MovieChat Forums > Creation (2009) Discussion > Reacting to 'Creation'

Reacting to 'Creation'

posted 10 years ago by kelly-j-wilson
2 replies | jump to latest

Hey,

I want to share a reaction I recently wrote to this lovely, and under-appreciated, gem called "Creation":

http://ponderingsofapriest.wordpress.com/2014/07/20/creation/

While this is more a love story than an extended reflection on the relationship between religion and science, there is a lot, still, for persons interested in that relationship between science and religion.

To give one example, I write:

Enraged by Reverend Innes making his daughter Annie kneel on rock salt – for disagreeing with his instruction about dinosaurs – Darwin sarcastically opines about “the love God shows for the butterflies by inventing a wasp that lays its eggs inside the living flesh of caterpillars.” Elsewhere referencing Malthus – Malthus observed the way in which epidemics and famines and wars seemed to keep the limited resources of the world in balance with those who would consume such resources – Darwin asks: “Why this exceedingly wasteful plan?” In light of a Creator often associated with goodness, why does it have to be, as the Victorian contemporary Tennyson had already described, a nature “red in tooth and claw”?

What are your thoughts and, if you are an Intelligent Design person, how do you engage with comments such as these?

KW.

[–] Romojo 10 years ago

KW, I read the page - well-put together and relevant comments. My compliments also on keeping your personal views )as a priest, I guess you must have some?) out of the review.

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To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven. J B Priestley

[–] graham-167 8 years ago

Your quoted section was actually the basis for the controversy over Darwin's work.

It is common in modern times to believe that the argument was a case of believers saying that evolution was untrue, against scientists like Darwin who said it was. This is simply false. Evolution was already an accepted and well-known fact amongst the religious, even in Darwin's time. The mystery was about exactly how and why it happened.

And the controversy arose because the picture Darwin painted was one of utter horror. The attitude to nature until then was that it was "all things bright and beautiful" - that nature was a tranquil, peaceful place. It's true that we also spoke of nature as a place of unforgiving cruelty, but the religious saw this as a result of the fall from grace as a result of original sin. It was a flaw in the design of nature - a flaw that WE had introduced.

In their view the true essence of nature was the Garden of Eden, a literal paradise in which the lion lay down with the lamb, and there was no bloodshed, no cruelty.

The shattering truth that Darwin revealed was that the beauty and majesty of nature was not in spite of its manifest cruelty, but because of it. That the butterfly is beautiful not because god designed it so, but because a billion times a billion butterflies lived on the brink of starvation and predation, and died usually cruel deaths after short lives.

Nature is an endless ongoing holocaust - and it's not a design flaw, it's one of the fundamental features that makes nature the way it is. Everything depends on it.

Squaring that concept with the idea of a "loving god" - THAT is why people reacted so harshly to Darwin. It's why they're still trying to pretend he was wrong more than a century later.

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Christianity : A god who loves you so much that he'll set fire to you if you don't love him back