Questioning Darwin : A 2014 HBO Documentaries (Questioning Darwin) Full Documentary Movie

Summary

The HBO documentary 'Questioning Darwin' explores the enduring conflict between the scientific theory of evolution and the biblical account of creation. With a focus on Charles Darwin and the implications of his groundbreaking work on evolution by natural selection, the film delves into the impact of these ideas on religious believers. The documentary showcases viewpoints from devout Christians who reject Darwin’s theories in favor of a literal interpretation of the Bible, revealing the tension that exists between faith-based beliefs and scientific evidence. Interviews, historical contexts, and personal stories highlight this ongoing debate, painting a complex picture of how two worldviews collide and coexist today.

Highlights

• Darwin's burial in Westminster Abbey was seen as ironic by some devout Christians. 🏰
• Fossils and geological discoveries in the 19th century challenged traditional biblical timelines. 🦖
• Darwin’s journeys on the HMS Beagle played a crucial role in the development of his evolutionary theories. ⛵
• The emotional turmoil Darwin faced after his daughter Annie's death deepened his skepticism of a benevolent deity. 😢
• The release of 'On the Origin of Species' marked a pivotal moment in both scientific and religious communities. 📚

Key Takeaways

• Charles Darwin's theory of evolution challenges traditional religious beliefs about creation. 🌍
• The documentary details the ongoing conflict between evolution and creationism. 🔄
• Many devout Christians view Darwin's ideas as contradictory to the biblical narrative. 📖
• Darwin himself struggled with reconciling his findings with religious beliefs. 🤔
• The Scopes Trial and Sputnik launch episodes highlight significant moments in the evolution vs. creationism debate. 🚀

Overview

'Questioning Darwin' delves into the intense debate between evolution and biblical creationism, portraying it as a fundamental clash between scientific inquiry and unwavering faith. The documentary presents a narrative where Darwin’s innovative ideas challenge entrenched religious dogmas, shedding light on a conflict that remains relevant in modern discourse.

The film paints a vivid picture of the cultural and philosophical battles that erupted in the aftermath of Darwin's revolutionary theory. Throughout the documentary, viewers witness the fervor of believers who feel their sacred truths threatened, contrasted against the backdrop of scientific exploration and discovery that paints a different origin story altogether.

Interviews and historical segments highlight key moments in this conflict, from the prominence of creationism in the modern evangelical movement to the historic Scopes Trial. By juxtaposing these events with Darwin's personal journey and internal struggles, 'Questioning Darwin' offers a rich, multi-faceted exploration of the intersection between science and faith.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 01:00: Introduction and the Garden of Eden The chapter titled 'Introduction and the Garden of Eden' begins with applause and music, setting a scene of perfection attributed to a place called the Garden of Eden. This garden is described as absolutely perfect. The story of the Garden of Eden originates from the book of Genesis in the Bible.
• 01:00 - 04:00: Christianity vs. Evolution This chapter discusses the conflict between Christian beliefs and the theory of evolution, specifically focusing on Charles Darwin's impact. It highlights that for some Christians who consider the Bible as the literal word of God, Darwin is viewed as the Antichrist. This is because his theory of evolution by natural selection presents a contrasting narrative to the biblical account of creation. The chapter also mentions the controversy surrounding Darwin being buried in Westminster Abbey, a site of significant Christian heritage.
• 04:00 - 13:00: Darwin's Initial Beliefs and Journey In this chapter titled 'Darwin's Initial Beliefs and Journey', the focus is on Darwin's personal reflections regarding his relationship with religion and the clergy. He asserts that he has never directly published work opposing religious institutions or figures. The chapter possibly explores his internal beliefs and the journey that shaped his views.
• 13:00 - 21:00: Darwin's Shifting Views and Personal Struggles The chapter titled 'Darwin's Shifting Views and Personal Struggles' explores how Darwin's perspective on evolution changed over time, reflecting on the intersection between religious beliefs and scientific theories. The narrative includes contrasting viewpoints on creationism rooted in faith versus the theory of evolution attributed to natural processes, which is often perceived as atheistic by some believers. The transcript captures a dialogue that highlights the tension and struggle between accepting religious doctrine and scientific discovery, ultimately delving into Darwin's personal journey navigating these conflicting ideologies.
• 21:00 - 27:00: Darwin's Theory of Evolution This chapter discusses the conflict between Darwin's Theory of Evolution and biblical Christianity. It touches on the perspective that believing in evolution requires more faith than believing in the creation story from the Bible. One of the major questions addressed is whether evolution is compatible with biblical teachings, with the assertion that it is not.
• 27:00 - 42:00: Teaching Evolution and its Challenges The chapter focuses on the challenges of teaching evolution, particularly when juxtaposed with religious beliefs. It underscores the viewpoint that religious texts, specifically the Bible, are the ultimate truth regarding the creation of the world. The narrative emphasizes that God has outlined the order of creation in Genesis, expecting believers to adhere to this account. Key aspects include the belief that God created heaven and earth, brought forth light, and commanded the earth to produce vegetation and the waters to abound with life, all of which are articulated as divine truth in contrast to evolutionary theory.
• 42:00 - 58:00: Darwin's Legacy and Final Thoughts In the chapter 'Darwin's Legacy and Final Thoughts', the narrative explores the theological implications of creation as it echoes the words from Genesis about the creation of life. It highlights the divine command for humanity to be fruitful, multiply, and hold dominion over other living beings on Earth, reflecting on human responsibility and the interconnectedness of life. The chapter suggests a dialogue between Darwin's evolutionary theories and theological creation narratives, concluding with a contemplation of humankind's role and stewardship of nature.

Questioning Darwin : A 2014 HBO Documentaries (Questioning Darwin) Full Documentary Movie Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 [Applause] [Music] there was one place on this earth that was absolutely perfect and it was a garden very good the Garden of Eden and the story that we're gonna hear about on the Garden of Eden comes from the book of Genesis in the what the Bible very good
• 00:30 - 01:00 in the Bible for those Christians who believe their Bible is the Word of God the literal truth one man is held up as the Antichrist Charles Darwin for leading millions of Christians astray with a very different account of creation evolution by natural selection it seems outrageous to them that Darwin was laid to rest here in Westminster
• 01:00 - 01:30 Abbey the highest honor the Church of England could offer [Music] I cannot remember that I have ever published a word directly against religion or the clergy [Music]
• 01:30 - 02:00 [Applause] we believe in creation because of our faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and God's Word the Holy Bible amen evolution I believe is a way for the atheist to devise a method of how we got here and it wasn't by God and it was all by accident if the theory of evolution is a fact
• 02:00 - 02:30 this Bible must be false and we're all stupid ignoramus my friend it takes more faith to believe in a theory an unproven theory than to believe in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth I think one of the major questions we run into today is is evolution really compatible with biblical Christianity and I believe the answer is just unquestionably no there's
• 02:30 - 03:00 no dispute God has determined what is true and he's told us what he did in Genesis the order in which he did it and he expects us to believe it in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth and God said let there be light and God said let the earth bring forth grass the herb yielding seed and the fruit tree yielding fruit and God said let the waters bring forth abundantly
• 03:00 - 03:30 the moving creature that has life and God said let us make man in our image male and female he created them and God said to them be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth
• 03:30 - 04:00 the evening and the morning were the sixth day according to the latest Gallup poll 46% of Americans believe the Genesis account of creation the Lord God
• 04:00 - 04:30 planted a garden in Eden at no time in the past 300 years has there been such a concerted effort in support of a literal interpretation of the Bible and especially the Genesis account of Adam and Eve and a six-day creation the Lord God said it is not good that the man should be alone I will make a helper fit
• 04:30 - 05:00 for him and he took one of his ribs and made it into a woman creationism is the fastest growing branch of Christianity not just here in the United States but worldwide I choose to believe that the Bible is the Word of God and it contains first and second hand witnesses of these events so I can believe it so much more than I can believe the secular scientists who weren't there to see
• 05:00 - 05:30 these things if somewhere within the Bible I were to find a passage that said two plus two equals five I wouldn't question what I'm reading in the Bible I would believe it except it is true and then do my best to work it out and to understand it I can't even fathom coming from this little thing that crawled on the ground to Apes to being human it just doesn't it sounds crazy to me
• 05:30 - 06:00 when you have generations of people being taught at evolutions fact and therefore Genesis is not true and you have to reinterpret the Bible why shouldn't we do what we want to do there's no absolutes therefore we determine what is right and what is wrong in the Creation Museum when we walk into graffiti Alley is to represent a culture where one has taken away a foundation and absolutes so why not abort a human being after all get rid of spare cats
• 06:00 - 06:30 get rid of spare kids what is the difference why shouldn't marriage be two men two women or whatever you want to make it to be I think that Darwin knew I think he knew what I'm teaching is going to have a profound effect on mankind and it's the kind of effect that moves people away from trusting God trusting the God of the Bible into trusting man and the words of man and he made a decision I'm going on with this
• 06:30 - 07:00 [Music] considering how fiercely I've been attacked it seems ludicrous that I once intended to be a clergyman I did not then in the least doubt the strict and literal truth of every word in the Bible and soon persuaded myself that our Creed must be fully accepted I don't believe he did believe all of the Bible he didn't
• 07:00 - 07:30 really believe in six literal days of creation you assume those days of creation are ordinary days and you take those genealogies in the Bible you can only get approximately 6,000 years you can't get millions of years if the idea of millions years hadn't had been popularized in the late 18th early 19th century Darwin could never have popularized his ideas of evolution no person of the first rank in professional geological circles in Darwin's day to whom he was exposed believed that the
• 07:30 - 08:00 earth was very very recently created with life on Earth in six 24-hour days you had to think about the 19th century as a period of enormous digging if you think about the canal systems if you think about the building work the laying of gas they building a railways this is a landscape that was being dug up everywhere fossils were coming up really extraordinary things like mammoths and Plescia sores that gave
• 08:00 - 08:30 evidence of very very early life forms in the very lowest rock strata which people were now beginning to understand as being deep time but also an enormous diversity of species that had that was no longer represented on the earth at all so enormous numbers of extinct species and people had to make sense of that and you couldn't make sense of it within the timeframe that the church was
• 08:30 - 09:00 promoting Darwin didn't work with any geologist who doubted that the earth was unimaginably old and full of the relics of extinct animals at Cambridge his role models were clerical natural ists these men were devout they were ethically upright they were professionally ambitious and they did science for the glory of God and it was from them Darwin learnt his ambition in
• 09:00 - 09:30 science and then came his chance to sail round the world on HMS Beagle [Music] which took five years started just three months after it graduated from Cambridge when he really was rather idly wondering what to do with his life he was invited on board not as a naturalist but as the gentleman companion to the captain the voyage of the Beagle was the most
• 09:30 - 10:00 important voyage ever taken while I find reading Darwin's own accounts is his excitement his delight his love in the natural world he was in a kind of paradise among the scenes which have deeply impressed on my mind none exceeded in sublimity the primeval forests under faced by the hand of man temples filled with the varied
• 10:00 - 10:30 productions of the god of nature no one can stand in these solitudes unmoved and not filled there is more to man than the mere breath of his body in this voyage which was nearly five years the longest stretch of time Darwin spent on board was I think 48 days and he never wasted an opportunity as soon as the ship came into pods he'd buy a horse rent a horse sometimes with companions sometimes on
• 10:30 - 11:00 his own and go up high into the foothills of the Andes or around the coast looking at coastal formations into deserts all the time describing describing describing noting it down he regarded it as his duty to do this this was why he was there and he wasn't going to waste an hour of his time idling around he must go and explore that rock face and see what he could find there Darwin wasn't just interested in the cost of the earth and
• 11:00 - 11:30 the formation of its features he was interested in the remains of life within that crust extinct animals every new landscape that he saw every new bit of scenery every new diversity of species group gave him more and more evidence that no this didn't happen in one great snap of creation these extraordinary mountains and lakes and coastal landscapes had all shifted imperceptibly
• 11:30 - 12:00 over millions and millions of years but while all this was happening Darwin was experiencing profound changes within himself Darwin has left the comforts of his upper-class English existence and for the first time in his life he was faced with extraordinary violence and cruelty when he was in Chile there was a major earthquake and his whole comprehension of the world
• 12:00 - 12:30 changed the solid earth our foundation of our life is shattering and as he later discovers in a day or so later in concepción there's been huge suffering the cathedral at concepción has collapsed burying in its rubble many devout worshippers he must began to think there's something arbitrary here this is not a loving God
• 12:30 - 13:00 probably the most shattering episode during the voyage was his encounter with slavery he had read all about slavery Darwin had and then on the Beagle voyage he set foot in Brazil and he saw it in the raw torn flesh he encountered instruments of torture he saw grown men
• 13:00 - 13:30 cowering in fear he saw children abused by their masters he was profoundly affected by what some humans were capable of doing to other humans who they regarded as animals it makes one's blood boil yet heart tremble to think that we Englishmen and our American descendants with their boastful cry of liberty have been and are so guilty
• 13:30 - 14:00 [Music] Darwin's empathy was for all suffering creatures I cannot see as plainly as others do and as I should wish to do evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us there seems to me too much misery in the world I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have
• 14:00 - 14:30 design idli created the if new mana dine with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars or that a cat should play with mice [Music] now if his professors had taught him that this world is not the way it used to be that it changed because of sin maybe if he had been taught the truth about the history in Genesis he would have responded differently to the death and suffering issue we are burying
• 14:30 - 15:00 bearing the brunt of Adam's sin and it's very difficult and the Lord tells us to love each other and bear each other's burdens and that's what we try to do here at Haven of arrest God cares for us give your cares let God deal with those cares Jesus says I'm the resurrection of life he who believes in Me yet though he
• 15:00 - 15:30 died he shall live do you believe that he will save you we have about 170 people come in here for dinner a large percentage of those asked for shelter as well those are the ones that are truly homeless so many of them have been through sexual abuse neglect you have
• 15:30 - 16:00 turned to alcohol and drugs for who knows what reason some of them have even shared with us that this is a last resort a lot of people ask how a loving God can allow so many evil and painful things to happen I don't believe there is any clear-cut answer because we don't understand the mind of God for one thing however the
• 16:00 - 16:30 Lord does not do things without a purpose some of the trials we go through will strengthen us and give us wisdom we don't usually learn strength and wisdom and faith through having it easy we learn the most through trials but also we live in a fallen world back in Genesis it talks about how it didn't start out that way but because of the
• 16:30 - 17:00 decision that man made because the angel of light Lucifer was there in tempted him we live in a fallen world now and so these awful things do happen all the death and suffering we see here isn't a result of a Creator God it's sin
• 17:00 - 17:30 that's the cause of what we see here so the whole point of this room is to get across to Christians and non-christians it's not God's fault there's death and suffering in the world it's our fault because we sinned in Adam after all that he had experienced Darwin could no longer accept a simple biblical explanation for cruelty and suffering but by now something else was taking shape in his mind something much more dangerous in September 1835 four years
• 17:30 - 18:00 after leaving England the Beagle dropped anchor of some little-known islands the Galapagos [Music] here we seem to be brought somewhere near to that great fact the mystery of mysteries the first appearance of new beings on this earth what Darwin noticed
• 18:00 - 18:30 most of all was that the animals and plants on the Galapagos were rather like the animals and plants on the mainland of South America but there was slightly different from them now it was just being on islands that made them different Cape Verde's and Galapagos should have looked the same but they didn't they looked more like their neighbors why was that Darwin realized what must have happened is that a small sample of creatures including many birds and the like reached these new
• 18:30 - 19:00 conditions and changed slowly over time in other words they'd evolved at that time he'd no idea how or why [Music] as he catalogued his species on the journey home he scribbled the first tentative notes on the possibility of evolution if there's the slightest foundation for these remarks the zoology of the
• 19:00 - 19:30 archipelago's would be well worth examining for such facts would undermine the stability of the species evolution was a dangerous idea and only bad people such as French atheists materialists free thinkers would dare to speculate that species had naturally arisen in the course of time he knew that he had to
• 19:30 - 20:00 confine his thoughts to private notebooks and it would take seven years of intensive research before he felt ready to write to a trusted friend at last gleams of light have come and I'm almost convinced quite contrary to the opinion I started with that species are not immutable it is like confessing a murder what he has done is worse than
• 20:00 - 20:30 murder I am saddened for Charles Darwin being led astray from the real truth and and leading so many others astray with his philosophies and doctrines and theology I think one of the saddest uh byproducts if you will of the theory of evolution is that it reduces our status as human beings to that of an animal we did not evolve out of something that is less important God created man on the sixth day created us separately created us distinctly
• 20:30 - 21:00 [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music]
• 21:00 - 21:30 man may be excused for feeling some pride at having risen they're not through his own exertions to the very summit of the organic scale and the fact of his having thus risen it may give him hopes for a still higher destiny in the distant future [Music] [Applause] the Bible said we are created a little lower than angels which is much more noble and majestic than the explanation that evolution
• 21:30 - 22:00 gives for who we are and what we are [Music] we can create solids we can write books we can do these things to the glory of God the Bible even says the Angels can't have the same relationship that we can have with God
• 22:00 - 22:30 I do not believe that we are some sort of a highly evolved primate I don't know how someone could observe humans and miss the dignity that's put there by God alone man and his arrogance thinks himself a great work worthy of the interposition of a deity more humbled and I believe
• 22:30 - 23:00 truer to consider him created from animals [Music] [Applause] [Music] the main conclusion that man is descended from some lowly organized form will I regret be highly distasteful to many it has been asserted that man alone
• 23:00 - 23:30 is capable of progressive improvement that he alone makes use of tools that no animal employs language has a sense of beauty the feeling of gratitude but they are endowed with well-marked social instincts parental and filial affection and would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience as soon as intellectual powers have become nearly as well-developed as in learned to put
• 23:30 - 24:00 man down as just an animal that were no different than a dog a horse an elephant or a cat or anything else is totally preposterous God made us in His image and so to say that man is ilysm animal and God created man in his own image so does one come back and say are you saying God has nothing more than an animal in the seven years that it took Darwin
• 24:00 - 24:30 to reach his murderous conclusion his life changed completely in 1839 he married his cousin Emma Wedgwood they had a marriage of 43 years of great mutual respect great tenderness and that stayed the same even though Darwin moved further and further away from Emma's beliefs and her Christian certainties eventually they would have ten children seven of whom survived into
• 24:30 - 25:00 adulthood two years into their marriage Charles and Emma moved here to down house 18 miles from London where they would spend the rest of their lives together down house was far more important to Darwin as a scientific arena thermistors and the Galapagos are eating the whole of South America and Dean because there he could settle down and get to work in order to be a great scientist you have to devote your entire
• 25:00 - 25:30 life to science twenty-four hours a day seven days a week and Darwin did that he worked mana clean it was a constant pulse war card collapse work hard collapse tik-tok through the years [Music] his house became a menagerie full of not just noisy growing children out of
• 25:30 - 26:00 growing plants all over the place and noisy animals and dead and alive and boxes of things coming in the post and ladders pouring through into the letterbox and all being presided over at home by the domestic goddess which was Emma freeing him to work hard in his study she made an environment in which he could work obsessively on his big project for 20 years and more he had greenhouses in which his gardener
• 26:00 - 26:30 was cooperating with him breeding programs on plants he was collecting stuff coming in from all over the world he was asking people to send him specimens which he would look at his correspondence with other scientists across the world is gigantic it's flabbergasting his letter writing and the letters he was getting back with people giving him Evan he's writing to Muller in Brazil can you give me evidence on these crabs which I believe
• 26:30 - 27:00 will exist on your Shores oh it's extraordinary and he's collecting all this together well aware that he will be attacked by religious people and by other scientists who think that this is fanciful I determined to collect every sort of fact that could bear in any way on what our species and have never ceased collecting facts when he was working he was not doing just one thing at a time he was doing his species he
• 27:00 - 27:30 was dissecting all the barnacles in the world he was keeping animal carcasses he was doing experiments with flowers in the kitchen garden he was raising pigeons and on and on it went [Music] he decided to make a collection of fancy pigeons because they showed the most extraordinary artists created just in a few generations he then compared them
• 27:30 - 28:00 and crossbred them and all to explore how man can change organisms by selective breeding if feeble man can achieve all these variations in so short a time by artificial selection I can see no limit to the amount of change to the beauty and infinite complexity which may be
• 28:00 - 28:30 affected in the long course of time by nature's power of selection he needed to gather the evidence think through everything and work it up into a theory that he could present for serious attention by fellow scientists I have steadily endeavored to keep my mind free so as to give up any hypothesis however much beloved as soon as the facts are
• 28:30 - 29:00 shown to be opposed to it I feel within me an instinct for truth there is only one truth and truth is not an assimilation of information but there's one truth and that's found in the Bible jesus said I'm the way the truth and the life no man comes to the Father but by me if all we are is a product of this random mutation process then where does morality come from where does Hope come
• 29:00 - 29:30 from where does love come from where where does anything that makes us a human being really come from I think Darwin was the first to understand where his ideas were leading him he had no illusions about how dangerous this work was or what conclusions it might lead to once grant that species may pass into each other and the whole fabric Tata's and falls we allow planets suns whole
• 29:30 - 30:00 systems of the universe to be governed by laws but the smallest insect we wish to be created at once by a special act with its instincts in place Darwin says no we do not believe that God individually causes the planets to go in orbits we should not believe that he individually creates animals and plants these things take place by laws ordained to govern the creation an innocent and
• 30:00 - 30:30 good man stands under a tree and is killed by a flash of lightning do you believe that God design Italy killed this man or when a swallow snaps up a note that God designed that I can't and don't Darwin's view is that God isn't really needed in the here and now he may exist he may well have designed an ordered creation but he basically lets it go on his way what that does it puts
• 30:30 - 31:00 God so remote that we can safely ignore him he's way back at the Big Bang and he really hasn't done much sense and here's another issue we need to think about what's more basic to Christianity than prayer prayer is a case where we actually have an opportunity and are invited to do so by our Father to speak
• 31:00 - 31:30 to God why I bother pursuing a relationship with God if he's if he's closed the door on us and doesn't care about us anymore to think that I had no communication with God would be so devastating I can't even imagine adopting such a view just to make peace with Darwin if that's the way the world works if it is just this mechanical thing that God set spinning in place then you believe in a God that doesn't intervene in nature that takes away any
• 31:30 - 32:00 possibility of miracles any possibility of answered prayer any possibility of the resurrection and in in reality you take away the possibility of Christianity to be true at all [Music] Christ me chapel started about 30 years ago with about 30 people gathering in a living room and from that we have grown to five different campuses that all operators one church we average a
• 32:00 - 32:30 weekend attendance of probably around in 4,000 to 4,500 people since the 1990s the number of megachurches in the United States has increased fourfold we have a lot of outreach going on overseas I think we are probably involved in 30 different countries in the Middle East and the Far East across world in South America and Africa here in the States the only growing
• 32:30 - 33:00 branch of Christianity I think is evangelical biblical Christianity that is faithful to the scriptures [Music] I think people are longing for truth for
• 33:00 - 33:30 something that they can sink their teeth into and that answers the deep questions of their souls and that's what biblical Christianity is offering now everybody has to come up with a reason for the world being in the mess that it that it's in right now that explanation for Christians happens in Genesis the flood everything in Genesis plays itself out throughout the entire rest of the scripture so if you take out or change Genesis to mean something else
• 33:30 - 34:00 to do something else you begin to eviscerate to gut the gospel message and the whole of Christianity there was only one being that really knows you from cover to cover knows everything you have ever done and every motive you have ever had and then it can deliver a verdict of whether you are okay or not okay and that's God God knows us intimately well
• 34:00 - 34:30 inside and now from the top of my head to the bottom of my feet the number of hairs on my head and that's the privilege of having a relationship with him that he is in every aspect every part of our movement day in and day out and we have this living relationship with him I can't imagine life without knowing that God has a plan and that that plan is not just for the here and
• 34:30 - 35:00 now but that plan includes a hope and a future and a future way beyond whatever we'll face here on earth but a future of him in heaven when my boys were 10 and 7 and 2 I found out after having a series of lumps and bumps in my body that I had ignored that I had non-hodgkins lymphoma and I remember the dread in that doctor's eyes when he told me that it was stage 3 and possibly stage 4 if I
• 35:00 - 35:30 only had a few days to live it would be hard it would be difficult there would be tears but I would know without a shadow of a doubt that I have a faithful God who loves me and had a plan for me we even shared with our boys that Mommy could get sicker and tried to help them to know that if I did die that God would still be God and that
• 35:30 - 36:00 he would still be faithful that was hard but we we did it in his strength I was prostituting in every single street here in Akron alleys abandoned houses jumping in and out of cars with complete strangers doing unthinkable sexual acts for money so that I was able to pay for crack I smoked away every dream in hope to a point where I thought
• 36:00 - 36:30 that I was just worthless I started to use marijuana in Vietnam and started with that and then I started to use opiates back when I got home morphine and then that turned into hair Ron and I soon have promised up with a habit and that habit demon king became the lord of my life and I remember one night being on Broad Street and I was screaming out to God to kill me or save me but don't
• 36:30 - 37:00 let me live like this anymore it was a horrible place and so I just very sincerely went and I said God it's got to be more to life than this and if you're real would you make yourself real to me he removed my addiction on the spot he healed me that's exactly what started bringing me up out of that
• 37:00 - 37:30 darkness it was that the love that he has for me it's amazing and I felt I felt like a new creature I know he's real I know he lives within me I know he's the best thing that ever happened to me it never happened to this world and now it is my privilege to share that and proclaim that to every man woman boy and girl there's good news and there's hope I would love to encourage mr. Darwin and
• 37:30 - 38:00 others that feel just like him to try God and see the transformation for themselves if I were asked what is the primary reason I believe evolution is incompatible with biblical Christianity I could sum it up in one word for you death if you want add pain suffering and
• 38:00 - 38:30 death I know a little about this I lost my first wife to cancer and now my second wife has cancer and so do I whether we're young or old to death is inevitable and how do we deal with death how does evolution deal with death it was a question Darwin would have to face himself in his early 40s he and Emma loved all their children or there was one it was especially precious to them their eldest daughter Annie Annie was a
• 38:30 - 39:00 delightful child liable amenable loving she loved to touch her parents to be caressed to be held to plot their hair to touch their arms she was sensitive to their feelings just before her tenth birthday Annie fell seriously ill Darwin took her to the spa town of mall friend and the
• 39:00 - 39:30 doctor he credited with saving his own life when he was in a critical condition two years earlier he left her there in the care of dr. gulley and hurried back to Emma who was heavily pregnant with their eighth child and in no condition to take the 150 mile journey from down house to Malvern two weeks later Darwin was summoned back to face an agonizing crisis it is now from hour to
• 39:30 - 40:00 hour a struggle between life and death oh my own it is very bitter indeed and he died at Easter 1851 this was a watershed because Darwin no longer felt it possible afterwards to believe in a good loving Christian God this is for him the final nail in his Christian coffin here's the
• 40:00 - 40:30 conflict God is good god is all-powerful horrific catastrophic tragedy takes place so how can all these things be true every 17 years old and she was an automobile accident and has since been unable to regain the use of her legs it's not able to breathe on her own or
• 40:30 - 41:00 eat I'm the doctor but I think God would have to move for Abby to walk again streams of Mercy never ceasing call for songs of loudest praise teach me some melodious sonnet sung by flaming tongues above I'll praise the mount I wish
• 41:00 - 41:30 someone of us could sing we can all sing we just can't sing good you can everyone so we don't make any sense of this I don't know how he could we couldn't agree that she's done anything to deserve this it's a horrible thing we're going through but there is no way we could do it without God's presence there's absolutely no way we are so weak
• 41:30 - 42:00 but he is strong and he is holding us up every day we don't understand the timing but we do understand his presence we know that all things will come to good we don't know how I can't understand how this could be for Abbey's good I trust that somehow it is we have no
• 42:00 - 42:30 doubt God is a good God a loving God you will never leave us or forsake us and he is a plan for her and I firmly believe he is going to use her life as a testimony and there already have been a lot of people touched by her Heather and my wife said I'm praying and praying and praying for Abbey and nothing's happening and nothing's changing why
• 42:30 - 43:00 would I pray to God who knows the Lord may choose to be merciful he might hear our cry and relent but if he doesn't no matter what happens I still believe that God wants the best for his people I don't know how people without God can survive things like this I don't know how they could I
• 43:00 - 43:30 couldn't I couldn't do it but Darwin there was no such consolation there was no comfort to be had in a God who would reconcile him to his daughter in another life or in the notion that there was a purpose to her death and he was inconsolable he tried to avoid the pain of Anna's death by concentrating on his species theory but there was a
• 43:30 - 44:00 darkness that started to permeate his writing Darwin was not a well man ever since he had begun working on evolution because he knew what a disreputable thing he was doing and yet he didn't intend to be disreputable he was afraid of being misunderstood it tore him apart Emma was his protector Emma made it possible for him to get on with what he cared most about which was this this enormous burden this this vision of
• 44:00 - 44:30 nature this vision of God's creation which he was determined to put to the Victorian world and hope they would accept On the Origin of Species was first published on November 24th 1859 it's never been out of print since people realized that when the origin came out in November 1859 this was serious substantial and something to be reckoned with and it sold out instantly I think
• 44:30 - 45:00 the most striking thing about the book in fact is that the reaction is much more muted and appreciative then I think legend would have it this was not an idea that you could ignore because Darwin had presented it so well and with so much evidence that it demanded a verdict and certainly within about 5 to 10 years most educated people in Britain including those of a religious persuasion and quite often those of an Orthodox religious persuasion are
• 45:00 - 45:30 convinced that species have evolved in the United States the book was published on the eve of the great civil war and by the turn of the 20th century evolution and its experts were well established in American higher education it was one thing when scientists were just debating it among themselves well you know scientists were always theorizing about things but when it was thrust upon you one was being talked to school kids as the you know the cutting edge of science that it really became a public flashpoint evolution came under attack
• 45:30 - 46:00 by a distinguished American politician named William Jennings Bryan he believed evolution was unamerican he believed it was immoral it was corrupting and must not be taught to American school students and Bryan's crusade it was called a crusade really reached a climax in the summer of 1925 in a small town in Dayton Tennessee where a local school teacher was put up to admit that he had taught evolution in
• 46:00 - 46:30 violation of a state statute and so it happened William Jennings Bryan prosecute John Thomas Scopes for teaching evolution Clarence Darrow the great defense attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union to defend scopes from fundamentalism so you suddenly you had this clash of these two you know brilliant and famous oratories Darrow and Brian and that was when it exploded into this huge media sensation the Scopes trial was a circus
• 46:30 - 47:00 circus performers came and brought their chimpanzees film crews showed up radio station had a live outside broadcast from the courtroom and the issue was whether Brian and his popular constituency were to have jurisdiction over professional scientists the jury were mostly illiterate local gentlemen
• 47:00 - 47:30 [Music] the result of the Scopes trial was that scopes was convicted and he was fined $100 but the real effect of the Scopes trial was simply that evolution largely disappeared forever from public school science classes that's why II the anti evolution sentiment itself largely died down over the next few decades if there
• 47:30 - 48:00 was a single event that brought Darwin's theory back into the spotlight it was the launch of Sputnik on the 4th of November 1957 [Music] the cultural impact of Sputnik is hard to exaggerate at that time of course you know there that the Cold War was just getting going and people were very worried about this the United States I think my god the you know the the
• 48:00 - 48:30 Russians beat us into space and this was considered a serious indictment of the American educational system we were falling behind in science there was a renewed interest in science education as a result of this and one effect of that renewed interest was redesigning curricula to be used in high school science classes and this involved teaching advanced physics and it involved teaching evolution as the framework for understanding life sciences when the Russians launched their Sputnik it was a challenge to the
• 48:30 - 49:00 scientific community to the government of the United States there was a panic in the scientific community of America hey we're supposed to be leading edge here we got to catch up we got to get ahead science almost became God in our country and so they started shoveling all kinds of money into scientific endeavors [Music]
• 49:00 - 49:30 but behind that all was this idea that Darwinism is correct also the huge programs to bring biology teaching into the American school system awoke effectively something of a sleeping tiger for the first time in history creationists fought back using an entirely new tactic they would fight science with science Orthodox science with creation science the Bible reveals
• 49:30 - 50:00 that God created all the animal and plant kinds in the beginning and we're now learning that God placed a huge amount of information within each created kind allowing them to diversify into the myriad of plants and animals we see today this is not evolution its creation by an all-knowing all-powerful infinitely wise Creator
• 50:00 - 50:30 [Music] further up we see a massive grouping of galaxies called the Virgo cluster it contains over 2,000 galaxies and is 50 million light years away from Earth critics of the Bible have suggested that it is impossible for the light from these galaxies to reach Earth in only 6,000 years but in fact there
• 50:30 - 51:00 are several different ways to get light to travel these distances in a short period of time these include gravitational time dilation alternate synchrony conventions and others many scientists contend that dinosaurs died off over 60 million years before humans came to be the possibility that humans and dinosaurs ever coexisted
• 51:00 - 51:30 is unthinkable to them but what does the Bible say the Bible makes it very clear that God created land animals on day six dinosaurs will land animals therefore Adam and Eve and dinosaurs lived hand-in-hand they live together from just reading Genesis you get the idea of a perfect world no death no disease animals man the dinosaurs were all vegetarian now the fossil record it's a
• 51:30 - 52:00 record of death it's a record of animals eating each other it's a record of disease because there are dinosaur bones with brain tumors but you can't have dinosaurs with brain chrimbus and dinosaurs eating each other until after sin so if dinosaurs lived alongside humans and Noah even brought pairs of young dinosaurs with him on the ark what happened to them where did they
• 52:00 - 52:30 all go well dragon legends are found in many cultures and traditions all around the world so it is hardly surprising that the world would be filled with legends of heroes like st. George and their encounters with mighty beasts [Music] if the only way you can make your belief persist is to lie to children which is what creations do about the age of the earth and things of that major if that's
• 52:30 - 53:00 the only way this thing can persist it's not worth it it should disappear there is so much evidence to show that what Darwin saw in outline to be true is infinitely true on every single level how miraculous it is that this man in the middle of the 19th century was able to see in broad outline what we can now see in infinite complexity has been so much advancement in science you know our understanding of DNA the genome our
• 53:00 - 53:30 kinship with animals if you are going to throw evolution away you have to throw all of that away we have eyes we have ears we were given those by God potentially why would we have been misled and not only us as individuals but why would hundreds of thousands millions of people would have taken these questions very seriously why would they all have been misled as well we're very aware of how much evolution is taught in the public school setting so
• 53:30 - 54:00 that's why we like to home-school can you show me on the timeline where he is he's right here okay okay and what what word that we use today came from his name in modern English martyr means somebody who's killed for the sake of Christ we do need to shield our kids from what's going on in the world and help them to be able to defend their faith gladiator fights dramas and as a
• 54:00 - 54:30 slaughtering house for Christians who would not tonight Jesus so all of these people were witnessing the slaughter of multiple Christians and watching gruesome things such as gladiators fighting each other to the death I'm sure that they will be attacked when they go out into the world when they're older and they're in the workforce one of our children is very interested in science Nero was the first emperor to start the major person
• 54:30 - 55:00 of the Christians we warned our son that there are going to be many people who are not going to agree that God created this world in six literal days they're gonna tell him it's a fairy tale he needs to have strong faith and believe God's Word to be able to defend that later it used to be that there were there was a three-legged stool the family taught what the school's taught
• 55:00 - 55:30 what the church taught now you have in our church you have families and church teaching one thing and you have schools teaching another thing oftentimes what I'm dealing with young people especially people who are about to graduate out of high school go off to college I tell them that they're going to face significant opposition to what they believe as far as their understanding and love for the Word of God you read headlines and you watch television and the overwhelming current
• 55:30 - 56:00 is belief in evolution are you threatened by it or do those those arrows kind of do they wear do they wear you down I absolutely believe that God had a controlling hand over my creation and over the creation of the earth and in the creation of all things and there's nothing that the secular world can say to shake that I was raised and I believe that the Bible is fact so if something's gonna collide with it then it's obviously incorrect and false I
• 56:00 - 56:30 think sometimes our culture has like overly heaven have a heavy reliance on like science Christianity is is more than science and scientific proof have you guys ever been in a situation where you've been articulating your faith and it was met with mockery she never surprised us that we were mocked or hated by the world I mean Christ said that this would happen and it's happening so I have to say and I'm willing to say you know that the first
• 56:30 - 57:00 11 chapters of Genesis are true incorrect because it's it's it's God's Word you know if one could imagine Darwin sitting down in that in a lovely sunny garden with those young people I think he would quite quickly in in a much more interesting series of conversations about the world and about being and the nature of creation and evolution and so on which I'm sure they would find absolutely fascinating but he wouldn't be giving them the answers he
• 57:00 - 57:30 would be asking them questions Darwin himself never stopped asking questions about his science and about God in my most extreme fluctuations I have never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of God I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect a dog might just as well speculate on the mind of Newton it was
• 57:30 - 58:00 the final humble admission from one of the greatest minds of all time on April 26 1882 thousands gathered here at Westminster Abbey for the funeral of Charles Darwin the American ambassador Russell Lowell was one of the pallbearers reflecting on Darwin's life the Bishop of Carlisle told the mourners there need be no conflict between the
• 58:00 - 58:30 study of nature and belief in God [Music] [Applause] [Music]