Charles Darwin Biopic “Creation” Released in the United States

The opening of the film, which stars atheist Paul Bettany as Charles Darwin, was delayed because of producer Jeremy Thomas’s failure to find a U.S. distributor—which, at the time, he blamed on anti-Darwin sentiments:

The film has no distributor in America. It has got a deal everywhere else in the world but in the U.S., and it’s because of what the film is about. . . . It is unbelievable to us that this is still a really hot potato in America. There’s still a great belief that He made the world in six days. It’s quite difficult for we in the UK to imagine religion in America. We live in a country which is no longer so religious. But in the U.S., outside of New York and LA, religion rules.

We originally reviewed the film at the time of its British opening in “Creation in the Making.” Now Answers in Genesis–U.S. president Ken Ham and our Creation Museum will be featured in a segment of the ABC–TV program Nightline about Creation (scheduled now for broadcast on Monday at 11:35pm Eastern/Pacific time, after being bumped from its originally planned airing on Friday evening).

The U.S. opening was also an occasion for LiveScience’s “Bad Science” columnist Benjamin Radford to author Charles Darwin: Family Man, Scientist and Skeptic. Radford focuses interestingly on Darwin’s skepticism regarding not religion, but rather “psychics, the paranormal, and alternative medicine,” concluding, “Darwin’s letters provide a fascinating historical context to paranormal claims.” What is also quite interesting is that surveys have shown religious people to be less likely to believe in the paranormal; see news we covered in December, November, and September 2008.