Cases

In 1925 Tennessee's Butler Act made it a crime to teach in public schools "any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible." Substitute teacher John Scopes agreed to be the test case, backed by the ACLU. The trial in Dayton pitted Clarence Darrow for the defence against three-time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan for the prosecution, and became a national spectacle — climaxing when Darrow called Bryan himself to the stand as an expert on the Bible. The judge confined the case to one question: did Scopes teach evolution? He admitted it. The jury convicted in about nine minutes and Scopes was fined $100. In 1927 the Tennessee Supreme Court upheld the law but voided the conviction on a technicality (the judge, not the jury, had set the fine). The law stayed on the books until 1967; in Epperson v. Arkansas (1968) the US Supreme Court struck down a similar ban. One view: the verdict was legally correct — the law was clear, he broke it, and the remedy for a bad law is repeal. Another: the law itself violated freedom of speech and the separation of church and state, so no conviction under it was valid. A third: the whole thing was a staged publicity contest, and the conviction mattered less than the debate.

In 1633 the Roman Inquisition found Galileo Galilei "vehemently suspect of heresy" for defending the heliocentric model — that the Earth moves around the Sun — in his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. He was forced to recant, the book was banned, and he spent his remaining nine years under house arrest. In 1992 Pope John Paul II formally acknowledged that the Church had erred. The case that the verdict was defensible in context: in 1616 the Church had warned Galileo not to hold or defend Copernicanism as fact, and the Dialogue was widely read as breaking that instruction (and as mocking Pope Urban VIII through the character Simplicio). Scientifically, heliocentrism was not yet proven — Galileo's tidal argument was wrong, stellar parallax had not been observed, and Tycho Brahe's geo-heliocentric model fit the data available then. The case against: a religious court has no business ruling on physical reality; the evidence Galileo did have (Jupiter's moons, the phases of Venus) already undermined Ptolemy; and the trial became the defining example of authority suppressing science. The question is about the verdict judged by 1633 standards, not by what we know now.