Every once in a while, those snooty Honor's Professors force us to attend lectures and symposiums and colloquiums outside of class. Generally, these are mildly interesting, and I can't say I mind going, but mostly annoying.

This week, I was assigned to go see a documentary called "Did Darwin Kill God." The hour-long film was made in Britain and shown on the BBC, hadn't been shown in the U.S. until this week. Tonight was only the second showing in the U.S. (that's not to say Americans haven't seen it... it's on YouTube).

I went in knowing nothing about the movie. Frankly, I was prepared to be annoyed. I figured it was going to be another Dawkins-esque victory dance over God's grave, and I've heard all that before. Turns out, I was wrong.

In the opening seconds of the documentary, Conor Cunningham says this: "I believe firmly in Darwin's theory of evolution. I think the ideas of Creationism and Intelligent Design are utter nonsense. And I believe Jesus Christ is God Incarnate, and that he literally died and rose again"

Cunningham, the film's narrator, is a Philosopher and Theologian from the University of Nottingham, and I found his movie to be a nice antidote to Ben Stein's Expelled. Cunningham is an ardent defender of evolution, and also an ardent defender of not only the idea of a God, but of the Christian God. The sixty-minute documentary begins by arguing that the Orthodox understanding of Genesis was not literal in the sense that God created the world in 6 days, 6,000 years ago, and he appeals to thinkers like St. Augustine and Philo to illustrate the point. It then explores the history of the young-earth view (Cunningham claims it was a 16th century development), Christian antipathy toward evolution (he traces it to the Scopes Trial), and the new developments in the landscape (New-Atheists, Intelligent Designers, etc).

The argument Cunningham makes isn't new, but it's very important. I'm still astonished at how many people, on both sides, miss the fact that Science, by nature, cannot comment on God. That's not just a swipe at Atheists, because Theists do it all the time (Expelled is a good example). It is demeaning to both God and Science to try and describe God in purely Natural terms.

But it's nothing new. The argument has been made by a lot of thoughtful people. I would recommend Cunningham's documentary to someone who wants to know how to reconcile God and Science, but many have already come to peace with that. So, had that been the entire night, I would have left pleasantly surprised, but bored anyway. I've dealt with it. As far as I'm concerned, I've made up my mind. I believe in Evolution and I believe in God. My reasons for believing in Evolution are different than my reasons for believing in God. Basically, I'm on the same page as Cunningham, and was already convinced of his premises before I woke up this morning. And if that was all that happened, I wouldn't have bothered to blog about it.

It turns out that Cunningham showed up to the showing tonight and did a Q&A afterwards (lasting about an hour). He is my kind of thinker. He's grounded in history, he feels deeply (from the looks of it, he had a pretty good grasp of literature), and he's a savage debater. Most of the questions were posed by atheists (or, at least people taking on the atheistic mantle for the sake of argument), and he came to brawl. The British have a reputation for being caustic and quick-witted in debates (tune into The Prime Minister's Questions, sometime), and Cunningham wasn't any different. I won't recount the different arguments here, but he didn't come with the intention of facing a crowd of yes-men (a not entirely unreasonable assumption to make when you come to Baylor). He was challenged vehemently, and he reveled in it. His various trains of thought were sometimes difficult to follow, and he certainly didn't talk down to his audience (I got lost at least twice). But he didn't dance around questions, and he didn't pull any punches. For that, he earned my respect.

My favorite parts of the Q&A, and the parts I would have liked most to talk more about, were those where Cunningham would get into his own Theology. One person asked him how he interpreted Genesis, and he said, "literally," which was odd given that he had spent the last hour and a half praising Darwin. When asked to explain, he said, "The accounts given in Genesis are one in the same with the account given in the first chapter of John's gospel." And, he added, "The Incarnation is the center of the entire narrative. Without it, nothing follows."