7 Problems with Ben Stein’s New Movie “Expelled”
posted on April 10th, 2008
This is by no means an exhaustive list.
I’ll note that the movie has not yet been released, and unless they care to send me a free pass so I can review it in more detail, I don’t intend to pay money to see it. These things are wrong presumably in the movie, but definitely on the website and in the trailer found therein.
- The trailer implies (and the website states outright) that Albert Einstein did not believe in evolution. There is no reason whatsoever to believe this, and specifically, there is every reason to believe Einstein would have disagreed with Intelligent Design. Einstein’s famous quote “God does not play dice with the universe” was about the probabalistic nature of Quantum Mechanics, not about evolution. In fact, Einstein stated that he “cannot for a moment entertain the idea of a being who interferes in the course of events.” As far as we can tell, Einstein believed in a god who created the universe and then stood aside while nature (including evolution) took its course. Incidentally, Einstein is still revered and uncontroversial, despite the fact that in his day, he was a politically active and controversial figure, and Darwin is controversial now despite the fact that he never wrote anything about “God” or meddled in politics.
- The trailer states that the theory of evolution is “dangerous” while showing images of Nazi concentration camps, implying that Evolutionary theory was the birth of ethnic cleansing. I guess Moses had a copy of On the Origin of Species (which, ironically, could only have been provided by Yahweh himself) when he carried out the extermination of Amalek and his people (Exodus 8 - 20 or so). Perhaps Genghis Khan, famous for killing enough men and raping enough women that entire races of people were wiped out and replaced with his own descendants, magically obtained a copy. And perhaps Andrew Jackson was reading that same divine copy of Darwin’s heresy when he signed the Indian Removal Act. Or, maybe people have been wanting to kill people who are different since the beginning of human history.
- The website introduces the visitor to “Big Science”, the enemy of the curious and defenders of the stagnant, wrong-headed atheist evolution cronies. This is, of course, ironic in that the wonderful thing about evolution is that there is no lobby, no special interest, not PAC that benefits from its acceptance. Constant denial of evolution, on the other hand, teaches kids that there’s no validity to the scientific method, and that a guess is as good as having evidence.
- The bad guy here turns out not to actually be evolution, which is too well documented to fight against, but atheism in general. The website appoints Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris as three of its four “class officers” (defenders of “Big Science”). The problem is, while all three accept the reality of evolution, all three are also famous atheists, which is an entirely separate question. You do not have to be an atheist to accept evolution, any more than you have to be an atheist to accept the heliocentric model of the solar system, or photosynthesis, neither of which are talked about in the bible. Choosing between evolution and god is a false dichotomy; you can believe in both.
- The trailer equates “getting fired” with “censorship”. But “getting fired” for “not doing your job” is called “getting fired”, not “censorship.” And teaching religion in a science class is not doing your job. I don’t want my Rabbi wasting my time telling me about photosynthesis, and I don’t want my science teachers wasting my time suggesting theories for which there is no evidence.
- The trailer strongly implies that Dr. Richard Sternberg was fired from his job for publishing a paper advocating Intelligent Design in a minor scientific journal. This is not the case; while Dr. Sternberg did file a complaint regarding a hostile working environment after he published the paper, he did not lose his job. According to his website, he did step down as managing editor of the journal in question (which is NOT his job), but that decision was unrelated to the controversy regarding the paper. It’s worth noting here that Stephen Meyers, the paper’s author, is not a scientist and the paper was a review, not primary scholarship, and as such contained no actual evidence of the conclusions it suggested. This is, in a nutshell, the problem with Intelligent Design: problems in one theory mean there are problems in that theory, not that some other theory is necessarily correct. Just because I can’t right now explain it doesn’t mean God did it. Just ask Persephone.
- Most glaringly, though, neither the site nor the trailer offers any evidence whatsoever of Intelligent Design. Not a list of scientists who support the theory, or links to follow, or anything. The closest it comes to anything educational is in the press kit, which asserts that both evolution and Intelligent Design are scientific theories that therefore deserve debate. The kit states that there “is growing support among scientists that there is evidence of Intelligent Design”, but between the trailer and the site, the only scientists mentioned in support of the theory are Dr. Sternberg and Dr. Meyers, only one of whom is actually a scientist.
This rant filed under: Evolution
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