Rick Townsend, *A Visit to the Rhea County Courthouse a Century after Scopes* (Part II)

Author’s note: I acted as the unofficial videographer during the symposium. I’m not a professional videographer, and some of the sound quality is hard to listen to. Apologies in advance! All of the videos of presentations can be found in this video. An overview of the Scopes Trial museum, housed in the basement of the Rhea County Courthouse, is in this video.

Scopes Redux

In July of this year, the centennial of the 1925 Scopes trial was commemorated with a history symposium and several other events in Dayton, Tennessee. The symposium looked back on the dramatic trial that brought a three-time Presidential candidate together with (and opposed by) the leading attorney of the early twentieth century. I provided a trial summary in the previous blog post. This post provides a series of videos from the symposium and a summary of each speaker’s remarks.

Historians and a sprinkling of theologians gathered for two days in the iconic courtroom. The floor sparkled with a fresh refinishing completed just weeks before the commemorative events. The original furniture, including wooden folding floor-mounted seats and the original judge’s bench, attorneys’ tables and chairs, and jury chairs, were all preserved and in place. It was an amazingly well-preserved space in the Rhea County courthouse, and the Rhea Heritage Preservation Foundation is to be commended for their sense of pride and purpose in maintaining the building and its history.

Scopes Trial Commemoration Videos

Tom Davis is the vice president of the Rhea Heritage Preservation Foundation and served as the host and moderator for the symposium. His introductory talk provided the history of the building, the courthouse and a bit about the town. His biggest point of emphasis, and indeed his chief concern, was that the symposium would be held as a collegial dialogue rather than a debate. He needn’t have worried, as all of the participating speakers seemed to be in general agreement. Click to watch Davis’s orientation.

The visiting speakers who headlined the symposium were Edward J. Larson and Randy Moore. Larson is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author whose Summer for the Gods tells the story of the trial, its cultural setting, and significance. Moore is a professor of biology and Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis-St. Paul, USA.

Ed Larson’s talk was about how the trial has affected the nation since 1925. He focused on ways in which the trial became a symbol of a broader national conflict between American evangelicalism and progressive ideals of science and liberty. Over the past century, the Scopes trial has continued to influence debates about the separation of church and state, religious freedom, parental rights, academic freedom, and individual rights. It remains a powerful example of the intersection of politics, science, and religion, and how those debates are covered in the media. Click to watch Larson’s talk.

Randy Moore recently completed the first authorized biography of John Scopes, John Thomas Scopes: A Biography. The trial’s namesake was ostensibly the focus of the trial, but Scopes himself had a challenging life in the shadow of the fame and notoriety of the trial in the public memory. The lookback Moore provided was helpful. His evening remarks were informative and illuminating. Click to watch Moore’s talk.

Nick Spencer is a BBC radio presenter and author of Magisteria: The Entangled Histories of Science and Religion. Spencer linked the trial’s early twentieth century time frame to the height of the animosity between scientific and religious establishments. That perception lingers today, though the actual antagonism was never based in as much fact as innuendo and general impressions. Actual scientists generally don’t care that much about the religious implications of the work they are doing. They just want the answers out of their experimental projects. A veneer of evolutionary assumptions are part of the work in many institutions, but those assumptions are seldom central. Where they are important, they sometimes drive research in directions that obscure actual evidence. But that is a larger story, and Spencer did not address it. Click to watch Spencer’s talk

Jerry Summers is a local Dayton lawyer who practiced law in the very courtroom in which we gathered and in which the trial was held. A new annex was built a few years ago. Trials are no longer held in the historic courtroom, so his perspective was one unique. Spencer’s homespun rhetoric and speech were sometimes difficult to understand (between the southern accent and acoustics) but his highlighting of some of the local Dayton personalities lent a local angle that was mostly lost on the Eastern press that dominated the news space as they breathlessly shouted about the famous and prominent legal characters. Click to watch Summers’ talk.

Bryan College biology professor Neal Doran compared scientific knowledge in the period of the Scopes trial in 1925 with what has been discovered since then. Many ideas and concepts have been discarded, rediscovered, or reframed and refined in the century since the trial. Click to watch Doran’s talk.

University of Madison-Wisconsin Professor of Anthropology John Hawks walked conferees through the myriad of competing fossil finds that have been offered up as evolutionary links in the past century. Some of those links are still considered valid while most have turned out to be frauds, mischaracterizations, or outright hoaxes. Click to watch Hawks’s talk.

University of Akron biology professor Joel Duff spoke on “the evolving landscape of Christian responses to evolution.” He cited various ways in which Christians have tried to accommodate the Darwinian framework into their theologies, most notably through the rise of theistic evolutionary concepts. Click to watch Duff’s talk.

The conference wrapped up with Todd Charles Wood, who co-authored The Fool and the Heretic, with Darrel R. Falk, which is described as a conversation between “two respected scientists who hold opposing views on the topic of origins, share a common faith in Jesus Christ, and began a sometimes-painful journey to explore how they can remain in Christian fellowship when each thinks the other is harming the church.” His talk was a bit difficult to follow in that one came away with the impression that Wood was supposed to be in a conversation with an atheist or someone who strongly disagreed with him in some way. But the ways in which they disagreed were never spelled out clearly. Unfortunately, he was supposed to present with another individual (not his co-author) who was unable to attend the symposium. Since that individual was not the one with whom he co-wrote the book, so the talk seems to have been cobbled together in a way that was not optimal. Click to watch Wood’s talk

Thoughts on the Commemoration

In the 1925 Scopes trial, only one scientific expert was allowed to speak in the courtroom, while several others were allowed to enter their evidence in favor of evolution into the court record through affidavits. All of these experts were on the defense side of the argument, either arguing for the scientific validity of Darwinian evolutionary concepts, or for the theological allowance for such concepts on the basis that they did not necessarily conflict with Biblical texts. No experts or theologians spoke in opposition to the scientific or theological problems regarding evolutionary theorizing. It was left to William Jennings Bryan and the prosecution team to make the alternative case for design, purpose, and traditional Christian concepts of creation. The prosecution argument was largely muted during the trial, setting the stage for a dramatic closing argument that never happened because of legal maneuvering by the defense team led by Clarence Darrow.

The 2025 Scopes symposium followed that same pattern. All of the speakers were in agreement in supporting the science of evolutionary biology and paleontology and the contention that those disciplines solely line up behind Darwinian lines. No mention was made of other concepts, in spite of the fact that a robust pseudo-industry of creation science and intelligent design authors and organizations have risen up to present their arguments. Whether their ideas are valid or not, it would have been beneficial to hear some critique of the various positions by people who have a stake in the argument and who would have been qualified and motivated to provide a more complete description of the landscape of the last century.

In that regard, the symposium was a perfect capstone to Scopes. Only one side made robust arguments, particularly in the press reporting during the century-old trial. Readers of the Eastern press had only one side presented, while local and regional papers did a better job of presenting balance without opining. The 2025 symposium was held in a way that suggested there was simply no controversy. So in that regard it was, in some ways, more of a pep rally than a balanced symposium. And that, despite lots of great content, was an unfortunate missed opportunity.