It was Friday night, and I noticed some Christian organization at my college had put up this film in an auditorium. The poster promoting the film said 15 scientists with Phd's in different scientific fields, and some of them allegedly ex-atheists, many new groundbreaking discoveries, will explain to us why Darwin's theory of evolution is falling apart. Big words. I feel a little bit embarrassed for having nothing better to do, but I got curious and thought it could be entertaining.
Of course, its always Christians or other religious groups who argues the theory of evolution, and never anyone else, and this is put together by Christians and for Christians, but okay, lets be fair and give it an open mind. The movie isn't horrible in every way. Production-wise its fine. It has some neat CGI-stuff from inside the cells, which must have cost some money to produce, and lot of alright footage elsewhere too, and it deals with lot of interviews with these 15 mentioned scientists. It attempts to be as scientific as possible. I'll also give them credit for trying to make their arguments clear and tidy. Thats not a given in every creationism documentary.
They have divided the documentary in several parts, dealing with evolution from different scientific fields. Natural selection was the first chapter, genetics was the next, the origin of life next, then cosmology and so on, challenging the present scientific world view from different fields. At the end of each chapter they summarize all the points, which I found commendable. People with the will to challenge the claims and double-check can easily look at their claims.
As for the claims, their overall goal was to make the literal interpretation of the Bible seem plausible, even if the consensus of science today says something else. Parts of it was interesting. Its a bit technical though, and I suspect they tried to make it sound a bit difficult to impress. I doubt many Christians understand what these people are talking about, but I suppose the message was that they're the experts. "You just have to trust these people. Don't they sound smart?"
Now, I am not en expert on DNA, nor cosmology, so I am not sure how to debunk every single claim here. I could however understand what they missed with the natural selection part, because they kept going on about evolution needing "new information" when natural selection just deals with existing information. You don't have to be an expert to understand random mutations is the link they seek. One of the scientists ironically does mention mutations at one brief point, but its like he just brushed it off, no need to go into it.
Anyway, quite a way into the movie I was actually prepared to say they'd done a presentable job at least, and fairly entertaining and fairly informative at times, if a little bit dense with information at times. The only real criticism to this point was that it's very biased. It would have been impressive if they let some scientist with a secular view, the opposite view, deal their arguments back and forth, so the viewer, religious or not, could weigh in which theory seemed more plausible for them. Its possible to claim the film is a bit of a circle-jerk, and that probably is because this documentary is probably pandering to the religious crowd. It's a documentary most likely made to strengthen the belief of the already converted, the slightly doubtful Christian that needs affirmation, and its not meant as something to really challenge the scientific establishment, but still, its seemed sincere so far.
The last one part however was atrocious, I regret to say. To go from a point of view that the creationists were at least somewhat attempting to be scientific, they severely shoot themselves in the foot in the grand finale of the movie. The last part is about Morality and ethics, in relation to Darwin. Oh, my! Many of the same people who went on an on about the science in their field was now starting to talk mindless out of their butts, and its very painful to watch.
If you ever heard a religious fundamentalist talking about secular morality, you know what to expect; Without god you have can't have any foundation for morality, so everything is allowed, and yes, that automatically will lead to murder, rape, Stalin and Hitler. Footage of Hitler and the Nazis was heavily used in this part. They claim Hitler was inspired by evolution, atheism and Darwin, without anything to really back that claim up. Its suddenly like social Darwinism and evolution is basically the same thing. I wonder if they really believe this, or if they are just trying to spread propaganda. It seems like the latter is the case. They should know atheists, agnostics and humanists aren't running around killing and raping everybody, as the statistics for this part of the population for criminality is shown to be lower than for religious people. These people should know moralities are more complex, if they really are PhD's, but still they feel they have right to say that if evolution is seen to be true people will put up holocausts in in every city.
Sadly for them, the last chapter became the films own "achilles heel". Some of these scientists even admits they are scared of the secular scientific world view, because they claim it would lead to new atrocities, and seems to openly admit this affected the way they saw science that supported it too. So there you go! They really believe it because they WANT things to be a certain way(Christian/religious), and not because things seem to really be that way, which is what science is really about. So is in other words they're not really doing real science. Perhaps a more fitting name for the documentary would be Creationisms Achilles Heel.
Of course, its always Christians or other religious groups who argues the theory of evolution, and never anyone else, and this is put together by Christians and for Christians, but okay, lets be fair and give it an open mind. The movie isn't horrible in every way. Production-wise its fine. It has some neat CGI-stuff from inside the cells, which must have cost some money to produce, and lot of alright footage elsewhere too, and it deals with lot of interviews with these 15 mentioned scientists. It attempts to be as scientific as possible. I'll also give them credit for trying to make their arguments clear and tidy. Thats not a given in every creationism documentary.
They have divided the documentary in several parts, dealing with evolution from different scientific fields. Natural selection was the first chapter, genetics was the next, the origin of life next, then cosmology and so on, challenging the present scientific world view from different fields. At the end of each chapter they summarize all the points, which I found commendable. People with the will to challenge the claims and double-check can easily look at their claims.
As for the claims, their overall goal was to make the literal interpretation of the Bible seem plausible, even if the consensus of science today says something else. Parts of it was interesting. Its a bit technical though, and I suspect they tried to make it sound a bit difficult to impress. I doubt many Christians understand what these people are talking about, but I suppose the message was that they're the experts. "You just have to trust these people. Don't they sound smart?"
Now, I am not en expert on DNA, nor cosmology, so I am not sure how to debunk every single claim here. I could however understand what they missed with the natural selection part, because they kept going on about evolution needing "new information" when natural selection just deals with existing information. You don't have to be an expert to understand random mutations is the link they seek. One of the scientists ironically does mention mutations at one brief point, but its like he just brushed it off, no need to go into it.
Anyway, quite a way into the movie I was actually prepared to say they'd done a presentable job at least, and fairly entertaining and fairly informative at times, if a little bit dense with information at times. The only real criticism to this point was that it's very biased. It would have been impressive if they let some scientist with a secular view, the opposite view, deal their arguments back and forth, so the viewer, religious or not, could weigh in which theory seemed more plausible for them. Its possible to claim the film is a bit of a circle-jerk, and that probably is because this documentary is probably pandering to the religious crowd. It's a documentary most likely made to strengthen the belief of the already converted, the slightly doubtful Christian that needs affirmation, and its not meant as something to really challenge the scientific establishment, but still, its seemed sincere so far.
The last one part however was atrocious, I regret to say. To go from a point of view that the creationists were at least somewhat attempting to be scientific, they severely shoot themselves in the foot in the grand finale of the movie. The last part is about Morality and ethics, in relation to Darwin. Oh, my! Many of the same people who went on an on about the science in their field was now starting to talk mindless out of their butts, and its very painful to watch.
If you ever heard a religious fundamentalist talking about secular morality, you know what to expect; Without god you have can't have any foundation for morality, so everything is allowed, and yes, that automatically will lead to murder, rape, Stalin and Hitler. Footage of Hitler and the Nazis was heavily used in this part. They claim Hitler was inspired by evolution, atheism and Darwin, without anything to really back that claim up. Its suddenly like social Darwinism and evolution is basically the same thing. I wonder if they really believe this, or if they are just trying to spread propaganda. It seems like the latter is the case. They should know atheists, agnostics and humanists aren't running around killing and raping everybody, as the statistics for this part of the population for criminality is shown to be lower than for religious people. These people should know moralities are more complex, if they really are PhD's, but still they feel they have right to say that if evolution is seen to be true people will put up holocausts in in every city.
Sadly for them, the last chapter became the films own "achilles heel". Some of these scientists even admits they are scared of the secular scientific world view, because they claim it would lead to new atrocities, and seems to openly admit this affected the way they saw science that supported it too. So there you go! They really believe it because they WANT things to be a certain way(Christian/religious), and not because things seem to really be that way, which is what science is really about. So is in other words they're not really doing real science. Perhaps a more fitting name for the documentary would be Creationisms Achilles Heel.