A Matter of Faith (2014)

I watched this movie particularly because it received such a phenomenally low rating on IMDB. Most Christian movies take a lot of hits from atheists and agnostic and other pro-evolutionists, but this one seemed to distinguish itself with a full two points lower rating than the average Christian film. I had to see why!Now that I have watched the film, I am stunned -- because it really is very good. Perhaps it is because it is that good it hits a nerve for naysayers.It's a perfectly good film, good cinematography, good screenwriting, good acting and yes, it has a purpose to show that it is both unscientific and just plain wrong for schools and universities to teach evolution as if that were the only possibility. I heard someone say that it takes more faith for someone not to believe in God than it does to believe in God. That is true. Additionally, it takes more faith to believe in evolution and that humans came from apes and that trees, flowers, the sun, moon, stars, animals and humans came from nothing but an accident.Bravo to the filmmakers. Well done! P.S. I don't really know if this contained spoilers or not so I said yes just in case.

More often than not, religious films are suitable for a good laugh. "God's Not Dead" and "God's Club," for instance, were laughably bad in an enjoyable way for me. I've seen my fair share of Christian propaganda films, yet for SOME reason, "A Matter of Faith" became my most hated.The film follows the typical tropes you'd expect. Awkward dialogue, little to no knowledge of basic scientific fact, and forced running gags that lead nowhere and only serve to waste your time. It was good for a few laughs, but it all went downhill after the first half, and made me furious. The amount of misinformation and downright falsehoods this film spews about evolution is completely uncalled for, and falls apart under the slightest scrutiny.The main plot point is that the father, the creationist, wants to debate the professor, scientist, on evolution vs. creationism. The father dislikes that Rachel is learning about evolution and assumes that it teaches the origins of life.However, evolution does NOT teach the origins of life. Anyone with basic understanding of evolution will tell you that. The main idea is that living organisms evolve and adapt over millions of years through natural selection and other processes. Also, universities don't teach biblical creationism as fact because it's... well, not scientific. And, again, it has nothing to do with evolution.Thus, the main premise of the entire movie is completely pointless from the get-go.Rachel is a pitiful main character, and I honestly felt sorry for her. Actually, the movie is more about her father. She's just trying to go to class and learn biology, yet she's dragged around by her professor, dad, and a creepy guy named Evan into believing one thing or the other. In fact, she was mostly neutral and just wants to be left alone throughout the film. Instead, in the end, she (of course) reaffirms her faith and denounces evolution simply because *insert reason here*. By the end, Rachel completely changes her character and decides, "hey, I'm still a Christian and wanna date that creepy guy now."The professor is a bit condescending and seemed overly desperate to debate. The father was completely inconsiderate to his daughter's feelings on the matter. She pleaded him to stop several times, and he refused. Evan, the "good Christian boy," was just downright creepy. He was condescending to Rachel, and was unnaturally determined to help the father win the debate.And do I even need to speak about the ending? Words can't describe how cringe-inducing it was. Scientific falsehood after scientific falsehood, improper and laughably juvenile debating, resorting to feelings instead of research, etc.Plus, they assert that the Earth is only thousands of years old. Need I say more?

I see that a lot of reviewers either find the film to represent the debate fairly, who confuse what a scientific theory is and who is buying into the premise of this movie.Therefore, I will compromise a list of the lies this movie brings forward:To begin with, the whole premise of this movie is built around the supposed claim that evolution says anything of the origins of life. The fact is, it doesn't. Evolution only deals with how life evolves and changes. As such, there is nothing in the theory of evolution itself that makes any claims on the existence of a god. Many evolutionary scientists believe in a god, it's not relevant to the theory.Big bang theory is physics, not evolution.Same can be said by abiogenetics. I won't get into detail about this,but abiogenetics is the field that deals with how life might have appaired. Again, not directly refuting any gods existence even if it's correct.Evolution does not claim that we are decentant from apes. Evolution categorizes us as a subtype of ape, with chimpanzees and apes as our closest relatives with a common anchestor. That's completely different than to claim that we decent from apes.Radio metric dating is not used to determine the age of the planet. Many different fields have approached the same question, including geology, physics, astronomics and so on. All come to the same conclusion based on different methods, all arrive at the same conclusion. Carbon dating is only used to measure the age of dead biological material using the half life of the Carbon isotope C14 as it's baseline.Evolution has never claimed that one animal will ever give birth to a completely different animal. It's rather fascinating that they use dogs as an example, some breeds of dogs has grown so far apart that it's more reasonable to talk of subspecies instead of different breeds. The definition of a new species is just that: Common anchestry between two populations that has grown so different that they can't produce offspring that is capable of reproducing.Lastly, and most importantly: The word theory is not a mere hypothesis. A scientific theory is not a hypothesis, but a logical conclusion based on scientific data gathered where none of it's predictions are shown to be wrong.If the main character ever got to be a pharmacist, she would have to rely on evolutionary theory, as a lot of modern medicine relies on it. Evolutionary theory is saving lives as we speak.So the entire movie is based upon either blatant lies about, or a complete misunderstanding of evolutionary theory. In addition, the acting is horrible and unconvincing, the characters are unrelateable and the whole story is condencending. Both the main characters father and the journalist students comes of as arrogant and unpleasant and are cast as far from sympathetic.

Possible spoiler alert if you haven't seen the movie yet.I watched this movie and it felt like what happened near the end was a sermon instead of a debate. The creationist guy who finished the debate for the other guy was basically saying that we should believe in creationism not because it's true but because we need a god to have rules and to be accountable to.If you believe in an all powerful god who can create the world in six days, then let him fight his battles. When you try to defend him, you imply that he is too weak to do it himself.To be clear, I am not all that well versed in evolution. I was raised in Christianity with creationism as the only thing I knew. However, something tells me that this movie is not at all an accurate representation of evolution. I have read some books and watched videos about evolution. If I understand correctly, evolution is not an explanation of the origin of life but how life has evolved over time.But more importantly. One could theoretically still accept evolution and believe in a god. Similarly, one could be a creationist and believe in a god that is NOT the same one as the Christian god. The world is full of Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, atheists, and agnostics. There is no such dichotomy of Evolution vs Creationism for the simple reason that there are infinite different types of creationism and/or theories for how life began. Indeed, one need not believe life had an origin at all.While I don't particularly like this movie all that much, I do think it is valuable because movies like this represent what Christians believe. It is for this reason that atheists like me still sometimes like to watch Christian movies. I may disagree with everything about Christianity but I would hate to misrepresent them. My main complaint though is that Christians nearly always misrepresent non-Christians. This can't be helped however because they simply often don't know what the rest of the world believes.