Difference between revisions of "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed"

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Michael Shermer’s Fact-Free Attack on Expelled Exposes Intolerance of Darwinists towards Pro-Intelligent Design Scientists

Expelled the Movie Website

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-'''''Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed''''' is a [[documentary]] charging [[Darwinists]] with suppressing and persecuting opponents in order to avoid discussing the scientific challenges which [[Intelligent Design]] presents to the [[Theory of Evolution]].
-The film's premise is that scientists have been expelled like naughty children from schools, universities and the scientific community, merely for daring to ask inconvenient questions.<ref>[http://www.expelledthemovie.com/news.php Expelled the movie website]</ref>
-The documentary is co-written and hosted by [[Ben Stein]] and was released Friday, April 18, 2008.
-* '''You can locate a theater near you by state or zip code [http://expelledthemovie.com/theaterap.php here].'''
-The film is described in its online trailer as “a startling revelation that freedom of thought and freedom of inquiry have been expelled from publicly-funded high schools, universities and research institutions.” <ref>http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/27/science/27expelled.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2</ref>
-The film argues that [[scientist]]s and [[educator]]s who promote intelligent design are persecuted by the scientific establishment.<ref name=pressrelease>{{cite web |author=Lesley Burbridge-Bates|publisher=[http://www.premisemedia.com/ Premise Media]|date=[[2007-08-22]] |url=http://www.premisemedia.com/EXPELLED-PressRelease_08-22-07.pdf |title=''Expelled'' [[Press Release]] |accessdate=2007-09-29 |format= |work=}}</ref>
-Examples given by the film include [[Richard Sternberg]], a [[biology|biologist]] and a journal editor and research associate at the [[National Museum of Natural History]], and [[Guillermo Gonzalez]], a pro-[[Intelligent design]] [[astrophysics|astrophysicist]] denied tenure at [[Iowa State University]] in 2007.<ref name="nyt">[http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/27/science/27expelled.html?_r=3&oref=slogin&oref=slogin&oref=slogin Scientists Feel Miscast in Film on Life's Origin], New York Times, 27 September 2007</ref>
-In the film's trailer, Stein states that there are "people out there who want to keep science in a little box where it can’t possibly touch God" and that "freedom of thought and freedom of inquiry have been expelled from publicly-funded high schools, universities and research institutions."<ref name="nyt"/>
-==Summary==
-Opponents of [[intelligent design]] have ulterior motives for suppressing any presentation of ID in classrooms or scientific journals, based on the the theory's ideological implications. If ID is true, naturalistic evolution is false, which removes the ground on which one of the most successful arguments for atheism is built. Thus, advocacy for atheism is one motive to suppress ID.
-* Atheists are not the only ideological opponents of ID. [[Answers in Genesis]] has criticized the intelligent design movement for its failure to endorse Biblical [[Creationism]], although it "supports the ID movement’s efforts to promote academic freedom and to question evolution." [http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs2002/0830_IDM.asp]
-The scientific establishment has erected a wall between [[Darwinism]] and all other alternate explanations, similar to the [[Berlin Wall]] which the Communists erected to prevent communication and movement within the city. Rather than permit students to be exposed to weaknesses and flaws in evolutionary doctrine, the establishment suppresses alternate ideas and destroys the careers of academics and even journalists.
-The film shows how opposition to ID is chiefly based on fervent (almost rabid) support for atheism and materialism. ID says that a purely naturalistic explanation of the first appearance of life is not as likely as the idea that it was designed. This leads ideologically to questions about an Intelligent Designer with supernatural powers, just as surely as Darwinism's "survival of the fittest" leads to [[Social Darwinsm]] and [[Eugenics]].
-* Those who are horrified at the [[Holocaust]] perpetrated by the Nazis condemn Darwinism for provided Hitler with ideological justification for his "[[Final Solution]]".
-* Those who are horrified at the prospect of a Creator condemn Intelligent Design for providing [[Young Earth Creationists]] with ideological justification for their beliefs, too.
-Thus it become difficult to separate science from its social or political implications.
-==Eugenics==
-The film shows the historical connection between the ideology of "[[survival of the fittest]]" and the [[Holocaust]]. By the 1920s, German textbooks were teaching evolutionary concepts including heredity and racial hygiene.  The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics was founded in 1927; in 1933, Germany passed the Law for the Protection of Heredity Health. [[Josef Mengele]] studied [[anthropology]] and [[paleontology]] and received his Ph.D. for his thesis entitled "Racial Morphological Research on the Lower Jaw Section of Four Racial Groups." In 1937, Mengele was recommended for and received a position as a research assistant with the Third Reich Institute for Hereditary, Biology and Racial Purity at the University of Frankfort, and subsequently became the "Angel of Death" for directing the operation of gas chambers of the [[Holocaust]] and for conducting horrific medical experiments on inmates in pursuit of [[eugenics]].  [[Evolutionist]] [[Stephen Jay Gould]] admitted:  "The [[Nazi]] racial hygiene program began with involuntary sterilizations and ended with [[genocide]]."<ref>http://www.georgetown.edu/research/nrcbl/scopenotes/sn28.htm</ref>
-==Filmmaker statements==
-{{quotebox|"If you acknowledge this idea that [[design]] can be detected scientifically in the universe, then you open up the door to saying, 'Maybe this [[atheist]]ic view isn't true,' [and] the entire worldview of people who are atheists crashes down around them," Mathis said. "This is a foundational concept for people who believe this way. So they defend it with incredible vigor."<ref>[http://www.sbcbaptistpress.org/bpnews.asp?id=27761 Intelligent Design foes no match for Stein in 'Expelled'] - Baptist Press </ref> }}
-==[[Liberal]] Reception==
-The [[liberal]] [[atheist]]  [[Richard Dawkins]] claimed he was tricked into appearing, indicating that he had been told it would be a movie named ''Crossroads'' that would be focused on "exploring the controversy." (Two others who were similarly deceived said they would have appeared anyway.) In response, [[conservative]] Ben Stein said that no one he interviewed asked what the film would be about, and the co-producer Walt Ruloff said at the preview that interviewees were paid and were even told ahead of time what the questions would be.<ref>Bethell, Tom, [http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=12759 No Intelligence Allowed] ''The American Spectator'', 19th February, 2008.</ref>
-Before the film opened, pro-[[evolution]] opponents of the film were heavily critical of its premise. [[Evolutionist]] Vadim Rizov of the Village Voice called it "bizarre and hysterical",<ref>[http://www.cultureandmediainstitute.org/articles/2008/20080417155632.aspx]</ref> even though there is no sign that any [[evolutionists]] were amused by it. ''[[Time magazine]]'', in its review, said Stein misrepresented evolution as saying that the first cell "arose whole" from the primordial soup, which is unlikely as the movie website correctly acknowledges the evolutionary view that it took millions or billions of years for the first cell to be produced by random, natural processes.
-The pro-[[evolution]] magazine ''[[Scientific American]]'' criticized the film, calling it "intellectually dishonest," and detailed their objections with the film and intelligent design in a series of inflammatory articles.<ref>http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=sciam-reviews-expelled</ref>
-The pro-[[evolution]] magazine ''[[New Scientist]]'' ran a review which described the movie as follows: "''Expelled'' is pure propaganda, its style reminiscent of a substandard [[Michael Moore]] flick complete with voice-over narration and lots of aimless wandering around".   The review criticized the movie's treatment of [[Richard Dawkins|Dawkins]] and even made claims of trying to "sneak ID into schools".<ref>Gefter, Amanda, Warning! They've Got Designs on You, 12 April 2008, New Scientist.</ref>
-== Viewer Reception ==
-''Expelled'' opened on April 18, 2008, on 1000 screens. It grossed $3.2 million US, or more than $3,000 per screen.<ref name=wnd>"[http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=62152 'Expelled' propelled to box office top 10]." ''WorldNetDaily'', April 21, 2008. Accessed April 21, 2008.</ref>
-==Movie Reviews==
-In ''National Review'', [[David Klinghoffer]] describes the [[Darwin-Hitler connection]]:
-* Expelled touches on [[Darwinism]]’s historical social costs, notably the unintended contribution to [[Nazi]] racial theories. That part packs an emotional wallop. It also happens to be based on impeccable scholarship. <ref name=dk>[http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=Mjg1NDg2ZDM5YTMwMGFiZGNhNTU5M2MwOTQ2NGE1Mjc=]</ref>
-* "The key elements in the ideology that produced [[Auschwitz]] are [[moral relativism]] aligned with a rejection of the sacredness of [[human life]], a belief that violent competition in nature creates greater and lesser [[races]], that the greater will inevitably exterminate the lesser, and finally that the lesser race most in need of extermination is the [[Jews]]. All but the last of these ideas may be found in [[Darwin]]’s writing."
-Tom Bethel wrote:
-:The film, a documentary, is about scientists and researchers who acknowledge the scientific evidence for the intelligent design of life and who have been ostracized or denied tenure as a result. In a word, they have been "expelled" from the academy. <ref>http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=12759</ref>
-[[Carl Wieland]]:
-{{QuoteBox|This powerful documentary is all about the persecution and censorship of any scientist who dares to oppose the Darwinist paradigm, by even suggesting the relatively modest hypothesis that the universe shows detectable evidence of design.<ref>Wieland, Carl, [http://creationontheweb.com/content/view/5638/ Cracking the wall in science] 20th February, 2008, (Creation Ministries International).</ref>}}
-As described by the review in the ''[[New York Sun]]'', [[Richard Dawkins]] "becomes so flustered at one point that he even posits a creation theory of his own that fits the parameters of the film's working definition of intelligent design" in [[Expelled]], but claims the movie is "dull, artless, amateurish, too long, poorly constructed, and utterly devoid of any style, wit, or subtlety."<ref>http://www2.nysun.com/article/74583</ref>
-Roger Friedman, a [[liberal]] who writes articles on the website for the [[conservative]] [[Fox News Channel]] (as part of their ongoing goal to remain balanced), criticized the movie in a celebrity gossip column by personally attacking Ben Stein, and claiming that the movie's "warped premise" that "somehow the theory of evolution is so evil that it caused the [[Holocaust]]" is actually [[anti-Semitic]]:
-{{QuoteBox|"Expelled" is a sloppy, all-over-the-place, poorly made (and not just a little boring) "expose" of the scientific community. It’s not very exciting. But it does show that Stein... is either completely nuts or so avaricious that he’s abandoned all good sense to make a buck..... Who cares, really, if "Expelled" is anti-Semitic? It will come and go without much fanfare.<ref>Friedman, Roger, [http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,348468,00.html#2 Ben Stein:Win his career], 9th April, 2008, <i>Fox News</i></ref>}}
-Jeffrey Kluger's review in the [[liberal]] [[Time Magazine|''Time'' Magazine]] asserts that [[Holocaust]] was the result of "the simple fact of being human":
-{{QuoteBox|"The truth, of course, is that the only necessary and sufficient condition for human beings to murder one another [in the [[Holocaust]]] is the simple fact of being human."<ref>Kluger, Jeffrey, [http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1729703,00.html Ben Stein Dukes it Out with Darwin], April 10th, 2008, <i>Time</i></ref>}}
-In his quest to attack Ben Stein further, Kluger puts words in his mouth, and then commits the [[strawman fallacy]]:
-{{QuoteBox|"[Stein] makes all the usual mistakes nonscientists make whenever they try to take down evolution, asking, for example, how something as complex as a living cell could have possibly arisen whole from the earth's primordial soup. The answer is it couldn't--and it didn't...<ref>Kluger, Jeffrey, [http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1729703,00.html Ben Stein Dukes it Out with Darwin], April 10th, 2008, <i>Time</i></ref>}}
-:The movie does not criticize Darwinists for saying the cell "arose whole" but for arguing "that life arose from a primordial sea on a lifeless planet through a chance collision of chemicals". This is the typical pro-evolution device of pretending that critics don't understand what evolution is saying. But it backfires, because the movie comes with a leader's guide which shows that Kluger is the one in error.
-Justin Chang wrote the following for the [[liberal]] publication ''Variety'':
-{{QuoteBox|"...the film's flippant approach undermines the seriousness of its discourse, trading less in facts than in emotional appeals....the filmmakers' failure to offer even a working definition of [Intelligent Design] leaves them open to the common charge that it's all unprovable, faith-based pseudo-science....Even more offensive is the film's attempt to link Darwin's "survival of the fittest" ideas and Hitler's master-race ambitions (when in doubt, invoke the Holocaust)..."Expelled" is technically well-mounted, though its [[aesthetics]] trump its ideas at every turn. If evolution is worth debating, it's worth debating well, and by a more intelligently designed film than this one."<ref>Chang, Justin, [http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117936783.html?categoryid=31&cs=1 Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed], April 11th, 2008, <i>Variety</i></ref>}}
-Craig Ghamberlain, at ''My Wise Generation'', offers his "Six Things ''Expelled'' Critics Don't Want You to Know," in response to an earlier criticism<ref name=sciam>Rennie, John, and Mirsky, Steve. "[http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=six-things-ben-stein-doesnt-want-you-to-know&sc=rss Six Things in ''Expelled'' That Ben Stein Doesn't Want You to Know]." ''Scientific American'', April 16, 2008. Accessed April 21, 2008.</ref> that he found unfounded and unfair after he actually saw the film.<ref name=Chamberlain>Chamberlain, Craig. "[http://mywisegeneration.blogspot.com/2008/04/six-things-expelled-critics-dont-want.html Six Things 'Expelled' Critics Don't Want You to Know]." ''My Wise Generation'', April 21, 2008. Accessed April 21, 2008.</ref>
-==Wider implications of the movie's main point==
-[[Allen Roebuck]] argues:
-* ... basic intellectual integrity demands that you take seriously the criticisms directed against [[Darwinism]]. In other words, you must take seriously any evidence supporting the notion that [[natural forces]] are incapable of either originating life or changing it from [[single-celled organisms]] to the species we observe now. And you cannot, as the Darwinian evolutionists do, dismiss the possibility of [[divine action]] as being outside the scope of science, and therefore de facto false. After all, if natural forces cannot do what obviously did happen, something supernatural must have been involved, and a proper science would acknowledge this possibility. [http://www.intellectualconservative.com/2008/04/18/evolution-101/]
-== Criticism ==
-The film quotes Charles Darwin's ''The Descent of Man'' to demonstrate how he supported what later became [[Social Darwinism]], which became fashionable among the dictators and intellectuals who perpetrated the [[Holocaust]].  Here is the quote in the movie, which is accurate:
-<blockquote>
-With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination. We build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick. Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. Hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.
-</blockquote>
-Darwin's full quote is more tedious but conveys the same objectionable belief that it is somehow unwise to help and weak and allow them to have children:
-<blockquote>
-With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; ''and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.'' We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination. We build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick; we institute poor-laws; ''and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind.'' No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. ''It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself,'' hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.
-The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; ''but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil''.<ref>http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?viewtype=text&itemID=F937.1&pageseq=181</ref>
-</blockquote>
-Ben Stein's speech was done specifically for the film, as in most films.<ref>http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=ben-steins-expelled-review-michael-shermer</ref>
-The movie completely omits Theistic Evolution, which is not taught in [[public school]] and used primarily by [[evolutionists]] to rebut their obvious correlation with [[atheism]].  Mark Mathis, an associate editor of Expelled, when asked why alleged religious evolutionists such as Catholic Kenneth R. Miller were not in the film, replied that this form of fallacious [[liberal logic]] (see point 6) "would have confused the film unnecessarily."<ref>http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=a-conversation-with-mark-mathis</ref>
-== See also ==
-*[[Origins debate]]
-*[[Theory of evolution]]
-*[[Creation-evolution controversy]]
-*[[Design detection]]
 == External links ==
 * [http://www.discovery.org/a/4689 Michael Shermer’s Fact-Free Attack on <i>Expelled</i> Exposes Intolerance of Darwinists towards Pro-Intelligent Design Scientists]
-== References ==
+* [http://www.expelledexposed.com <i>Expelled</i> the Movie Website]
-{{reflist}}
-[[Category:Movies]]
-[[Category:Intelligent Design]]
-[[Category:Evolution]]

Difference between revisions of "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed"

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