Posted by
Yubaduck on Wednesday, April 23, 2008 2:13:32 AM
So as I mentioned in the last post, I went to see Expelled last Saturday. According to much of my field of study, I am a deluded simpleton to even consider seeing this movie, but I went all the same. The movie was not really even about ID, they don't go into great detail about what it is: (The idea that some aspects of living things are irreducibly complex, that is, unable to have developed or evolved one step at a time, because they are made up of multiple parts, all necessary for function. The next portion states that complexity points to design and design to some sort of designer.) The movie is about this in passing, but it is much more about academic freedom. What appears to disturb Ben Stein more than anything else is the fact that it appears that those who do not toe the line on evolutionary theory are systematically shut out of meaningful and prestigious places in science. Is this true? Stein makes a very compelling case for it in the early stages of the movie.
He then takes his movie in a new direction. He wonders and explores why it is that there is such a hedge of protection around this one theory. The answer he comes up with is that it isn't about science at all, its about faith and ideology. Seems that in the community of scientists, most of the prominent ones are not just Athiest, but rabidly so. They view religion as "The opiate of the masses" or perhaps as a "mental disorder", something one should quietly push to the unswept dank corners of the minds' attic and never explore except on rainy days and after a number of alcoholic drinks. They cannot possibly fear that the religious will burn them at the stake or cast them into dungeons for heresy. Yet they seem to. He finds that evolutionists are not as objective as they may sometimes seem, they are ideologically driven, and their ideology is to marginalize active religious faith. He explores where this Godless world view can lead, and here the critics of the movie go apoplectic. Darwinism CAN and DID lead to Eugenics....the founders of Eugenics used "Survival of the Fittest" to excuse horrifying actions, and Hitler bought into the idea of Eugenics. Combining this with a virulent racism, fascist government and bitterness over the results of WWI, and Darwinism was one small ingredient in the most horrific regime in our time. Unfair they say, foul they cry....they do this to Christianity all the time. They equate a pastor preaching homosexuality as sin with a puritan burning witches at the stake. They blame priest abuse scandals on the faith repressing sexuality, quite conveniently forgetting that as many or more secular school teachers are convicted of molesting students, and both are horrific and stem from depravity, not religion. They applauded or smiled approvingly when people accuse 9/11 of being an inside job or Al Gore makes up stuff for his Inconvenient Documentary. But this they cannot stand.
Finally, Stein explores the evolutionists themselves, the contempt in which they hold those who do not accept them. This was by far my favorite part. My favorite Ben Stein acting bit was not as the teacher in Ferris Buellers Day Off. It was in The Mask as the expert on pop psychology who studies masks. When Jim Carrey is trying to show him the mask working, he has this look of bored incredulity on his face as he says: "You don't scare me Mr. Ipkiss." The look on his face for Jim Carrey precisely mirrored the look on his face for both PZ Meyers (as he explains that life may have originated on the backs of crystals) and Richard Dawkins (as he states that life could have been brought here by extra terrestrials, but God is an impossibility). The statements that these scientists made when they apparently thought they were talking to an intellectual agnostic were incredibly revealing of both the amount of uncertainty surrounding parts of Darwinian theory and the absolute contempt in which they hold the rest of the world who is not as "smart" as them.
This movie does not intend to teach about ID as much as expose Darwinists for the idealogues that they are. This is an important thing in itself and the compelling look Mr. Stein provides us of the inside of the Ivory Towers is well worth the admission price.