I clicked on the link for Ben Stein Expelled on one of the Google ads. This is the sparse imdb listing and here a YouTube and lastly the official site.
Okay, it’s impossible to judge the merits of a film you haven’t seen, so I won’t. I knew that Ben Stein is politically conservative and an anti-abortion activist who believes video games are as addictive and dangerous as crack (he sent his son to a “rehab” for a video game ‘addiction’), but I didn’t realize he was Fundie. Also, I know he has an impressive CV with everything from speech writing for presidents to “Bueller? Bueller?” to professorships and law practice and I certainly accept him as a legitimate spokesperson on Constitutional or many other kinds of law, and I even liked his game show, but does he have some scientific credentials I’m not aware of? Because from the trailer he seems not just to be a celebrity narrator but a lecturer acting as some kind of authority.
And is there really a proven incident where a science professor was denied tenure because s/he openly believed in God?
Must be a right wing response to Gore’s Oscar win, or Michael Moore.
Anyway, more MPSIMS that could also work in GD or the Pit but I don’t have the desire to write an OP for such, so since it’s a movie with a C-list celebrity I’ll park it here. Make any comments you feel like about it.
Meh, I lost interest in Stein when it turned out he wasn’t Deep Throat.
And inspired by that O’Reilly clip, next time someone tells me I’m wrong about something, I’m going to tell them to stop trying to block my freedom of inquiry.
Og almighty at the sense of martyrdom in that. True, he lives in California, which the rest of the country sees rightly or wrongly as one of the most secular and liberal populations in America, but even so I just can’t imagine that a scientist doing legitimate bonafide research in a university/hospital/think-tank/laboratory is going to be fired because and only because he or she is religious, and not teaching ID in a science course is no more a violation of one’s freedom of inquiry and expression and belief than not teaching how to hem pants and sew buttons (both undeniably useful skills) in a history course.
He’s preachy, self-righteous, and shrill. Reading his column in American Spectator, I get the feeling that he has this Notepad document with his stock column which he runs through a Javascript randomizer which comes up with a different variation of how lucky he is to live in America (and how lucky we are, too), and how terrible it is for Jews in every nation that doesn’t happen to be America, and gosh, his adopted son is a brat who doesn’t know how good he has it, and our troops are the best and the bravest people in the world (OK, I’ll agree with that last part.). A little whining, a little patronizing, humiliate his son–who, let’s not forget, is adopted, complain about his latest cold symptoms, and it’s off to press.
And yet I love him. I love Ben!! He’s brilliant (Yale valedictorian, wrote 27,350 books on government and money, yadda yadda), he’s funny as hell, and best of all, he’s nobody’s shill. In that same column, Ben routinely blasts Wall Street for celebrating its record closes while American troops are dying overseas. He goes further, in fact, and proposes taxing the hell out of the very rich to provide more pay and bennies to the military. Oh, and he’s repeatedly called for our government to pull the troops out of Iraq now, and never mind the surge. He even takes a few shots at The Almighty himself, implying that Bush is simply not up to the task of POTUS–although he still vows to vote Republican no matter what. Still, he’s nobody’s puppet. To me, Ben is the founder, spokesman, and chairman of the board for nerd cool.
Which is why I just shake my head and wonder what the fuck is going on with Ben when he endorses such patent idiocy as teaching intelligent design in schools. I know he’s not stupid. I know he’s not a craven bootlicker, and it’s not like he needs the money or the press. Who or what has gotten to Ben? I have trouble believing that he’s really this ignorant.
As far as I can tell, he isn’t. In fact, given the risque nature of some of his Comedy Central appearances, I seriously doubt that he is.
Ben Stein does believe in a Creator, and he doesn’t think that evolution is enough to explain life on Earth. That doesn’t automatically make him a Fundie, though. Heck, even scientists like Fred Hoyle and Sir Francis Crick questioned the sufficiency of evolution, and they were athiests. (Both gents suggested that life on Earth had been seeded by aliens–a notion known as panspermia.)
Note: I’m not trying to defend their view, nor am I seeking to attack evolution. My point is simply that Stein’s questioning of the sufficiency of evolution doesn’t automatically make him a fundamentalist.
I’m fairly convinced in the truth of evolution, but I enjoy reading well thought out arguments against it on occasion, and I figured Ben Stein seems a pretty smart guy, so I clicked on the Expelled site and read his blog posts there. Was pretty disappointed to find the same sort of shrill nonsense I’d find on the walls of a creationist museum. Lots of “help, I’m being repressed!”, and “evolution made the holocaust!” crap.
Yea. I work in a Physics department at a large University and there are several fairly outspoken religious folks (and I imagine many more who just talk about it less). It doesn’t seem to have affected their careers any.
Usually the “scientist denied tenure because belief in God” stories boil down to the scientist either teaching creationism as fact, or just being a bad teacher and using that as a justification. It’s a lot of whining, ultimately, and Ben Stein can whine with the best of them.
Very true. He has a large capacity for self pity, and it comes across in his articles. I feel sorry for his son, actually. What’s his name, Tommy? Tommy comes across as a typical teen, but essentially a good kid, and after reading about Ben, I would be willing to bet my next paycheck that Ben was every bit as big of a pain in the ass as his son was at that age, and probably bigger. Writing about his son’s relatively minor faults in a popular journal is a lousy thing to do.
I think Ben Stein is hilarious but the fact that he was a speechwriter for Richard Nixon makes me lose a little respect for him. Not that I have a particular axe to grind against Nixon - I think he was an underrated president who did some great things, in addition to some bad things and was foolish enough to get caught. What I dislike is the very idea of a presidential speechwriter. Call me naive but I think the president should write his own damn speeches! God knows that’s what I would do if I were in the oval office.
Which is not relevant to the topic at hand. Both Hoyle and Crick argued that the complexity of life on earth was far beyond what evolution could produce. Moreover, evolution goes far beyond merely explaining how life behaves. Rather, it is supposed to account for the complexity and diversity of life on earth, which goes far beyond mere behavior.
Additionally, evolution (or at least, unguided atheistic evolution) is contingent on abiogenesis, which is required to account for life on earth. Both Hoyle and Crick argued against life developing on earth through naturalistic processes – and being atheists, they argued that aliens were responsible for seeding the planet. So even though evolution per se does not purport to explain how life came about, the purely mechanistic interpretation of evolution does require some naturalistic explanation thereof.
Very disappointed. I was a fan of Stein and enjoy his articles on Yahoo! Finance. These articles tend to offer sound advice on retirement. I also feel (felt) that he was an intelligent and articulate defender of common sense.
I wasn’t using the word “behavior” to refer to individuals but to the process of life as a whole – i.e. reproduction, mutation, natural selection, adaptation, speciation. Evolution refers to how life “behaves” as a phenomenon on earth.
Actually, this is not true. Evolution does not depend on any particular origin for life. Evolution works just the same whether life arose naturalistically or miraculously. All it tells is what happened AFTER life began. It does not address HOW it began.
They were wrong in asserting that natural process cannot theoretically produce abiogenesis (even though we still have not discovered exactly what happened on earth, we do have a number of plausible hypothetical models. We know that abiogenesis is possible, which is all we need to know), but that still has nothing to do with evolutionary theory.
But it doesn’t. If it were proven tomorrow that God created the first life forms, the theory of evolution would be completely unaffected. The origin of life is irrelevant to evolution.
what bothers me about this particular brand of stupid is the claims of censorship and persecution. Christians being persecuted for their views, bullshit I say. There is a big freakin difference between being silenced for speaking about creationism, and having a university say “We’re not gonna pay you to speak about creationism”.
I have never heard of christians being threatened with bodily harm or death for their views. I have seen enough such comments from religious folks towards atheists and even members of other religions. The persecution complex displayed by the like of Ben Stein is comical, and just a little bit scary.
Let’s just talk about Crick. The paper you linked to says nothing of the sort. In fact, it clearly accepts that the complexity of life on Earth is the result of a billion years of evolution, even if started by seeded microorganisms. There is nothing that supports the notion of intelligent design, and nothing that supports the notion that humans are the predetermined result.
As for Hoyle, you might check out how helpful his colleague was to the creationist side in the Arkansas case.
On the “To the Best of our Knowledge” show on this subject, they gave some time to a creationist who used it not to support his argument but only to use the “they’re oppressing us” argument. I suppose they figure Americans like fairness. I’m going for equal time for Flat Earthism myself - nothing to sphere but sphere itself. In your heart you know it’s flat.
And if I had claimed that Sir Francis Crick denied evolution outright, you would have a point. I did not, though. Rather, I explicitly said that he denied the sufficiency of evolution, which is another matter altogether.
You say that there’s nothing of intelligent design in Crick’s views. Frankly, I think that’s woefully simplistic. Crick didn’t claim that every single aspect of life on earth was designed, but neither did he believe that the extent, diversity, and complexity of life on Earth could have come about by random chance. This is by no means unusual; in fact, many proponents of Intelligent Design – including the infamous Dr Michael Behe – do believe in abiogenesis and/or evolution. They simply don’t accept that it’s sufficient to account for the extent and complexity of life on earth.
And if I were attempting to defend Hoyle, you would have a point. As I explicitly said though, I am not endorsing their views – and I certainly do not endorse panspermia! The point is that one can question evolution and/or believe in a measure of intelligent design without being a “Fundie”–and the atheistic Dr. Fred Hoyle is a prime example of that.
My good friend Ben needs to hire some nice carpenter (heh) to build him a bridge, so he can get the fuck over himself.
In the meantime, there’ll always be a fuzzy place in my heart for him, as long as there are re-runs of Win Ben Stein’s Money and Fairly Oddparents with him voicing the Pixies.
