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Creation

Paul Bettany, Jennifer Connelly, Jeremy Northam

In April 1882, Charles Darwin, bedridden for several months, lay on his deathbed at his home, the Down House. Forty year old Lady Elizabeth Reid Hope, a famous British evangelist and temperance movement leader, paid a visit to the elderly naturalist. She found him dressed in an embroidered, purple dressing gown staring out the window at the woods and cornfields that were just on the outskirts of his estate. In one of his hands he held a Bible open to the “Letter to the Hebrews.” He remarked to her that he had been studying the book for some time now. Much like Philip and the eunuch, she helped guide the sickly man through various passages and then preached to him the grandeur of God’s creation and of His word. The sickly old man became troubled as she overwhelmed him with her arguments and insights. Moved, he asked her to speak of Jesus Christ to his friends and family and that he became animated with love and joy for his Lord and Savior. Not only had he rejected his theory of evolution, but found rest in the everlasting arms of the Almighty.

It is a wonderful story, beautiful, dare I say almost angelic. You can almost picture the sickly old man, with his white beard, seeing the errors of his ways. There is little wonder that it has been told thousands of times in pulpits across the world. Problem is, it is utter bunk, at best an exaggeration, more likely a lie put out by an elderly woman in 1915 who wanted a greater legacy than she merited. Darwin’s son Francis and daughter Henrietta, who were present with their father during his last few days of his life, claim the story was a falsehood. Even if there is a modicum of accuracy to this tale, when facing the darkness of death, there is a terror that might cause anyone to say or do anything so that they might find that loophole that gets them through the eye of the needle, whether he or she believe it or not. Equally, we have all been confronted by a pest, that we are willing to say anything, because you do not want a conflict, particularly if we are not feeling well, to make them go away. Yet, Christians and biographers of Darwin have desperately wanted this tale to be true. Why is it so important?

Two hundred years after Charles Darwin’s death, only 39 percent of Americans believe in evolution. Of the remaining portion of the pie, most have no opinion at all, but 25 percent of Americans believe the theory of evolution to be hokum and intellectual magic beans. We are the only industrialized nation to stubbornly fight Darwin’s insight. For the most part, even though it is like a man eating a hamburger who claims not to believe in cows, it does not matter. I, like most Americans, cannot explain how most of the modern comforts that surround me, like my ipod, television, computer, etc., works. They just do. I could believe that magic elves drinking gasoline live under the hood of my car, and as long as it gets me where I am going and I have a mechanic who knows the truth, everything works out. Scientists are the mechanics of our society and as long as India keeps on sending them our way, it is alright that a large percentage of Americans are fat, happy, ignorant and full of cheese puffs, are watching “American Idol.” It does not matter that the secrets of the genome and the decoding of DNA have confirmed Darwin quite apart from the fossil record. A lot of Americans want to believe that the Flintsones are a biopic.

Given that we are the children of the scientific revolution and of a 2000 year old book, it is certainly a strange marriage and maybe that is the best way to understand the relationship between science and religion. As I have said frequently, science can tell us everything about life except what makes life worth living and that is the realm of theology and philosophy. Love cannot be found on the elemental table. Beauty is nowhere in a test tube. Good and evil are absent from a Petri dish. Poetry is not dressed in a white coat. Two separate realms. Yet, neither seems happy with this relationship. One side states how something happened. The other states the truth of what has happened. A marriage made in hell, but a marriage all the same, and Christians keep on eating their hamburgers.

I was so interested in catching this biopic on the marriage of Charles Darwin and his devoted Christian wife Emma. While his bulldogs picked up the cause, for the most part, Darwin avoided open fights with Christians and kept his beliefs to himself. Early in his life, mainly under pressure from his father, Charles had studied to be a parson. But as Darwin himself noted, "Thus disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but at last was complete. The rate was so slow that I felt no distress, and have never since doubted even for a single second that my conclusion was correct."

Emma was Charles’ first cousin and had known him since they were children. After several rejections, at the age of 30, she finally accepted Darwin’s proposal of marriage. For the most part, the couple seemed to have a happy life together in the rural village of Down, well as happy as you can be with ten children running around. Like all of us they had their problems, Charles battled a mysterious illness throughout their marriage and many of those around the Darwins credit her patience and nursing ability with helping Charles to continue his scientific research and writing. The couple also lost three of their children. The death of 10-year-old Annie, the second child and eldest girl, of scarlet fever was particularly hard on Charles as she was the apple of her father’s eye. Charles acknowledged as much when he said, "We have lost the joy of the household, and the solace of our old age ... Oh that she could now know how deeply, how tenderly we do still and shall ever love her dear joyous face.” Yet, there was a rub in their marriage. Emma was deeply religious, actively involved in her church, even helping the parson’s wife met the needs of the poor, sick, and elderly of the community. In turn, Charles’ theory and Agnostic religious outlook became a major source of contention in the marriage, particularly after Annie’s death. The fact that his religious outlook concerned his wife greatly pained him and he tried as gently as he could to communicate his thoughts.

Dry English period piece, involving emotions and deep thoughts, with no action sequences, those words pretty much sum up if this movie is meant for you. For the most part, Jennifer Connelly has rarely gone for the big payday (Dark Water and The Hulk are exceptions) and done quality work in quality films. (One of the most underrated love stories in the last few years was her movie Waking The Dead.) She continues that trend here with her real-life husband Paul Bettany.

I love movies like this because they are simple stories that entertain us for a couple of hours. Real life is a lot of things, but simple is not one of them. As much as I want the world to be a Dr. Phil existence with clean-cut lines and easy answers, it is not the case. When you research, really study, the theory of evolution, it is a wonderful and complicated journey. Like a detective, when you let the facts speak for themselves, the genome and the fossil record, a person has to admit that something is there, that evolution really happens. What it means to your philosophical and religious outlook is a story that takes more space than we have here, or could even write for that matter. Nietzsche could not escape his Lutheran upbringing and Mother Teresa was filled with doubt about the truth of the story she was living out. It’s the same for you or me.

Verdict: Academy Award Material For Acting