Faith vs Logic

Logic is what prevails in today’s society and for something to be considered true it has to be proven. I still cannot understand what is wrong about expressing your opinion whether atheist or not, but I guess Cates must have broken many of society’s rules by teaching Darwin. In Inherit the Wind logic and faith are tested. In the movie the facts or books representing logic/science and faith are Origin of the Species and The Bible. After watching the movie I’ve made up my mind and overlooked faith because of its illogical reasoning even though its defenders had the wittiest responses. When asked whether a sponge has the right to think, Henry Drummond responds with a smart, “I don't know. I'm a man, not a sponge!”



Darwin’s theories (Origin of the Species) are very controversial and unorthodox at the time even though they make a lot more sense than The Bible’s unjustifiable views on creation, which I will come to explain subsequently. We all know that Adam and Eve were the first man and the first woman and that Eve bare Cain and Abel. But, with whom did Cain and Abel procreate? Where did their wives come from? How did Abraham come to be? Where did the rest of the world come from? The obvious response and the logical response would be that Adam and Eve were not the only man and woman in the world, but since the bible did not clarify this and stated the opposite of this, it was wrong. What the bible said, admitting that it was saying that Adam and Eve were the first humans, was accurately describe the creation of man, talking about it as if it had been something never seen before. “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” (Genesis 1.28) Then there is another contradiction. What the bible is telling them to do is to be fruitful and to multiply, but how is this possible if they only had two boys? This goes along with the story of Noah and how he stayed inside an ark while God killed the rest of the world. Then what was the point of Adam and Eve? They only way the defenders of the Bible could respond to this would be by stating that the bible did not mean this literally and that the stories are only meant to teach lessons, not because they actually happened. Except the Bible never clarifies this, so the Christian religion is led to believe that all of this really did happen.

Another point that can be analyzed and proved wrong, and that was briefly touched in the movie was sex or procreation or in the Bible’s words to be fruitful. When Drummond is asked what the biblical interpretation of sex was, he answered that it was the original sin. Drummond is supposedly a man who knows the Bible by heart and can cite its passages well, by the way. So he was saying that to reproduce was a sin? Very contradictory.

Science is more involved in this point as it involves the whole universe. God only claimed to have created day, night, and the stars. “And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years: And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so. And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.” (Gen. 1) But what is very much obvious and scientifically proven is that there are other planets out there other than stars and there is gravity and the way things work that can be explained more clearly and with more sense than how it is “explained” in the Bible.