SCIENCE AND JESUS CHRIST

Pastor Art Watkins of Coden Bible Church (Coden, Alabama)

July 24, 2018

William Jennings Bryan defeated Clarence Darrow in the famous Scopes trial that took place in Tennessee in 1925. After the trial, William Jennings Bryan wrote in his summary of the Scopes trial of how science tells us what we can do, religion tells us what we should do: "Science is a magnificent force, but it is not a teacher of morals. It can perfect machinery, but it adds no moral restraints to protect society from the misuse of the machine."

"It can also build gigantic intellectual ships, but it constructs no moral rudders for the control of storm-tossed human vessel. It not only fails to supply the spiritual element needed but some of its unproven hypotheses rob the ship of its compass and thus endanger its cargo..."

Bryan continued:

"In war, science has proven itself an evil genius; it has made war more terrible than it ever was before. Man used to be content to slaughter his fellowmen on a single plane, the earth's surface. Science has taught him to go down into the water and shoot up from below and to go up into the clouds and shoot down from above, thus making the battlefield three times as bloody as it was before; but science does not teach brotherly love..."

"Science has made war so hellish that civilization was about to commit suicide and now we are told that newly discovered instruments of destruction will make the cruelties of the late war (WWI) seem  trivial in comparison with the cruelties of wars that may come in the future..."

Bryan concluded:

"If civilization is to be saved from the wreckage threatened by intelligence not consecrated by love, it must be saved by the  moral code of the meek and lowly Nazarene. His teachings, and His teachings alone, can solve the problems that vex the heart and perplex the world."