Scopes Trial, also called Scopes Monkey Trial, (July 10–21, 1925, Dayton, Tennessee, U.S.), highly publicized trial (known as the “Monkey Trial”) of a Dayton, Tennessee, high-school teacher, John T. Scopes, charged with violating state law by teaching Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. The trial’s proceedings helped to bring the scientific evidence for evolution into the public sphere while also stoking a national debate over the veracity of evolution that continues to the present day. In March 1925 the Tennessee legislature had passed the Butler Act, which declared unlawful the teaching of any doctrine denying the divine creation of man as
creationism, the belief that the universe and the various forms of life were created by God out of nothing (ex nihilo). Although the idea of God as creator is as old as religion itself, modern creationism is largely a response to evolutionary theory, which can explain the diversity of life without recourse to the doctrine of God or any other divine power. It may also reject the big-bang model of the emergence of the universe. Mainstream scientists generally reject creationism. Creationism is largely associated with conservative branches of Protestant Christianity, though there are proponents of Jewish and Islamic creationism as
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