I saw Expelled: no Intelligence Allowed a little while ago. I don’t know if anyone else will have seen it - it’s not the most-watched film of the season, and I even took care to buy a ticket for a different movie so my money wouldn’t go to the producers of this film.
The primary point of the movie is to claim that advocates of a form of creationism called “Intelligent Design” are systematically purged and discriminated against with restrictions on free speech that could lead to a new Holocaust.
It is tempting to think that I am using the words “new Holocaust” in a form of hyperbole. However, the film itself appeals to the Holocaust, with Ben Stein visiting a Nazi asylum and a concentration camp. Images from the building of the Berlin Wall, the Holocaust, Stalin’s reign in the Soviet Union, and ‘50s science fiction movies form about a third to half the footage in the movie.
Ben Stein opens the movie by talking about academic freedom and claims that academic freedom is being threatened. He then interviews people he claims have been subject to a purge by biologists.
Next, Stein seeks out advocates of Intelligent Design (primarily from the Discovery Institute, an Intelligent Design-focused think tank.) He spends an inordinate amount of screen time (probably 3 or 4 minutes) asking Seattleites where the Discovery Institute is, presumably to demonstrate the Discovery Institute is a small David against the Goliath of ‘Big Science,’ but in the 21st century it just makes him appear incompetent at using Mapquest. He also interviews philosophers and mathematicians. A distinct difference can be seen in the film’s interviews with evolutionary biologists. Where the Discovery Institute’s fellows and the philosophers are generally interviewed in good light – outside or well-lighted offices - the evolutionary biologists are interviewed with dark backgrounds. Also important is the fact that every evolutionary biologist interviewed (Sternberg is a taxonomist) is an atheist. Stein did not speak to any evolutionary biologists who are theists, such as Ken Miller Kenneth R. Miller - Home Page, most likely since that would undermine his next point.
The final section of Expelled conflates evolutionary biology with atheism, and boils down to an easy equation:
Atheism + scientists = Darwin + eugenics = Hitler’s genocide + (I’m not kidding) Planned Parenthood
It seems like some bad parody of an internet argument gone wrong, but the whole point of the last third of the movie is that scientists believe in evolution not because of evidence but because they are atheists who want to push their atheism on the rest of us, and this atheism with the justification of Darwin makes eugenics and the Holocaust possible.
Perhaps the most “gotcha” moment in the film occurs at the very end, when Stein asks Richard Dawkins if there’s any way Dawkins could imagine intelligent design being correct. Dawkins responds by discussing the idea of panspermia (which if you read Dawkins’ books, you know he disagrees with.) Panspermia is the idea that life on Earth did not originate on Earth, that it instead arrived from elsewhere. There is no evidence for panspermia, but it can be related to intelligent design. Dawkins says that if intelligent design were taken as a given, then intelligent aliens a long time ago could have engineered some seed of life that landed on Earth, and spread from there. The filmmakers did an excellent job of making Dawkins look like a fool – the other people in the theater chuckled when they heard Dawkins mention aliens. What they failed to realize is that Dawkins was talking about intelligent design instead of his own beliefs.
In short, Expelled is a propaganda film designed to advance a single point of view – that scientists are atheists who use evolution to support crimes against humanity and free speech. That someone thought it worthwhile to spend $9 or $10 million to make and market this movie is a testament to the twisted priorities of discourse on controversial subjects in America.
Anyone else see it or have thoughts on the movie?
