So you are advocating doing science line this?
Posted on 04/11/2008 9:58:56 AM PDT by Sopater
Don't Believe Everything You Hear
If you have heard of the new documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, opening April 18, chances are you have heard all kinds of distortions and myths about it. So let me set the record straight about some of the most common myths.
Myth #1: Darwinists interviewed for this film were tricked into participating.
Not so. Each scientist interviewed for Expelled, on both sides of the evolution debate, knew who would do the interview and what it was for. Each of them signed a release, allowing the producers to use the footage of their interviews.
Myth #2: The film is anti-science.
Wrong again. Many distinguished scientists were interviewed for this film and given the chance to express their views. Just like their Darwinist counterparts, the advocates of intelligent design and their supporters who are interviewed are there to talk about science, not to dismiss it. These are people like Cambridge physicist John Polkinghorne; Oxford mathematician and philosopher John Lennox; journalist Pamela Winnick, who has received hate mail for covering the issue; and biologist Caroline Crocker, who was fired from George Mason University for discussing intelligent design in the classroom. Some of them are religious believers; some are not. But what they share is a commitment to science and the unfettered pursuit of truth. Expelled is not anti-science; it is anti-censorship.
Myth #3: Ben Stein, the actor and writer who hosts the movie, has lost his mind.
Bringing up this very issue in a conference call, Stein quipped that he probably has, “but it was a long time ago . . . probably sometime around 1958.” Well, I have known Stein well for years, and he is as bright as a button and anything but out of his mind. On a serious note, Stein and his film’s producers explained that the mud that people are flinging at him is just one small example of what happens to people who question Darwinian orthodoxy. The original idea for Expelled, said co-producer and software engineer Walt Ruloff, came to him when he was working on a project with a group of biotechnologists and learned “that there was a whole series of questions that could not be asked.”
The prevailing ideology among many scientists—it turned out—he concluded, was keep your mouth shut, take the research money, and publish only the data that fits with “the party line.” The issue that concerns Ruloff and the others behind Expelled is whether the scientific establishment in this country is going to allow genuine “freedom of inquiry,” or simply shut up—and slander—those who do not toe the line.
Given all this, Ben Stein states, “As long as the cause is right, I’m happy to be in an uphill struggle.”
Myth #4: Popular author and atheist Richard Dawkins tells Ben Stein in this film that there could have been a designer of life on earth, but it would have had to have been “a higher intelligence” that had itself evolved “to a very high level . . . and seeded some form of life on this planet.”
Well, actually . . . that one is not a myth. He really did say it—striking admission, though it is.
So, I urge you to go see Expelled when it opens at a theater near you. Believe me, in this case the truth really is stranger—and more compelling—than any fiction the film’s detractors could possibly dream up.
Jeff Peck, “Stein’s ‘Expelled’: See It. Believe It.” The Point, 5 March 2008.
Gina Dalfonzo, “You’ll Never Look at Ben Stein the Same Way Again,” The Point, 5 October 2007.
Gina Dalfonzo, “Those Darwinists Know How to Party,” The Point, 28 March 2008.
J. Clinton, “How Not to Attack Evolution,” The Point, 12 March 2008.
Gina Dalfonzo, “Striking Back at Darwin Day,” The Point, 11 February 2008.
Jason Bruce, “More on Ben Stein’s Documentary on Intelligent Design,” The Point, 30 January 2008.
Kim Moreland, “The Stirring Pot,” The Point, 9 November 2007.
Jeffery Overstreet, “Did Richard Dawkins Just Crash the Party at a Screening of ‘Expelled’?” Looking Closer, 20 March 2008.
Shankar Vedantam, “Eden and Evolution,” Washington Post, 5 February 2006.
I can’t seem to find information about when it is going to be released. I saw one brief blurb that had the date “April 18” in the headline, but no further mention in the article.
Scientific American reviews "Expelled"
A sample:
The movie's unreliable reporting is even more obvious during the scene in which Stein interviews Bruce Chapman, the president of the Discovery Institute, the institutional heart of ID advocacy. Stein asks whether the Discovery Institute has supported the teaching of ID in science classes so avidly because it is trying to sneak religion back into public schools. Chapman says no and the film blithely takes him at his word. No mention is made of the notorious "Wedge" document, a leaked Discovery Institute manifesto that outlined a strategy of opposing evolution and turning the public against scientific materialism as the first step toward making society more politically conservative and theistic. Maybe Ben Stein didn't think it was relevant, but wouldn't an honest film have trusted its audience to judge for itself?The most conspicuous absence from the movie, however—and you would think it was impossible in a movie about evolution and ID—is any real science. Anyone looking for scientific reasons or even detailed arguments for why scientists maintained either position would go away unsatisfied. A half hour or so passes before anyone in the film offers even simplistic definitions for evolution and ID. Nor is there any discussion of evolution's accomplishments in illuminating the history of life and problems in fields as diverse as medicine and astrophysics, and its applications to technology such as combinatorial chemistry.
Instead, various Discovery Institute fellows intone that evolution is a "slippery," hard-to-pin-down theory. No such criticism is made of ID, a notion which firmly states that at one or more unspecified times in the past, an unidentified designer who might or might not be God somehow created whole organisms, or maybe just cells, or maybe just certain parts of cells—they're still deciding and will get back to you on that.
Expelled would rather dwell on what it considers to be the failures of evolution, most notably the lack of a detailed explanation for the origin of life. Never mind that nearly all of evolutionary biology concerns other problems. Indeed, even if life somehow did have a supernatural origin, evolution still offers the most coherent scientific explanation for what is seen in nature and the fossil record about the development of life since then.
Moreover, modern biologists do have tentative ideas about how life might first have evolved. One snippet of the film shows philosopher Michael Ruse gamely trying to explain how crystals might have offered a substrate on which the components of protolife could have organized themselves into early replicating units, but that idea is met with Stein's stony-faced derision and a mocking clip of a swami with a crystal ball.
It speaks to their anti-intellectualism and fundamental misunderstanding of science that for the makers of Expelled (and ID advocates more generally) the answer "we don't know yet" is a badge of shame. "We don't know yet" is what defines the fruitful frontier for science; it is what directs scientists' curiosity and motivates them to spend years on research. Research starts where knowledge and certainty drop off. It's one of the many ironies of Expelled that Ben Stein says he wants this movie to free people to ask questions about science, but the ID theories he defends would close off inquiry with nonanswers.
Scientific American is looking more dogmatic all the time.
Scientific American is looking more dogmatic all the time.
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Can you please demonstrate, from your viewing of the film, exactly where the Scientific American article is incorrect?
You mean you haven’t seen it yet? Then on what basis are you dismissing this review?
read later
Nice strawman. Very pretty.
Short, misleading, dismissive, and economical in your use of words.
I’d give it a 7.
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Someone dismisses a review of a movie they have not seen based the fact that they don’t care for the publication in which it is found, and for the crime of pointing that out, I have created a strawman argument?
Admit it, you really don’t know quite what a strawman argument is. Cuz this ain’t an example of one. Did you read the post I was responding to?
You’re funny. But rarely is anything I write worth more than a 6.
Expelled bump
Is there a yet more evolved higher intelligence who seeded this evolved higher intelligence?
You assumed he dismissed it.
That’s where we harvest the straw to set up your dismissal.
He made an indirect comment on the magazine. You ran with it.
I still think it rated a 7 on style.
It's lazy, flippant, dismissive, and sophomoric. The quality of writing and generous interspersing of colloquialisms makes it more suited to polemic than anything serious. I would have believed it came from some pro-Darwin blog based on its quality and tone.
“we don’t know yet” is not a phrase I heard much of when I took Evolutionary Biology in college...indeed, the final included the essay question, “Why is evolution absolutely essential to the study of biology?”
FWIW - I answered that it wasn’t, and did my best to explain why. The Professor, a great guy, gave me full credit for my answer, saying it was the only original answer in the class.
The most conspicuous absence from the Scientific American’s review of the movie, and you would think it was impossible in a review of a movie about evolution and ID—is any real science. Anyone looking for scientific reasons or even detailed arguments in the review would go away unsatisfied after reading it.
The science is in libraries and journals and museums.
But here are bits from another review:
Biblical creationism, repositioned as creation science and most recently intelligent design has lost the contest of ideas on all counts: the rules, the criteria and the judging. It doesn't follow the scientific method; it doesn't allow us to explain, predict, and control better; and the jury of relevant experts (aka biologists) keeps returning the same verdict.Now the creationists have taken a new approach that they hope will help them achieve their goal of teaching religious beliefs in our schools as science. That approach can be summed up in one simple word: whining.
...
The mountain of evidence supporting mainstream biological science is overwhelming. The paltry evidence for "insurmountable gaps" and "irreducible complexity" is actually shrinking. Evolution should be taught as science and creationism, in its many guises, as religion, including the rich pre-scientific stories about origins from many cultures and traditions. So why not just ignore the whiners and hope they will go away? Because they won't until we force them to stop their marketing of religious beliefs as science. ...
Besides, how long has it been since the famous Scopes trial? How long have creationists been talking about "Darwinism" as if no one but Darwin had noticed the fossil record or the DNA code in the last 100 years? It does get tiresome, responding to their ever evolving anti-evolutionary rhetoric. But we need to expose the bizarre supernaturalist agenda behind all the sudden whining about academic freedom. And somebody needs to gently remind Stein and his creationist cronies that they haven't been expelled from school, they flunked.
I have to laugh this. If one actually followed the scientific method objectively, and free of bias, evolution would fail as a legitimate scientific theory, and here's why:
Natural selection is essential to evolution, and it therefore must either be a mechanism or a metric. It has no mathematical value, so it can't be a metric, and since it doesn't explain physical phenomena that isn't already explained by other mechanisms such as drift, mutation, and recombination, among others...which, by the way, do not infer evolution exclusively, and to the exclusion of anything else...it can't be a mechanism.
The notion that 'this is all we've got, therefore it must true,' simply isn't scientific....no matter what one wants to believe, regardless of how many initials they may have after their name or title...
I have to tell you, if you tried that kind of logic and reasoning in a college class you would not receive a passing grade.
Any question or statement about the legitimacy of the gospel according to Darwin can lead to a failing grade in many college classes. Thats the problem.
You mean the kind that actually makes sense? Regardless of the overwhelming data that is associated with the theory of evolution, if the the structure of the theory itself is not scientific, then all you have is a philosophical theory, and nothing more. It's that simple.
Have you read #12 yet? Not all assumptions are, apparently, incorrect and reflective of straw man arguments. Sometimes, the truth can shine through in an assumption.
Or sometimes I just get lucky.
LOL! The same people who are expelling all the scientist in "Expelled" have written this article!
LOL! The same people who are expelling all the scientist in "Expelled" have written this article!
You don't like Scientific American? OK, here are a few other reviews:
Ben Stein: Front Man for Creationism's Manufactroversy
So what kind of "force" do they have in mind? Sounds like the return of the "Inquisition!"
Just like all leftists -
if an idea is competing with theirs, it must be silenced, forceably if necessary.
You prove my point again! LOL !!!
Compared to another paragraph in the article:
" It speaks to their anti-intellectualism and fundamental misunderstanding of science that for the makers of Expelled (and ID advocates more generally) the answer "we don't know yet" is a badge of shame. "We don't know yet" is what defines the fruitful frontier for science; it is what directs scientists' curiosity and motivates them to spend years on research. "
Evo's sure do whine.
Speaks volumes on their paranoia.
Pass the popcorn...
/ sarcasm
Worse still, I believe in God's word, and I believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God, who died for my sins, and was resurrected;that all who believe in him shall have everlasting life. I guess that makes me a very dangerous person...but bitter I'm not, although, I can understand why those who put their faith in men would be....
If those scientists left it at "We don't know yet", I wouldn't have a problem with them. It seems, however, they spend a lot of time denigrating anyone with a different explanation from themselves, accusing them of trying to 'sneak religion' back into education. That wouldn't need to be done, if those same scientists hadn't worked so hard to remove it over all these years.
There are some who believe God created everything, who also have no difficulty accepting an idea of Evolution, after all, no one really knows for sure how He brought life forward, or how long it truly took. And you don't even have to dismiss any of the descriptions of the six days of Creation in the Bible. We don't know how long each of God's days are, so why should we be so conceited as to think they have to be the same as OUR days?
What's interesting, though, is how the reverse is not true. Many of those who push Darwinian Evolution seem to go out of their way to deny any possibility that there was an 'Author of Life'. It's like all their science would be meaningless if they had to depend on the idea of a Creator.
So you are advocating doing science line this?
I'm not saying that the scientists have to prove that God created the world, but I haven't seen any proof from any of them that He didn't. I'm just suggesting that they shouldn't be so dismissive of those who DO think God created the world, but can't prove it either.
The point of the cartoon is that science does not rely on miracles. If one comes by, you can be sure science will check it out. So far, none have yet passed the test of scientific scrutiny.
(My favorite "miracle" is Peter Popoff and his faith healing. Google "popoff and mhz" for a good laugh.)
I saw this movie. It was great and enlightening! It was factual and gave the Darwinian leftists a lot of rope(camera time) to hang themeselves with their OWN WORDS.
The main point of the film was for a level playing field in the classroom with the inclusion of Creationism being taught also. Currently there is a monopoly of Darwinism ONLY! Anyone who even proposes a level playing field losses their job, career and more. Sounds like the Soviet Union. What are they so intellectually afraid of?
So you are advocating doing science line this?
*snort*
*snort*
I was snickering about your inference that scientists are accepting that ‘miracle occurring’ when they talk about Evolution. Wasn’t that what you meant?
Yes, thats what I was meant.
A snort without context can just be a little tricky to interpret. ;)
Fortunately, some scientists are still objective about the subject of Evolution.
But they are few and getting even farther between.
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