One of the commonest arguments from authority used by Christians to demonstrate the “truth” of the resurrection is a statement from “Former Lord Chief Justice of England, Lord Darling”, who apparently said that “no intelligent jury would fail to bring in a verdict that the resurrection is true”. I have tried to track down the source of this quote, but cannot find any reference to a Lord Darling as a Lord Chief Justice of England (e.g. can’t find him on wikipedia: as far as I can tell such a person never existed). Does anyone know the original source of this quote? It might refer to a judge called Justice Darling who worked in the 1890s to 1920s in England and seems to have been a rather nasty man.
Posted: March 24th 2011
brian thomson www
I have access (through my university) to the Westlaw UK database, and I have found a religion-related court case that appears to have been adjudged by Justice Darling. The case citation is [1907] 2 K.B. 112, where K.B. stands for King’s Bench, a supervisory court that hears a wide range of cases. According to the biographical information here he was never appointed Chief Justice of this or any court.
The case in question was a dispute over the status of Ascension Day to followers of the Church of England, which arose because more than two CofE members kept their children out of school on that day, were summoned to court, and found guilty because Ascension Day was not recognised by the CofE as an official holiday. This meant that they were in breach of the Elementary Education Act, but they were appealing the decisions, and the King’s bench found in their favour and granted the appeals. The Justices delivered individual responses, and Darling’s response included the following:
Can anyone say that the desire of that man, whatever his creed may be, that his child should attend the religious service of the body to which he belongs is not a reasonable excuse for withdrawing his child from school, or that the time of the magistracy is properly taken up with the prosecution of such a man for preferring to observe the rites of the religion in which he has been brought up, instead of sending the child to receive purely secular instruction?
In other words, he thought pulling a child out of school to go to church was a reasonable thing to do, everyone should agree that it was, and it was a waste of the court’s time prosecuting anyone who did so. The other Justices concurred, Justice Phillimore concluding with:
I agree that the appeal should be allowed, and I am very glad to be able to do so, because it seems to me that the cause of civil and religious liberty would suffer much if the judgment were otherwise.
This is the closest I can get to the claimed quotation – but it should be clear that the scope is limited to the rights of parents, not as a general comment about the truth of a religion.
Posted: March 24th 2011
Reed Braden www
I did a quick Google search for “Justice Darling Resurrection” and found dozens of relevant hits. A few pages in, I found the print source that the few sourced references seem to refer to. I believe this to be the original source of the quote, which is interesting because it was written well after Darling’s life.
And because the information was so simple to find, that’s where I’m stopping. I don’t want to be a brat, but AskTheAtheists.com is not meant as a replacement for simple research. Google it yourself for more information and come back when you have a question whose answer is less easily Googled.
Posted: March 24th 2011