Posted on 09/12/2009 7:34:09 PM PDT by Borges
Creation, starring Paul Bettany, details Darwin's "struggle between faith and reason" as he wrote On The Origin of Species. It depicts him as a man who loses faith in God following the death of his beloved 10-year-old daughter, Annie.
The film was chosen to open the Toronto Film Festival and has its British premiere on Sunday. It has been sold in almost every territory around the world, from Australia to Scandinavia.
However, US distributors have resolutely passed on a film which will prove hugely divisive in a country where, according to a Gallup poll conducted in February, only 39 per cent of Americans believe in the theory of evolution.
Movieguide.org, an influential site which reviews films from a Christian perspective, described Darwin as the father of eugenics and denounced him as "a racist, a bigot and an 1800s naturalist whose legacy is mass murder". His "half-baked theory" directly influenced Adolf Hitler and led to "atrocities, crimes against humanity, cloning and genetic engineering", the site stated.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
I keep asking this ... for those that believe in evolution ... is OBAMA the missing link they are searching for?
Darwin had no ‘faith’ - only religious association.
Jennifer Connelly - the Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel of cinema...
I have never heard an argument for naturalism that was not based on the presumption of naturalism.
She’s married to the director of this film.
O and the Mrs. discussing healthcare.
You mean she’s married to the star of the film (Bettany). Jon Amiel is the director.
My point was that she’s played the wife or mistress of several famous men: Jackson Pollack, John Nash, and Charles Darwin.
What Darwin said at the last: “I am conscious that I am in an utterly hopeless muddle. I cannot think that the world, as we see it, is the result of chance; and yet I cannot look at each separate thing as the result of design”.
Charles Darwin
He was totally conflicted to the end. I pray that he found it before he died.
I am pretty sure that Charles Darwin, later in life, came to regret that his thesis was embraced as a way to deny God. He reportedly spent the latter years of his life reading the Bible, which he called his favorite book. He often commented on the book of Hebrews which interestingly takes up the topic of faith. Has anyone else researched the REST of Darwins life?
How is that different from saying, "if you are descended from your parents, why are your parents still alive?"
Or, "if power boats descended from sailing ships, why are there still sailing ships?"
Each new species (apart from whatever ecological relationships there may be) is independent in it's fate from any other. The very definition of a species is that it is reproductively isolated from other species.
Once man is a separate species from, say, the various species of apes or monkeys, or whatever, their fates are separate. Monkeys (or a given species thereof) may continue to exist or may not, but (again, unless there be some ecological connection) whether they do or not has nothing to do with mankind's fate.
Or look at it by analogy to jobs in an economy. Being a monkey is one way of making a living, being an ape is another way, and being a man another yet. Each have different jobs.
In a real economy new job descriptions arise all the time, like making automobiles, and old ones disappear all the time, like making buggy whips. Sometimes older jobs continue to exist alongside newer ones. Sometimes they don't. Each job has to "survive" in the economy on it's own merits.
“Get your hands off me you damn dirty ape!” - Charlton Heston
“Get your hands off me you damn dirty ape!” - Charlton Heston
Marx's Manifesto of Communist Party was published in 1848. Before him, socialist/communist ideas have been around --among others--in the writings of St. Simon. Darwin's Origin of Species was published in 1859.
You missed the point (all that wild turkey get to your brain?) that the easy excuse for blowing off the idea of God made it easier for those doctrines to flourish.
The Voyage that Shook the World
Did you happen to notice the review that "Voyage" receieved from the very same MovieGuide.org mentioned in the article above :o)
The rest of your post, about Darwin reading the Bible extensively as an old man, calling it his favorite book, etc, is entirely mythical and false. In fact the myth is backwards. Darwin was a believer as a young man, but became more, not less, skeptical about religion as he became older.
But the part I quote above is, I think, pretty much correct.
Except it wasn't just "later in life". Darwin was always averse to public controversy, and always reluctant to oppress others with his own doubts, or to upset more orthodox friends and family members. He was always fairly conservative, and always uncomfortable with radicalism. Indeed the association of radicals with (pre-Darwinian Lamarkian) evolution in the early half of the 19th Century, and especially the 1830's and 40's, is almost certainly one of the reasons Darwin waited more that 20 years before publishing his own ideas about evolution.
(Incidentally -- the preference of leftists for Lammarkian, as opposed to Darwinian, evolution continued for more than a hundred years. The Soviet Union persecuted neo-Darwinists starting early in Stalin's reign of terror and continuing well into the 1970's.)
Anyway, here's a very old FR topic I posted which, I think, gets at this side of Darwin: The often closeted and always cautiously non-confrontational "free thinker". It should also be of more general interest in this thread as it is an excerpt from the biography of Darwin upon which -- I suspect -- this film is largely based:
The "gentle squire of Down" (Charles Darwin) & the day the Pinko Atheists came to lunch
I knew you would like this LOL
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