Difference between revisions of "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed"

Revision as of 20:16, April 24, 2008

Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed is a documentary charging Darwinists in America with suppressing and persecuting opponents in violation of that country's First Amendment^[1] 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.^[2] The documentary is co-written and hosted by Ben Stein and was released in America on Friday, April 18, 2008.

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.” ^[3]

The film argues that scientists and educators who promote intelligent design are persecuted by the scientific establishment.^[4] Examples given by the film include Richard Sternberg, a biologist, journal editor, and research associate at the National Museum of Natural History, and Guillermo Gonzalez, a pro-Intelligent design astrophysicist denied tenure at Iowa State University in 2007.^[5]

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."^[5]

Summary

Opponents of intelligent design have ulterior motives for suppressing any presentation of ID in classrooms or scientific journals, based on 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.

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 who openly question it.

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.

Thus it become difficult to separate science from its social or political implications.

Darwinism

The movie describes Darwinism as a brilliant theory for the 19th century, when no one had any idea of the structure of the cell. In the 21st century, when we know how complex it is, ID proponents "would just like to be able to ask the questions". (Stein on O'Reilly)

Stein asks why modern scientists can't have the same freedom to believe in God as Einstein, Newton, and Darwin himself.

About intelligent design itself

Ben Stein told Bill O'Reilly,

Intelligent design is an attempt to fill in the gaps; it might be totally wrong. ^[6]

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."^[7]

• One academic says in the film, "While I would never want to indict a theory for how someone misused it ... [yet] views of human nature that lower our estimation of what we are have consequences to how people treat each other." [3]

• Steven C. Meyer said, "In Darwinism there's a denial of any intrinsic dignity for human persons. We are the result of undirected natural processes that did not have us in mind"^[8]

Filmmaker statements

"If you acknowledge this idea that design can be detected scientifically in the universe, then you open up the door to saying, 'Maybe this atheistic 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."^[9]

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 similarly claimed to have been 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.^[10]

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",^[11] 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.^[12]

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 Dawkins and even made claims of trying to "sneak ID into schools".^[13]

NCSE used the film's release to launch a fresh attack on ID, repeatedly calling it "creationism" as part of their strategy to demonize scientific critiques of evolution. The gist of their defense of Caroline Crocker's dismissal was (1) she wasn't "fired" (because that means only immediate termination in their book) but merely let go at the end of the semester; and (2) each mention of intelligent design in class was an unauthorized addition to the curriculum. Apparently, only pro-evolution information is allowed in evolution class, and its weaknesses are not to be revealed if you want to get tenure. [4]

Viewer Reception

Expelled opened on April 18, 2008, on 1000 screens. It grossed $3.2 million US, or more than $3,000 per screen.^[14]

Movie Reviews

In National Review, David Klinghoffer, a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute, 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. ^[15]
• "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 Bethell, a conservative journalist for the American Spectator, 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. ^[16]

Carl Wieland, the managing director for Creation Ministries International, wrote:

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.^[17]

As described by the review in the conservative 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."^[18]

Liberal Roger Friedman 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:

"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.^[19]

Jeffrey Kluger's review in the liberal Time Magazine asserts that Holocaust was the result of "the simple fact of being human":

"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."^[20]

In his quest to attack Ben Stein further, Kluger puts words in his mouth, and then commits the strawman fallacy:

"[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...^[21]

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:

"...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."^[22]

Craig Ghamberlain, at My Wise Generation, offers his "Six Things Expelled Critics Don't Want You to Know," in response to an earlier criticism^[23] that he found unfounded and unfair after he actually saw the film.^[24]

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. ^[25]

Criticism

The film quotes Charles Darwin's The Descent of Man in an attempt to illustrate how he supported what later became eugenics, a justification given by the dictators and intellectuals who perpetrated the Holocaust. Here is the quote in the movie, which is accurate, although omitting parts:

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.

Darwin's fuller quote, at least the first section, is arguably more tedious but introduces the same objectionable belief that it is somehow unwise to help the weak and allow them to have children ("breed"). He follows this with observations as to why we do help the less fortunate, and mentions his reservations against the idea of not helping the less fortunate, calling it ("evil"):

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.^[26][Italics indicates text not in the film's quote.]

Ben Stein's speech was done specifically for the film, an non-unusual practice for films.^[27]

The movie completely omits theistic evolution, which is not taught in public school and is used primarily by Christian evolutionists to reconcile their faith with what they perceive scientific truth. 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."^[28]

See also

• Origins debate
• Theory of evolution
• Creation-evolution controversy
• Design detection
• Suppression of alternatives to evolution

External links

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

References