CYKIAE (Christ You Know It Ain't Easy)

In June 1925 John Scopes, the defendant in the Scopes Monkey Trial, visited New York for two main purposes. The first was to meet with the American Civil Liberties Union (the ACLU) to discuss tactics (which included the ACLU’s fervent wish to get Clarence Darrow off Scope’s legal team). The other purpose was to have Scopes attend a fund raising dinner in his honour at the fashionable Civic Club. The ACLU needed to raise...

Darrow … had grand matters to place before the country — issues of academic liberty, free thought, and scientific inquiry. He hoped, by calling scientists to the stand, to educate the public and alert them to the threat posed by rural zealots with their silly lockstep creed. And the defense was aided by public expectations. The country was looking forward to a spectacular debate on Monkeys and Man, led by the titans Da...

Darwin took us forward to a hilltop from where we could look back and see the way from which we came. But for this insight and for this knowledge we must abandon our faith in the pleasant poetry of Genesis

Thus sprake Henry Drummond, (Spencer Tracy) who played the fictional role of the real life Clarence Darrow in the 1960 movie Inherit the Wind which was based, ever so loosely on the Scopes Monkey Trial in Dayton Tennesse...

William Jennings Bryan was pitched against Clarence Darrow in the Scopes Monkey Trial – and it wasn’t a fair fight.

John Farrell, in his biography, Clarence Darrow – Attorney for the Damned, wrote of one of Darrow’s more remarkable court wins – and he had had many remarkable court wins:

He was a practicing defense lawyer, and in his time he represented … many a scorned woman like Emma Simpson...

William Jennings Bryan had won the nomination of the Democratic Party to run for President against William McKinley in 1895. For the same elections, Clarence Darrow had secured for himself the nomination of the Democratic party to run for Congress. Darrow in fact spent most of his time campaigning vigorously for Bryan, to the detriment of his own campaign. In the result both he and Bryan failed in their bids for office.

John Farrell...

Now here’s what could sound like a very modern story. Only it isn’t. In this part I’m going to be telling you about Sue Hicks of Tennessee. Except Sue Hicks isn’t the 1925 Southern Belle that you might be thinking she is, in any event Sue Hicks wasn’t originally from Tennessee. Although in one sense Sue was. But in another she wasn’t – but one thing is for sure and certain, Sue Hicks played...

If you get it right all the time, you’re doing really well. But sometimes you get it really, really wrong. Permit me to illustrate. William B Riley conceived the idea of a body to advance Christian Fundamentalist ideas. The body that emerged from this idea was called World's Christian Fundamentals Association – the WCFA. In 1922 the movement lobbied to ban the teaching of evolution in public schools. It threw its w...

William Jennings Bryan challenged evolution for what he saw as the lack of evidence to show that man evolved from lower animal forms. His chief scientific opponent, well I’ll let Edward J Larson tell you about that from his book on the Scopes Monkey Trial, Summer for the Gods:

At the time, the popular debate over the status of evolution as science centered largely on the interpretation of fossils. Various types of scienti...

It was the rise of mass public education that was going to make inevitable the clash between Darwin’s materialistic Theory of Evolution (excluding God from the role of the creator of all life, and especially human life) and the Christian religion in America, in that rather large courtroom in Dayton Tennessee in July 1925. Darwin’s materialistic explanation of how life evolved left, and was not intended by him, to leave ...

What many atheists call the war of religion against science, most relevantly against the Theory of Evolution, moved from being a debate in the public square, in churches and elsewhere and moved into the courtroom in Tennessee in 1925. Maybe now a decisive answer from this Court, or some superior court following an appeal, would lay the issue of whether evolution was true or not to rest once and for all. 

This incredibly importa...

In one of his many books, River Out of Eden, Richard Dawkins wrote:

The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.

That isn’t how I see the world, the universe. Perhaps I could attempt to understand Richard Dawkins statement by imagining that he’s speaking of some other universe not o...

Medieval Muslim scholars developed one of the most famous versions of the cosmological argument, known as the Kalām argument. It asserted that the universe had a temporal beginning — a proposition that philosophers typically sought to justify by showing the logical or mathematical absurdity of an infinite regress of cause and effect. The argument concluded that the beginning of the physical universe must have resulted from an...

What science has just learned about the history of life on earth is a result entirely unexpected by atheist scientists. It doesn’t give the appearance Richard Dawkins ascribed to the universe of no design, no purpose . . . nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. Instead Stephen Meyer, in his book The Return of the God Hypothesis, wrote:

the information problem associated with the origin of the first life does not r...

In the Origin of Species, Darwin depicted the history of life as a gradually unfolding, branching tree, with the trunk representing the first one-celled organisms and the branches representing all the species that evolved from these first forms. In this view, novel animal and plant species arose from a series of simpler precursors and intermediate forms over vast stretches of geologic time. Darwin argued vigorously for this vi...

At the very beginning of this series I opened with the words Carl Sagan spoke, in the opening of his spectacularly successful 1970 TV series, Cosmos. His entire philosophy reduced to just 13 words:

the cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be.

But that was clearly untrue. Stephen Hawkings proved it wasn’t true when he proved that the universe came from what is called a singularity – or as the ancient Romans wou...

Hitler, in his book Mein Kampf, praised one American, and only one American. He described him as the single only great man in that country. He spoke about how the sinister tentacles of the Jewish world conspiracy had even reached the New World. These are Hitler’s exact words:

it is not only the Old World that he [the Jew] holds thus enmeshed, the same fate menaces the New. It is Jews who govern the stock exchang...

… we  would in all likelihood deduce on visiting a remote planet if we found a succession of piles of perfect cubes of titanium with a prime number of cubes in each pile in ascending order — 2,3,5,7,11, etc. We would see at once that here was an artefact produced by an intelligent agent, even though we had no idea what kind of intelligent agent it could possibly be. The piles of cubes are in themselves much '...

An anonymous person, once jokingly remarked:

One of the main evidences that there is intelligent life out there is that it has not tried to contact us!

Or as Monty Python put it in their Galaxy Song

“pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth”

We now know, thanks to advances in science, that every living thing has its own operating system. And those operating sys...

Bill Bryson, in his book, The Body - A Guide for Occupants tells us:

Your cells are a country of ten thousand trillion citizens, each devoted in some intensively specific way to your overall well-being. There isn't a thing they don't do for you. They let you feel pleasure and form thoughts. They enable you to stand and stretch and caper. When you eat, they extract the nutrients, distribute the energy, and carry off the was...