It will come as no news to readers of The American
Spectator that science is now no longer just science
but has become a religion-substitute for a large number of
Americans. This faith, perhaps, claims even a majority of those
in some other liberal democracies of the West. And if science,
and its political arm, environmentalism, is the new religion,
Charles Darwin is its Christ figure, despised and rejected of
(theist) men and persecuted for the Truth he sought to bring to
set men free of their inherited chains. These are not the bonds
of sin and death but of the superstition and ignorance which
supposes the world to have had any Creator at all or any Redeemer
other than Darwin himself. That is what we mean by myth: a story
that explains the world, whether or not the story happens to be
true, and the Darwinist myth now comes closer to an explanation
that people are prepared to accept than any other since the
Redemptive history in the Christian interpretation of the
Bible.
For this reason Jon Amiel’s Creation, written by
John Collee from a family memoir by Randal Keynes, Darwin’s
great-great-grandson, has something of the odor of piety about it
that has hardly been seen on screen since the days of Cecil B.
DeMille’s Biblical epics. The movie would have us believe that
Charles Darwin (Paul Bettany) lost his always rather uncertain
religious faith on account of the death of his beloved daughter
Annie (Martha West) and only then allowed himself to be persuaded
by a group of hard-line atheist friends, led by T.H. Huxley (Toby
Jones), to finish the long-delayed writing of The Origin of
Species. Furthermore, their ideological interest in his
doing so became his own over time and fully congruent with the
atheistic triumphalism in Huxley’s words of proleptic
appreciation for the Origin: “You have killed God,
Sir.”
That sounds dubious enough, even coming from the historical
Huxley, but then the filmmakers can’t resist making him add:
“Good riddance to the vindictive bugger” — the v.b., that is,
being God. At once we are made aware that we are no longer in
anything that is even meant to look like the 19th century except
in the most superficial ways. Instead, the film is quite
self-consciously taking up the cudgels on behalf of the
Dawkins-Hitchens faction in the theist-antitheist debates of our
own time. The movie-Darwin tentatively protests at first about
how society is held together by religion and, though it is a
frail bark, it nevertheless manages to float; he is also
restrained by the still-powerful religious belief of Mrs. Darwin
(Jennifer Connelly, the real-life Mrs. Bettany) — until she
reads the book in manuscript and urges him to publish it. But in
the end his own atheism is as confirmed as Huxley’s. Or, more to
the point, Richard Dawkins’s.
All the movie’s drama over God versus no-God, in other
words, is just a vulgar invention by the filmmakers, made to make
their hero seem more “relevant” to a tedious public controversy
of our own time than he ever was or could have been in his. It is
as much an anachronism as Huxley’s ungrammatical but unmistakably
21st century colloquial description of a committee “comprised of”
himself and others. A screen card at the beginning informs us
that “Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species has been
described as the biggest idea in the history of thought. This is
the story of how it came to be written.” Does it matter if it is
in fact, as it is in fact, nothing of the kind? Not even
approximately? I don’t know, but I do know it matters that it is,
instead, the story of how that idea has since been put out to
stud by a progressive-minded faction and so made to sire the
politicized science of today.
Writing in the London Review of Books, the
historian of science Steven Shapin
shows how much of last year’s celebration of the
200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth as “Darwin Year” owed to the
political agenda of Professor Dawkins and others who regard
Darwin’s work as the unanswerable proof of the non-existence of
God, even though Darwin himself was never an atheist. “The party
[i.e. Darwin 200] is one in which the present, with its pressing
present concerns, processes fragments of the past in roughly the
same way that assorted blocks of white fish, bulked out with
filler, are processed into fish fingers. Myths have a market;
myth-busting has a small one; setting the historical Darwin in
his Victorian intellectual and social context has practically
none at all.” In other words, this movie is just another bit of
cheerleading in the same cause, and even as propaganda it is
pretty poor stuff.
The human drama naturally centers around the close
relationship between Darwin and the doomed Annie with subplots of
the same tendency involving the Missus’s gradual “conversion” to
Darwinism (and, implicitly, to atheism), a clergyman (Jeremy
Northam) who is comprehensively put down and spurned from him by
Darwin after years of friendship on account of not being
progressive enough, and the great man’s own rather eccentric
notions about taking the “water cure” for his eczema — except
that the movie finds eczema not poetic enough as an ailment for
the great man and hints at a more spiritual sickness requiring
barrels full of cold water to be spilled over him. Between being
dowsed with water and racked with grief, both of which present
Mr. Bettany with opportunities to show his stuff, Darwin finally
arrives at that moment of triumph in his own godlessness that his
atheist followers of today have achieved with considerably less
trouble. What, if anything, that has to do with the actual
Origin of Species or the theory of evolution viewers
will have to supply for themselves.
