The court has two appointments, both nominated by President George W. Bush, a staunch conservative and Creationist. Justice Scalia’s written dissent was telling. He wrote that Creation Science was a scientific theory, and that the “plain meaning of the term creation is not necessarily religious.” Scalia in his descent warned that “Striking down a law approved by a democratically elected representatives of the people is no minor matter.”
Tell that to President Abraham Lincoln, who’s well known and long battle with the Supreme Court over the Case of Dred Scott resulted in the great Civil War. Lincoln held that if the Supreme Court had applied the law, rather than reverting to politics…the Civil War would never have happened. But there are those who say that Lincoln’s intentional failure to fortify Fort Sumter, handing the south an invitation to take the Fort was the beginning of the Civil War and had nothing to do with Dred Scott, the slave who was an assistant to a traveling military physician, moved from fort-to-fort and was nothing more than a pack animal, a possession likely to be moved about as was any possession who maintained he was free because he traveled into free states and was therefore free.
As in the case of John Thomas Scopes, both sides of the slave issue came out of the woodwork. The despicable; underhanded, maniacal, abolitionist murderer of men and women opposed to slavery used men like John Brown to do their dirty bidding while striking the cleansed hand. On the other side of the issue the politically powerful southern planters, unlike the conniving abolitionist were front and center with guns; knives, swords, money and influence to support the cause of slavery.
In the end, men appointed to positions for life were not intimidated by either side but they were impudent by a predisposition on a matter which divided the country. Instead of applying the Rule of Law, as strict conservatives, the court in a majority opinion fanned the flames of bigotry and hatred in a decision which was politically biased and legally flawed.
The Scalia descent left the floor open for debate and the battle certain to be joined by fundamentalist seeking to reverse the test preserved by secular proponents who have long maintained that the teaching of Genesis in the classroom is in conflict with the separation of church and state. Interestingly, from what the press had been able to glean, Senator Elliott did not take umbrage with the big picture, only the principle that man did not have his own evolutionary track. In this theory, man came closer to the closely held belief of the majority…man was a product of the creator of all things, God, Himself. That man was of a higher and more select origin and had the same distinct opportunity to evolve separately and in different hemispheres, without the aid of the ape…Thank you!
It is this critical and equally transparent prospect that set Elliott apart from Wallace, Darwin and God. As to Wallace and Darwin, Elliott would try to prove that man came from the same warm pool, quite on his own, and evolved from the water in different parts of the world. Hence, the Asian came forth; the Caucasian came forward, the Black race came forward, the Native American race came forward, and each begat its own chain in the evolution of the human species, that is until interracial mating producing a race yet unnamed.
We must be open, Elliott argued, at some point in time, all species were vulnerable. How was an ape supposed to be more or less predisposed to the survival of the fittest when they are as historically sensitive and exposed to growth as is the human. But how do we know that the ape and the human were not as jeopardized, at birth, as was the sea turtle? It is well known that the sea turtles are hatched in the millions and are left to fend for themselves from day one…to get back to the sea and become a part of the food chain or to become part of the few survivors returning in time to hatch their own offspring to be fed to the sea.
Another source of confusion in thinking about evolution relates to the role of chance; according to the current scientific view, chance collisions between molecules led to the appearance of the first forms of life; than chance variations in the forms of life led to the evolution of complex forms out of simple ones; finally, after four billion years, man appeared, emerged out of a succession of more primitive forms and like the ape…seemingly the product of a long chain of random events.
“For most people,” writes Robert Jastrow “such an explanation of the origin of mankind is as improbable as the creation of the Mona Lisa through the random splatter of paint on the canvass.” But few scientists share this skepticism. The majority of scientist feel that Darwin’s law of natural selection removes the need for a guiding hand in the universe. In their view, the theory of evolution is complete and requires the action of no mysterious force beyond the reach of scientific understanding. The great evolutionist, George Gaylord Simpson wrote that evolution, “achieves the aspect of purpose without …a purpose, and had produced a vast plan without…a planner.”
Though Darwin saw no evidence of a beneficent design in the details as he struggled with the prospect of blind chance, and his own struggles with the issues of agnosticism and science would not permit him to believe there was a beneficent and patient hand…and not chance which permitted evolution and creationism as we know it today.
It was easy for Elliott to follow the historical record in Genesis. Much of what had been written by the Jews, preached by Jesus Christ and whose disciples; Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were chosen to record the gospels, later edited by King Constantine designee monks in deference to all the other disciples who had also written of the savior and his many works which he never recorded. Even the prophets in the Old Testament had weighed in on the matter and these writings could be verified by the writings of the Egyptians who kept nearly impeccable records. Though seriously flawed, the accounts of the Jewish deliverance by Moses is not contracted.
It happened pretty much as related in Genesis and Exodus without the production and insidious opportunity to right the history of the Jew, which the Jews are so want to do! Most especially in its treatment of King David who is believed by the Minimalist to never have existed at all. But you have to admit that the Jews are just so believable in their misery. God knows how much we love Woody Allen.
But where the creative writers went wrong…was to give man his origin in the Garden of Eden, through the assistance of God. Although there is one aspect of Creationism vs. Natural Selection which troubled Senator Elliott. Since the time of Adam and Eve, why have there been no discovery or witness to the generation of new species of man? According to Darwin’s massive body of work, convincing circumstantial evidence, that all forms of life on the earth have evolved out of other forms from just one lonely cell, which lived at an earlier time, and that those in turn had evolved out of still earlier forms.
According to Darwin, the chain of life extends far back into the distant past to some ‘ancestral strand of matter’, lurking in a warm pool. Every creature on our planet is a distant cousin to every other according to Darwin, all are related to one another by decent from common ancestors. Man is among those creatures; he too, has evolved out of a lower and simpler kinds of life, and differs in no fundamental way from other animals on this planet with the exception of the important fact that none of the other cousins have a moral underpinning.
Certainly the question in what appears to be the cessation of the human species bogs down scholars falling on the side of Darwin and Wallace. Because in the Darwinian Theory, he stated without equivocation that man will continue to evolve. If Darwin is correct, where is the empirical evidence of change in man? There is none in fifteen thousand years, nor anything else which has evolved…so there is some relative issue on the side of the creationist who say that God made all things, and that was the end of it. But there is a new Pandora’s Box filled with more than cat litter. Coming from none other than Dr. Steven Hawkings, the genius physicist who has determined there is life sufficient to sustain aliens on an earth like planet discovered recently in our universe. Dr. Hawkings states that it is disingenuous of us to believe we are alone,