The Scopes Monkey trial (22.07.2025)

You’ve got to admit it; The Scopes Monkey Trial is a brilliant name. Not a fair one, (no monkey was on trial), but catchy nonetheless.

It’s a hundred years this month since John Scopes was tried in Tennessee, U.S. To give you some background in case you don’t the story, it was illegal to teach human evolution in schools under Tennessee law and the trial became a nationwide battle between modernists and Christian fundamentalists. The famous lawyer, Clarence Darrow defended Scopes while a former secretary of state (and presidential candidate) supported the prosecution.

It fascinates me how out-dated and yet how modern this trial still is. The wider anxiety over rapid social and intellectual change is resonant today (although we are fighting different battles) and the fundamentalists are still with us, especially in the U.S.

The Prosecution argued for Biblical inerrancy (it can’t be wrong).  They feared that the theory of evolution would lead to atheism through the undermining of key religious claims about the nature of reality from Adam and Eve to the Virgin birth.

The trial lasted eight days and Scopes was found guilty within nine minutes of deliberation. Later, the verdict was overturned on a technicality but the act under which Scopes was prosecuted was not repealed until 1967.

If you find that shocking (as I do), hear this: my mother’s general studies book from her school days in Argentina, begins as follows… “The only opinion worthy of notice on the origins of the world is from the Bible. God created the world in six periods…”. From there, it went on to discuss the Stone Age, the Bronze Age and the Iron Age. Unbelievable!

The question of how science and religion relate is on-going, and the three key positions in the 1925 trial are still held by different people today: those who demand that science agrees with the Bible (fundamentalists), those who demand the Bible agrees with science (understanding the creation story as allegory) and those who think that science and religion belong to different domains of intellectual thought and can’t be mixed.

Of course, for many people, the question is irrelevant. In our post-modern world, there is no objective ‘truth’, only the beliefs that people hold within their communities. You’re a fundamentalist? Go for it. You’re an atheist? High Five!

Yet, surely you can’t say that ‘anything goes’. There must be a ‘true’ answer somewhere. Even if we are limited in what we know and our beliefs about the world are deeply cultural, there is still evidence, and there is still data. Interestingly, the fundamentalists agree. I read the following on the website, ‘answeringenesis.org’.

The earth is only a few thousand years old. That’s a fact, plainly revealed in God’s Word. So we should expect to find plenty of evidence for its youth. And that’s what we find—in the earth’s geology, biology, palaeontology, and even astronomy.

They make the valid point that observational science is interpretative and (the invalid) conclusion that nothing science says is reliable. The only person who knows the truth is the God of the Bible. And what does God say? Read Genesis.

But this is a terrible argument! What makes the Biblical account (a historical and cultural record of the Hebrew people) any more reliable than a scientific account based on repeated observation and analysis?

Their answer is God.

And this highlights an important point that we tend to forget, that all claims to knowledge stand on certain foundations.  For science, it is empirical data and the rigorous testing and re-evaluation of that data. For the fundamentalist, it is God’s existence and the inerrancy of scripture.

We are then left with a question: whose foundations are more reliable? And a choice: who do we agree with?

This is what I object to. It’s a false dichotomy. It isn’t either/or. I can agree with the scientific method and its conclusions about our universe while also arguing that God is not a scientific fact to be tested (it’s impossible; God is not an object to be observed and measured).

Surely, I can have faith in God as the ultimate explanation for all things, and have faith in science to explain the nature of physical reality. I can read the Bible as humanity’s attempt to know God, growing from a tribal mentality to a universal one, and still believe it holds some deep moral and spiritual truths.

Seen like that, surely the science-religion debate is over and we can move on.