Edward J. Larson Quotes

Stanford university president David Starr Jordan, an eminent evolutionarily biologist who later volunteered to aid in the legal defense of John Scopes, spoke for many academics when he dismissed traditional Protestant revivalism as “simply a form of drunkenness no more worthy of respect than the drunkenness that lies in the gutter!”

I never yet found any conservative lawyer who, at the beginning, wanted to undertake a case which might reflect discredit on him. When it turns out differently and there seems to be some publicity or honor to be had, then offers of assistance come from all over the country.

The state law against teaching evolution and the resulting trial of John Scopes did not settle the matter in Tennessee or anywhere else. America’s adversarial legal system tends to drive parties apart rather than reconcile them, which certainly happened in this case.

By the 1960s, however, federal courts had long since stop using the Fourteenth Amendment to strike down progressive state economic regulations and instead used it to avoid repressive state social legislation.

Darrow’s opening introduced his main point. The antievolution statute was illegal because it established a particular religious viewpoint in the public schools.

The inexorable growth of [biology] continues to widen, not to close the tectonic gap between science and faith-based religion.

Darrow shortly wrote to Mencken about the examination of Bryan, “I made up my mind to show the country what an ignoramus he was and I succeeded.”

The public mind is poisoned at its source when special interests take hold of educational institutions for their own propaganda.

What is the purpose of this examination?"
Darrow answered honestly. "We have the purpose of preventing bigots and ignoramuses from controlling the education of the United States," he declared, "and that is all.

Darrow replied within the hour by tersely affirming his agnosticism on every point, concluding with his succinct answer as to the question of immortality: “I have been searching for proof of this all my life, with the same desire to find it that is incident to every living thing, and I have never found any evidence on the subject.”

Already, the three main tactics for attacking the antievolution measure had emerged: the defense of individual freedom, an appeal to scientific authority, and a mocking ridicule of fundamentalists and biblical literalism; later, they became the three prongs of the Scopes defense.

Ginger titled a concluding chapter, “To the Losers Belong the Spoils,” and drew the lesson from Bryan’s “fatal error of tactics: if a person holds irrational ideas and insists that others should accept them because of their authoritative source, he should never agree to be questioned about them.”

We have to live in the universe science gives us. A theology that is contrary to reality must be abandoned or improved.

Behe has never developed his arguments for intelligent design in peer-reviewed scientific publications. Indeed, he doesn’t actually conduct research in the field and, along with other leaders of the intelligent-design movement, concedes that there is not as yet much affirmative scientific evidence supporting the concept of intelligent design.

By the 1940s, a fundamentalist subculture had formed in the United States, with a creationist scientific establishment of its own.