In the form of futile and perverse government programs is not alone going to drive people back to a Bronze Age god and specifically to. Genesis and its 25th verse. “And God made the beast of the earth after his kind. and cattle after their kind. And every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind. and God saw that it was good.”
It is not inefficient government alone that led John Whitcomb. In The Genesis Flood_ (Morris. 1961). to say that the second law of thermodynamics started operating only with Adam’s sin in Eden. Or other Creationists to speak of “a genealogical table which begins in the mud. has a monkey in the middle and an infidel at the tail.”^ Cited. Without attribution. In Debora MacKenzie. op. cit.
“Perhaps if there is any other being entitled to
Mr. Bryan’s satisfaction at this Tennessee legislature it is the monkey. Surely if the human race is accurately represented by that portion of it in the. Tennessee house of representatives. the monkey has a right to rejoice that the human race is no kin to the monkey race.” “Darwinism Done For.” Louisville Courier-Journal. as phone number list reprinted in Chattanooga Times. 1925.2.1. My source is the best book to date on the trial. Edward J. Larson. Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate over Science and Religion (Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1997). Larson gave a splendid talk at the annual meeting of the American.
Association for the Advancement of Science
He is Professor of History and Law at the University of Georgia. near enough to Dayton for us to hope he will journey to Dayton this Summer for the 75th anniversary of the trial and that members of the Mencken Society making the trek will be able to meet him.
What has happened is that. To a large extent. the old Christian morality has been replaced by amoralism. while a new morality based on evolution is still in the works. It is hard to see what this new morality will look like. though it will have much in common with the older morality. After all. Moralities. Like everything else. Are subject to Darwinian selection.
This is very true of older moralities that have stood
What Mr. Mencken called the this distinction is what separates average platitudes of the Book of Proverbs set to sonorous tones contained a lot of wisdom. the most famous perhaps being “He that spareth his rod hateth his son: but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes” (13:24). Our institutions are notorious for sparing the rod.
Now it is impossible to live without some sort of code of conduct. even an unworkable one. but periods of moral change. change from an old bahrain lists workable code to a new code that eventually works even better. can very much look like times of utter moral decay. This was true when the old code of hunters gave way to the new code of farmers (the Old Testament has been treated as primarily a record of this).