. And, as we all know, when science finally became a science out of the dark ages, a basic tenet was that supernatural forces were not allowed to be considered in scientific theory. If we allowed ID to be a science, we would be essentially putting us all back in the dark ages. Thank God the Creationists lost that trial.

Posted by on July 26th, 2008 under Uncategorized

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