"One of my goals was to humanize Charles Darwin, to show who he was as a man, a father and a husband," Jon Amiel explained to me when we spoke last week. Amiel, director of the highly acclaimed film Creation, achieved this and more.
In fact, much of the movie can be viewed as a trope for the modern religion and science debate, with Amiel demonstrating that the controversy need not play the divisive role it so often seems to in society. Amiel accomplishes this by taking literary license and mixing fact with fiction -- as any good drama should.
The facts are relatively straightforward. Emma Darwin was a deeply religious person who was devoted to her husband. She greatly respected Darwin's work and helped him with it by occasionally acting as a sounding board and doing some editing. She also worried that his religious perspective, different from hers, might separate them, both in their marriage and beyond their deaths.
Emma Darwin also believed that a sincere search for the truth could not be something that religion outlawed. Two weeks after she accepted Darwin's marriage proposal, she wrote to him, "My reason tells me that honest & conscientious doubts cannot be a sin, but I feel it would be a painful void between us. I thank you from my heart for your openness with me & I should dread the feeling that you were concealing your opinions from the fear of giving me pain."
And, shortly after their marriage, Emma wrote him the following:
The state of mind that I wish to preserve with respect to you, is to feel that while you are acting conscientiously & sincerely wishing, & trying to learn the truth, you cannot be wrong; but there are some reasons that force themselves upon me & prevent my being always able to give myself this comfort....Your mind & time are full of the most interesting subjects & thoughts of the most absorbing kind, viz following up yr own discoveries--but which make it very difficult for you to avoid casting out as interruptions other sorts of thoughts which have no relation to what you are pursuing or to be able to give your whole attention to both sides of the question.
Clearly, Emma Darwin felt the strain between religious and scientific issues and worried about their impact on her life and her relationship with her husband. Equally clearly, she was unwilling to conclude that religiosity meant ignoring the truth to be found in the natural world.
Amiel takes Emma's conflict, and Darwin's respect for his wife, a step further. In the film, after Darwin finishes his final draft of On the Origin of Species, he leaves the manuscript with Emma, telling her to do with it what she thinks best. She agonizes over the possibility of burning the manuscript but instead opts to wrap it up and address it to Darwin's publisher. Devout Emma, then, is responsible for bringing one of the world's greatest scientific discoveries to public attention.
Creation shows so well that in Emma, as in society at large, the tension between religion and science need not be ignored but can be played out in productive and respectful manners. The problem lies not with a search for truth but with an unquestioning acceptance of orthodoxy.
Unfortunately, as with so many issues in modern society, we seem to think that only dichotomous choices exist: it is either religion or science. As Emma concluded, and as many religious leaders have similarly concluded, scientific knowledge can enhance rather than diminish faith.
The sensitivities that Amiel brought to Creation may help move people to a richer understanding of the possibilities for productive coexistence. And the good news in this regard is that the DVD release of Creation is scheduled for this week. Given that the film appeared to have a very modest advertising budget when it was originally released in January, it should now be far more accessible to a wider audience.
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John Farrell: Bad Faith (in Science): Darwin as All-Purpose Boogey Man?
Do thou discern.
(Third in name. Eleventh in Element.)
I clothe me (Kore) with the heaven, (Andromeda)
And cast the sea (Lagoon Nebula M8) around me, (Persephone)
and for me (the Moon) Earth is a footstool,
and the air (Planetary Nebula 6853) is poured
Around my body; (Adjustment) and on every side (Universes)
Around me runs the chorus of the stars. (Constellations)
Nine letters have I; (Elizabeth I)
of four syllables (Cleopatra VII, Magdalena, Merovinge)
I am; (beginning and the end (Endless Ocean); first planetary nebulae popped into place from the Churning of the Ocean of Milk, will be the last to leave, and outside this Universe, the Alpha and the Omega, I hold the sword, double-edged, the Dove) discern me.
The first three have each (Isis, Gaga, Ge)
Two letters, the remaining one the rest, (Gaia, Ma'at, Kali)
And five are mates; (Uranus to Gaia, Shiva to Kali, Hades to Persephone, Osiris to Isis
and of the entire sum (Vegisimal System)
The hundreds are twice eight and thrice three tens
Along with seven. (Planetary Nebulae popped or foamed into place to monitor and influence the conveyor belt between Earth and the Lagoon Nebula M8, known as Hades to evolve all souls through a thousand lifetimes, and thus by the recording of all thoughts, words and deeds, separate the good from the bad)
Now, knowing who I am, be not uninitiated in my lore."
Could the movie be made available for low-cost download (as on moviepro.net) to make it more available to family men on budgets?
Darwin's Dilemma about the Cambrian Explosion by the Discovery Institute. It was full of historical error and I did my bit to point that out as it misrepresented Darwin's 1831 work in wales.
Darwin the voyage that shook the world produced by CMI (breakaway group from AIG) I had fun when they showed that near my house as I went along and pointed out all its historical dishonesty
And the CREATION which is equally inaccurate and full of historical error. It completly misrepresents Darwin, Emma and others and is simply a shoddy piece of work. It simply follows a naive and outdated view of conflict between science and religion which no Darwin scholar holds.
Of these three I don't know which was the worst and most inaccurate
But on the whole people do not regard religion as just a story that isn't really true. Do you really think people want creationism taught in science classes because Genesis is just a story? Or the 9/11 terrorists thought sacrificed there lives because the 40 virgins is fiction? Because you know, this debate is largely motivated by these sorts of things. Granted you admit the fundamentalists take things too literally. Fine then, let's consider the religious moderates. Do you think when my Christian friends say they believe in the resurrection of Jesus they mean to say the resurrection narrative is a really good story and they accept it as fiction? Or when people support "under God" being in the Pledge it is because they really enjoyed the fictional stories in the Bible and they wanted it represented in the Pledge, as if they support the equivalent of "one nation under Skywalker"? Clearly many people do not take religion to be fiction.