Did Darwin Kill God Page #4

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of a wider malaise, a breakdown in

morality not seen since the 1920s.

But the fundamentalist churches

fought back in the way they knew best.

The moral order could only be restored by

return to the literal word of the Bible.

# Well, God told Noah to build an ark

# He said it's gonna rain... #

As if on cue, in 1961, a book was

published called The Genesis Flood.

Written by Henry Morris,

a hydraulics engineer,

and John Whitcomb, a Grace Brethren

elder, the book became a bestseller.

The reason for the success

of The Genesis Flood was that

it claimed to provide a scientific

explanation to back up the Biblical account.

#.. on earth was dead

# But Noah's faith was like a rock

# God laid his ark

on a mountain top. #

I'm curious to find out more,

so I've come to the Creation Museum in Cincinnati,

which promotes the teachings of The Genesis Flood.

'The Lord God drove

out the man from the Garden of Eden.

'Adam was forced to grow food

by the sweat of his brow... '

It's one of the strangest museums

I've ever been to,

with a take on science and history

that I do not recognise.

Since when did being a Christian mean

believing that dinosaurs lived with humans?

I was hoping

Dr Terry Mortenson could tell me.

The basic premise

is the Biblical account

of Noah's flood in Genesis 6:8

is a historically accurate account

of a global catastrophic flood.

We believe that the Bible

is the word of the creator

and he was the eyewitness. Noah

was also an eyewitness to the flood.

The Bible tells us

Adam was created on the sixth day,

and we believe that there are good Biblical reasons

for taking those as literal days, just like our days.

And then the Bible,

in Genesis 5 and Genesis 11

gives us the genealogies

from Adam to Noah, Noah to Abraham,

and if there are no gaps

in those genealogies,

the age of the earth and universe

is about 6000 years.

So how does the book

explain fossils?

OK, well,

fossils are the lithofied remains

of former living creatures.

You can't produce a fossil

unless you bury the creature rapidly,

because - take, for example, the dinosaur -

if it falls over, dies of old age

and lays on the ground,

it won't be fossilised because...

scavengers and decay processes

- the sun beating on the bones, and the rain and...

is gonna just destroy

all the evidence.

So the flood gives us

an explanation for

why we have these massive sedimentary

layers with billions of fossils in them.

Do you think dinosaurs and humans

shared the earth at the same time?

Yes, because dinosaurs are

land animals and Genesis says that

on day six God made the land animals,

so he would have made the dinosaurs.

He had to make 'em sometime, unless

we accept evolution, which we don't.

The Genesis Flood flew in the face

of all scientific evidence.

It undid 100 years of scientific discovery,

and 2000 years of Christian theology.

I'm Christian, but I don't recognise

the creationist view.

They've abandoned a Christian tradition

of seeking deeper truth in the Bible.

By turning Genesis into a science textbook,

they're calling us to worship science,

and in so doing,

we no longer worship God.

They've generated a clash between evolution and

God which wasn't there in the time of Darwin.

But the latest Christian attack

on Darwinism has gone even further.

It claims to be a scientific theory,

and not religion.

It is intelligent design.

Although it appeared in 1987,

it was, in fact,

no more than a resurrection of Paley's

discredited notion of God as a designer.

Scientists the world over reject it,

but for me, it's biggest problem

is what it says about God.

Intelligent design describes a God who

intervenes in the development of life,

making improvements along the way.

But if that's the case,

why does God not intervene

and stop child abuse, stop famine -

indeed, stop genocide?

The God of intelligent design is a supernatural

mechanic who is extremely good at making things,

but appears to be lacking

in morals altogether.

I cannot worship

that idea of a God -

a God who is simply a bigger,

cleverer version of you or me.

For me, God is the source

of the gift of life, of all life.

God is He in whom we live,

move and have our very existence.

And this is what

traditional Christianity tells us.

God is existence itself.

He is the creator of time itself.

So I can see no philosophical conflict

between belief in God as creator,

and our understanding of evolution

as the process through which God

enables all life to unfold.

It is my contention that Darwin's theory of

evolution did not challenge God in the 19th century,

nor did it challenge God in the 20th century

- despite claims made by creationism.

The only reason people thought

it did, was because of the noise,

furore and cacophony

caused by creationists.

But I don't think that creationism is

the true heir to the Christian tradition -

rather they are a modern anomaly, an

aberration, a product of 20th-century anxiety.

And that brings us

into the 21st century.

Today it is not just creationists who

tell us that evolution and God are at war.

Another group of fundamentalists

have entered the debate...

Darwinian fundamentalists.

I'm heading to Boston

to meet someone who believes

that Darwin's theory has killed

the need for God altogether.

He's part of a school of thought which is

referred to as universal - or ultra - Darwinism.

It uses the theory of evolution

to target every notion of God,

especially the Christian God.

Daniel Dennett is one of the world's

most famous atheist philosophers.

He has spent his career

using Darwinism to justify atheism.

I think anybody who understands the

theory of evolution by natural selection

recognises that there's...

no role to play... by a creative God,

an intelligent God,

a benign God of any sort.

According to you,

how do you think evolution works?

It takes no intelligence. It takes no purpose.

It just happens, you might say, automatically.

This is Darwin's great...

inversion.

One of his early critics called it a strange

inversion of reasoning, and it is exactly that.

Until Darwin came along,

everywhere we saw a purpose.

And Darwin showed us that we can

turn that right upside down,

we can have a process... which isn't

smart, isn't intelligent,

isn't trying to do anything.

It's just the unrolling of

the mechanical laws of nature.

Unlike Charles Darwin, ultra-Darwinists

like Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins

claim that evolution

means there cannot be a God.

The basis for this new-found confidence

in atheism is the idea of the selfish gene.

If we recognise

that everything that lives,

whether it's a redwood tree,

or a whale, or a human being...

.. has genes that have been in competition with

other genes for three billion years and counting,

this sheds a lot of light on why

organisms are the way they are.

Think of genes as if they were selfish, as if they

were trying to make more copies of themselves -

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