Since the Age of Enlightenment, the religious institution has had to face opposition from science on the questions of the origins of the world and the human species. Until about the end of the 17th century, the Church was the authority on how the world and everything in it came to be. However, with the great intellectual revolution came thinkers such as Galileo, Copernicus, Bacon, Descartes and many others who challenged biblical assumptions with empirically deduced scientific theories. The Catholic Church had a bad habit of persecuting these ideological dissents in favor of creationism, calling them heresy and thus somewhat suppressing a complete upheaval of Scripture. For many centuries, scientific research developed and gave rise to theories such as the Big Bang and evolution, but mainly where such advances were tolerated. Tennessee State in 1925 was no such place. In the town of Dayton, Tennessee, a high school biology teacher violated a recently passed law, the Butler Act, because he was teaching the theory of evolution in his class. The debate that followed has yet to be resolved, with the modification of creationism to the theory of intelligent design. The argument for creationism was based solely on Scripture, although it had to be modified in light of its recasting, whereas the argument for evolution was only strengthened by continued scientific discoveries. In Dayton, Tennessee, in May 1925, John Scopes was incited by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to challenge the Butler Act, a law passed earlier in May. The law declared it illegal "for any teacher in any of the universities, no...... middle of paper ......08 .Bryan, William J. State of Tennessee V. John Thomas Scopes. No. No. 5232. Rhea County Circuit Court. July 21, 1925. March 30, 2008. Herndon, Peter N., comp. The Constitution, Censorship, and the Schools: Tennessee V. John Thomas Scopes. 1997. Yale University. March 31, 2008. Malone, Dudley F. State of Tennessee V. John Thomas Scopes. No. No. 5232. Rhea County Circuit Court. July 21, 1925. March 30, 2008. Nachman, M W., W M. Brown, M Stoneking and C F. Aquadro. “Non-neutral variation of mitochondrial DNA in humans and chimpanzees.” NCBI PubMed (1996). March 30. 2008 .