I’m currently reading How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the World. It’s a very interesting book and I’ll be writing about it in more detail when I’ve finished it.
But last week I read a section which talked about the “Monkey Trial” that took place in Tennessee in 1925. For those who don’t know the story, a biology teacher was prosecuted for teaching the Theory of Evolution in class. A law had been passed a few months earlier banning the teaching of “any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible”.
I was thinking that if I was an intelligent American filmmaker who wanted to show up the nonsense of the fundamentalist christianity that seems to have taken hold in the USA then I’d seriously consider making a new film based on this story that would show the creationists to be the morons that they are.
If Ted Turner still ran any networks he’d probably take the opportunity to run “Inherit the Wind” as often as they run cop show reruns.The 1960 version that is: http://imdb.com/title/tt0053946/
I saw Francis Wheen do a launch of this book at Foyles in London a few months ago. He was very good , and looks surprisingly like Iain Duncan Smith (who he?) He did a pretty good job of laying into creationism. Although the way I see it, the Darwinists have more to lose than the creationists. Because if the creationists are wrong they won’t know. But if the Darwinists are wrong then we’ll all have to face God and explain why we snubbed him. I seem to remember that this is called Pascal’s wager or something. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_WagerOh well, never mind, eh.
Yeah, but Pascal’s wager is largely bollocks as pointed out in the Wikipedia article :)And besides the atheist vs theist argument isn’t quite the same as Darwinist vs creationist. All creationists are (by definition) theists, but in my experience the vast majority of theists are sensible enough to choose Darwinism over creationism.