God Experts

It’s delightful to see a humanist-oriented book win something, especially something as prestigious as the National Book Foundation’s annual award for nonfiction. Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve: How the World Became Modern is a deserving winner, for taking an event little noted when it happened and demonstrating in an entertaining way its impact on the world ever since.

The central story of The Swerve is the discovery by an ex-Papal bureaucrat of a long lost Roman manuscript called De Rerum Natura, or “The Nature of Things.” Greenblatt’s recounting of how and why the book resurfaced in the 15^th century is fascinating, but for me what’s far more important is the text of The Nature of Things itself, and the light it sheds on pre-Christian humanism. (more…)

Last week, we saw how William Jenings Bryan’s campaign for an anti-evolution amendment to the federal Constitution led to the 1925 prosecution of high school teacher John Scopes.

Bryan immediately volunteered his services to the prosecution, even though he had little experience as a litigator. “The contest between evolution and Christianity is a duel to the death,” said Bryan. “If evolution wins in Dayton, Christianity goes – not suddenly of course, but gradually – for the two cannot stand together. … In an open fight the truth will triumph.”

The prospect of an “open fight” enticed Clarence Darrow, a confirmed agnostic, to volunteer for the defense. As Darrow put it, “Scopes isn’t on trial; civilization is on trial. The prosecution is opening the doors for a reign of bigotry equal to anything in the Middle Ages. No man’s belief will be safe if they win.” (more…)

By a vote of 70-28, the Tennessee House of Representatives has just approved a bill to protect teachers who choose to teach creationism, rather than evolution, in their public school classrooms. The State of Tennessee, which pays their salaries, would no longer be able to enforce standards for the teaching of evolution, as it currently does. Instead, science curriculum would become a free-for-all. Studies already show that 13% of high school biology teachers advocate creationism in their classrooms, and that a large majority avoid talking about evolution altogether, because it would get them in hot water with the local God experts. If this bill takes hold – it’s already been introduced in seven states – expect those numbers to skyrocket.

Proponents of the Tennessee bill disingenuously say they are simply trying to promote academic freedom. Evolution is just an unproven “theory,” they say, and other “theories” like that contained in the book of Genesis should be taught as well. In fact, evolution is a “theory” in the same sense that gravity is a “theory”: a coherent group of principles used to explain a class of phenomena. Like evolution, gravity hasn’t been conclusively proven in every case, and Isaac Newton was roundly condemned by the God experts of his day. I can only suggest that those who prefer divine revelation to observable fact should try stepping off a rooftop sometime. (more…)

Tomorrow is the 150^th anniversary of the collapse of Chichester Cathedral. Not an event especially notable in its own right (the building was 450 years old, and no one was hurt), but memorable for Benjamin Disraeli’s quip that “It is a privilege to live in such an age – to say nothing of Essays & Reviews, which convulses Christendom and seems to have shaken down the spire of Chichester Cathedral.”

How could anything with a title as unsexy as Essays and Reviews be so controversial as to flatten, at least metaphorically, a Gothic cathedral? What was it about Essays and Reviews, published three months after Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, that made it sell more copies in its first two years than Darwin did in his first twenty? (more…)

When I first read the news article about the new anti-evolution court decision in California, I assumed the reporter had simply gotten it wrong, and that no federal court in America could possibly have ruled the way the article described. As usual, my optimism was misplaced. The case of Farnan v. Corbett holds, flat out, that a public school teacher who criticizes the doctrine of creationism in class – as every teacher of evolution implicitly or explicitly does – violates the First Amendment to our Constitution.

James Corbett has taught at Capistrano High School in Mission Viejo, California for the past 20 years. One of his students, a fundamentalist Christian, sued him on the grounds of promoting a “religion of secularism” in his class. The federal district court threw out all but one of the student’s complaints, but Judge James V. Selna held as follows on the creationism count:
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