Famous voice joins creation vs. evolution debate
Bible hero 'speaks out' after
4,000-year silence
Millions of Americans tuned in to
watch Bill Nye “The Science Guy” and
Creation Museum Founder Ken Ham debate creationism vs. evolution as a viable
explanation for the origins of mankind.
But on March 28 a new voice will
speak out on the subject after being silent for more than 4,000 years: Noah,
the Ark
builder.
Thanks to some Hollywood
special effects and the acting of Academy Award-winner Russell Crowe, “Noah”
will be giving movie audiences a stirring lecture on the subject of what came
first, the chicken or the dinosaur egg.
Only instead of backing Nye’s
theory of random evolution or Ham’s insistence on God’s six-day creation,
director Darren Aronofsky’s “Noah” is going to push for one of the compromise
positions that have sprung up as many people have attempted to reconcile the
biblical account with Charles Darwin’s
theories on the origin of the world’s species.
A copy of the film’s original
screenplay obtained by WND reveals a scene in the film where “Noah” explains to
his family how all of creation came to pass.
Want the truth about the Ark, the flood and the
archaeology behind it all? Get “Noah: The Real Story” exclusively from the WND
Superstore!
In one scene aboard the famous Ark, Noah’s monologue
gives a day-by-day account of creation, almost right out of the Bible’s book of
Genesis. But the screenwriter’s directions for what appears on screen doesn’t
reflect six, single “days” of creation, but rather millennia passing in between
each “day” and an evolutionary process enfolding long before the arrival of
Adam and Eve.
Ham describes this compromise
position as “progressive creationism.”
“And the waters brought forth
swarms of living creatures,” Noah states in the film, a reference to the
biblical fifth day of creation.
But then the screenwriter then
describes what audiences will see while Noah is talking: “Soon there are
vertebrates: fish, eels, all life under the sea. We follow one creature and
with each frame it morphs into a new creature, a distant descendent, evolving
as time shoots by at unimaginable speeds. This evolving creature swims
underwater dodging other evolving creatures. Above the surface of the water we
catch glimpses of dinosaurs ruling the planet.”
After Noah describes the sixth day
of creation, the screenplay continues: “And still our ancestor evolves. Moving
away from the water. Up through the chain of mammals. And soon our distant
primate fore-father [sic] swings through the trees above the earth. Some form
of monkey. Still evolving.”
Excerpt from screenplay of "Noah"
Though these scenes may or may not
make the final cut of the movie (films often undergo extensive edits in the
weeks leading up to a major release), the intended depiction is of a theory Ham
dismisses as common among well-intended Christians, but one that is nonetheless
both biblically and scientifically untenable.
“Progressive creationists claim
that the days of creation in Genesis 1 represent long periods of time,” Ham
writes in a rebuttal of the theory on his Answers in Genesis website. “This
assertion is made in order to allow for the billions of years that evolutionists
claim are represented in the rock layers of earth. This position, however, has
problems, both biblically and scientifically.”
Ham then explains why the ancient
Hebrew that Genesis was written in is clear in distinguishing each “day” of
creation as a 24-hour period and not some collection of billions of years.
“To accept millions of years of
animal death before the creation and Fall of man contradicts and destroys the
Bible’s teaching on death and the full redemptive work of Christ,” Ham
continues. “It also makes God into a bumbling, cruel creator who uses (or can’t
prevent) disease, natural disasters, and extinctions to mar His creative work,
without any moral cause, but still calls it all ‘very good.’”
Discover more of Ken Ham’s
writings – like “How Do We Know the Bible Is True?” and “Already Compromised” –
in the WND SuperStore!
As WND reported, this creation
scene isn’t the only place where Aronofsky’s “Noah” film wildly diverges or
even flatly contradicts its scriptural source material.
For example, while in the biblical
account of Noah and his famous Ark, God is so grieved by wickedness,
corruption, violence and evil in the world that he resolves to destroy all the
earth’s creatures by flood, God’s grief in “Noah” is less about murder and violence,
more about abuse of natural resources.
In the movie’s pivotal early
scene, when Noah’s wife asks him why the Creator is planning to destroy the
world, Noah gets a vision of the pristine environment before mankind, a taste
of the barren land after humanity’s crimes against the planet and responds,
“Because it is dying already. At our hand, all he created is dying. … If we
work to save it, perhaps he will too.”
Later in the film, Noah asserts,
“We must change. We must treat the world with mercy so that the Creator will
show us mercy. … We must respect the ground. Respect the rivers and seas.
Respect the other beasts of the Earth. Stop the slaughter, the rape, the
carnage.”
This environmentalist message,
which Aronofsky freely admits is a “big theme” in the film, is even taken to
the extreme, when Noah later decides to kill his own grandchildren so the earth
won’t again be poisoned by humanity’s carelessness.
“The old adage that says the book
is usually better than the movie is frequently true,” writes Larry Stone in the
chapter titled “Noah Goes to Hollywood” in his new book, “Noah: The Real
Story.”
Stone told WND the differences
between Aronofsky’s “Noah” and the Bible’s Noah are no surprise. Last fall Paramount, which has more
than $100 million riding on Noah, decided to hold some test screenings – over
the vehement objections of Aronofsky – to see if the movie would appeal to
Christian viewers. The blog Beginning and End stated the obvious: “It’s clear
that Noah is not a Christian film.”
Stone, who has also has written
“The Story of the Bible” and “Women of the Bible,” said that the story of Noah
and the Ark has been filmed many times, and usually the biblical story is a
framework on which the writer and director can hang their own story with their
own viewpoint, and which usually has little to do with the Bible’s Noah and the
ark. One of the first talkies – “Noah’s Ark”
– did just that in 1928. The writer mixed up Noah with Moses, Samson and even
the Sermon on the Mount.
In “Noah: The Real Story,” Stone
points out some of the material from Aronofsky’s movie adaptation of “Noah”
most contradictory to the scriptural account and most likely to offend
Christian viewers.
“The world of Aronofsky’s Noah is
a bleak one,” Stone writes. “Noah decides the only reason God preserved him and
his family is to make sure the animals on the Ark return to the earth safely. If mankind
disappeared, ‘it would be a better world.’ His family should have no more
births so that humans will eventually die out and then ‘the creatures of the
earth, the world itself, shall be safe.’ But one of his daughters-in-law is
pregnant. If it is a boy, Noah will let it live; but if it is a girl, it will
be killed. The woman gives birth to twin girls and Noah sets out to kill them
both while the animals on the Ark
help pin down his family. But he’s too weak to carry out his task. ‘I can’t do
it,’ he says to himself and to God. ‘I am sorry.’”
Brian Godawa is the screenwriter
for the award-winning feature film, “To End All Wars,” starring Kiefer
Sutherland, and author of “Hollywood Worldviews: Watching Films with Wisdom and
Discernment.”
In an October 2012 blog post,
Godawa explains why the near murders upon the Ark in Aronofsky’s “Noah” are such an
affront to the Jewish and Christian faiths:
“The movie script for ‘Noah’ is
deeply anti-biblical in its moral vision,” Godawa writes. “While the Bible
commands mankind to ‘work and keep’ the garden of earth as its stewards, the
sin that brought about the judgment of the Flood was not violence against the
environment as depicted in the script; it was violence against God and his
image in man. That’s no minor difference.
“Also, at the end, when psycho
Noah realizes that he cannot kill the baby girl to stop the human race, the
reason is not because he realized he was too extreme against humans, but
because he was too weak to follow through with God’s commands and his ‘higher
cause’ of genocide,” Godawa continues. “This Humanistic worldview certainly
tugs at the heartstrings of our hubris. Man’s weakness of compassion makes him
superior to God.
“Most of the last half of the
script is a family killer thriller like ‘Sleeping With the Enemy,’ that asks
the dark dramatic movie question, ‘Will Noah kill the child if it is a girl or
not?’ Ancient sex-selection infanticide,” Godawa writes. “But in the end, he
fails. … He is just too compassionate to carry out God’s cruel plan. Noah is
more loving than God.”
Stone insists there’s a greater
and truer lesson behind the biblical account of Noah that Aronofsky’s version
of the tale misses completely.
“When Noah was warned of disaster,
God told him how to survive the Great Flood,” Stone writes in “Noah: The Real
Story.”
What can we do now to survive the
end of the world that both futurists and the Bible say is coming?
“Noah’s secret on how to survive
the end of the world is to watch, be ready, and choose now which side you are
on … who you will believe and serve,” Stone writes.
He quotes Christian author C.S.
Lewis, who wrote, “God will invade … When that happens, it is the end of the
world. When the author walks on to the stage the play is over. God is going to
invade, all right, but … this time it will be God without disguise; something
so overwhelming that it will strike either irresistible love or irresistible
horror into every creature.
“It will be too late then to
choose your side … It will be the time when we discover which side we really
have chosen, whether we realized it before or not. Now, today, this moment, is
our chance to choose the right side.”
“If you’re looking for spectacular
special effects, the most complex scene ever created by Industrial Light &
Magic and a story line inspired by the account of Noah and the Ark on which
Darren Aronofsky hangs his own message, enjoy ‘Noah,’” Stone told WND. “But
don’t look to it for biblical accuracy. Why would you expect that?”
Bill Nye “The Science Guy”
Bill
Nye is the host for Bill Nye the
Science Guy, and was a Sidwell
Friends School graduate.
Note: Albert A. Gore
III was a Sidwell Friends School
graduate, and his father is Albert A.
Gore Jr.
Albert
A. Gore Jr. is Albert A. Gore III’s
father, the narrator-host for An
Inconvenient Truth, and the chairman for the Climate Reality Project.
Al Gore’s AN Inconvenient Truth: The Crisis of Global
Warming
Foundation
to Promote Open Society was a funder for the Climate Reality Project, the Brookings
Institution (think tank), the NAACP
Legal Defense & Educational Fund, the Millennium Promise, and the Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace (think tank).
George Soros
was the chairman for the Foundation to Promote Open Society.
Lael
Brainard was the VP & director for the Brookings Institution (think tank), a trustee at the Sidwell Friends School, William J. Clinton’s deputy national
economic adviser, and is the under secretary for international affairs at the U.S. Department of the Treasury for the
Barack Obama administration.
William J. Clinton’s
deputy national economic adviser was Lael
Brainard, an Oxford University Rhodes
scholar, his attorney was David E.
Kendall, and his daughter is Chelsea
V. Clinton.
Ruth
Padel is a professor at Oxford University,
and is Charles Darwin’s great-great-granddaughter.
Chelsea V. Clinton
is William J. Clinton’s daughter,
and was a Sidwell Friends School graduate.
Malia
Obama was a student at Sidwell
Friends School.
Sasha
Obama was a student at Sidwell
Friends School.
David E. Kendall
was William J. Clinton’s attorney, is
a trustee at the Sidwell Friends
School, and a
director at the NAACP Legal Defense
& Educational Fund.
Susan M.
Blaustein is a trustee at the Sidwell
Friends School, and a director at the Millennium
Promise.
Margaret A.
Hamburg was a trustee at the Sidwell
Friends School, is the commissioner for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and a VP for the Nuclear Threat Initiative (think tank).
Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace (think
tank) was a funder for the Nuclear
Threat Initiative (think tank).
Jessica Tuchman Mathews is a director
at the Nuclear Threat Initiative (think
tank), the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
(think tank), a director at the American Friends of Bilderberg
(think tank), was an honorary trustee at the Brookings Institution (think
tank), and a 2008 Bilderberg conference participant (think tank).
Ed Griffin’s interview with
Norman Dodd in 1982
(The investigation into the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace uncovered the plans for population
control by involving the United
States in war)
Lael
Brainard was the VP & director for the Brookings Institution (think tank), a trustee at the Sidwell Friends School, William J. Clinton’s deputy national
economic adviser, and is the under secretary for international affairs at the U.S. Department of the Treasury for the
Barack Obama administration.
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