Throughout history, the vast majority of people around the globe have believed they have, however defined, a “soul.” While the question of whether the soul exists cannot be answered by science, what we can study are the causes and consequences of various beliefs about the soul and its prospects of surviving the death of the body. Why are soul and afterlife beliefs so common in human history? Are there adaptive advantages to assuming souls exist? Are there brain structures that have been shaped by environmental pressures that provide the foundation of body/mind dualism that is such a prominent feature of many religions? How do these beliefs shape the worldviews of different cultures and our collective lives? What is the role of competing afterlife beliefs in religion, science, politics, and war? This course explores several facets of this relatively unexplored but profoundly important aspect of human thought and behavior. The course consists mainly of 70 to 80 minute lectures, typically broken up into 3 segments, recorded from a course offered by Rutgers University School of Arts and Sciences. These videos include slides and some embedded video clips. Most lectures are accompanied by slides used during the lecture, also including recommended reading assignment which may provide additional opportunities to reflect on your studies. Due to the lengthiness of this class and natural progression, the online course has been separated into 3 units, this is Unit 3.
The Scopes Trial Part C
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From the course by Rutgers the State University of New Jersey
Soul Beliefs: Causes and Consequences - Unit 3: How Does It All End?
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Rutgers the State University of New Jersey
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From the lesson
The Scopes Trial: Human Origins and the Public Classroom
Meet the Instructors
Prof. Daniel M. OgilvieProfessor of Psychology
Psychology
Prof. Leonard W. HamiltonProfessor of Psychology
Department of Psychology
Darrow was not sure that he was going to be given an opportunity for
a closing statement, because of the way some of these court things can go.
So he had decided to put all of his eggs into the basket of the opening speech.
But before that, jurors had to be selected.
And Darrow, very quickly, realized that he wasn't going to find
local people who shared his view on the teaching of evolution in the classroom.
So the best he could hope for
was people who might not hold the view quite as strongly as some of the others.
So they had quite a little wrangling for selecting jurors.
One of the questions that he asked a juror was,
have you read anything about evolution?
And the juror said no.
Well, why not?
It's been in the news.
He said I can't read.
Because of your eyes?
No, because I'm illiterate, I have not learned to read.
And there were a couple of jurors who had not had enough schooling to read.
But they were put on because they didn't have to read to be on the jury.
It was a target rich environment because everybody knew this was
going to be a huge deal.
It was already very crowded.
So people thought, if I could be a juror,
I could have a front-row seat in all of this and really get the most of it.
So people were lined up to become jurors.
But eventually, the jurors were chosen, and Darrow gave
a brilliant opening speech.
And the next day, one of the local newspapers described this speech.
It said, you have but a dim notion of it, who have only read it.
It was not designed for reading, but for hearing.
The clangorousness of it was important as the logic.
It rose like the wind and ended like a flourish of bugles.
Darrow paced as he spoke, tugging on his lavender suspenders.
He would stop and brood a minute, hunching his shoulders almost up to his ears.
Then they would drop, his head would shoot forward.
His lower lip protrude, as he hurled some bitter word at his opponents.
Big opening speech.
Let me read you a couple things that he said in this opening speech.
The Bible is not one book.
The Bible is made up of 66 books written over a period of about a thousand years,
some of them very early and some of them comparatively late.
It is a book primarily of religion and morals.
It is not a book of science, never was, was never meant to be.
Under it, there is nothing prescribed that would tell you how to build a railroad or
a steamboat, or make anything that would advance civilization.
It is not a textbook or a text on chemistry.
It is not big enough to be.
It is not a book on geology.
They knew nothing about geology.
It is not a book on biology.
They knew nothing about it.
It is not a work on evolution.
That is a mystery.
It is not a work on astronomy.
It does not specify what you cannot teach, but
says that you cannot teach anything that conflicts with the Bible.
Then just imagine making a criminal code that is so uncertain and impossible,
that every man must be sure he has read everything in the Bible, not only read it,
but understands it, or he might violate the criminal code.
So Darrow was basically saying that this is a lousy law,
because it's so vague, it makes it almost impossible for
anybody to do anything without the potential of violating the law.
Then William Jennings Bryan had his turn.
The statute defines exactly what the people of Tennessee desired and
intended, and did not declare unlawful and it needs no interpretation.
The caption speaks of the evolutionary theory and the statute specifically states
that teachers are forbidden to teach in the schools supported by taxation,
any theory of creation of man that denies the Divine Creation.
If, for instance, and I think this is a fair illustration,
if a man were made a contract with somebody to bring rain in a dry season,
and if he was to have $500 for an inch of rain.
And if the rain did not come, and he sued to enforce his contract,
he could bring in experts to prove that a drought was better than rain,
at which point the courtroom burst into laughter.
Basically, what he was saying here is that
we don't need to know whether evolution is true or not.
We don't need know whether it's scientifically supported or not.
The law simply says you can't teach it, and
the majority of people want it to say that.
So that's the way it is.
So that was his argument that he didn't want any
scientific experts to come in and testify,
because he felt they were irrelevant to what the court was dealing with.
So the two sides.
Darrow the statute is vague, the Bible is wrong, we want to protect our freedom.
William Jennings Bryan, the majority should rule, the Bible is everything,
and our culture is more important than our freedom.
And two brilliant minds arguing these positions.
And going back, this was just a classic
example of what has been termed
the non-overlapping magisteria.
This is exactly what we've talked about before.
We've got all of the religion things on side,
all of the science things on the other side.
And they were not really very willing, or able in that context,
to talk with each other reasonably about it.
They were, by the way, friends.
They had known each other for many years.
They respected each other's views.
They just didn't agree with each others views.
But they had a cordial relationship.
So Bryan argued that scientific experts were not relevant.
That he didn't really care whether it was true or not.
Darrow, on the other hand, desperately wanted the scientific experts to come in.
He had them all lined up.
He had contacted Cattell with the American Association for
the Advancement of Science.
They had handpicked scientists who could strongly support
the scientific validity of the theory of evolution,
and who were also personally religious themselves.
So he wanted people to come in who could share the views of religion,
and still say that the theory of evolution had scientific validity,
and was an important thing to be taught.
In high school and college Biology courses.
Well, this turned into a bit of a contest between Darrow and the judge.
And Darrow got a little bit huffy,
as it were, in his interaction with the judge, and
this was at the end of a long, hot week of testimony.
And the judge threatened contempt of court charges
against Darrow for not treating the judge properly.
But the decision was made not to have the scientist testify,
but they were allowed to submit written statements that
could be read into the record.
So they assigned us all beautifully put together, long,
involved written presentations that were in fact,
read into the record, but the jury did not hear and of this evidence.
It was just being read into the court record.
So when Darrow came back to court after the weekend and
all of these things were read in and everything.
Darrow made this heartfelt apology to the judge that
the people of Dayton have been so nice to me and I'm just so
sorry if I offended you or the community in any way.
It had been a long hot day, and some things just followed other things and
I probably said some things that I should not have said,
please take that into consideration.
And so the judge dropped the contempt charges,
but did it in a very strange way.
The judge basically made a speech and
recited this long favorite religious poem of his.
And he was suggesting that Darrow go home reflect on this and
to ask forgiveness from God so he would be forgiven and everything else.
So basically, threw it right back at Darrow.
[COUGH] So
now Darrow is no longer in contempt of court.
He doesn't have his scientific witnesses there, and
is not allowed to bring them in.
But over the weekend, Darrow had come up with a fiendishly clever
idea from a legal standpoint.
So after this whole interaction with the judge, and
the dropping of contempt charges and everything.
When they normally would have gone into closing arguments,
Darrow shocked everybody.
He said, I would like to call to the stand, an expert on the Bible.
Mr. Brian the prosecuting attorney.
Now nobody calls the prosecuting attorney to the stand.
And of course, the prosecution attorneys were leaping up and
objecting and all sorts of things like that.
But Brian said no, I want to do this.
I'm not afraid of agnostics, bring it on.
So Brian goes to the stand, and by now the whole court had moved out into
this stand out under the shade trees and
Brian had just volunteered for a two hour grilling on the Bible.
Was Jonah really swallowed by a big fish?
He asked.
It's in the Bible, so it's true.
Or was it a whale?
In the old testament is says Jonah was swallowed by a fish,
and in the new testament he was swallowed by a whale.
Is the bible wrong in one place or the other?
is there any independent evidence for the Great Flood.
And how did Noah get all of those creatures from all the different
continents onto this little boat that he had built?
And in Brian's opening statement, he had jokingly said that
the Great Flood had wiped out all of the creatures on earth except for the fish.
But, the Bible actually doesn't accept the fish.
So, Darrow said, really, you're telling me that the fish were also killed by a flood?
That seems a little unreasonable.
Do you really believe that there were no human civilizations more than 5,000
years ago?
Have you ever looked at other religions?
And curiously, Brian answered no, that he had not looked at any other religions.
Highly educated man.
Was everything created in six 24-hour days?
Bryan says, well, maybe that was just kind of a concept.
Where did Cain, the son of Adam and Eve, get his wife?
Since there's no report of any other people around.
They spent a good bit of time.
Did Joshua really stop the sun?
And Brian says, well that's it says in the Bible.
Well, Darrow said did the sun go around the earth back in those days?
Because otherwise, shouldn't the Bible have said that the earth stopped,
instead of the sun stopping?
So you get the drift here,
that it was just question after question after question.
And the prosecuting attorneys tried to get him to stop after the first hour and
Brian said no, no, no let's keep going, I don't mind doing this.
But what Darrell was doing was establishing that this Bible expert,
William Jennings Bryan, did a fair amount of interpretation of the Bible.
And that's what he was looking for, the little waffling here and
there that Brian didn't take the Bible totally literally, so other people
could take it not so totally literally in other different lesser, and more ways.
So it was a brilliant idea to bring Brian to the stand in this matter.
And attorneys today in law school still go back and read this trial because it's just
filled with the things that are worthwhile knowing if you're going to be an attorney.
So what do you think?
Should the Butler Act stand?
Because, after all, the vast majority of the people wanted it, and
they were paying for the schools.
Teachers don't have to teach.
They don't have to take the job if they don't want it.
Would you find Scopes guilty?
So these are the issues that were facing
the jurors at the end of this trial.
Darrow, you have to remember now, Darrow is the guy defending Scopes.
His final words to the judge were " Let me suggest this.
We have no proof to offer on the issues that the court has laid down here.
That Mister Scopes did teach that the students said he taught.
I think to save time we will ask the court to bring in the jury and
instruct the jury to find the defendant guilty.
We make no objection to that.
It will save a lot of time and I think that it should be done".
So here's an interesting case, everybody, everybody wanted to find Scopes guilty.
The ACLU wanted to find him guilty?
The prosecution certainly wanted to find him guilty.
And now the defense wants to find him guilty because they wanted to take it
up the ladder.
Well, the jury who had been sitting in the jury room most of the time and hadn't
been able to see most of the entertaining aspects of this, were now called,
given their instructions and sent back to the jury room, but the crowd had got so
thick that they couldn't get back there so they met in the hallway for
nine minutes and decided that Scopes was guilty and came back and reported that.
Judge Raulston said let's set the fine at $100.
The minimum.
Set the fine at $100 and Darrow said,
okay that's fine $100 it is.
And Darrow finished I think this case will be remembered because it is the first case
of this sort.
Since we stopped trying people in America for witchcraft because here we have done
our best to turn back the tide that has sought to force itself upon us,
upon this modern world of testing every fact in science by religious dictum.
That is all I care to say, and the trail is over.
But the event wasn't over
William Jennings Brian went out to do what he does best and
that is to write a speech because he was going to message
his final closing statement into this big speech that
he was going to deliver all over the country.
He was going to travel around and talk about this case and how Scopes had been
found guilty and just make this a national event.
But.
He died five days later in his sleep.
One of the local newspapers suggested that God had been aiming at Darrow and missed.
>> [LAUGH] >> And when somebody
reported the news to Darrow that Bryan had died perhaps of a broken heart.
Darryl referring to his girth said more likely a broken belly.
But anyway, Bryan was now out of the picture.
Bryan's wife was not happy with what he was doing,
and she thought he was overstepping his bounds on all of this.
And she said, in one conversation with him, are you sure that you
can maintain that fine balance between the protection
of religion and the protection of freedoms, which he also believed in?
And he said I think I can.
She said do you think you can keep your followers on that narrow
line between protecting religion and protecting freedom?
And he says well, I think I can.
He was not nearly so certain about that.
So there was some conflict there.
So it works its way, with some wrangling,
up to the Tennessee Supreme Court, a few months later.
One of the defense attorneys.
Who was appealing the case, missed the deadline for turning in some papers.
So this whole thing about whether it was legitimate to keep out scientific experts
could not be put on the table in the Supreme Court.
They hadn't filed properly.
And then they get there.
And start looking carefully at this and
it turns out that the way the butler act had been written in the details
it was the jury that had to set the fine, not the judge,
and because the judge had set the fine they set aside the guilty verdict,
so this whole big trial of the century went on and it just ended up thud.
Because they didn't have any legal result of it that was of any importance.
So, that means that the Butler Act was still standing, and,
so we had to go through some other things going on here.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court upheld
most of the things that the ACLU had been concerned about.
They brought in various test cases and got some additional protections for
freedom of speech most universities across the country had adopted the AAUP
guidelines the American Association of University Professors Guidelines to
provide some protection for university professors to teach what's in their
discipline, instead of what university officials might like to be taught.
Then we have the national policies of the 1950s.
One of my childhood memories when I was 12,
I think, I still remember standing in this
shed where we separated the cream from the milk after we milked the cows.
And I was reading a popular science magazine
that my cousin Gilbert had passed on to me.
And I say to my dad, there's a little
thing here that says the Russians are going to put up an artificial moon.
A satellite that will circle the Earth.
Could you imagine that a satellite circling the earth?
My father said well you can't believe everything you read, but
a few years later in 1957 everybody was reading about Sputnik.
The Russians had indeed put an artificial moon
going around the earth and the United States was not even close.
Our Science and Math Education had barely prepared us to
understand what the Russians had done let alone do it ourself.
So, the National Defense Education Act was put into place.
Our lack of science and math education is harmful to our national defense.
And a few years later, the National Defense Education Act was paying
my fellowship for graduate school so it had a personal effect on me.
The National Science Foundation began to provide funding for
state-of-the-art science textbooks.
A National Committee, the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study committing,
a committee developed high school biology textbooks that stressed,
emphasized evolution, rather than leaving it out.
So, it was getting to the point where
taking evolution out of biology textbooks was almost unpatriotic.
Because it was going against these big changes in our national science and
math education.
And an Arkansas antievolution law was struck down
by the US Supreme Court in 1968.
So finally, after all of these other things,
one of the cases went to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court said, no,
you can't have a law that says you can't teach evolution in a biology classroom.
But, creation has proved to be agile
in their attempts to keep science out of the classroom.
And in the 1970s, Tennessee, Arkansas and
Louisiana each passed laws for equal coverage.
So okay, you spend two weeks teaching evolution in your biology class but then
you also have to spend two weeks talking about creationism in your biology class.
And they were all struck down in separate lawsuits,
but there was a lot of political wrangling.
And then in 1995, Tennessee tried something else, that you could fire
teachers who taught that evolution was factual rather than theoretical.
And this law was defeated by one vote.
It almost passed the Tennessee legislature.
Last week, Senator Rubio from Florida
was asked if he thinks the earth is 5,000 years old.
I'm not a scientist, man.
I can tell you what recorded history says, I can tell you what the Bible says,
but I think that's a dispute amongst theologians.
In an interview.
Paul Broun, Republican from Georgia,
ran unopposed in our recent election.
Charles Darwin got 4,000 votes because [LAUGH] write-in votes,
because Paul Brown had made the statement that
evolution involved lies straight from the pit of hell.
So he drew a lot of attention for that.
We have a brand new Tennessee law that protects teachers who explore
the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of evolution and
climate change to make sure that science doesn't have the only say in these things.
On a somewhat lighter note, Dr. Pepper released
an ad campaign showing pre-Pepper discovery.
And post-Pepper for the evolution of flavor in Dr. Pepper.
And they immediately got a huge outcry from people who were boycotting Dr.
Pepper, because of their pro-evolution views.
This conflict is nowhere near gone folks.
In 2005.
Yes?
>> I just want to know, do you have any idea what like percentage wise of America,
of people that are pro-evolution versus against it?
Do you have any idea where we stand?
Because it seems crazy that, that would be cool.
>> It's a majority.
Do you have a number for that?
It's probably in the- >> Usually it's about 80% of
United States believe there's a soul, and
a large portion of them believe that it will go somewhere.
Now that doesn't account for everything that's being said there but
the support for that, it's not representative of people in this class.
You go other places, in the south, the midwest,
we would find it very difficult to teach a course like this there.
That's all I can really say.
I wish we had some hard figures on it, but that's as close as we can get.
>> But I think that's exactly right.
I do not want to teach this course at the University of Tennessee.
>> [LAUGH] >> [LAUGH] Yes?
>> Actually, 2009 Harris poll says 45% of the US population believes in Darwin's
theory of evolution.
>> 45% believes it, yep.
Okay.
So right close to us here in Dover, Pennsylvania in 2005,
the school board required an oral disclaimer.
They had a sticker to go in the front of the biology
textbooks in their local high school that required the biology teachers to
read a little statement about evolution and how it wasn't really true.
And that they had to give
equal if not more treatment of something called intelligent design.
Which is something different than creationism, they said.
And this was a long involved trial.
It was probably the trial of this century on this issue.
And we're going to be covering that next time, but
I think what you will see both in this early scopes trial and
in this more recent big trial in Dover, Pennsylvania that
sole beliefs not only have causes but they have consequences and
sometimes these can be really big social consequences.
Thank you. >> [APPLAUSE]
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