“Expelled” Reviewed
By Dave Berg over at NRO:
The highlight of the film features Ben Stein interviewing Dawkins, who concedes that an intelligent being may have created life on earth. But that being cannot be “God.” Instead, he suggests it may be an alien, itself a product of “Darwinian evolution.” Oh, the scientific imagination — there’s nothing like it on God’s green earth.
Dawkins has since complained that the interview was set up under false pretenses, and that he didn’t even know who Stein was. It is rather astonishing that it did not occur to the world’s smartest atheist to look up Ben Stein on the Internet, where he might have readily discovered numerous examples of his writings that are critical of Darwinism.
Dawkins dismisses the Emmy-winning actor as having “no talent for comedy.” He believes during the interview Stein is an “honestly stupid man, sincerely seeking enlightenment from a scientist.” A lawyer, a law professor, an economist, and a speechwriter for both Nixon and Ford, Stein hardly seems to fit the description “honestly stupid.”
In the end, the film isn’t really about intelligent design as much as about a relentless attack on an authentically free inquiry. As Ben Stein points out, “Freedom of inquiry has been greatly compromised, and this is not only anti-American, it’s anti-science. It’s anti-the whole concept of learning.”
We live in an age of lies - a lot of people believe a lot of things which are either outright false, or heavily distorted. I’m constantly amazed at the amount of sheer nonsense people believe - my favorite example of this is the Kennedy assasination. I’ll bet that if we did a survey of the American people, a very large minority would come back with the opinion that a conspiracy killed Kennedy, and a much larger number of people - perhaps even a large majority - would hold that there are at least a lot of unanswered questions surrounding the event. This belief flies in the face of every single fact which has been discovered about that tragic day - the further anyone investigates, the more clear it becomes that Oswald, a lunatic acting alone, killed President Kennedy. But very, very many people believe otherwise, and no amount of evidence will convince them to change their views.
So it is with a host of issues - in this case, the debate between ID and Darwinism. Its good here to define what we’re talking about - ID is not creationism. Creationism is the belief that the world was created in six literal days approximately 6,000 years ago - many of my Evangelical brothers and sisters believe this; I don’t. ID is the belief that the development of life on earth - heck, the development of anything, anywhere - is only explicable if there is a will guiding the whole process. The chances of even one random accident resulting in anything useful are so small that to believe that we are the result of nothing but a series of random accidents is laughably foolish - and even such a theory (that its all developed by random chance) still fails to explain how the basic matter of the universe came to be. Darwinism is not a belief in evolution, as such; it is the belief that no matter what else is said, there must be no Creator, or at least no Creator which intervenes post-Big Bang in creation. When we say we’re debating “creation vs evolution”, what we’re really debating is ID vs Darwinism.
If there is one thing we should never see in the scientific community, it is the phrase “rigid orthodoxy” - but that is precisely what we have these days, and not just in the debate over origins. Such orthodoxy also reigns supreme on such matters as global warming and the genesis of homosexuality, as well as other subjects. To say that there is a “consensus” about a subject means only one thing - no one has really looked at it or been able to explain it, so the herd of science has arbitrarily decided that “X” shall be considered true about a subject. Scientific advance, of course, has always rested on those who ignore consensus - and one does wonder how many bits of sciece lie submerged beneath the waves of ideological purity which have taken over so much of the scientific community. A true scientist is not someone who asks, “what does everyone else say”, but “what evidence do we have to form an opinion?”.
Stein’s new movie might just be the thing to break this logjam - to expose to a mass audience just how purblind a great deal of our higher educational establishment has become, and thus move people to demand changes. We should not fear truth - and we should go where ever truth leads…time to stop consigning vast areas of research to the trash heap simply because we’re afraid to buck trends.
240 comments April 19th, 2008
