Overview of The Courtship of Charles Darwin

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Overview of The Courtship of Charles Darwin
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Scopes Monkey Trial

• 1925, statute to prohibit teaching Evolution in
  Tennessee classrooms
• Clarence Darrow vs. William Jennings Bryan

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Epperson v. Arkansas

• 1968
• US Supreme Court held that laws that mandated
  Creationism violated the Establishment Clause
• What Is the Establishment Clause?

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The Genesis Flood

• Published in 1961 by Virginia Tech professor of
  engineering, Henry Morris
• Scientific sounding arguments
• Supported the six day creation story and the
  earth being 10,000 years old
• Led to Scientific Creationism

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Edwards v. Aguillard

• 1987
• Scientific Creationism was still religion and
  violated Establishment Clause

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Phillip Johnson

• UC law professor
• Attacked Materialism
• Materialism is the view that material entities
  subject to physical laws account for everything
  in nature.
• Johnson Question the sufficiency of Darwinism
  to explain life
• Teach the controversy

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Intelligent Design

• Michael Behe, a Biochemist and devout Catholic
• Claims that life is so complex and so beautiful
  and perfect that it could only be directed by
  Intelligent Designer
• Irreducible Complexity
• Design rather than chance and competition direct
  life

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The Blind Watchmaker

• Richard Dawkins
• Early design thinker, Paley, compared living
  things to mechanical watches
• Intricacies of watch betray the existence of its
  purposeful creator
• Dawkins asserts natural selection is the
  watchmakerhence blind

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NAS

• National Association of Scholars
• Affirmed the compatibility of evoutionary
  naturalism and personal belief in God
• Separate ways of knowing
• Science deals with natural world religion with
  supernatural
• Whether God exists or not is a question about
  which science is neutral

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NABT About Face

• National Association of Biology Teachers
• 1995 Defined Evolution an unsupervised,
  impersonal, unpredictable, and natural process of
  temporal descent with gradual modification
• 1997 took out unsupervised and impersonal
  because these would be theological statements