When I Run Out of Ideas... (Scopes trial was a HOAX?)

AMERICAN CHRONICLE.COM ^ | JULY 21, 2005 | DOUG BOWER

[CHARLITE]

I do on occasion run out of ideas for my column writing. I do this after finishing a huge writing project like a book. I am just plain "written out" and am fresh out of things to say. When this happens, I turn to the news and am rarely disappointed.

This morning, I read a story by Associated Press writer, Carl Hartman, entitled, Smithsonian Finds Scopes Trial Photos. This seemed innocuous. The story, as well as the photos, were... interesting.

What got my "Snit-O-Meter" going was how this reporter, like probably everyone on the face of the earth would report, reported the Scopes Trial as a genuine and bona fide criminal trial that took place.

Would it surprise you to learn that it was not so?

Let me first site two sources you simply must read. The first is an article by Carol Iannone.[http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft9702/articles/iannone.html The second is small book by Phillip E. Johnson, a law graduate of Harvard and The University of Chicago. He was also a law clerk for Chief Justice Earl Warren and taught law for thirty years at University of California at Berkley.

In Johnson's book, Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds[Intervarsity Press; copyright @1997], he says:

"The Scopes Trial was not a serious prosecution but a symbolic confrontation engineered to put the town of Dayton, Tennessee on the map. The Tennessee legislature had funded a new science education program and, to reassure the public that science would not be used to discredit religion, had included as a symbolic measure a clause forbidding the teaching of evolution. The governor, who signed the bill, realizing that any prosecution would be an embarrassment, predicted that the law would not be enforced. The American Civil Liberties Union wanted a test case, however, and advertised for a teacher willing to be a nominal defendant in a staged prosecution."

This man never had a chance in hell of going to jail or paying a fine for anything. The Scopes Trial was a hoax.

Now I encourage you to seek out these sources and read them. The small book by Johnson can be purchased cheaply at most bookstores and at Amazon.com. Get it and read it!

But my point in writing about this is NOT to unravel the hoax of the Scopes Trial but to pose an issue that I often bring up in my writings and in my newest, yet-to-be-released book, America's Anti-Mexican Xenophobia.

It is just beyond the pale that this Associated Press writer would accept, minus the application of a finely tuned "Phony-Baloney Detector", without question that the Scope's Trial was a genuine criminal prosecution. I might add the American public as a whole and most scientists as well to that list.

How is it the Scope's Trial, as well as any other number of ideologically motivated hoaxes (The Gay Agenda movement?) has been accepted and ingrained into the minds of the American people as incontrovertible fact?

Harvard Genetics Professor Richard Lewontin writes of a possible reason (one which I accept as valid):

"We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a priori commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated.

Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen."[The Unraveling of Scientific Materialism; by Phillip E. Johnson;
http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft9711/articles/johnson.html]

Professor Lewontin's quote is probably the most salient explanation for why the Evolution hypothesis or the "I was born that way" Gay Agenda hypothesis seems so certain to elitist insiders and so uncertain to those outside the elite groups. It is the a priori commitment to an ideology first, then to setting about to "prove" their ideology with evidence. These groups are compelled by their ideological a priori commitment to go about creating methodologies of investigation, to produce their desired outcomes, based not on Critical Thinking Skills (Phony-Baloney Detection) but on ideology.

This is why it is so important NOT to live your life according to untested assumptions! You have to develop a finely tuned and razor sharp Phony-Baloney Detection kit that you will pull out to evaluate everything you hear and read—including this author's writings!

Thinking critically is hard work. It takes time and it takes commitment. Nevertheless, please do not doom yourself to living a priori commitment to an ideology first kind of life. Test! Test! Test!

[okstate]

The Smithsonian magazine did a front page story on the Scopes Trial. They explained the whole origins of the trial in the minds of Dayton's businessmen.

But I'm not sure that makes the trial a HOAX -- it did happen, after all, and it was a watershed moment in America's attitudes towards evolution (mainly due to the contemporary press).

[nothingnew]

Monkey uncle bump

FMCDH(BITS)

[D-fendr]

"Inherit The Wind" was the bigger hoax.

[okstate]

"The law was the hoax, then."

I'd say that's more accurate than the overall premise of the article.

[okstate]

Agreed.

[Coyoteman]

This is so lame it does not even warrant a good Native American creation story.

Sorry, folks. You will have to wait for the next (hopefully more serious) post.