[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hi, this is Steve Meyer and I want to thank you for being a regular listener of the ID the Future podcast. We appreciate your interest in Intelligent design and the work we're doing to develop the case for the theory of Intelligent design. And I'd like to encourage you, if you find these broadcasts edifying, intellectually or otherwise, to become a regular financial supporter of the work of the center for Science and Culture. You may know that we depend entirely on private donations. We don't get any federal money, we don't get government money for our scientific research program. And if you find the work that we're doing interesting, we'd be awfully grateful if you'd consider becoming a partner in that work by providing whatever you're able to ensure that that work goes forward.
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Now on with the next episode of ID the Future.
[00:01:23] Speaker C: This is John West, Associate Director of Discovery Institute center for Science and Culture. As some of you know already, I had a lifelong interest in Walt Disney. I even wrote a book about him called Walt Disney and Live Action. It's the only book that focuses solely on Walt Disney's live action films and television features. If you're interested, you can get
[email protected] like many of you, I also like the Disney theme parks. In fact, I recently visited Disneyland with my family. One of the things we did while we were there was take the train ride around the park that goes through Primeval World. Primeval World features giant robotic dinosaurs, including a fearsome Tyrannosaurus rex. Primeval World has always fascinated me since my first visit to Disneyland when I was the ripe old age of five.
This historic Disneyland attraction was adapted from an exhibit called the Magic Skyway that Walt Disney created for the 1964 World's Fair in New York City.
The Magic Skyway told the history of evolution all the way to the development of humans and human culture.
It turns out that Walt Disney had a long time fascination with the theory of evolution. But just what type of evolution did Disney believe in and how did he help promote evolution to the public?
That's our topic for this edition of id. The like many artists and intellectuals of his era, Walt Disney was smitten by the theory of evolution. Perhaps the most striking example of this was the Rite of Spring segment of his 1940 animated film, Fantasia. Fantasia matched animated stories with famous pieces of classical music. The Rite of Spring segment of the film was set to the music of Igor Stravinsky's famous composition of the same name. The segment presented a starkly materialistic account of the history of life.
No effort was spared to make the Rite of Spring segment scientifically accurate for its time, including consultations with astronomer Edwin Hubble and evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley, as well as paleontologists at the American Museum of Natural History in Caltech. At the Disney Studio in Burbank, animators studied the movements of live iguanas and and a baby alligator, while other staff members were sent to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City to do portraits of their dinosaurs.
Darwinian's survival of the fittest supplied the organizing principle of the Rite of Springs sequence. During a story conference at the Disney Studio, conductor Leopold Stokosky suggested the the jungle is full of animals preying upon each other and being preyed upon. That is life, said Stokowski. If we could put that on the screen and end with the most terrific and terrifying of the animals fighting and eating each other, people would gasp.
Walt Disney enthusiastically agreed. We could base it on the dog eat dog idea all the way through, he told his staff. We could have a battle and build it to a grand climax. It's the fight for life.
Music critic Deems Taylor, the on screen host in Fantasia, introduced the Rite of Spring sequence by saying it was a coldly accurate reproduction of what science thinks went on during the first few billion years of this planet's existence. He went on to so now imagine yourselves out in space billions and billions of years ago, looking down on this lonely, tormented little planet spinning through an empty sea of nothingness.
The Rite of Spring segment in Fantasia showed the development of life through a blind materialistic process, from single celled animals up to the dinosaurs who were fought finally wiped out. The segment inspired the imaginations of generations of Darwinists. The late Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould later recalled being enthralled by the sequence when he was taken to see Fantasia by his father at age five.
Like many others in the decades after Fantasia's initial release, I first encountered the Disney version of Rite of Spring in science class where it was being used to teach about the history of life. I only saw it as part of Fantasia years later. In many ways, that was unfortunate because I initially missed something quite important.
In the context of Disney's larger work, the depiction of evolution in Rite of Spring is much more ambiguous.
As I've rewatched Fantasia over the years, I've come to appreciate the Rite of Spring segment as more of an expose of Darwinian materialism than a promotion of it. Indeed, it now seems to me that Fantasia as a whole can be properly interpreted as the exploration of several competing attempts to understand nature. Only by contrasting these competing explanations can one see which is finally the most satisfying.
The opening Toccata and Fugue segment in Fantasia might be interpreted as man's attempt to comprehend the universe solely by his own faculties, without recourse to religion. In sharp counterpoint to the perfect order and clarity of Bach's Reformation inspired music, the images on screen are indistinct, ambiguous and abstract. The message is striking. Man cannot comprehend the cosmos, relying solely on himself. He must reach beyond himself in order to understand the world that he inhabits.
The second segment of Fantasia, the Nutcracker Suite, offers the most primitive attempt to explain the mysteries of creation animism.
Here, nature itself is enchanted, and the trees and flowers are all inhabited by sprites and spirits. This is surely the most seductive of all the sequences in Fantasia, but in the end, its explanation of the world proves unsatisfying. It fails to account for the universe as it really is, because it can offer no explanation of evil. Nature is wondrous, but it can also be violent and cruel, as the Rite of Spring segment shows with savage clarity.
The Rite of Spring in Fantasia seemingly portrays the development of life on earth from the standpoint of an atheistic version of evolution, driven not by God or by some higher purpose, but by mere survival of the fittest. In this materialistic creation story, there is no room for mercy, morality, justice, God, or any of those things that human beings intuitively recognize as the most important anchors of human life.
Unable to adequately explain these fundamental facts of human existence, atheistic evolution also fails as an adequate explanation of the world.
According to animation historian John Culhane, the Rite of Spring sequence in Fantasia was originally envisioned as extending through the age of mammals and the first men to fire and the triumph of man.
Culhane suggested that Disney scrapped the proposed sequences dealing with human evolution because fundamentalists threatened to make trouble for Fantasia if Walt Disney connected evolution with human beings. Culhane cited Disney animator John Hubley as the source for this claim. But Hubley's actual recollection of what happened was more complex. Acknowledging that there were a lot of problems with the fundamentalist groups in terms of origins, Hubley added that Disney himself had a fundamentalist background, so he was a little bit torn between that and wanting to go with evolutionary science. I think he really understood the rightness of the science, said Hughley. But he was a showman, you know, kind of mystical on that. It's not clear from Hubley's account whether Walt Disney's decision to stop the Rite of Spring segment with the extinction of dinosaurs was due to outside pressure or to Disney's own ambivalence. Nor is it clear whether the proposed segments on human evolution would have preserved the overall sequence's depiction of evolution as an unguided material process.
It might have transformed the depiction of evolution into something more teleological, with human beings seen as the purposeful climax of evolution.
Regardless, the Rite of Spring as it was actually produced by Walt Disney offers a vision of evolution that seems inadequate precisely because it does not explain many of the things human beings most value.
But if attempts to explain the universe in terms of nature alone are revealed as insufficient in Fantasia, so too are explanations that rely on an inaccurate view of the supernatural.
In the Sorcerer's Apprentice sequence, we are shown why human attempts to assume the supernatural powers of God must inevitably fail. Here, Mickey Mouse, Walt Disney's embodiment of the common man, tries to take upon himself the magical powers of his master.
In the process, Mickey unleashes a destructive force that threatens to destroy the world in a deluge. The Sorcerer's Apprentice sequence in Fantasia underscores how man risks annihilation whenever he attempts to play God. Mankind has neither sufficient wisdom nor sufficient goodness to take the place of the divine.
The complement to Sorcerer's Apprentice comes in the segment of Fantasia based on Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony.
Disney set Beethoven's Symphony amidst the polytheism of ancient Greece by attempting to fashion gods in the likeness of human beings. Polytheism offers us gods who are as petty and vain as ordinary mortals. In the process, it fails to leave room for the existence of absolute goodness.
Only in the last sequence of Fantasia do we finally begin to approach an adequate accounting of both good and evil. This sequence begins with Mazursky's Night on Bald Mountain. Here, evil is incarnate in a demonic figure who oversees the midnight revels on the mountain.
Goodness and absolute power, including the power to crush evil, is assigned to a God who transcends time and space, symbolized as the light toward which the pilgrims are drawn. Once morning comes, the pilgrims proceed to the music of Ave Maria. This vision of goodness that transcends the material world is, of course, in harmony with the historic Judeo Christian conception of the universe. And this appears to be the explanation of nature on which Fantasia finally settles.
[00:12:25] Speaker D: And now Walt Disney's Magic Skyway takes you back through the Time barrier. Each rainbow flash an eon Back, back millions of years to the dawn of life on land.
[00:12:39] Speaker C: Over two decades after making Fantasia, Walt Disney revisited the evolutionary account of life in the Magic Skyway, a lavish attraction he mounted at the 1964 World's Fair in New York City.
Sponsored by the Ford Motor Company, the ride was visited by millions of people, including Dr. Martin Luther King and his children.
The Magic Skyway took participants on a journey through evolutionary history narrated by none other than Walt Disney himself. Seated in a Ford car, passengers initially found themselves visiting the age of the dinosaurs. As I mentioned at the beginning of this podcast, you can see remnants of the Magic Skyway attraction on the train ride at Disneyland when it goes through Primeval World.
What Walt Disney had refrained from doing in Fantasia, he now felt the freedom to do at the New York World's Fair tell the evolutionary story up to human beings in the birth of technology.
After passengers on the Magic Skyway left the age of the dinosaurs behind, Walt Disney told them. And now, as a changing Earth ends the rule of the reptiles, the Magic Skyway takes you forward in time once more, toward the shadow of a new arrival.
[00:13:51] Speaker A: Man.
[00:13:54] Speaker D: Now a new world rises with the dawn, and a new creature stands before the challenge of the universe. Man.
Homo sapiens. Thinking man. His skills as a hunter and toolmaker trapped the mighty mammoth and gave his world its name, the Stone Age. Never were the exploits of primitive man depicted with such realism or such good humor as through Walt Disney's modern, marvelous new technique, Audio Animatronics.
[00:14:29] Speaker C: The attraction gingerly skirted the question of humanity's precise origins. Humans simply appear on the Earth. The how of their appearance isn't explained. Nevertheless, the primitive humans depicted by Disney clearly exhibited features suggesting their kinship with apes. At the same time, however, Disney also acknowledged in his narration that humans represented something different from what had previously existed. This was a strange new world, he told his passengers. But man embarked on his adventure with a new power, the ability to think and reason. Before long, the caveman discovered how to harness nature's fire to cook his food and warm his home. The things he learned, like fire making and language, were passed from father to son and to a friend in need.
The arrival of humans in the Magic Skyway was rather too easy and pat. They just happened to appear. They just happened to have the ability to think and reason. They just happened to discover how to harness fire. They just happened to learn language. Hunting tool making, pictographs and the invention of the wheel arose as a matter of course.
One wonders what might have been. Had Walt Disney lived until our own day and encountered the writings of someone like biologist Michael Denton, imagine how much richer Disney's Magic Skyway could have been had it explored the exquisite features needed to enable humans to actually utilize fire.
Imagine the additional wonder that could have been inspired by explaining just how unique human language really is.
You can explore these topics yourself through Discovery Institute's videos Firemaker and the Biology of the Baroque, both available for free at our website privilegedspecies.com that's privilegedspecies.com Interestingly, when Walt Disney moved pieces of the Magic Skyway to Disneyland, he didn't end up using the scenes about primitive humans. Perhaps even he recognized at some level that the story of human origins was far richer than he had been able to tell.
For ID the Future this is John West. Thanks for listening.
[00:16:42] Speaker B: This program was recorded by Discovery Institute's center for Science and Culture. ID the Future is copyright Discovery Institute. For more information, visit Intelligent Design.org and IDTheFuture.com.
