Tuesday 12 May 2009

Darwin vs God

I snuck in to a showing of "Did Darwin kill God?" last night at the University of Nottingham, courtesy of Theosoc. It was attended by Conor Cunningham, the presenter and writer of the BBC show.

It was very interesting and the documentary was well put together. The essence of it was that the Darwin vs God debate is a false one, that has only been perpetuated by extremists from both "sides". He presents a fairly coherent view of how orthodox (not to be confused with Eastern Orthodox) Christianity has never been committed to 6-day creationism. Equally, he shows that Darwin himself wasn't and mainstream science isn't close to ultra-darwinism.

The Q&A session went somewhat over my head because of a lot of jargon (theodocy, aristotlian oojimaflips, philoan thingies, ontological vs methodological, subjectivity ... and plenty of others that I didn't even understand enough to remember!). But it was still useful and definitely interesting to be around people who are engaging with debates on this issue.

I could say a lot more on it, but I don't really have time. One question I would have asked if I'd had the guts would have been: "How do you see God interacting with individuals now?".