Creationist Wave Hits Volcanoes of the Deep Sea

Stephen Low isn’t sure which line of dialog in his award-winning 2003 IMAX film Volcanoes of the Deep Sea raised the ire of creationists. Maybe it was the one about soft-bodied creatures that were in the seas “hundreds of millions or even a billion years ago.” Or perhaps it was the description of a deep-sea thermal vent as a place that “had seen a billion years of darkness, yet there was no night.”

Low suspects it was the statement that the microscopic hyper-thermophiles living in the hellishly hot, poisonous thermal vents have the same “universal alphabet” in their DNA as humans. “We are most certainly related,” the film’s narrator says. “There is a good chance that this is where life began on Earth, and here … is where we began our journey five billion years ago.”

“That’s just solid science, not controversial, but [creationists] didn’t like that either,” Low says. “Anytime you touch on science, it contradicts the Bible.”

Low, a Canadian filmmaker, became the focus of a battle between science and creationism earlier this year when the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History in Texas decided not to show his film after the museum’s marketing director said several members of a test audience called the film “blasphemous” and objected to its “presentation of human existence.” The New York Times reported that several IMAX theaters associated with science centers in the South would not run the film for religious reasons, although it isn’t clear how many theaters or which ones.

“We don’t know because [the reports] are anecdotal,” Low said. “We’ve had, I think, about 10 or 15 that didn’t take it because of [religious objections], but it is hard to know for sure.” Many IMAX theaters are commercial facilities not connected to science centers or museums, but 54 of the large-format theaters in the US are regarded as “institutional or cultural” theaters that typically show science films.

The decision by the Fort Worth museum not to run Low’s film triggered strong objections from the local community in the form of letters, phone calls, and e-mails, and in late March the museum finally booked the film for a month-long showing, with a longer run scheduled for the fall. In Charlotte, North Carolina, officials at the Discovery Place IMAX theater who rejected the film when it first became available two years ago reversed their decision after the Charlotte Observer newspaper reported that evolution had played a role in the film’s not being shown. Discovery Place’s president John Mackay Jr said the film was rejected primarily because it might scare children. The film was shown three times on a single day in April at the Discovery Place IMAX. Low introduced one of the screenings.

Low says he has heard the scared children excuse before. “Sometimes they say that the science is too much for the children,” he said, “but that is only said in the South. No one says that anywhere else. Is that coincidence? Who knows?”

But Mike Day, executive producer at the Science Museum of Minnesota’s IMAX theater, said that in more than 20 years of making and distributing such IMAX films as Genesis, Darwin on the Galapagos, and Jane Goodall’s Wild Chimpanzees, he has never faced significant objections from creationists or religious conservatives. He adds, “I think this is a bit of a tempest in a teapot.” Day, who is a friend of Low’s, hasn’t purchased Volcanoes for his theater because he said it is a film of limited appeal and difficult to market.

Both Day and Low note that the marketing potential of IMAX films is increasingly important for science museums struggling with budget constraints. Low worries about what he calls the “beach-boy science” aspect of new IMAX films. Marketers want appealing young people in the films, not the “couple of old guy scientists” that star in his Volcanoes film, he said. “The box office for IMAX has become so important. Science museums clean their toilets and floors and run their institutions with this money.”

Lawrence Krauss, chair of the physics department at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, doesn’t object to the entertainment and marketing aspect of science but is concerned that some museum officials let it undermine their educational mission. Krauss, who has served on the boards of two science museums and written the mass-market book The Physics of Star Trek (HarperCollins, 1995), said that the people who object to films such as Volcanoes “are really fighting against science. It’s not just evolution. Evolution is there, but the Big Bang and age of the Earth is right behind it. They don’t want to have people informed in any way that can challenge their belief systems.”

“Showing [ Volcanoes ] isn’t going to change anybody’s mind,” Krauss said. “But not showing it is bad. It is censorship.”