Did anyone go see Ben Stein’s new documentary on Intelligent Design this weekend? “Anyone? . . . Anyone?” (Sorry, had to get that in there somewhere!). Well I did, and I thought Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed was pretty good. No, I don’t think it was the best documentary ever made, and I have to agree with some of the film’s negative critics - but not with most of their conclusions. Basically, their main issue is that the film is skewed in its presentation.
Well yeah, of course it is.
No one makes a documentary about something they do not think is important, and their take on its importance will usually come through. I would even say it should come through. While some film makers are better at hiding their agenda, this does not make more blatant messages false. Whether or not Expelled is 100% objective (I’d guess it was about 80.5% objective), its message is important if for no other reason than to wake America up to the fact that a considerable number of scientists disagree with the Darwinian hypothesis and are simply being lambasted into silence.
In its first week (the largest release of a documetary ever - just over 1,000 theaters) Expelled earned over $3 million . That’s very good for a documentary. True, this is substantially less than the $23 million Michael Moore’s anti-America “Fahrenheit 9/11″ claimed in 2004. However, I.D. is not exactly at the top of most Americans’ interests right now (which is a huge part of the problem, and one reason Stein’s film is so very important).
To make Expelled, Stein and company talked with educators and scientists who say they have been persecuted for questioning Darwin’s theory of natural selection. This included Dr. Richard Sternberg, who was fired from the Smithsonian Institution for publishing a paper that mentioned I.D. as a possible way to help explain life’s origins. Guillermo Gonzalez, an accomplished astrobiologist who was denied tenure at Iowa State University because of his pro-I.D. stance (which university officials admitted, BTW).
Also interviewed extensively is the Dickety-Doc himself, Richard Dawkins (Oxford University). Dawkins is the current pop-prophet and media darling of Darwinism. In a rather bizarre moment, between his typical rants about the evil of religion and how it holds back real science blah blah blah, Dawkins states that evidence of I.D. points to aliens who themselves were evolved along Darwinian paths. So, even if I.D. were to topple Darwinian evolutionary theory on earth the evolutionists will simply push it back to another planet??? Whoa! Talk about dying in the ditch for an ideology! How can that possibly be seen as authentic science? These people are so committed to keeping the supernatural out of the equation that they will stick to their theory even if it means positing a Darwinian evolution on another planet to explain its lack of presence here! I wish I had faith like that . . . not.
As stated above, critics of the film are whining quite a bit about the rhetorical devices employed by the film (examples of these with useful comparisons to Fahrenheit 9/11 can be found here). Stein’s use of holocaust imagery, communist film clips, and much anonymous footage to alternately make fun of and accuse evolutionism-ists is clearly designed to evoke emotional responses. My reply - so what? First off, this is typical documentary behavior (consider “Jesus Camp’s” use of Bush/Iraq news footage to frame their entire story of the so-called evangelical subculture, or, well, anything that Michael Moore has ever produced . . . ).
Second, it shows the atheists can’t take their own medicine. Is Expelled emotionally manipulative? Yes. Is the rhetoric overdone? Yes (if only slightly). Does the film use scare tactics? Yes. Is this the same tactics that these new militant atheists use with regard to religion? Absolutely. Blaming religion for what a handful of people over the centuries have done “in the name of God” . . . referring to scientists with better credentials than themselves as stupid because they don’t bow the knee to Darwin . . . it makes for brilliant satire if nothing else.
Most important though - none of this whining over rhetorical devices matters if it’s true!!! I was a member of the women’s abuse council at DSS. At our first meeting we listened to a 911 call from a child who was watching his mother being brutalized by his father. It was one of the most horrible things I have ever experienced, and it certainly made me want to help the group in passionately acting to stop such things. Was that propaganda? Was it emotionally manipulative? Did it use scare tactics? Yes. Did that matter? No.
What the critics seem to be failing to do is give me a reason to think Stein’s thesis is false. Rather, they have launched a series of their own emotive attacks - some very personal ones on Stein himself.
Richard Dawkins whines about everything from the title of the film being changed to being misrepresented when he tries to be nice to the “IDiots” (his phrase). He says that the interview was set up under false pretenses and that he didn’t even know who Stein was. OK, first, so what? He said what he said regardless of what he thought he was doing. Second, Dawkins is now attacking Stein (a lawyer, law professor, economist, and speech writer for two presidents) as “honestly stupid.” Dawkins even goes so far as to mock Stein’s reaction to his visit to a Nazi death camp (and if you don’t believe that he would do such a thing then you don’t know Dick!). Basically it boils down to him not being aware of the film’s agenda. What seems “honestly stupid” to me is not bothering to Google Stein’s name to discover his background before agreeing to be filmed for a documentary! Even if this was somehow Stein’s fault, the point is moot - facts are facts regardless of one’s purpose for exposing them.
Andy Klein (LA City Beat) gives this enlightened response to the film: ” In its simplest terms, Expelled sees Hitler’s push for racial cleansing as a natural result of Darwin’s ideas. Whoa. Big F—ng Whoa.” Brilliant! Insightful! Seriously Andy, have you read Mein Kampf? Consider this quote:
At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. . . it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.
Is this not textbook Nazi racism? Nope - it’s from Darwin’s Descent of Man! Klein makes another rhetorical-yet-factually-lacking statement with regard to Planned Parenthood: “‘The spirit of eugenics lives on in Planned Parenthood’ – huh? – and then lumps together “abortion and euthanasia” in one breath. This is yet another tip-off as to Expelled’s true goal.” Wow. There is NO QUESTION about the eugenic origins of Planned Parenthood (Margaret Sanger, the founder, once said that, “The undeniably feeble-minded should, indeed, not only be discouraged but prevented from propagating their kind”); and the medi-ethical issues of abortion and euthanasia go hand in hand by definition (whether one is for or against either).
Jeannette Catsoulis (NY Times) called Expelled “One of the sleaziest documentaries to arrive in a very long time . . . a conspiracy-theory rant masquerading as investigative inquiry.” She then revealed startling ignorance when she stated that, “Every few minutes familiar — and ideologically unrelated — images interrupt the talking heads: a fist-shaking Nikita S. Khrushchev; Charlton Heston being subdued by a water hose in ‘Planet of the Apes.’” Excuse me? Is she seriously questioning the evolutionary links between evolutionary theory and communism or Planet of the Apes (a film wholly dedicated to the evolutionary hypothesis)???
Sorry guys, but these links have been recognized by scholars for quite some time. Discovery Institute fellow Dr. Richard Weikart explains the Nazi connections in his book From Darwin to Hitler (even a pro-Islam website shows many of these Nazi/Communist connections). While it’s true that Hitler did not mention Darwin by name, he hardly ever named thinkers from whom he derived ideas. Even if, like most people today, Hitler never even read Darwin, he would have learned evolutionary ideals in school, and popular media (again, like most people today). As Weikart notes, “Hitler believed that population pressure causes a struggle for existence between organisms that leads to evolutionary progress. He also believed that this struggle occurred between human races. This is completely Darwinian . . . and Hitler often described evolution in Darwinian terms. . . . Hitler’s anti-Semitism did not derive from Darwinism, but many of his ideas did have Darwinian roots.” Dawkins himself tries to make a strong distinction between Darwinism and its social ramifications when he says, “As I have often said before, as a scientist I am a passionate Darwinian. But as a citizen and a human being, I want to construct a society which is about as un-Darwinian as we can make it” (see “Dick” link above).
William Dembski pointed out the media ’s inconsistency with regard to these connections:
. . . the same weekend that “Expelled” opened in theaters saw the opening of another documentary, “Constantine’s Sword.” Here’s what the Village Voice has to say about that film: “X marks the spot, literally, where Christianity and the Catholic Church fostered the centuries of religious hatred and anti-Semitism that culminated in the Holocaust…” So, for our culture’s secular elite, a film that shows how Christianity “culminated in the Holocaust” constitutes cutting-edge cultural commentary. But a film like “Expelled,” which carefully documents how the Nazis appropriated Darwin’s ideas, is “bizarre and hysterical.”
Where are the facts??? Whether or not Expelled has any artistic merit, what few critics seem to be unable to do is find actual instances of outright falsehood. Besides vague references to “other issues” being involved with Sternberg’s firing I have not heard anything but outraged opinions about Stein’s outraged opinions.
But being outraged is not the same thing as being outrageous . . . not if you’re right.
