The big anti-evolution “blockbuster,” Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, was supposed to be shown at a private screening here tonight. For unspecified reasons, that showing has been postponed indefinitely. Whether the preview arrives before the national release of April 18 is debatable, so I decided to take a look at the “supertrailer” on the Expelled website.
The movie’s agenda is clear as day. If you were hoping for a fair review of creationism, Intelligent Design and evolution, stay home. Expelled is about as subtle as a brick through a picture window.
As the supertrailer opens, we see a janitor cleaning up a hallway, the camera pulls back and turns toward a door marked “Biology 101.” Inside, we see a man writing on the chalkboards in a large lecture hall, “Do not question authority” and “Do not question Darwinism.” Apparently, he was a bad boy.
Meanwhile, Ben Stein’s voiceover tells us of his search for answers and of his belief, that “everything that exists was created by a loving God.” He says he understands that others, including very intelligent people, believe otherwise, that despite the “spark of the divine” in all humans, they believe we arose from “pure dumb fate or chance.”
People are entitled to believe whatever they like, Stein’s monologue continues, and they are free to express those thoughts. Or so he thought …
The film cuts to focus on a case study, that of Richard Sternberg, a victim of a “massive campaign” to smear his reputation as a scientist. Why? Stein asks. Because Sternberg stated that he saw signs of Intelligent Design in nature, that our existence is not a “cosmic mistake.”
Sternberg, Stein’s voiceover continues, made the error of questioning “authority” in the “age of Darwin.” The status quo of “Darwinism” is maintained by a bulwark of forces: scientists, the media, the education system, the courts. To challenge the status quo is to risk one’s own livelihood, reputation, friends, family, — indeed one’s entire future.
“Darwinists” are afraid, Stein says. “They are trying to hide something.” So, he says, he is going to set out on a quest to find why.
As this monologue plays out, we see disparate scenes of Nazi Germany, Martin Luther King Jr, a picket line somewhere — all suggesting that the issue of Intelligent Design/creationism vs. evolution somehow involves suppression of free speech and free religion by a fascist “authority” — “Darwinism.”
Oh, brother.
The premises for the movie are wrong in so many places it’s hard to decide where to start. Clearly, the movie’s creators are grinding a religious axe, not a scientific one, but conflating the two in such a way as to make it impossible to keep them separate. In the “teaser trailer,” in fact, Stein addresses an audience, saying that there are people who want “to keep science in a little box where it can’t touch God.”
In that one pithy quote, that’s the entire problem with this flick. Stein and the other creators of Expelled do not seem to understand (or do not want to, for the purposes of propaganda) that science is not about God, or anything else supernatural. Science is about the natural world, and natural causes. Creationism and intelligent design rely on the concept that extra-natural forces provide the only explanations for the enormous complexity of the universe. Thus, they say, science has to include God as a cause of the observed universe.
Most scientists, regardless of their religious belief, seem willing to keep science and religion separate, to play by the rules as it were. Others, like Sternberg and the other scientists featured as victims in the movie, are not so willing. By stepping outside the bounds of conventional science, they have run into difficulties with the “Establishment,” as we used to say back in the day.
The movie is yet another expression, however veiled, of the so-called “war on Christianity” that some conservatives assert exists in our “secular” society. And like that so-called war, it’s a lot of bunk. Christianity shows no signs of going away anytime soon.
To get back to Expelled, the supertrailer sets up a false dichotomy between “Darwinism,” a perjorative term coined by creationists and IDists, and divine (or intelligent) creation. By referring to “pure dumb fate or chance,” it misrepresents the theory of evolution and the scientists who accept and use it as the primary organizational framework of modern biology. Evolution does not depend on pure chance; the theory shows that environmental forces affect the development and eventual success of organisms. Random events divorced from those factors are not part of the theory at all.
Creationists and ID proponents like to oversimplify the theory of evolution by carping on the chance meme, since it makes their arguments against evolution so much easier to believe. Given that the target audience for this film are religious folks already predisposed to accept divine Creation or at least ID, they are not going to question the false representation.
Sternberg, the movie alleges, faced ridicule and professional pressure because of his decision to “follow the evidence where it leads,” even if it leads to the conclusion that something supernatural influenced the natural world. Again, the film misrepresents the situation.
I will avoid reviewing the details here. Wikipedia has a reasonably impartial review of Sternberg’s case. The man is still employed and did not lose his job because of his pro-ID stance. Maybe he was ridiculed, but so what? It happens in science as it does in politics.
Let’s get something straight. There is no such thing as “Darwinism.” The term brings up images (deliberately, no doubt) of a school of political thought, like Marxism or communism, or a heretical theology, like manichaeism. There is no dogmatic “darwinist” ideal, authority or supreme leader. Creationists and IDists have conjured the whole concept of “Darwinism” from some paranoid delusion that Someone Evil is out to get them.
Science does expect its practitioners to rely on tangible or observable evidence, not surmises or appeals to authority (“Darwin said so!”) or supernatural causes (ET aliens or God). To make a rough analogy, science plays by certain rules just as basketball does. If a basketball player or coach breaks the rules, he is fouled out, suspended or dismissed. There’s no conspiracy, no “basketballism.” You break the rules, you pay the price.
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