The Atlanta Creation Group has the distinct honor of being the first organization in Atlanta to premier the film, The Voyage that Shook the World. Join us on Thursday, May 14 at 7:00 pm to see this incredible documentary on Charles Darwin.

A new film that could shake large numbers out of their evolution-based complacency to considering the God of the Bible.

 by Carl Wieland

For months now, humanist and atheist groups have been celebrating 2009 as the ‘year of Charles Darwin’, parading  him as a hero of science.

To help Christians make a powerful stand, Creation Ministries International has released a high- quality big-budget documentary, The Voyage That Shook the World.

Produced by CMI’s subsidiary, Fathom Media, and using both in house and consultant professionals of a high level of experience and expertise, the film is framed around a retracing of Darwin’s voyage on HMS Beagle.  

The primary purpose of this 52-min high-definition ‘docu-movie’ is to move the creation/evolution debate into the secular mainstream and to break down some of the seemingly impenetrable barriers of evolutionary prejudice.

The Voyage has been produced with world TV networks in mind and their viewing audiences of millions. Followup DVD sales to believers to use with their non-Christian connections could then add greatly to the numbers potentially reached. 

Designed for modern secular audiences, The Voyage has deliberately avoided a polemical path in favour of a thoughtful questioning approach. And it does not engage in gratuitous “Darwin-bashing”—this complex individual, who was in fact right about many things, is treated with dignity, but not deference. 

The historical framework in which the film is set also allows it to make bold reference (often from the mouths of secular science historians) to Genesis, the Flood, recent creation, our descent from Adam and Eve—but in such a way as to add to the assembling jigsaw without the sense of having things rammed down the viewer’s throat. The viewer is taken on a thinking ‘voyage’, one that clearly indicates that Darwin’s theory of evolution has not resolved the issues. It subtly challenges the viewer to consider the Bible’s account as being the better explanation, after all.

The film features stunning on-site nature footage from around the world, period drama re-enactments, and interviews with worldclass experts from e.g. Harvard, Cambridge and so on.  It also features scientists from both the creationist and ‘ID’ movements. 

 If Darwin had known what we now know…

The film also highlights the fact that Darwin saw himself early on as more of a geologist than a biologist.  His ‘Bible’ on the voyage was Lyell’s Principles of Geology (with its long ages of time displacing the Flood in Earth history).  As a prominent evolutionary academic reinforces in the film, Lyell out to destroy the idea that Genesis was real history.

As we revisit the sites Darwin saw, we find repeatedly that his conviction about Lyell’s ‘deep time’ (so crucial to Darwin’s theory) is not scientifically sustainable.

For example, we examine the upright fossil trees in South America which Darwin thought had grown in place and been subject to slow up-and-down movement of the land over millions of years.  The documentary examines these trees in the field, revealing definitive evidence that they did not grow in place at all, but were torn off and deposited catastrophically.

Out of their own mouths… 

Interestingly, some of the most telling statements come from the lips of the evolutionist experts themselves. For example, Darwin’s racism; his tendency from an early age to invent big imaginary stories; and the way in which evolution, by undermining Genesis, destroys the foundations of Christianity in general, including the doctrine of salvation.  Also, a powerful statement from a leading evolutionary scientist of how scientists can be locked in by their worldviews such that their minds are closed to other possibilities.

In one revealing interview,  the Head of Research at the Darwin Research Station  discusses the ‘surprising’ things happening on the Galápagos.  For example, finches’ beaks changing very rapidly under selection, cycling back and forth, from big to small and back again. But such shifting back and forth is clearly not evolution as Darwin envisaged it.  As one creationist biochemistry professor indicates in the film, processes such as this add no real novelties to nature of the sort evolution requires.

Myth-busting

The Voyage undermines several commonly-believed myths about Darwin.  These include that:

• The idea of evolution dawned upon Darwin, based on the ‘facts of observation’. (He was soaked in the evolutionary ideas of his grandfather’s book.

• He thought of natural selection in the Galápagos, mostly from observations on the finches. (He did not even know they were all finches at the time and missed the natural selection, already discussed by creationist Blyth, happening on these islands.)

• Religion played no part in his ideas (in fact, in common with then-popular currents of religious thought, he was trying to impose a particular antibiblical notion of God onto nature).  
  

An international distribution firm eagerly signed up once they saw it, and strong interest has been shown by broadcasters already.  The DVD version should be released around late June/early July.  Creation Ministries International believes that The Voyage that Shook the World can be a powerful rallying point for believers in 2009, and a pre-evangelism tool.  So much of the information all around us is of high production quality, but is pro-evolution.  The sheer quality of this film will greatly encourage your family.  Why not get your unbelieving friends to see it?  It may break the ice and give you an opportunity to follow up with some of the many other powerful resources and information we have available (see creation.com).  

To see a trailer of the film, and news on TV broadcasts, etc. throughout this year and beyond, see the website <thevoyage.tv>.