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.
8 responses so far ↓
Pauli Ojala // April 30, 2008 at 11:15 pm
Stein is under heavy attack for ‘exaggerating’ the influence of evolutionism behind Nazism and Stalinism (super evolution of Lysenkoism in the Soviet Russia). But the monstrous Haeckelian type of vulgar evolutionism drove not only the ‘Politics-is-applied-biology’ Nazi takeover in the continental Europe, but even the nationalistic collision at the World War I.
I quote from my conference posters and articles defended and published in the field of bioethics and history of biology (and underline/edit them a ‘bit’):
http://www.helsinki.fi/~pjojala/Asian_Bioethics.pdf
http://www.helsinki.fi/~pjojala/Haeckelianlegacy_ABC5.pdf
It was Charles Darwin himself, who praised and raised the monstrous Haeckel with his still recycled embryo drawing frauds etc. in the spotlight as the greatest authority in the field of human evolution, even in the preface to his Descent of man in 1871.
Darwin did not apply his revolutionary theory to the human beings until his Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex in 1871. This was after the ambitious Haeckel had firmly stepped in the print, and the old Darwin paid hommage in his introduction:
“The conclusion that man is the co-descendant with other species… is not in any degree new… maintained by several eminent naturalists and philosophers… and especially by Häckel. This last naturalist, besides his great work
‘Generelle Morphologie’ (1866), has recently (1868, with a second edit. in 1870), published his ‘Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte,’ in which he fully discusses the genealogy of man. If this work had appeared before my essay
had been written, I should probably never have completed it. Almost all the conclusions at which I have arrived I find confirmed by this naturalist, whose knowledge on many points is much fuller than mine.”
Race biological reason was not only rhetoric, it was scientific. There is evidence, that In Ukraine and Baltic countries, the people wellcomed the German troops as redeemers. These illusions evaporated soon, when the SS (Schutzstaffel) and civilian administration followed the field-army. Hitler did not even try to separate the Russian people from the Soviet government. The Eastern Europeans Slavic people were born “slaves”, indeed. For Hitler, they were “Untermenschen” (Bullock 1958 pp- 423-5). The ethymology for the Greek “barbaros” was in their uncomprehensible tongue, the word was onomatopoetic.
BUT NOTE! The marriage laws were once erected not only in the Nazi Germany but also in the multicultural states of America upon the speculation that the mulatto was a relatively sterile and shortlived hybrid. The absence of blood transfusion between “white” and “colored races” was self evident (Hailer 1963, p. 52).
The first law on sterilization in US had been established in 1907 in Indiana, and 23 similar laws had been passed in 15 States and sterilization was practiced in 124 institutions in 1921 (Mattila 1996; Hietala 1985 p. 133; these were the times of IQ-tests under Gould’s scrutiny in his Mismeasure of Man 1981). By 1931 thirty states had passed sterization laws in the US (Reilly 1991, p. 87).
So the American laws were pioneering endeavours. In Europe Denmark passed the first sterilization legislation in Europe (1929). Denmark was followed by Switzerland, Germany that had felt to the hands of Hitler and Gobineu, and other Nordic countries: Norway (1934), Sweden (1935), Finland (1935), and Iceland (193
(Haller 1963, pp 21-57; 135-9; Proctor 1988, p. 97; Reilly 1991, p. 109). Seldom is it mentioned in the popular Finnish media, that the first outright race biological institution in the world was not established in Germany but in 1921 in Uppsala, Sweden (Hietala 1985, pp. 109). (I am not aware of the ethymology of the ‘Up’ of the ancient city from Plinius’ Ultima Thule, however.) In 1907 the Society for Racial Hygiene in Germany had changed its name to the Internationale Gesellschaft für Rassenhygiene, and in 1910 Swedish Society for Eugenics (Sällskap för Rashygien) had become its first foreign affiliate (Proctor 1988, p. 17).
Hitler’s formulation of the differences between the human races was affected by the brilliant sky-blue eyed Ernst Haeckel (Gasman 1971, p. xxii), praised and raised by Darwin. At the top of the unilinear progression were usually the “Nordics”, a tall race of blue-eyed blonds. Haeckel’s position on the Jewish question was assimilation, not yet an open elimination. But was it different only in degree, rather than kind?
In 1917 the immigration of “defective” groups was forbidden even in the United States by a law. In 1921 the European immigration was diminished to 3% based on the 1910 census.
Eventually, in the strategical year of 1924 the finest hour of eugenics had come and the fatal law was passed by Congress. It diminished immigration to 2% of the foreign-born from each country based on the 1890 census in order to preserve the “nordic” balance in population, and was hold through World War II until 1965 (Hietala 1985, p. 132).
Richard Lewontin writes:“The leading American idealogue of the innate mental inferiority of the working class was, however, H.H. Goddard, a pioneer of the mental testing movement, the discoverer of the Kallikak family,
and the administrant of IQ-tests to immigrants that found 83 % of the Jews, 80% of the Hungarians, 79% of the Italians, and 87% of the the Russians to be feebleminded.” (1977, p. 13.) Finnish emmigrants put the cross on the box reserved for the “yellow” group (Kemiläinen 1993, p. 1930), until 1965.
Germany was the most scientifically and culturally advanced nation of the world upon opening the riddles at the close of the nineteenth century, and in 1933 the German people had not lived normal life for twenty years. And so Adolf Hitler did not need his revolution. He did not have to break the laws in Haeckel’s country, in principle, but to constitute them.
Today, developmental biologists are anticipating legislation of laws that would define the do’s and dont’s. The legislation should not distract individual researchers from their personal awareness of responsibility. A permissive law merely defines the ethical minimum. The lesson is that a law is no substitute for morals and that dissidents should not be intimidated.
I am suspicious over the burial of the Kampf (Struggle). The idea of competition is innate in the modern society. It is the the opposite view in a 180 degree angle to the Judaeo-Christian ideal of agapee, that I personally cheriss. The latter sees free giving, altruism, benevolence and self sacrificing love as the beginning, motivation, and sustainer of the reality.
pauli.ojala@gmail.com
Biochemist, drop-out (Master of Sciing)
http://www.helsinki.fi/~pjojala/Expelled-ID.htm
PS. Here’s the final chapter scanned from an evolutionist scholar D. Gasman from his The Scientific Origins of National Socialism: Social Darwinism in Ernst Haeckel and the German Monist League (chapter 7, Gasman 1971)
http://www.helsinki.fi/~pjojala/Gasman.htm
I emphasize that Daniel Gasman is NOT an IDist or Idealist of any kind.
MGraham // May 1, 2008 at 9:49 am
Excellent post! I loved the documentary. It’s an abbreviated version of what many Christian intellectuals have been saying for years, though secular academics have been too blind to even consider the connections that Stein was making in the film.
Brian // May 2, 2008 at 12:33 am
Just for fun, your next post should be….
“Stein on wine”!
Samuel Skinner // May 16, 2008 at 7:07 am
You are a hypocrite. First you declare the truth is irrelevant of presentation- than you procide to attack evolution for being tied to eugenics. Well, what matters is if evolution is true or not. And it is. Stein does not offer any evidence to why we should believe evolution is false and creationism is true. And in science, that is all that matters.
As for blaming all that stuff on evolution… I tend to blame racism. People didn’t change their mind upon hearing about evolution- they used it to justify their own prejudices. It is like saying that IQ tests are messed up because of “The Bell Curve”.
I’m also reminded of the fact that you can tie Newtonian Mechanics to “The Terror” and the French Revolution. How? Well, Newton’s theory brought about the idea of a mechanical, deistic universe based on order and rules… an idea Robspierre, exploited to the hilt. So is gravity false? Is gravity to blame?
No.
Doug Beaumont // May 16, 2008 at 8:47 pm
Samuel,
I’d love to see your explanation of how someone who does not believe truth is tied to presentation is a hypocrite for believing that a something is true regardless of its presentation. Good luck with that. If you need me to draw you a diagram I will.
Further, you blame racism for eugenics. OK, I think that is valid. I assume you mean things like calling blacks closer to animals than whites? But of course who would say something like that? Oh wait, it was DARWIN.
Samuel Skinner // May 17, 2008 at 3:32 am
Well, you attack evolution for eugenics. That would be “truth by presentation”.
Simple- Darwin was a racist. I can’t believe you didn’t know that. I mean, he said ” I’d rather be descended from the smart chimp that made tools, the brave one that died for his comrades, that a savage, terrified by supersticious fears who beats his wife”.
So, no- he didn’t like black people. Surprise, surprise. I mean, this is a time when Lincoln was advocating shipping blacks back to Africa because they wouldn’t be able to fit in. In the 1868 elections you had Grant winning against by half a million votes… equal to the number of black voters. Which meant half the US endorsed a man whose campaign song was N****r Doodle Dandy.
Those were NOT humane times.
Eugenics is attempts to improve the human species genetically. This would be impossible before the advent of genetic engineering- an even now there are extreme limits. Back then it was part of progressivism- finding new ways to control the poor. Why do you think the socialists gained popularity?
Samuel Skinner // May 17, 2008 at 3:33 am
And, before you ask- no I don’t support eugenics.
Improving people is silly- we have tools we can simply use instead. The only decent usage would be to eliminate genetic disorders like Huntingtons and the like.
main ideas of mein kampf // May 21, 2008 at 7:16 am
[...] Well I did, and I thought Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed was pretty good. No, I don??t thhttp://ircontent.wordpress.com/2008/04/23/whine-on-stein/WikiAnswers - What were the ideals of the nazi party described in …Two of hitlers ideas in mein [...]
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