History is a guide to the direction mankind will move in the future. Looking back one hundred years, we find that in a courtroom in Tennessee, the rights of a state to inject what you believe was on trial.

The state had declared that teaching anything which does not recognize that man was created by a great Entity we call God, was illegal and immoral to speak of in a public classroom.

Nearly seventy-five years before the trial, a man named Charles Darwin published a book, The Origin of Man.

Contained in the pages were his beliefs that all living creatures evolved from life forms millions of years in their creation. That belief included man.

John Scopes believed that his responsibility to teach young minds was to give them the ability to think, reason and figure for themselves. He believed that was the one thing that separated mankind from the other creatures of the world. He knew that scientists and people of considered wisdom obtained that ability by reasoning and thinking an issue through. And to reach a conclusion based on known facts.

Scopes never said that God did not have a hand in creation, he only wanted his students to think about the ideas of Darwin.

Local businessmen and religious leaders cautioned him on betraying their faith and the law, but Scopes felt it was his duty even though the law was clear. He felt education on the beginnings of man did not specify only the hand of God, but also that science could lend credence to all beginnings.

Some speculated Scopes wanted to bring to light the law that he and others believed was a way of limiting free speech, one declaring God was the only way into heaven. What Scopes had in mind we will never know, but it is reasonable to believe he wanted only one thing, to educate his students on the science of the world. That each man and woman had the right to think, reason and believe in evolution or a creator.

In fact, John may have believed that both can be true with belief and thought.

In the 1960 movie version, Spencer Tracey asked the question concerning the teachings in the Bible. “Is it fact, that Jonah was swallowed by a great fish, do we take that literally or do we think and believe that some unexplainable event took place? Could Jonah have believed he was taken by a great darkness near the sea, and that darkness could have been the insides of a fish?”

To those who lived thousands of years ago, it was enough that words became the belief, and the lesson of Jonah became ways to teach other men to believe without fact. There were no books, radios, or television, only the words of wisemen who wanted others to believe and follow them.

In the movie, Inherit the Wind, Spencer Tracey played the role of Henry Drummond who defended John Scopes. Fredrick March played the part of Matthew Harrison Brady, defender of the Tennessee law, and a man of pure belief in all things declared in the Bible. Both men could have been the brothers of the men they portrayed in the film.

The movie tells the story in a way that was evident. That on trial was the belief in God, and man’s duty was to prevent teachings that went against that belief. But what Scopes and his attorney wanted to prove was the fact that mankind’s real true gift is the right to think and ponder the things in the world around him. If man were to stop thinking, he would lose himself in the darkness of ignorance.

Darwin’s words were, that we should look at the things around us with a wonder that each in its own way grew from a beginning and over time each grew stronger, more beautiful and found ways to survive. A butterfly is as delicate as a wisp of wind, and yet it can fly thousands of miles to winter beyond the weather in the north. The largest of all mammals, the whale must navigate from the polar seas where it feeds, to southern waters where it gives birth to the next generation. No maps or directions, only the knowledge that it knows the way given by generation upon generations to make this journey. Did it evolve that knowledge, or was it created along with its genetic makeup? Could both not be true?

Still today in many ways, we are still holding trials and debates on the same questions they debated 100 years ago in a hot Tennessee courtroom. Was it a great hand that set life upon this earth? Or did we as Tracey said, “Wriggle out of the sea?”

There are school systems and states today that purchase textbooks that teach Biblical history, and that evolution is only a theory that non-believers push upon our children. Some school boards that have stepped over the line, have been prevented from forcing a religionist education in the classroom. In fact, in West Virginia a county BOE was in a legal battle for interjecting religion in a public-school classroom.

The trial proved little, except, some men with their laws would bar your free thoughts or ability to think, and reason. They want you to follow only the words in the Bible. And yet there are those who wonder what is beyond the stars, and ask, did we come from stardust, and what happens when we return to dust?

Or are we a creation of something beyond the stars that gives us the ability to think and reason?

At least that is how I see it Through the Lens.