Many newspaper articles and television segments in the past few weeks have marked the fiftieth anniversary of the famous Scopes trial in Tennessee — that dramatic courtroom confrontation between the theory of evolution according to Darwin and divine creation according to the Bible.
A half century ago, the Darwinian liberals such as John Scopes, and the flamboyant atheists such as his lawyer Clarence Darrow, were asking for the right of an individual teacher to expound the theory of evolution in the schools. Darrow once boasted: “I don’t believe in God because I don’t believe in Mother Goose.”
The wheel has now turned full circle. The liberals and the atheists have censored out of our schools the concept that God created the world and its inhabitants.
In 1973, the Tennessee Legislature passed a new law requiring that, if evolution is taught, then the theory of divine creation must be given equal time. This year a Federal Court of Appeals ruled that law unconstitutional. Similar laws in Arkansas and Mississippi have also been struck down by the courts.
Battles are currently being waged in Michigan and California to give God equal time with Darwin in teaching our students how human life began.
The notion that life somehow began spontaneously without God, and mysteriously evolved to include all sea, land, air, and human life, does violence to causality and lacks scientific proof. The more we explore and learn about outer space, the more certain we are that, of all the known celestial bodies, only our earth can support human life.
The evidence is overwhelming that there must have been a divine Engineer who arranged the unique combination of sunlight, air, water, a tilted earth to provide four seasons, a rotating earth to prevent extremes of heat and cold, and a moon to furnish the tides to keep our oceans fresh with oxygen to support sea life.
A Robinson Crusoe who finds a gold watch on a deserted island does not conclude that by some chance combination of events, it evolved from the iron ore, silica and gold in the rocks. Like wise, the evidence of a divine Architect who designed the laws of physics, chemistry, heredity, and life itself, with man and his intellect infinitely superior to animal species, is too plain to reject.
To say that human beings, who can compose symphonies and build space vehicles, are children of apes rather than children of God, is scientifically absurd.
If the evolutionists had scientific proof of their theory, they would not fear a challenge from the Biblical story of creation. True academic freedom should permit equal time in our schools for God and Darwin.
