Comments on: Inherit the Wind
To The Audience Just Before The Play As Given At The Warehouse Theatre, Greenville, South Carolina, September 29, 2000, by James H. Sightler
Let me say at first that I do
not grant the accuracy of the so called facts which are routinely
cited in support of evolution. But since we only have 20 minutes to
discuss the play, and since others will or have discussed the
history of the actual Scopes trial, I felt it would be best to
examine closely the ideas presented in the play itself. Your
director called the Creation Study Group and asked for a speaker.
The lot fell to me, and my remarks, especially any speculation, are
my own and should not be taken as the official view or approach of
the Creation Study Group.
Inherit the Wind
was written by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee in 1955 and
first performed in Dallas on Jan. 10, 1955. The movie starring
Spencer Tracy was filmed in 1960, in black and white. Lawrence had a
career in journalism with several newspapers and with CBS in New
York before he began writing with Lee in 1942. The authors state in
the preface “Inherit the Wind is not history…does not pretend to be
journalism. It is theatre.” I say it is philosophy, certainly not
science. Who are these authors who are so presumptuous as to give
this play a title from Proverbs 11:29, “He that troubleth his own
house shall inherit the wind.” Just who is doing the troubling?
Jerome Lawrence, in his notice in Who’s Who, said: “I want people to
leave the theatre…feeling as if their souls had been sandpapered…A
work must have meanings many layers deep.” He says in his notice in
Contemporary Authors that his religion is transcendentalist. He also
wrote, with Robert Edwin Lee, 39 other plays, including Shangri La
and another called The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail. Thoreau of
course was also a mid-nineteenth century transcententalist, and the
play was concerned with civil disobedience. Thoreau wrote an essay
on that subject which 75 years later became the political method of
Mahatma Gandhi. Lee’s notice in Contemporary Authors says that “It
was his conviction that the role of a theatre artist is to explore
political and philosophical issues through drama.”
In the play Matthew Harrison Brady is the name
given for William Jennings Bryan, Henry Drummond is Clarence Darrow,
Bertram Cates is John Scopes, Rachel Brown is his fiancee, and Rev.
Jeremiah Brown is her father. The Browns are fictional, invented for
the play. Is Inherit the Wind philosophical and in particular
transcendentalist? Is it in opposition to orthodox Christianity? The
answers are clearly yes. Can we demonstrate this?
First, Drummond, the lawyer for Cates, says “I
must say that ‘Right’ has no meaning to me whatsoever!…Truth has
meaning--as a direction. But one of the peculiar imbecilities of our
time is the grid of morality we have placed on human behavior; so
that every act of man must be measured against an arbitrary latitude
of right and longitude of wrong-in exact minutes, seconds, and
degrees!” This is the philosophy of our time, that there are no
moral absolutes, and that truth is relative and can not be known
with certainty. It was developed by the early 19th Century German
philosopher Hegel, one of the first transcendentalists.
Hegel believed in what mystics have called the
Absolute Spirit of the Universe and that it achieves consciousness
only in man. That Absolute Spirit is impersonal and unknowable and
is not the God of the Bible. Furthermore, Hegel said that any idea
necessarily contained an incompleteness which gave rise to conflict.
The incomplete idea is called a thesis, the conflicting idea an
antithesis. A higher truth can be reached by combining the thesis
and antithesis into a new idea, the synthesis. But the synthesis is
also incomplete and falls short of truth, although slightly nearer
to truth than either of the ideas which gave rise to it. Therefore
truth can be approached but never actually can be reached. The
process of approaching truth through synthesis is called the
dialectic. Hegelian philosophy and evolution both say that nothing
is perfected or purposeful, nothing complete, nothing absolutely
true; all things are slowly evolving toward a distant state of truth
or perfection.
19th century Transcendentalist writers saw a
direct connection between the Absolute Spirit of the Universe and
the individual soul, just as ancient Eastern mystics connected the
One Universal Life with the Self. The philosophical concept of
transcendence was developed by Plato. Monism, the idea that there is
only one reality or one being of which everything is a part, is
inherent in it, and God is immanent in all things; nothing can be
said to be fallen or sinful. Divinity permeates all objects, animate
or inanimate, good and evil, and the human soul is in union with the
so-called World Soul. Transcendentalists found that Darwinian
evolution fit perfectly with their philosophy.
The English biologist Thomas Huxley, who was
known as Darwin's bulldog because of his skill in debates over
evolution, once said:
“The only religion that appeals to me is
prophetic Judaism. Add to it something from the best Stoics and
something from Spinoza
and something from Goethe, and there is a
religion for men.”[1]
Huxley then, though he claimed to be agnostic,
was actually oriented toward the pantheistic religion of Plato,
Spinoza, and Goethe and here shows himself engaging in Hegel’s
dialectic or synthesis.
But Christians believe that everything was
perfected by God for the purpose He had in mind for it, and that the
Bible does lay down moral absolutes, such as the Ten Commandments.
And Jesus prayed in the garden as we read in John 17:17, "Sanctify
them through thy truth: thy word is truth,” and the Word was Jesus,
according to John 1:1. John 1:14 further tells us that the Word was
made flesh, and dwelt among us.
Second, at the end of the play, Drummond,
speaking of the deceased Brady, said: “A giant once lived in that
body. But Matt Brady got lost. Because he was looking for God too
high up and too far away.” By this he means the pantheistic belief
of transcendentalism that every man has God within him, that
existence itself is God. Denial of absolute truth, and belief in the
universal incarnation of God into all men are the two most
outstanding characteristics of transcendentalism.
Transcendentalism has no room for the Fall of
man or sin, no room for forgiveness and Redemption, no room for a
personal God who exists before, and independently of, the universe.
It is philosophy first, not science, and a radically different
cosmogony from the Genesis account of creation.
In another cosmogony the Indian Upanishads
present a picture of evolution very much like that of Darwinism.
Both say that all life evolved from inanimate, dead matter. These
scriptures, given anonymously by the ancient Forest Fathers, say of
the evolution of the Cosmos:
“At first was Death. Yea, all with Death
Was covered. Nothing was, my dear, save Death…
Death…made up
His mind: “O would that I embodied were…
O would that I a body had!”[2]
Death, having the property of
mind, by his own will evolves into the World of Life inflate with
his Spirit or Self. The Self comes from Death. We see all around us
now the fascination with death and suicide that have become fixtures
of the culture of our youth. The Buddhist Nirvana, by the way, does
not mean Heaven, but nothingness.
What a contrast this presents with the true
cosomgony found in the Bible: “In the beginning God created the
heaven and the earth,” and “In the beginning was the Word, and the
Word was with God, and the Word was God.” By and for that Word, the
Lord Jesus Christ, were all things created. The same Word declares
in John 14:6, “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh
unto the Father, but by me.” The Word is life, not death. Death
entered the world by sin.
The basis of evolution, as we can now clearly
see after 140 years of Darwin, whose theory is still unproved, is
monistically philosophical, not scientific, not based on
experimentation, and goes back at least to ancient Greece, if not
also to India and Egypt. The Upanishads teach evolution, from death
itself, and show no concept of a transcendent God who created the
universe ex nihilo and upholds all things by the word of his power.
Father Teilhard de Chardin, perpetrator of the
Piltdown man fraud, which went unquestioned for 40 years, shows
clearly that he was thinking of evolution as a pantheistic
philosophy when he wrote:
“Is evolution a theory, a system, or a hypothesis? It is much more-it is a general postulate to which all theories, all hypotheses,
all systems must henceforth bow and which they must satisfy in order to be thinkable and true. Evolution is a light which illuminates all facts.”
Evolution is taking us to the Point Omega:
“A harmonized collectivity of consciousness, equivalent to a kind of superconsciousness. The earth is covering itself not only by myriads of thinking units, but by a single continuum of thought, and finally forming a functionally single Unit of Thought of planetary dimensions. The plurality of individual thoughts combine and mutually reinforce each other in a single act of unanimous Thought…In the dimension of Thought, like in the dimension of Time and Space, can the Universe reach consummation in anything but the Measureless?”[3]
Collectivity of consciousness,
superconsciousness, Measureless, and Point Omega are all identical
to pantheism, and are all monistic. And what is wrong with
pantheism? It says that God is in everything, Stalin as well as
Florence Nightingale. If that is true then one must say that God is
both good and evil, or that evil does not exist. Both are patently
false.
The same ideas Teilhard expressed were being
developed at Cambridge University during the years between Darwin’s
voyage on the Beagle and the publication of the Origin of Species in
1859. At Cambridge Darwin was trained in theology. Such students
took courses in classics, mathematics, and theology, but they did
not study the Bible. His reading in theology consisted only of
Butler’s Analogy, Paley’s Evidences of Christianity,and Natural
Theology. Paley did not argue from a Biblical standpoint, but
believed that God created life and then retired to let matters
develop by chance processes.
There are in this play three grossly incorrect
caricatures of Christianity, of the type one might expect from a
transcendentalist like Lawrence or from the ACLU, which I must point
out.
First, Drummond asks Brady, “I’m not asking you
what you think of sex as a father, or a husband. Or a Presidential
candidate. You’re up here as an expert on the Bible. What’s the
Biblical evaluation of sex?” Brady answers “It is considered
Original Sin.” The Bible does not teach that sex is original sin.
The Apostle Paul says in Hebrews 13:4 “Marriage is honourable in
all, and the bed undefiled.” Original Sin is disobedience to God’s
commands, as Genesis 3:3 clearly shows, and not sex in Biblical
marriage. In fact, sex between Adam and Eve happened in Genesis 2,
before Original Sin began.
Second, Brady, the Christian prosecutor, asks
Rachel about the accidental drowning of 11 year old Tommy Stebbins.
She replied “At the funeral, Pa preached that Tommy didn’t die in a
state of grace, because his folks had never had him baptized.” Cates
then says “Tell ‘em what your father really said! That Tommy’s soul
was damned, writhing in hellfire,” and goes on to say “Religion’s
supposed to comfort people…Not frighten them to death!” The true
church, since the days of the apostles, both before and after the
Reformation, has never preached that salvation from eternal
punishment comes by baptism. Those who go to hell do so by willful
rejection of Jesus’ substitutionary sacrifice, not because of a lack
of baptism, either as an infant or adult. The true church has
preached that salvation comes by grace through faith in the blood of
Jesus Christ, freely shed for our sins on the cross to save us and
restore us to fellowship with God, a fellowship which had been lost
by the disobedience which caused man’s fall. Of the Lord Jesus
Christ we read in I Peter 2:24, “Who his own self bare our sins in
his own body on the tree, that we being dead to sins, should live
unto righteousness: by whose stripes ye were healed.” True
salvation, not formalized religion, does indeed comfort people as
nothing else can do, both here and hereafter.
Third, the play depicts Christians praying for
the damnation of evolutionists and the minister praying for the
damnation of Rachel, his own daughter. Praying for damnation of
souls has never been done in any Christian assembly I have seen or
heard about.
One of the things which struck me most about
this play is that it was written in 1955. I had expected a date
closer to the Scopes trial of 1925. What else was going on in 1955?
The nature of the cell and its irreducible complexity were just
becoming apparent to the leaders of research in cell biology, but
had not yet come to the attention of the public. Neither Darwin,
Darrow, Scopes, nor Bryan had any idea of the nature of protoplasm
or of cellular complexity. Fred Hoyle, the astronomer, has
calculated that even the simplest bacterium is so complex that the
chance of formation, by random processes in an organic soup, of its
enzymes alone, excluding its DNA and RNA, is 1 in 10 to the 40,000th
power, which is zero.
In 1953, Frances Crick and James Watson, at
Cambridge, deduced the complex double helical structure of DNA, from
x-ray crystallographic studies of that macromolecule. The complexity
of the structure of proteins and enzymes also was being shown during
the 1950’s and 60’s. A supreme irony it is that Cambridge had a hand
both in Darwin’s thought and its present day downfall, molecular
biology and irreducible complexity. It was becoming clear in those
days that cellular metabolic processes were dependent on the
structure of enzymes and regulatory proteins. Cybernetic feedback
regulation of metabolic pathways inside the cell was discovered.
I worked at Johns Hopkins University School of
Medicine in biochemistry for five years, 1961 to 1966, on the
feedback regulation of the activity of the enzyme homoserine
dehydrogenase, in which the end product of a metabolic pathway,
threonine, controls the activity of an enzyme in the pathway by
inducing a polymerization of that enzyme. The process is dependent
on a precise linear and three dimensional structure of the enzyme. I
sat in Hurd Hall at Hopkins and heard Francis Crick describe the
double helical structure of DNA in 1962, the year Crick and Watson
were given the Nobel Prize for their discovery. Twenty years later
Crick was reduced, by the impossibility of chemical evolution, to
postulating that an advanced, extraterrestrial civilization sent
life to earth on a spaceship.[4]
But Lawrence and Lee, both intellectuals in New
York where much of the research was accomplished, I believe were
shown the problem. The play in 1955 and the movie in 1960, were the
last chance, so to speak, for an emotional appeal to the public on
behalf of classical Darwinism, before it became clear to the general
public that life depends on the simultaneous working of DNA, RNA,
and proteins, each unimaginably complex and impossible to arrive at
by chance even in an eternity. Could it be by accident that the play
arrived at just this time? I doubt so. If that is speculation, and
it is, or treason to the scientific establishment, which it also is,
then make the most of it.
Think of the difference in the outlook of our
young people, from Littleton to Little Rock, if, instead of having
their souls sandpapered by Mr. Lawrence’s Hegelianism and the
purposeless anomie and evolutionary speculation which they daily
meet in the classroom; think how things might be if they were taught
the Bible and the words of II Corinthians 1:3 and 4, “Blessed be
God, even the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of
mercies, and the God of all comfort; Who comforteth us in all our
tribulation, that we may be able to comfort them which are in any
trouble, by the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of
God.” Think of Psalm 23:4, “Thy rod and thy staff they comfort me,”
and of Handel’s Messiah, which takes from Isaiah 40:1, “Comfort ye,
comfort ye my people, saith your God.” And remember that the Lord
Jesus Christ said in Luke 4:18, “He hath sent me to heal the
brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering
of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised”, and
in Luke 19:10, “the Son of man is come to seek and to save that
which was lost.”
Thank you very much for your attention. Watch
the play with these things in mind
James H. Sightler, M. D.
Sightler Publications
175 Joe Leonard Road
Greer, SC 29651
Representing the Creation Study Group of Greenville, SC
