Science on Trial
This chapter examines the resurrection of William Jennings Bryan's rhetoric in the twenty-first century, one in Kansas and the other in a small town in Pennsylvania, as creationists continued to appeal to individual rights and democratic principles. One side fumed for science and against theocracy. The other side railed about the assault on religion and bemoaned the abandonment of sacred traditions. In both cases, two worldviews are evidently in conflict. This chapter begins with an overview of the controversy involving the State Board of Education in Kansas, which adopted science standards in 2005 that treated evolution as a flawed theory. It then considers the case in Dover involving the American Civil Liberties Union and how it brought intelligent design to “the center of legislative debates in more than a dozen states.” It shows that the Dover trial was proof that, over the years since Scopes, creationism had moved from a faith-based argument to one that claimed to be empirically grounded and an argument not about religion in schools but about individual rights and fairness.