Is Genesis History?

Once upon a time I used to be a fundamentalist Christian who believed in a literal six- day creation account, which I ardently defended. I no longer meet these qualifications, and have become an evolutionist. I watched the documentary expecting it to be a faith-filled defense of Genesis, despite its logline of "Presenting two view."

Here are numerous issues I discovered within the documentary:

The film only interviews literal six-day creationist scientists, and offers no rebuttal or counter-evidence from opposing beliefs. This gives the film a significant bias, with scientific opinions being founded foundationally upon subjective, religious beliefs. It creates an echo chamber for the film, where the only opinion you're told is the one you're expected to believe in.

The film is highly dichotomous. You either believe in 100% of Darwin's theory, or you believe 100% in Genesis. No room for theistic evolution, old-earth creationism, day- age, or anything. This is a further problem of the echo chamber mentioned above. One of the film's interviewees after the film's released attempted to redact some of his statements for being misconstrued as advocating this false dichotomy.

Perhaps most horrifying is how presuppositional the film is—it's bad science. Everyone interviewed in the film believes the Bible is 100% literal (except the parts that aren't), and, consequently, will not believe in evolution anyways. "Well Genesis is 100% true so anything else can't be right" seems to be the feel throughout.

What is funny about the film though, is that if you're familiar with evolution, the film helps reaffirm your position. A lot of the experts in the film clearly recognize what evolution is, but they won't admit they believe in it. They believe in specieization (that species evolve within phylum), but they won't believe it on the macro-scale. They recognize the difference between a Sea Urchin and Starfish is just a few genetic changes, but they again presume God first, and then deny the potential for evolution.

This film has beautiful cinematography and scenery, but it was not written well. It is not definitive, or even remotely helpful. It is a perpetuation of the echo-chamber of fundamentalism.

I rated it 3 stars because of the beautiful images. But it is so disappointing ! This film is obviously biased from start to finish. Contradictory points, so many obvious questions just ignored... I thought that finally this film would open a real dialogue, but it is way too inconsistent -only six people are interviewed, all creationists anyway, forgetting extremely important factors. Not scientific, not rigorous. Just creationist propaganda. Too bad.

When Creationist came up with Intelligent Design to, somehow, fool people into thinking there was something scientific about Genesis, I was surprised at how far they would go.... failing that, they have now decided to try history, to somehow justify their religious beliefs... I am not saying everyone does not have a right to their own beliefs, but to undermine proved science of geology, microbiology, DNA, etc, to further this, is a joke... yes, I watched it to see how far and by what method creationist will go to justify an impossible time frame as laid out in Genisis, and to falsely create a historical background to it.... like Intelligent Design, this to will fail to prove the impossible.

I watched this without any idea of what it was going to be about except that its clearly about the bible. What impresses me so much with this is the number of serious scientists that present views that we may not necessarily expect of scientists.

Its compelling, it really doesn't matter of you are a bible person or not, for that matter it doesn't really matter what if any religion you follow. The fact that it presents a view that challenges commonly held "facts" and makes such a strong argument tells me that we just cannot trust what we are told just because its presented as fact. An no matter what you believe, there will always be another view that has validity.

I will not say that I have come to any real conclusion about genesis and if its true or not, but I have a lot more questions now that I had before and that's a good thing.

I gave it a 3 because it's very well made with excellent production values. However, it's such a godawful load of crap that I can't even be bothered giving an example, except to say that it quickly devolves from outlandish claims about the origins of various geological formations to going on and on about the Bible.