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Talk:Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed (view source)
Revision as of 18:22, April 26, 2008
, 18:22, April 26, 2008→If you watched the movie...
Oh my gosh Nathan! I've grown up my whole life in a Christian missionary home... and I don't mind decent secular music! Besides, the film wasn't a Christian film. It existed to point out a wrong in the scientific community, not to evangalize! My goodness your kids are over sheltered if this movie offended you! [[User:Saksjn|Saksjn]] 17:30, 22 April 2008 (EDT)
Oh my gosh Nathan! I've grown up my whole life in a Christian missionary home... and I don't mind decent secular music! Besides, the film wasn't a Christian film. It existed to point out a wrong in the scientific community, not to evangalize! My goodness your kids are over sheltered if this movie offended you! [[User:Saksjn|Saksjn]] 17:30, 22 April 2008 (EDT)
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I watched the movie at its premiere, but was blocked and haven't had a chance to add my comments here (per the request above) until now. I was even interviewed for television about it, although because it was a Christian media company, I doubt they will air my comments.
It was a pretty bizarre film. Literally five seconds into it, they begin interspersing scenes with old film clips of Stalin's USSR, the Berlin Wall, and Nazi Germany, without any explanation. It isn't until much later that you find out the actual "meaning" behind these scenes.
The film also adopted a strange tactic... it spent the first hour arguing for freedom and how no idea could be dangerous, but that academic inquiry demanded all possibilities be open. And then it spent the second hour insinuating that evolution by means of natural selection was a dangerous idea because it "led" to Nazi ideals. This would seem to be contradictory, at least on its face.
The three or four examples provided by Stein were not very conclusive, especially after one becomes familiar with them. Richard Sternberg martyrs himself in the movie, implying that he was fired from his position and he lost his office because of intelligent design, but even ID advocates admit that neither fact is true. He was already scheduled to leave the journal in which he published the ID paper, and it was his last issue to edit. And the office change at the Smithsonian just moved him to a different office, which he then relocated voluntarily. The rest of the examples are about of the same calibre, and no statistics or other data is provided to suggest that there are others (aside from shadowy anonymous people, but the movie lacks the credibility to believe that).
I couldn't help but notice that they made a number of propaganda-style moves in the film. For example, they only refer to the theory of evolution by natural selection as "Darwinism," perhaps to imply it is some sort of cult of personality. But it would be absurd to suggest that modern evolutionary theory relies primarily on Darwin's works. The basic premise he suggested holds true and has been found to be accurate inasmuch as we can tell in science, but that is a very different thing. No one calls relativity "Einsteinism" for the same reason. Another ideological move was to cherry-pick interviewees, selecting only rabidly atheist or terminally-ill insane Texans to represent the evolution side of the debate. Without balancing out this presentation, it just makes it hilariously biased. A comparable move would be a pro-science (evolution) movie which only interviewed Kevin Hovind and his ilk through prison bars. Interestingly and on a side note, the movie equated ID with creationism throughout. I guess the Discovery Institute forgot to remind them to pretend there was a distinction.
Most particularly, the movie used the Holocaust to try to make their ideological point, and didn't even do so well. Berlinski and Stein discuss in the movie how "Darwinism" was a "necessary but not sufficient" cause for Nazism and the Holocaust, yet the movie proceeds to dwell on that tragedy overlong nonetheless. Even if you believe evolution was "necessary but not sufficient," why would you then use that incredible emotional manipulation on the audience to suggest that evolution was the cause? By traveling to the camp (Dachau, I think?) and then discussing at length what went on there, it implies that evolution is at fault, even after they just had to admit that it was not. It's rather insulting.
Stylistically, it borrowed a lot of Michael Moore's techniques, as others have pointed out. Having Dawkins sit in darkness on a stage and Stein travel in a taxicab to "confront" him paints the same sort of (absurd) hero shot that Moore uses (such as in Moore's ''Roger and Me'', when he "confronts" the CEO of Ford Motors). Things like that were fairly common, and the movie actually got pretty boring about two-thirds of the way through. The "shucks I'm just here finding out the truth" schtick got old very quickly... I don't see how anyone couldn't see that the whole approach was staged, and that he had this agenda from the beginning.
So overall, not a very good movie in general, and ludicrously ineffective in establishing its point. Two thumbs way down.--[[User:TomMoore|TomMoore]] 14:22, 26 April 2008 (EDT)
==ID and science==
==ID and science==