Ben Stein, spokesperson for Clear Eyes, presents a murky vision of evolution.
Ben Stein-the former Nixon speech writer, game show host and Clear Eyes spokesman-can now add crafter of one of history's most propagandistic, manipulative and shoddy documentaries to his résumé.
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It's called
Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed
and its cinematic lecture can be roughly summarized thusly: In 1809 The Great Satan was born. Anyone know who that was? Anyone? Charles Darwin. His writing would lead to…anyone? Anti-god scientists abusing innocent religious scientists…Anyone know what else? Class? Abortion, eugenics, the loss of free will, gulags and…anyone?…Starts with "Na"…Nazism.
In fact, the Intelligent Design (ID) agitprop dressed in the sheep's clothing of academic freedom opens with Stein giving a lecture, à la Al Gore. But
Expelled
quickly switches to badly imitating a different documentary film star: Michael Moore.
Dressed in an ill-fitting suit and skate shoes, Stein wanders around, lamely trying to be funny by doing things like using a retractable backscratcher and playing the hapless everyman while he "discovers" that ID scientists have been the recipients of "Darwinist wrath"-that is they've occasionally been denied tenure-by Big Science. Stein draws, it would seem, on the Karl Rove handbook. Flags flutter in the background and he suggests that if the ID "scientists" don't get tenure every American soldier who has ever died will have died in vain.
Not only does Stein's case for abusive firings seem weak, it also seems clear that institutions have the right to delimit what they consider compelling and appropriate work. Should denial of tenure to a proponent of, for instance, Satanist Economics also be considered a threat to academic freedom?
The imagery and music takes an ominous turn as Stein interviews notable evolutionary biologists and philosophers such as Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins. Footage of storm troopers, the Berlin Wall and marching communist soldiers (along with mention of "being a good comrade") is interspliced with Dennett's and Dawkins' obviously cherry-picked quotes. Particularly hilarious is the shooting of Dawkins in a dark room, his face cast in sinister shadows as the camera zooms up his nostrils and into his facial pores.
Strangely, there is no exploration of ID research itself, a curious lacuna in a film that constantly suggests Darwinism is rife with "curious lacunae." And not only do those behind
Expelled
abuse their audience's assumed scientific ignorance, they also take part in wanton dishonesty. For instance, they attack ***image1***ideas that are merely suggested as possible directions for research-such as the possibility that DNA structure could have an origin in the structure of crystals-as the "Darwinist gospel" account for the origins of life. "Crystals?!?" Stein shrieks nasally as black-and-white footage of turban-bedecked magicians rubbing their crystal balls is rolled out.
But
Expelled
moves from merely pathetic to thoroughly insulting when it tries to blame the Holocaust on evolutionary biology. Darwinism was a "necessary" condition for the Holocaust, an interviewee claims. False! Yes, the Nazis drew on the current science of the time (as well as religion and philosophy) to defend what they did. But they just as easily could have drawn on ID-which has absorbed most of evolutionary biology while trying to insert God where it perceives there are "lacunae"-had it existed at the time.
Expelled
is more a catalog of logical fallacies and disingenuous rhetoric (
ad hominem
and strawman attacks,
post hoc, ergo propter hoc
reasoning and guilt by association figure prominently) than it is a film. An interesting movie could be made about religion's challenge to science.
Expelled
is not it. Stein, who tries to style himself as a sort of Ronald Reagan-like hero who tries to bring down the wall of scientific freedom, should be ashamed.
