Darrow’s opening introduced his main point. The antievolution statute was illegal because it established a particular religious viewpoint in the publ… - Edward J. Larson

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.”

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.

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.