Eye Candy #387 - "Expelled - No Intelligence Allowed"

Expelled-No Intelligence Allowed: I’m not a religious person.  I don’t celebrate a faith, don’t go to church, don’t own any of “holy books”, and don’t care much for organized religion.  But I like Ben Stein, so I decided to check this out.  And I found a well-constructed documentary that is bound to piss a bunch of people off (for the wrong reasons) and embolden a bunch of people (for the wrong reasons).  Ben Stein, a well-known conservative (just as Michael Moore is a well-known liberal),  decides to take on the scientific stigma attached to Intelligent Design (the idea that certain features of the universe are best explained by intelligent causation; this is not to be confused with creationism, which means that God is responsible as opposed to any other force, nor does Stein ever use the word), by finding scientists that were attacked, fired, punished for furthering ID in their work as well as evolutionary proponents such as well-known author Richard Dawkins (a devout atheist) and way-left scientist PZ Myers (a man who on his blog says “question everything“…except apparently ID).   His focus is on scientific freedom, freedom of inquiry, and the breakdown in dialogue on this subject and indeed the overt suppression in some quarters of it (not that ID is inherently right).  He even catches admitting that they did this to their peers.  What Stein does in his effort is find ID defenders that aren’t all crackpots, that are degreed and eloquent,  while at the same time finding evolutionary defenders who are rabid, spiteful hypocrites who refer to those that disagree with them as “stupid“ by default (Stein catches several of them lying on camera referencing their treatment of their peers) who are about as far removed from straight, rational evaluation as you can get and rely heavily on the word ‘creationism‘ to make their point.  And to have some of them deny the complexity of life and dismiss any attempt to say “there is causation here of some kind, any kind, and not a random one-in-a-quadrillion chance that all 250 essential proteins lined up in just the right order” while at the same time putting forth that theories that life developed on crystals or because of aliens is the side of the debate you don’t hear about in the paper (hey, you guys with the alien theory?  That‘s actually an example of INTELLIGENT DESIGN).  He even finds some of them calling for the replacement of religion with more and more science until religion is gone, and then draws comparisons between that stance and comparable stances of Soviets under Stalin, and Germany under Hitler, who also took strong stances against religion up to and including the mass murder of particular religious and ethnic groups.  He lets Dawkins ramble on long enough for Dawkins to make himself look like a fool (and a hypocrite).  This movie is going to rile the “shut up, you’re an idiot, this is science” crowd that only knows what they’ve been taught and told and if you took that away from them, that which they spent so much of their lives buttressing, their work, careers, study, and passion would be made meaningless (their personal stake is too high, which is the worst kind of scientist to have; they can‘t afford to be wrong).  I’m sure Darwin must have felt the same thing when he first published in the 1860’s, as his work flew in the face of convention as well (Dawkins seems to think that Darwin‘s inclusion of references to “the Creator“ in “On the Origin of Species“ to be an almost immediate capitulation to critics; at least one Darwin biographer disagrees).  Sure, this movie has been panned by certain groups…they just happen to be the same groups that he singles out as problematic in his film and they behave exactly as he describes by painting the film with terms like ‘propaganda‘, ‘religious nonsense‘, and ‘conspiracy theory-rant‘ (the USA Today “review“ doesn‘t even read like it was written by someone who got more than 5 minutes into the movie).  Those painting this as a religious polemic must have watched a different movie.  Woodchuck sez, “If someone doesn’t think you should see a movie because it doesn‘t say what they want it to say, it’s probably a good idea you should check it out.  And I‘m sure this review will piss some people off too.”