Scopes at 100: America Is Still Animated by the Scopes ‘Monkey Trial’ | Cover Story | nashvillescene.com

...The challenge with teaching evolution in 2025 is the same each semester, says Elizabeth Barnes, who is now approaching her fifth year on the biology faculty at Middle Tennessee State University.

"I would say one of the biggest things that we face when we go to teach evolution is this perception that in order to accept evolution, to actually believe that evolution is a real thing, that you have to be an atheist or reject religious belief," Barnes says.

A national survey of biology students conducted by Barnes and other researchers in 2022 showed that 50 percent of the respondents believed acceptance of evolution was a rejection of God.

"That's just a misunderstanding of the nature of science," Barnes says.

Although the Butler Act was repealed in 1967 and there's no current move today to ban the teaching of evolution in Tennessee's public schools, introducing students to the subject remains challenging. But it's a challenge the 38-year-old assistant professor has accepted, determined to convince her students that the topic doesn't have to negate science or God.

Thomas Huxley, a contemporary and friend of Charles Darwin, coined the term "agnostic" in 1869 as he was trying to find a way to settle debates about the religious or antireligious nature of science, Barnes notes. 

"Huxley said that science is a process that doesn't have the means to determine whether or not something outside of the natural world is influencing the natural world." 

In other words, science says that evolution happened. How it happened, well, the debate continues and likely will: everything from the creation narrative found in Genesis to the cosmological slow dance of creation that followed the Big Bang.

"But these ideas of deistic, theistic, agnostic and atheistic evolution are equally compatible with what we know from science, because it's not really science's job to tell you whether God exists or whether God had an influence on the natural world," Barnes says.

Science's job, she adds, "is to determine what did happen in the natural world."

Although students in Tennessee's public schools are exposed to evolution in high school biology classes, per the state's science standards, Barnes has found that many of her students don't have a firm understanding of evolution when they arrive at her classroom. That may be because students took biology early in high school and did not retain the material. But many, she says, have concerns about reconciling their faith with science.

Barnes was introduced to evolution in a biology class at a community college. She calls it "one of the most beautiful, amazing ideas that I ever heard of." At the same time, Barnes says she also "learned that about 60 percent of the United States doesn't think that evolution was real."

A year or so later, when she was taking upper-level biology classes at Arizona State University, she was confounded by research professors who "were talking about evolution in a way that kind of put evolution and religion against one another." Although Barnes is not a person of faith, she recognized that fellow students who were churchgoers were wrestling with this teaching approach, sometimes to the point of dropping the class. 

"It seemed to be very conflict-inflating," Barnes says.

She wondered if there wasn't a better way. That prompt led to a major focus of her research: teaching evolution in a manner that reduces conflict. 

In the Bible Belt, many students bring religious values fashioned by teachings that are opposed to evolution, Barnes says. Through her research and teaching, Barnes says she's learned it is possible to nurture scientific inquiry without being dogmatic to the point of negating someone else's faith.

"What we really want them to be able to do is evaluate scientific evidence, you know, apart from their personal biases," she says. "What I've said [to students] is that I don't come in here and teach you science just so you can learn the facts and not be able to do anything with them." 

Her job, she says, is not to make students accept evolution. Every semester, Barnes tells her classes: "It's not my job as an instructor to grade you on what your beliefs are. Or to judge you on what your beliefs are. My job is for you to understand the science."

She's confident her approach has made a difference. 

"I get emails from students, or they come up to me after class, you know, talking about how they have been so relieved to not have to pick between their science and their faith."
...

https://www.nashvillescene.com/news/coverstory/scopes-monkey-trial-100th-anniversary/article_26bbeb9c-a101-41d6-ae51-ca05b23e53cd.html?utm_source=ActiveCampaign&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Scopes%20%22Monkey%20Trial%22%20at%20100&utm_campaign=Daily%20Scene%20071025%20Thursday

Changing the tribal mind

From growing up in a highly religious household to becoming a leading evolutionary biologist and broadcaster, Ella Al-Shamahi's story is one of courage, curiosity, and discovery.

https://bsky.app/profile/humanists.uk/post/3lthcxkczts27

Secular humanism and ethical culture

How to live a good life, fourth video: secular humanism and ethical culture. M. Pigliucci

https://substack.com/@figsinwintertime/note/c-128929918?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action

What the hell?

"…Perhaps the biggest shift comes from the most religious Americans overall. Among the people who attend religious services at least once a month, Trump went from getting 59% support in 2020 to 64% in 2024. Roughly two out of three Americans who are regular church-goers were willing to vote for a right-wing zealot who constantly pays them lip service. It makes you wonder what the hell they're hearing in so many of these spaces— is it a message to help the poor or a promise to punish every person who's considered different? 

Many churches now appear to be nothing more than arms of the Republican Party..."

https://open.substack.com/pub/friendlyatheist/p/new-data-reveal-how-religion-and?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

Materialist spirit

"I call myself a spiritual materialist. By "materialist," I mean that I believe the world is made of material stuff, and nothing more, and that material obeys rules and laws. At the same time, like many of us, I have "spiritual" experiences: feelings of connection to other human beings and to the larger cosmos, moments of communion with wild animals, the appreciation of beauty, wonder. Nature is capable of extraordinary phenomena. We human beings stand in awe of those phenomena. That's part of my view of spirituality."

— The Miraculous from the Material: Understanding the Wonders of Nature by Alan Lightman
https://a.co/7ZfKc4r

Free course: Introducing Humanism

 Welcome to Introducing Humanism: Non-religious approaches to life.

During this course, we'll provide you with a deeper understanding of the humanist approach to life and how humanists tackle life’s big questions. We’ll explore some of the tensions and dilemmas contained within the humanist worldview, as well as the arguments against it, and the responses humanists give to those arguments. You’ll find contributions from academics, humanist campaigners, celebrants, pastoral carers, and members of the public to widen your awareness of what it means to be one of the millions of humanists living around the world today. The course will also allow you the opportunity to reflect on life’s bigger questions for yourself.

We’ll begin with an introduction to humanist beliefs, values, and goals, before investigating the humanist understanding of human nature. This should help to ground the humanist responses to many of the questions covered later in the course.

In Part 2, we’ll explore a humanist approach to knowledge about the world and the consequences for a humanist understanding of reality. We’ll follow this by tackling the question of how we ought to live, approaching it with three distinct but connected focuses: ourselves, our relationships with others, and society and the planet as a whole (Parts 3-5). Finally, in Part 6, we will draw together what we have learned throughout the course in an attempt to reflect upon what conclusions we can reach about humanism.

We hope you enjoy the course!

Kind regards

Luke Donnellan

Director of Understanding Humanism

https://courses.understandinghumanism.org.uk/courses/introducing-humanism/

==

The course includes several videos, including:

 

Summary of Part One:

1. A humanist understanding of human nature recognises that we are animals; we were not created, nor was this universe made for us, but we are the result of natural, purposeless, physical and biological processes.
2. Humanists believe that we are material and mortal creatures, and that there are many good reasons to be sceptical of any notion of an afterlife.
3. There are ways that human beings stand out from the rest of the natural world – things we can celebrate about being human – for example, our capacities for communication, imagination, creativity, empathy, and problem solving.
4. Self-consciousness provides us with an ability to ask questions and understand the world around us, an opportunity to become the authors of our own lives, and the potential to be moral beings.
5. Our capacity to share our ideas with one another is what has enabled us to develop knowledge and culture, and to create many things that enrich our lives.
6. A humanist believes all our human capacities are natural.
7. These distinctive human capabilities bring a responsibility to consider how we should live.

Sandi Toksvig – Humanism and the human being – Summary

...

• Richard Dawkins’ Spectrum of Theistic Probability
• Atheists, agnostics, and humanists
• Why atheist don’t believe
• Russell’s teapot, a thought experiment on the burden of proof
• The problem of suffering
• Crash Course Philosophy: a series of videos including arguments for and against the existence of god (see videos 9, 10, 11, and 13)
• Video: The Free Will Defence: A Good God vs The Problem of Evil (BBC Radio 4)
• The evil god challenge

Summary Part Two:

1. Our beliefs can be mistaken; we should therefore be prepared to adopt a sceptical approach to knowledge and subject our beliefs to rational, critical scrutiny in order to give them the best chance of being true
2. Humanists will typically trust the evidence of their senses; they will be wary of claims made on the basis of faith or revelation
3. Different beliefs can fit the same evidence; when presented with more than one hypothesis that fits the evidence, it is often safest to go with the simplest; we should always consider whether our beliefs might be motivated by something other than the evidence
4. Reasonableness can come in degrees; beliefs that are neither proved nor disproved can still be more or less reasonable than each other
5. There is no non-circular justification for trusting reason; however, nor is there a good reason for assuming that reason is unreliable
6. Humanists will reject a relativist approach to truth; facts about the world are independent of our beliefs about them
7. Humanists believe that science provides the best and most reliable method of answering questions about the world
8. Science has enabled us to make great progress in our understanding about the world; we should be wary of jumping to supernatural explanations for questions we can’t yet answer
9. There might be questions that science cannot answer but that does not mean we must turn to religious answers to such questions
10. A humanist will believe they have good reason to doubt the existence of any deity; humanists will be atheists, agnostics, or both
11. Humanists believe we can be comfortable living with uncertainty; curiosity can provide many pleasures

Andrew Copson's FiveBooks humanism reading list

What is ‘humanism?’ Is it just another word for atheism?

It’s not just another word for atheism. The word ‘humanism’, like all words with long histories, has had lots of meanings at different times in different places. In English, it started being used in the 19th century. Since then, it’s had two uses. One is a historical one, to refer back to the culture and scholarship of the Renaissance. We usually call that ‘Renaissance humanism’.


The second use of the word has been to refer to a non-religious worldview: a set of beliefs and values that together constitute a certain approach to life. The precise content of those beliefs and values is up for debate and up for negotiation—just like any idea in the history of ideas. But, broadly speaking, humanists are people who don’t look outside of reality for moral guidance or ways to understand the universe. They try to understand the world that we live in by the use of reason, evidence, and experience all bundled together in the scientific method.

Humanists are people who think that morality is not some unnatural thing that comes from outside, but something that’s in us, having its basis in biology and then built on by culture. Morality doesn’t come from outside, from tablets of stone, but is inside us. It’s generated by humanity itself. When we think about questions like right and wrong, we don’t need to look for rules and commandments and authorities; we need to think for ourselves, about the consequences of our actions, and have a this-world, contextual approach to morality... (continues)