View a FREE sample

Introduction

• America's most famous courtroom scenarios transpired in 1925, in Dayton, Tennessee in connection with the Scopes trial.

• Defense attorney Clarence Darrow calls William Jennings Bryan, one of the prosecutors and a leader in the fundamentalist cause against evolution, to the stand.

• Darrow questions Bryan about several Old Testament miracles, eliciting in pieces the response he was hoping to get: that some scriptural passages need interpretation.

• Bryan was caught between arguing for a literal interpretation of the Bible and accommodating facts about the solar system and geology, and he concedes this critical point.

• The chief prosecutor then calls for the end of the questioning, but Bryan refuses to leave the witness chair, determined on defending revealed religion.

• Although Darrow never specifically asks about evolution, he does lead Bryan through a series of questions intended to show that the reliance on the Bible as a source for the educational teaching...

(read more Chapter Abstracts)

This section contains 3,832 words (approx. 13 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample