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Ben Stein’s latest media endeavor is the politically incorrect documentary, “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.” (No longer playing locally.)
The deadpan, good-humored director is a noted writer, actor, economist and lawyer in Beverly Hills and Malibu, Calif. What’s more, he is brave and courageous to produce this work. Wearing brown tennis shoes with white laces, he walks in with cameras and startles the Big Science establishment with his characteristically somber, poignant questions.
He won’t be liked for what he has done.
Within Big Science he finds a disturbing, politically correct agenda that suppresses freedom of inquiry. He chronicles the use of political and institutional power to dismiss scientists and educators who pose questions about intelligent design of the universe.
According to the documentary, asking why a single cell contains millions of encoded information imprints to instruct its behavior may be anathema to one’s career. If you entertain the idea of a “signature of intelligence” within the cell’s existence and functions, you may be expelled from the laboratory.
Stein asks why the prospect of simply asking about intelligent design is so offensive to the National Academy of Science and science laboratory leaders.
By definition, science is based on gathering observable, empirical and measurable evidence of the physical world and explaining it by using specific principles of reasoning. Physical reality is science’s domain.
When scientists perceive that the physical world is the sum total of reality, as many do, they move beyond science. They adopt a closed view of reality. In a closed world view, space and time sum up reality. Faith and hope in God beyond the physical world is meaningless.
Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist at Oxford University who often is dubbed “Darwin’s Rottweiler,” makes his case against an open world view in his book, “The God Delusion.” For him, if it isn’t physical, it isn’t. Hence, the idea of God is self-delusion.
MIT-trained nuclear physicist and biologist Gerald Schroeder sees the signature of God in his more open world view of reality. He argues the opposite of Dawkins. In recent years he emerged as one of the most popular and accessible advocates for the melding of science and religion. In his book, “The Science of God,” he reconciles science and faith as different perspectives of a single whole. Science, properly understood, he says, provides positive reasons for faith.
What concerns me about Stein’s documentary is the dark path he highlights in which American physicists and biologists who hint at intelligent design of the universe are denied grants, disciplined, censored, fired and blacklisted from universities and laboratories.
An underlying theme, illustrated with flashbacks to Nazi Germany and Communist Russia, is the presence of evil to suppress freedom of inquiry among many within America’s academia. Poland has more freedom in science, one scientist contends, than America.
Protecting free speech and freedom of inquiry should be important to all Americans. If Stein is right, our freedoms in academia are eroding, to embrace only a closed world view. We should pay attention.
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Why does it not say who wrote this?
JWhite asked: "Why does it not say who wrote this?"
Possibly because it's another Dishonesty Institute press release, lying about the bogus "Expelled" movie, and they don't want you to know that.
Oh, and the reason the movie is "(No longer playing locally.)" is because it was such a failure - it earned less than half what the producers predicted, and over half the theaters initially showing it have yanked it after only two weeks.
See http://www.expelledexposed.com for the truth about this pitiful piece of creationist propaganda.
And yes, Ben Stein is right: Biologists who support intelligent design creationism over evolution ARE "expelled," just as doctors who support the Demonic-Possession theory of disease are "expelled," just as mathematicians who support 2+2=3 are "expelled," just as geologists who support a 6,000-year-old Earth and a 4,000-year-old Grand Canyon are "expelled." Get the picture? As the Dover Federal trial judge ruled in 2005, intelligent design creationism has much more to do with religion than science. In fact there's no science there at all: no theory, no testable hypothesis, just an "argument from ignorance" and wishful thinking.
Paul has it right on. The so-called suppression is a sham. None of the stories of the five "expelled" are even close to the way this documentary reports on them.
I recommend looking at the Wikipedia article on this movie: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expelled... before you spend a dime on this movie. If you read the website and still want to go, have at it. You were warned.
Even the "standing ovation" that Ben gets at the end of his "lecture" is staged! The whole lecture hall is manned -- by extras!
The reviewer is right about one thing: Ben Stein won't be liked for what he has done. The people who will be most PO'd by what he has done is the Creationist/ID crowd. Anyone who does a fact-check will discover that Ben and the other writers have made a mockery of their cause.
Paul: my favorite non-science is where the 1897 Indiana State Legislature attempted to set the value of Pi to a variety of rational numbers, including 3.2. You can see the full writeup at http://www.straightdope.com/classics/... . Just make sure you're not drinking any beverages when you read that story.
I apologize for omitting the author's name when I posted this story. It was written by Ed Nelson, one of the paper's Faith & Values Advisory Board members.
Crystal Boyles, religion reporter
Maybe its time the AIM discontinued its weekly pandering to the cultist and tried being a reality based newspaper for a change.
Or at the least, they could invite a member of the reality based community to serve on their faith and values board to offer some reason and rationality to counter the gang of superstitious sky pilots worshiping their invisible cloud beings.
I don't have a problem with AIM having a Faith and Values section because that seems to be something that is important to this community. I just think that an opinion piece should let us know to whom we should attribute that opinion so that we can understand any possible bias they might have. This was an oversight and was corrected.
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