Movie Review: Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed

[cslewislover]

Did you see the new trailer? It's really fun. http://www.expelledthemovie.com/playground.php

[Daniel]

I have not seen the film, but will comment on this review.

First, it seems that a lot of the discussion over the film assumes that it focuses squarely on evolution, which isn't quite true, as the case of Guillermo Gonzalez doesn't seem to deal with evolution so much as the anthropic principle. The issue of Intelligent Design is more nuanced than most people (on either side) would like to think. I consider myself a believer in ID although I am TE.

I am disappointed to read that there were references to Reagan and the Berlin Wall, although I am fully aware that Ben Stein is a politically active Republican. I am a proponent of separating politics from evangelism as much as possible (i.e. I don't mind the church taking a stance on important moral issues, but making transparent political endorsements is likely to turn away prospective converts, many of whom are more likely to be politically liberal to start with, and is likely to damage the cause of Christ.)

[Gman]

I am disappointed to read that there were references to Reagan and the Berlin Wall, although I am fully aware that Ben Stein is a politically active Republican. I am a proponent of separating politics from evangelism as much as possible (i.e. I don't mind the church taking a stance on important moral issues, but making transparent political endorsements is likely to turn away prospective converts, many of whom are more likely to be politically liberal to start with, and is likely to damage the cause of Christ.)

Excellent point Daniel... Yes, I too believe it was not wise route to take. Now it looks like anyone who is an advocate for ID is a republican.

[peter]

I came accross this website http://www.expelledexposed.com/index.php/the-truth which kind of discredits the movie scientifically and intellectually as well as it accuses the movie of twisting truth as well as telling only facts which strengthen their point. It is claimed to be biased propaganda.

I haven't seen it myself, so I cant comment on it, but as a sciene teacher i recognnize many truths on their site, which apparantly differ from the movie.

[SnowDrops]

I came accross this website http://www.expelledexposed.com/index.php/the-truth which kind of discredits the movie scientifically and intellectually as well as it accuses the movie of twisting truth as well as telling only facts which strengthen their point. It is claimed to be biased propaganda.

I haven't seen it myself, so I cant comment on it, but as a sciene teacher i recognnize many truths on their site, which apparantly differ from the movie.

I haven't seen the movie, but the site simply seems to assert that evolution (macro-evolution) is a fact and ID can't be true because it has a God (which isn't even necessarily true) and therefore is not naturalistic. Well if you're not going to address the issue...

[Ivellious]

I was really disappointed by this documentary...I'm not going to run a full review on it, but there are a few really troubling bits that really do make it too biased in my opinion to really be considered anything beyond propaganda.

The first thing is the overarching assumption/claim that ID proponents are being wrongfully pushed out of the scientific community. He almost goes so far as to say there is some great conspiracy among the "evil atheist scientists" to remove religion from the world. I disagree, being a student of biology at a major public research university that is a top producer in the field of biological research. Yes, there is a very strong and overwhelming amount of support for evolution in the scientific community. But that isn't a false statistic or a result of atheists taking over science, it's because after years and years of testing, experimenting, challenging, and pondering on evolution, it has been deemed the most correct or most possible explanation that anyone in science can muster. ID has yet to even come to a consensus on its own hypothesis and lacks numerous parts for it to be seriously considered as a scientific alternative to evolution. If you can't write about it scientifically in a manner that includes anything beyond raw speculation, you will not get published on the subject. End of story.

Freedom of speech is great. It lets anyone who wants to talk about ID or evolution or whatever say what they feel (like on the main site here). But getting published in a scientific journal isn't a matter of your opinion, or your right to free speech. Those journals are there to present real science pertinent to their audiences, not speculation and presentation of a non-scientific concept that is still being heavily worked on. Again, if you can't do science on it, too bad, that journal has the right to turn you down on that basis.

I'd like to see concrete examples of people being fired or denied tenure because they didn't believe in evolution. If you study evolutionary biology at a university and want to spend your time doing something other than evolution, then I'm sorry, you need another job. If you do real biological science and you have the credentials/research to get tenure, then no reasonable or respectable university will turn you down for tenure.

Also, on a personal note...I go to a public research university studying biology (as I said before). We study evolutionary biology. As part of a required course for all students of biological sciences at my school, we spent weeks studying ID, its arguments, its history, the controversy surrounding it and evolution...I've yet to hear anything new in regards to ID or its arguments outside of that classroom (we learned it inside and out). My university teaches biology as derived from the Theory of Evolution. There is no mistaking it, the professors and the entire College of Biological Sciences supports evolution as the basis of evolution. And yet, we learned ID too...So before anyone says ID is being shunned and pushed out of our education system, I'd look at my university, which very clearly and respectfully teaches it despite using evolution as the base of everything. The documentary makes it sound nothing like that.

I've also heard numerous complaints about the interviews being skewed and cut/edited heavily to get a bad meaning out of what was really said. I obviously can't prove that, because my attempts to find the original film for the interviews have not been successful. But while the editing is nothing new to political documentaries, I think in this case it would seem to be sketchy.

[wrain62]

I was really disappointed by this documentary...I'm not going to run a full review on it, but there are a few really troubling bits that really do make it too biased in my opinion to really be considered anything beyond propaganda.

The first thing is the overarching assumption/claim that ID proponents are being wrongfully pushed out of the scientific community. He almost goes so far as to say there is some great conspiracy among the "evil atheist scientists" to remove religion from the world. I disagree, being a student of biology at a major public research university that is a top producer in the field of biological research. Yes, there is a very strong and overwhelming amount of support for evolution in the scientific community. But that isn't a false statistic or a result of atheists taking over science, it's because after years and years of testing, experimenting, challenging, and pondering on evolution, it has been deemed the most correct or most possible explanation that anyone in science can muster. ID has yet to even come to a consensus on its own hypothesis and lacks numerous parts for it to be seriously considered as a scientific alternative to evolution. If you can't write about it scientifically in a manner that includes anything beyond raw speculation, you will not get published on the subject. End of story.

Freedom of speech is great. It lets anyone who wants to talk about ID or evolution or whatever say what they feel (like on the main site here). But getting published in a scientific journal isn't a matter of your opinion, or your right to free speech. Those journals are there to present real science pertinent to their audiences, not speculation and presentation of a non-scientific concept that is still being heavily worked on. Again, if you can't do science on it, too bad, that journal has the right to turn you down on that basis.

I'd like to see concrete examples of people being fired or denied tenure because they didn't believe in evolution. If you study evolutionary biology at a university and want to spend your time doing something other than evolution, then I'm sorry, you need another job. If you do real biological science and you have the credentials/research to get tenure, then no reasonable or respectable university will turn you down for tenure.

Also, on a personal note...I go to a public research university studying biology (as I said before). We study evolutionary biology. As part of a required course for all students of biological sciences at my school, we spent weeks studying ID, its arguments, its history, the controversy surrounding it and evolution...I've yet to hear anything new in regards to ID or its arguments outside of that classroom (we learned it inside and out). My university teaches biology as derived from the Theory of Evolution. There is no mistaking it, the professors and the entire College of Biological Sciences supports evolution as the basis of evolution. And yet, we learned ID too...So before anyone says ID is being shunned and pushed out of our education system, I'd look at my university, which very clearly and respectfully teaches it despite using evolution as the base of everything. The documentary makes it sound nothing like that.

I've also heard numerous complaints about the interviews being skewed and cut/edited heavily to get a bad meaning out of what was really said. I obviously can't prove that, because my attempts to find the original film for the interviews have not been successful. But while the editing is nothing new to political documentaries, I think in this case it would seem to be sketchy.

I can believe this. It appealed and relied upon my emotional side more than intellectual side.

[Ivellious]

Right. I'm not saying that everything is fake in the video. There probably are isolated incidents of discrimination that ought to be investigated, but once again if you are valuable to a university and have a good research track record and make money for your school, you will not be turned down for tenure or fired. I guarantee that in most circumstances, there are other reasons that got the people in that video fired. One in particular said he was forced to give back his grant money after the school found out he believed in ID. This is not true...in fact the grant money he had received was given under the assumption he was working on evolutionary biology and he used for something else...of course, the school finds out and didn't want to get in trouble for employing someone who lies about his research, so they did the right thing.

But yeah, outside of some isolated incidents and dumb quotes from evolutionary biologists, most of it was a bunch of sarcasm and poorly-veiled emotional appeal (especially the insane Hitler references, one of the worst fallacies that I hear lots of extreme Christians use).

[Dudeacus97]

I was really disappointed by this documentary...I'm not going to run a full review on it, but there are a few really troubling bits that really do make it too biased in my opinion to really be considered anything beyond propaganda.

The first thing is the overarching assumption/claim that ID proponents are being wrongfully pushed out of the scientific community. He almost goes so far as to say there is some great conspiracy among the "evil atheist scientists" to remove religion from the world. I disagree, being a student of biology at a major public research university that is a top producer in the field of biological research. Yes, there is a very strong and overwhelming amount of support for evolution in the scientific community. But that isn't a false statistic or a result of atheists taking over science, it's because after years and years of testing, experimenting, challenging, and pondering on evolution, it has been deemed the most correct or most possible explanation that anyone in science can muster. ID has yet to even come to a consensus on its own hypothesis and lacks numerous parts for it to be seriously considered as a scientific alternative to evolution. If you can't write about it scientifically in a manner that includes anything beyond raw speculation, you will not get published on the subject. End of story.

Freedom of speech is great. It lets anyone who wants to talk about ID or evolution or whatever say what they feel (like on the main site here). But getting published in a scientific journal isn't a matter of your opinion, or your right to free speech. Those journals are there to present real science pertinent to their audiences, not speculation and presentation of a non-scientific concept that is still being heavily worked on. Again, if you can't do science on it, too bad, that journal has the right to turn you down on that basis.

I'd like to see concrete examples of people being fired or denied tenure because they didn't believe in evolution. If you study evolutionary biology at a university and want to spend your time doing something other than evolution, then I'm sorry, you need another job. If you do real biological science and you have the credentials/research to get tenure, then no reasonable or respectable university will turn you down for tenure.

Also, on a personal note...I go to a public research university studying biology (as I said before). We study evolutionary biology. As part of a required course for all students of biological sciences at my school, we spent weeks studying ID, its arguments, its history, the controversy surrounding it and evolution...I've yet to hear anything new in regards to ID or its arguments outside of that classroom (we learned it inside and out). My university teaches biology as derived from the Theory of Evolution. There is no mistaking it, the professors and the entire College of Biological Sciences supports evolution as the basis of evolution. And yet, we learned ID too...So before anyone says ID is being shunned and pushed out of our education system, I'd look at my university, which very clearly and respectfully teaches it despite using evolution as the base of everything. The documentary makes it sound nothing like that.

I've also heard numerous complaints about the interviews being skewed and cut/edited heavily to get a bad meaning out of what was really said. I obviously can't prove that, because my attempts to find the original film for the interviews have not been successful. But while the editing is nothing new to political documentaries, I think in this case it would seem to be sketchy.

I feel so betrayed right now. Now, I notice that it tried to appeal to my emotional rather than intellectual brain. It constantly rattled on about "evil darwinism" and the "scientific conspiracy to eliminate religion". I bought it for a while because I didn't notice it. Before someone goes on about the social implications of an ideology, it is good to go towards the root of it: is it true or not? I watched other documentaries, like The Case for A Creator (Lee Strobel's book in movie form) and The Signs for God's Existance, which were much better because they barely touched on the social factors. The closest that The Signs for God's Existence got was on how the popular media is trying to force evolution a lot, which I agree on. Then again, this was only for about 5 or so minutes of the documentary and they established why they thought that evolution was false first.

The Hitler references made sense in a way, since Hitler's theory was rooted in Darwinism, along with Communism (Karl Marx dedicated Das Kapital to Charles Darwin). Darwin was also opposed to eugenics and saying that the theory is bad because it led to the Holocaust is about as valid as saying that we shouldn't teach physics because of nuclear weapons. The fact that Ben Stein is Jewish might also have something to do with him mentioning Nazism.