20 April 2008 - 14:01Ben Stein - the Right’s Michael Moore
Some of the Frontier staff, along with some College Republicans, went to see Ben Stein’s new big screen documentary “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed”. In case you haven’t heard, the film is about intelligent design and whether or not it is a valid scientific theory. Honestly, I went into the theater hoping for myths about evolution to be debunked, for scientific hypotheses generated by intelligent design, for significant holes in the evolutionary theory. I was sorely disappointed (but rather entertained, I should add) by a parade of fluffy interviews, Ben Stein wandering around various cities, and scathingly atheistic evolution advocates, all juxtaposed with footage from Nazi and communist Germany.
To be fair, Ben Stein had a point. His claim that anybody who even mentions intelligent design in the scientific community is instantly ridiculed and ostracized is probably true. Science should be about challenging authority, breaking theories down to make them better. Most of the people he interviewed said that intelligent designers had some very valid issues with evolutionary theory.
Unfortunately, I never saw nor heard from these “valid issues”, only some very weak, non-arguments that have already been raised, debated on, and settled. Anybody who has read a little bit of literature on evolution will find the arguments presented to be ridiculous. Ben Stein’s incredulity at “DNA riding on the backs of crystals” was laughable, the intelligent design scientists’ claim that evolution could not construct new species was simply ignorant.
The rest of the movie was riddled with propaganda. A large chunk of time was devoted to Ben Stein visiting a holocaust memorial. Wait, what? What does that have to do with evolution? His point was that Hitler was a firm believer in Darwinism, and therefore Darwinists are Nazis. Clips of interviews with evolutionary scientists were interspliced with clips of Nazis murdering Jews. Planned Parenthood was portrayed as a neo-Nazi eugenics movement. Does all this remind you of something? Or perhaps, someone?
Yes, Michael Moore, the liberals’ own “documentary” maker, notorious for his non-arguments and skewing of facts. Moore has been criticized for bad facts, poor taste, and downright misconstruing of quotations. Stein is now just as guilty. In “Expelled”, he quotes from Darwin’s “Descent of Man”, using the quotation to imply that Darwin was suggesting Hitler-like breeding of the human race. Stein stops right there, but Darwin goes on to say that mankind’s sympathy is “the noblest part of our nature”, and if we were ever to participate in the kind of breeding he just described, it would be an act of “overwhelming … evil”.
“Expelled” is an entertaining watch, I’ll admit that. I had a good time chuckling at the absurdities of the movie, and at the very least it made me think about the issues again. My opinion of Mr. Stein has been lowered some, but hey, the Republican’s can have their own Moore if they want.
3 Comments | Tags: Opinion
20 Apr 2008 - 20:35
I will agree with you that the movie missed its oppurtunity to sell Intelligent Design, but I don’t think Stein should be in the same sentence as Moore. During the Communist footage the voice over is comparing the way the wall keeps out non Marxist ideals is what is happening today in schools. Universities have built a wall around themselves and only Darwinism is allowed. Any thought of ID is like teaching capitalism in East Germany.
As for the scene in the Hadamar T-4 center, Stein was reenforcing an underlying problem in our world. Darwinism does not grant people free will or any of virtue of religion. It instills the notion that we are only here becuase of some insanely minute chance that cells lined up and we rode in on the backs of crystals as that one Darwinist claims.
Both Nazi Germany and arbortion proponents are guilty of embracing Darwinist pillars of natural selection and killing off those deemed inferior. The entire philosophy rejects respect for human life and human capabilities. That is something we should all find disturbing.
20 Apr 2008 - 22:15
I have to agree with Nick here, the point of the movie was not to describe ID. Ben Stein is not a scholar of the theory, and I would think that true scholars would be insulted if he attempted to explain their work.
The point of the movie was to describe how people’s lives were being ruined for a belief. Much like Republican ideals in some polysci classes these views were seen as attacks and assaults on the norm.
As for the Eugenics aspect of Planned Parenthood, its true. While not aimed at the disabled it is applied to low income families. They would rather kill the child then let it grow up in a poor environment.
22 Apr 2008 - 6:38
On the whole Nazi/Planned Parenthood references, I will not dispute that Stein had a certain agenda he was trying to advance, but he is not wrong in his fundamental assertion about the problematic conclusions of evolutionary theory if you follow Darwin’s arguments to their logical conclusions. Sanger’s eugenics agenda and Hitler’s obsession with junk race theory are very real and understandably chilling examples of this. Sanger is especially frightening given that her organization operated right here in America, promoting an agenda of mandatory sterilization of Negroes, mental deficients and lower-income adults.
Again, you can certainly dispute the formal necessity of including that stuff in the film; hell, I would. But if you want to consider Stein’s central thesis in the documentary as more holistic than a mere defense of ID and rather a critique of the whole inquisitive process behind the origin of man, then certainly the inclusion of these examples is not only valid, but quite useful and persuasive. Then again, I laughed out loud when Stein said the Urey-Miller experiment was a complete failure, along with some other inaccuracies that raised eyebrows. But again, I saw the movie more as an observation of an extremely problematic approach to a scientific question rather than a defense of any one theory at the expense of another. I don’t doubt Stein is an ID supporter, but he seemed far more concerned with the intellectual conflict going on rather than the science behind it, as clearly evidenced by his layman’s perspective shown in almost all of his interviews.