Edward J. Larson

Edward J. Larson in 2015

Edward John Larson (born September 21, 1953) is an American historian and legal scholar.

Quotes

Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion (1997)

All quotes from the trade paperback edition, published by Basic Books, ISBN 978-0-465-07510-2, 4th printing

Bold face added for emphasis

• “What is the purpose of this examination?”
  Darrow answered honestly. “We have the purpose of preventing bigots and ignoramuses from controlling the education of the United States,” he declared, “and that is all.”
  • Introduction (p. 6)

• Conservative Christians drew together across denominational lines to fight for the so-called fundamentals of their traditional faith against the perceived heresy of modernism, and in so doing gave birth to the fundamentalist movement and antievolution crusade.
  • Chapter 2, “Government by the People” (p. 34)

• Stanford university president David Starr Jordan, an eminent evolutionarily biologist who later volunteered to aid in the legal defense of John Scopes, spoke for many academics when he dismissed traditional Protestant revivalism as “simply a form of drunkenness no more worthy of respect than the drunkenness that lies in the gutter!”
  • Chapter 2, “Government by the People” (p. 41)

• Already, the three main tactics for attacking the antievolution measure had emerged: the defense of individual freedom, an appeal to scientific authority, and a mocking ridicule of fundamentalists and biblical literalism; later, they became the three prongs of the Scopes defense.
  • Chapter 2, “Government by the People” (pp. 52-53)

• “The public mind is poisoned at its source when special interests take hold of educational institutions for their own propaganda.”
  • Chapter 3, “In Defense of Individual Liberty” (p. 81; quoting Harry F. Ward)

• “If the Anti-Evolutionists in Tennessee were aware of the existence of any other religions than their own, they might realize that it is the very genius of religion itself to evolve from primary forms to higher forms.”
  • Chapter 5, “Jockeying for Position” (p. 117; quoting Charles Francis Potter)

• “We have to live in the universe science gives us. A theology that is contrary to reality must be abandoned or improved.”
  • Chapter 5, “Jockeying for Position” (p. 118; quoting Shailer Mathews)

• Darrow’s opening introduced his main point. The antievolution statute was illegal because it established a particular religious viewpoint in the public schools.
  • Chapter 6, “Preliminary Rounds” (p. 163)

• Darrow shortly wrote to Mencken about the examination of Bryan, “I made up my mind to show the country what an ignoramus he was and I succeeded.”
  • Chapter 7, “Trial of the Century” (p. 190)

• Darrow replied within the hour by tersely affirming his agnosticism on every point, concluding with his succinct answer as to the question of immortality: “I have been searching for proof of this all my life, with the same desire to find it that is incident to every living thing, and I have never found any evidence on the subject.”
  • Chapter 8, “The End of an Era” (p. 197)

• “I never yet found any conservative lawyer who, at the beginning, wanted to undertake a case which might reflect discredit on him. When it turns out differently and there seems to be some publicity or honor to be had, then offers of assistance come from all over the country.”
  • Chapter 8, “The End of an Era” (p. 209; quoting Arthur Garfield Hays)

• By the 1940s, a fundamentalist subculture had formed in the United States, with a creationist scientific establishment of its own.
  • Chapter 9, “Retelling the Tale” (pp. 233-234)

• Ginger titled a concluding chapter, “To the Losers Belong the Spoils,” and drew the lesson from Bryan’s “fatal error of tactics: if a person holds irrational ideas and insists that others should accept them because of their authoritative source, he should never agree to be questioned about them.”
  • Chapter 9, “Retelling the Tale” (p. 235)

• By the 1960s, however, federal courts had long since stop using the Fourteenth Amendment to strike down progressive state economic regulations and instead used it to avoid repressive state social legislation.
  • Chapter 10, “Distant Echoes” (p. 249)

• The state law against teaching evolution and the resulting trial of John Scopes did not settle the matter in Tennessee or anywhere else. America’s adversarial legal system tends to drive parties apart rather than reconcile them, which certainly happened in this case.
  • Afterword (p. 269)

• Creation science was nothing but religion dressed up as science, the high court decreed, and therefore was barred by the Establishment Clause from public school classrooms along with other forms of religious instruction.
  • Afterword (p. 271)

• Behe has never developed his arguments for intelligent design in peer-reviewed scientific publications. Indeed, he doesn’t actually conduct research in the field and, along with other leaders of the intelligent-design movement, concedes that there is not as yet much affirmative scientific evidence supporting the concept of intelligent design.
  • Afterword (p. 272)

• “The inexorable growth of [biology] continues to widen, not to close the tectonic gap between science and faith-based religion.”
  • Afterword (p. 274; quoting E. O. Wilson; brackets as in the book)