Film review: Bad Shabbos (2025)

In these days of relentlessly depressing news, a good comedy comes as a welcome relief and this is such a film.

It is about an observant Jewish family in New York who host a Sabbath dinner to meet the Midwestern Catholic parents of their son’s fiancée, when something happens that leads to the evening going completely awry.

The humor depends on some extent on the practices of observant Jews on the Sabbath, especially the many restrictions on what you can do, but I thought that it was not offensive. But then, I am not Jewish and hence not the best judge.

Here’s the trailer.

Living in an alternate reality

Joseph Ladapo is the surgeon general for the state of Florida and is a vaccine skeptic who recently announced plans to abolish all mandates that requires parents to vaccinate their children against preventable diseases such as measles, mumps, chickenpox, polio, and hepatitis, comparing such mandates to slavery. He also opposes gender-affirming care and counseling for transgender and nonbinary minors. He is a good example of how an education obtained at elite institutions (he obtained his undergraduate degree from Wake Forest and his MD and PhD from Harvard) does not mean that one cannot hold unscientific views. He has been publicly rebuked by the CDC and FDA for spreading scientific misinformation.

But extreme as his views are, they are nowhere close to those of his wife Brianna who is described as an “intuitive spiritual healer, movement therapist, and teacher”.
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Is there a middle ground between atheism and theism?

To me the answer is ‘no’ but the title of this post was suggested by this essay by Philip Goff, a professor of philosophy, who clearly wants to find one. The subheading says, “Neither atheism nor theism adequately explains reality. That is why we must consider the middle ground between the two.”

Goff says that he was brought up as a Catholic but started identifying himself as an atheist at the age of 14 and was comfortable with it for about two decades. Then about five years ago, he had to teach a course on the philosophy of religion that required him to present the arguments for and against God. In doing so he says that he found the arguments for God “incredibly compelling too! In particular, the argument from the fine-tuning of physics for life couldn’t be responded to as easily as I had previously thought.”

A few weeks into this existential morass I was peacefully watching some ducks quack in a nearby nature reserve, when I suddenly realised there was a startingly simple and obvious solution to my dilemma. The two arguments I was finding compelling – the fine-tuning argument for ‘God’, and the argument from evil and suffering against ‘God’ – were not actually opposed to each other. The argument from evil and suffering targets a very specific kind of God, namely the Omni-God: all-knowing, all-powerful, perfectly good creator of the universe. Meanwhile, the fine-tuning argument supports something much more generic, some kind of cosmic purpose or goal-directedness towards life that might not be attached to a supernatural designer. So if you go for cosmic purpose but not one rooted in the desires of an Omni-God, then you can have your cake and eat it by accepting both arguments.

And thus my worldview was radically changed.
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“Died peacefully surrounded by family”

I have read the above line many times in newspaper reports of the deaths of celebrities, most recently that of Ozzy Osbourne.

A statement from the Osbourne family reads: “It is with more sadness than mere words can convey that we have to report that our beloved Ozzy Osbourne has passed away this morning. He was with his family and surrounded by love. We ask everyone to respect our family privacy at this time.” No cause of death was given, though Osbourne had experienced various forms of ill health in recent years.

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The big unresolved question from the Scopes trial onwards

As I emphasized in my posts during the past week, the Scopes trial did not resolve any of the major legal questions involving evolution. But many of those questions were resolved in subsequent cases over the next 80 years, as I chronicle in my book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom that reviewed the 80-year legal fight by religious groups to combat the teaching of the theory of evolution in public schools, that began with the Scopes trial in 1925 and ended with the Intelligent Design trial in Dover, PA in 2005

But there was one issue raised by the prosecutor in his defense of the Butler Act (that forbade the teaching of evolution) that is still unresolved and that is what is appropriate to teach children in public schools and who should get to decide it. Should it be the public through its elected representatives? Should it be educators? What should be role of subject matter experts?

In many countries, especially those with a national educational system, the answer is simple: the government does. In general, there is a ministry of education that sets the standards, curriculum, and even lesson plans and teachers are trained in it. There is no real basis for legal challenge and in theory they could decide to teach anything at all. In reality, public opinion acts as a major constraint on teaching nonsense. But in the US, education is very much a local affair, with each local community having its own school boards that determine these things, and these can vary widely. The state can set overall guidelines, while textbooks and standardized tests provide some measure of uniformity, but not much.
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The surprising impact of the Scopes trial

As discussed in the last three posts, as a purely legal matter, the Scopes trial was inconsequential, setting no legal precedent whatsoever. While the Dayton civic leaders achieved their goal of creating huge publicity around the trial, like all publicity stunts, the hoopla eventually died away, the crowds disappeared, and life went largely back to normal. The Butler Act that triggered the trial was quietly repealed only four decades later. The first major case involving the teaching of evolution was the 1968 Epperson v. Arkansas in which the US Supreme Court struck down a law similar to the Butler Act that banned the teaching of evolution in public schools. This was the case that the Scopes trial sought to be and yet few have now heard of that case while the Scopes Monkey trial, as it has come to be known, is firmly embedded in the public culture.

How did that come to be?
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How the Scopes trial came about

As I discussed in my two previous posts, in strictly legal terms, the 1925 Scopes trial had little impact. But it was never meant to be primarily a legal issue. Right from the beginning, the whole case was designed as a publicity stunt and in that respect, it succeeded spectacularly. The newly created American Civil Liberties Union announced that it would challenge the 1925 Butler Act, passed in March of that year, as a violation of free speech and put out an ad saying that it would represent any teacher who was charged under it. A small group of Dayton civic leaders saw such a legal challenge a public relations opportunity and decided that such a case should take place in their city and quickly moved to ensure it, fearful of being scooped by other cities. They put the case on a very fast track, which is why a mere four months later, a lightning pace in the legal world, the Scopes trial took place.

In my book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom that reviewed the 80-year legal fight by religious groups to combat the teaching of the theory of evolution in public schools, that began with the Scopes trial and ended with the Intelligent Design trial in Dover, PA in 2005, I describe how the case came about.
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The Scopes appeal

As I said in my previous post, the Scopes defense team wanted their client to be found guilty of violating the 1925 Butler Act guilty so that they could appeal to the higher courts on the constitutional grounds that it violated free speech guarantees. This was why Scopes’s main attorney Clarence Darrow actually asked the jury to bring in a guilty verdict, which they were happy to do after just a few minutes deliberation.

The following extract from my book, God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom that reviewed the 80-year legal fight by religious groups to combat the teaching of the theory of evolution in public schools, that began with the Scopes trial and ended with the Intelligent Design trial in Dover, PA in 2005, describes the aftermath of the trial

The Scopes verdict was appealed to the Tennessee Supreme Court. Many people on the defense side, including the ACLU, tried to have Darrow removed from the defense team for the appeal since they wanted to bring the focus back to the issue of free speech and feared that Darrow’s strong antipathy to religion would result in that issue dominating once again. But Darrow and his allies outmaneuvered them and he stayed on.
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Recalling the Scopes trial on its 100th anniversary

This week I will review some aspects of the famous 1925 Scopes trial that lasted from July 10 through Tuesday, July 21. It has cast such a long shadow, and has reverberated so much in public consciousness, that it is worthwhile to have a quick summary of the actual events of that trial, in order to separate the facts from the folklore that has arisen around it as a result of the hugely popular play and film Inherit the Wind, the former produced in 1955 and the latter in 1960.

The trial itself was brief, lasting just eight days, much of it involving wrangling over legal technicalities that took place with the jury out of the courtroom. It involved the question of whether John T, Scopes had violated the Butler Act passed by Tennessee in March of 1925 that said that “it shall be unlawful for any teacher in any of the Universities, Normals and all other public schools of the State which are supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of the State, to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.” There were only two occasions when the two famous attorneys William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow were able to make speeches and these occurred in the middle of the trial during legal skirmishes.

What follows is an extract from my book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom that reviewed the 80-year legal fight by religious groups to combat the teaching of the theory of evolution in public schools, that began with the Scopes trial and ended with the Intelligent Design trial in Dover, PA in 2005.

Day 1, Friday, July 10: The morning saw the grand jury and witnesses appear to issue a new indictment, since the older one was discovered to have had a technical flaw. Scopes had to tell a reluctant student that he would be doing him a favor by testifying against him, and then was duly indicted again. After lunch, jury selection took place.
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Balancing the universality of humanism with one’s specific ethnic heritage

I found this interesting short clip of the versatile physician, writer, director, documentarian, comedian, and public intellectual Jonathan Miller, who died in 2019 at the age of 85, talking with Dick Cavett about how he views his own Jewish ethnicity. I found completely relatable his views about subordinating the ethnic and religious heritage into which he was born to a more universal sense of humanity.

The exchange is well worth watching for anyone trying to navigate rejecting ethnic and religious sectarianism and embracing solidarity with the human race as a whole, without giving the impression that they are disowning or are even ashamed of being born into a specific heritage. As he said, the only time he feels it necessary to tell anyone that he is Jewish is when they turn out to be an antisemite.
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