Posted on 04/19/2008 12:17:00 PM PDT by cornelis
I like rebels, especially ones who go against type. Take Ben Stein in his latest film, Expelled, which comes out this Friday. Dressed in a sport coat, tie, and tennis shoes, he’s not who you expect — the deadpan, monotone-voiced but ever-likable teacher he portrays in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and The Wonder Years.
Stein retains his characteristic deadpan affect, but this time he’s playing himself — a deceptively erudite and well-educated interviewer, who is passionately skeptical of evolutionary biology and its leading proponents.
The film’s endeavor is to respond to one simple question: “Were we designed, or are we simply the end result of an ancient mud puddle struck by lightning?”
Big science doesn’t like that question because they can’t answer it. Underneath their antagonism toward explanations that suggest an intelligent cause, lies a fundamental egoism. Science wants to deny any evidence of a supreme being precisely because it wants to be a supreme being. Moreover, representatives of big science in the film are unsettlingly snippy, suggesting that they feel threatened by rival opinions, rather than assured of their own.
To make this point, the film introduces teachers and scientists who are shunned, denied tenure, and fired for questioning dogmatic Darwinism. The film’s producers spent two years traveling the world, talking with more than 150 educators and scientists who say they have been persecuted for questioning Darwin’s theory of natural selection.
Dr. Richard Sternberg, a biologist, publishes a peer-reviewed paper, which posits evidence for intelligent design (ID) in the universe. For his efforts, Sternberg’s bosses at the Smithsonian Institution trashed him so badly that it led to a congressional investigation.
Iowa State University denied tenure to Guillermo Gonzalez, an accomplished astrobiologist. University officials admitted that Gonzalez’s work on ID is a factor.
For Richard Dawkins, by contrast, job security is not a problem. To this superstar Oxford University evolutionary biologist, and devout atheist, intelligent design is nothing more than an “ideological cousin of creationism.”
The highlight of the film features Ben Stein interviewing Dawkins, who concedes that an intelligent being may have created life on earth. But that being cannot be “God.” Instead, he suggests it may be an alien, itself a product of “Darwinian evolution.” Oh, the scientific imagination — there’s nothing like it on God’s green earth.
Dawkins has since complained that the interview was set up under false pretenses, and that he didn’t even know who Stein was. It is rather astonishing that it did not occur to the world’s smartest atheist to look up Ben Stein on the Internet, where he might have readily discovered numerous examples of his writings that are critical of Darwinism.
Dawkins dismisses the Emmy-winning actor as having “no talent for comedy.” He believes during the interview Stein is an “honestly stupid man, sincerely seeking enlightenment from a scientist.” A lawyer, a law professor, an economist, and a speechwriter for both Nixon and Ford, Stein hardly seems to fit the description “honestly stupid.”
In the end, the film isn’t really about intelligent design as much as about a relentless attack on an authentically free inquiry. As Ben Stein points out, “Freedom of inquiry has been greatly compromised, and this is not only anti-American, it’s anti-science. It’s anti-the whole concept of learning.”
— Dave Berg is a senior segment producer at The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.
True. We have been trying to hid the fact that the Theory of Evolution is called the Theory of Evolution by calling the Theory of Evolution the Theory of Evolution.
Me thinks that the first word kind of gives away the fact that the Theory of Evolution is a Theory.
But, then again, I could be wrong.
Nope.
I have never resisted before on Darwin central nor had I heard of that site before I started posting on this one.
You are more than too funny.
Google darwin and Nazism, learn about the connection.
While you are at it go to tellthechildrenthetruth.com
And I am not trying to do anything to you, only pointing out that you have recently signed up and are posting trash.
You imply that my account will soon be canceled which, in civilized circles, is a threat.
The Nazi movement also used Christianity to advance their cause. Is that the fault of Christianity? I say no - ideas and knowledge aren’t a fault when the insane and crazy use them to commit evil.
Those that commit the evil are wrong. Not Christianity and not Darwin.
The cosmological constant problem, the worst problem of fine-tuning in physics: there is no known natural way to derive the tiny cosmological constant used in cosmology from particle physics.
More like an educated guess.
Better yet, Google Charles Galton, Leonard Darwin and eugenics.
More like an educated guess.
here here
Just read these:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1997256/posts
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1993653/posts
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1975167/posts
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1967691/posts
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1954325/posts
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1942952/posts
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1930863/posts
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1893517/posts
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1887900/posts
“You imply that my account will soon be canceled which, in civilized circles, is a threat.
The Nazi movement also used Christianity to advance their cause. Is that the fault of Christianity? I say no - ideas and knowledge aren’t a fault when the insane and crazy use them to commit evil.
Those that commit the evil are wrong. Not Christianity and not Darwin”
You come to a website known to be conservative and most have a deep walk with God nad you choose the screen name you have. Then you post the crap you do.
Go back to DU.
DU?
The Nazis PERVERTED Christianity into something that Christianity isn't.
Tne Nazis FOLLOWED Darwinian eugenics programs to their "logical" and monstrous conclusion.
As in DUmmie.
With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination. We build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.
The producers of the film did not mention the very next sentences in the book (emphasis added in italics):
The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; ***** but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil. ******
Yea - Darwin sure sound evil.
Is calling others names what passes for conservative discourse in your circles?
Since when do you have to believe in God to be a conservative? I remember the moderator posted there’s no religious test for being here. You have a problem not that guy. Your kind of gatekeeping is the problem. Argue the guy down or move on.
If you see everything as explainable by physics and science, so how did life begin??
Pray for W and Our Troops
This is something that science doesn’t yet know.
I miss reading the old arguments where people didn't try to run each other out. There were no mods to whine to and the owner made the calls himself. I guess were too big to do it the old way. I hope you tough it out.
I haven’t called ANYONE a name, you asked what DU referred to and I gave you clarification.
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