J.D. Mitchell
[Originally published as One Hundred Years of the Scopes Trial]
As I sit and type this article, it is July 2025, exactly one hundred years since the famous Scopes Trial took place in Dayton, Tennessee. For a century now, the techniques developed at and around that trial have been used by American promoters of deep time and evolution to destroy acceptance by the general population of the truth of the Bible.
While the verdict of the trial was that John Thomas Scopes was guilty of teaching human evolution, which was against the law at that time and place, the real result was the ever-widening belief in American culture in human evolution, promoted by media, academia, and the legal system. The only thing that has changed is the preferred evidence. Today, the most popular story is that humans have evolved from unknown ape ancestors, not from monkeys.
As biblical creationists have pointed out, the idea that science and the Bible cannot be reconciled is strongly held everywhere one looks in America, even in many churches. This is not true, and science itself largely exists today because of the foundational work of Christians who believed that a logical God created the universe. The fictional 1960 movie, Inherit the Wind, supposedly about the trial, has corrupted the minds of generations of high school and university students with relatively little pushback from the church.
This situation could be so different if only the professors in our Christian seminaries and universities had half the faith in God’s Word as secularists have in deep time and evolution. There is no doubt that there is an anti-God religion widespread in American culture. Evolutionary ideas in science are elastic enough to stretch to fit the constantly changing facts to match the godless faith of the moment.
In my book The Creation Dialogues—2nd Edition, I wrote about ideas that were promoted by the evolutionists in 1925 in order to promote evolution. Today, these ideas are known to be scientifically incorrect and are rejected by a majority of secular scientists. Some of the so-called evidence for human evolution that was commonplace in 1925 science circles was:
- Vestigial organs,
- Embryonic recapitulation,
- Neanderthals,
- Piltdown Man,
- Nebraska Man.
There is still no true science that has disproven the teachings of the Bible. It is amazing and encouraging how much of the Bible’s history and science is being reinforced by new creation science research each year.
I think that the biggest takeaway from the Scopes Trial was the impact of having William Jennings Bryan put on the witness stand.
By all accounts, he was a fine Christian man who believed in the Bible as being God’s accurate and inerrant Word. But, while he was not ignorant about science, there were few creation scientists in America at that time, and so biblical creationist answers for some of the hard parts of the origin story were few and far between. He did not have the knowledge he should have had, and so he waffled about the six-day creation under oath. This is the worst thing any Christian can do. It is an obvious example of inconsistency that undermines a person’s testimony on the veracity of the Bible.
Scopes was convicted by the court of teaching human evolution, but the longest lasting conviction was that Bryan was not able to show that he had complete faith in God’s Word. Unfortunately, a few days after his trial testimony, Bryan died in his sleep.
I think that the producers of the 1960 movie, Inherit the Wind, chose that title as an affront to the fundamentalist Christians whose “ignorant fables” were defended at the Scopes Trial by William Jennings Bryan.
Proverbs 11:29 (all verses NIV) addresses this with the words:
Whoever brings ruin on their family will inherit only the wind, and the fool will be servant to the wise.
But the Bible also says: “The fool says in his heart ‘there is no God’” (Psalm 53) and “Not so [blessed] the wicked! They are like chaff that the wind blows away” (Psalm 1:4). In Romans 1:22 we read that, “although they claimed to be wise, they became fools.” And finally Proverbs 3:35: “The wise inherit honor, but fools get only shame.”
The influence we still feel today from an event 100 years ago shows how important it is for Christians to take all of God’s Word seriously and as it is written. We can learn from the experience of the Scopes Trial that, if Christ has not yet returned to earth, our testimony today will likely still have an impact 100 years from now. We should make sure that the future impacts of our testimonies today regarding the truthfulness of the Bible will be good ones!
References
- Bergman, Jerry, and Howe, George, Vestigial Organs are Fully Functional, Creation Research Society, 1990.
- Cornelius, R.M, and Morris, John, Scopes: Creation on Trial, Master Books, 1999.
- De Camp, L. Sprague, The Great Monkey Trial, Doubleday, 1968.
- Mitchell, J.D., The Creation Dialogues—2nd Edition, CEC Publications, 2014, pp. 43-47.
