Frigidus wrote:MeDeFe wrote:I'm a little over one hour into Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, and so far the movie is one big facepalm.
What sort of arguments does it make? I don't really get to watch too many documentaries, let alone one's I'm entirely against.
The main messages are, firstly, that anyone who so much as takes a neutral stance on ID in an article, be it in scientific or in mainstream public media, is ostracised by the scientific community. Has grant money revoked, loses their job, can't find a new one, and so on.
Secondly, Ben Stein also tries to link Darwinism directly to genocide as it took place under Nazism. He goes so far as to claim that there's a direct link from the theory of evolution by natural selection to Eugenics and industrial scale mass murder of minorities within the population, ethnic or otherwise. Godwin's law doesn't even begin to cover it.
He also takes some pains to portray the ID movement as the underdog, with hardly any funding, no agenda, all of them very objective. And, on the other hand, the scientists who do not conclude that there's a designer are the oppressor with supporters at all levels who control what is accepted within science and what is not, their agenda is to destroy religion and as an implied result of this they are not objective. He tries to draw a lot of parallels between the scientific community and the one party system as it was found in communist east Germany, as closed to new ideas and only permitting what fits the rules the party has laid down.
Funnily enough Richard Dawkins, the man portrayed as the Champion of Darwinism, the Scourge of Religion and Chief Atheist, shoots down this line of argument a few minutes before the end of the movie (without even knowing it, and I doubt Ben Stein noticed it) when he explains that yes, it's possible for life to be designed, but ultimately you need a designer that came to be through evolution by natural selection. Otherwise you end up with something extremely complex that just jumped into existence. (Which incidentally is the problem many IDers see with evolution, and they're only talking about proteins and complex molecules forming spontaneously from already existing building blocks, not intelligent beings with the power to create matter and arrange it to their liking existing without a prior cause.) Well, If BS wanted to use Dawkins to show that mainstream science is categorically opposed to anything containing the term "design", he utterly failed there.
In all, the movie is less a defense of ID than an attack on evolution. Stein goes very easy on the ID crowd, in fact he goes so easy on them that he fails to spot the main flaw in the definition of ID given at one point. Unfortunately I can't quote it here, but one main proponent explains that ID is about looking for patterns in natural science that can have been intelligently designed. Well, if you look for patterns you will find them no matter where you look. You could give people a randomly generated image and they will see patterns that look designed in it. If you start out knowing what you want/expect to find, chances are you will, whether it's there or not.
On the other hand he reduces one (out of how many?) possible explanation of how the first self-replicating molecules might have originated to "They piggybacked on crystals" followed by a 3 second excerpt from a movie with some charlatan shouting "I see it in my crystal ball!". I imagine the long version included an explanation of crystalline structures under varyingly high pressures and temperatures and how other chemical elements behave in such an "orderly" environment. At an other point he uses a movie made for 2nd or 3rd graders (at most) as "a good example" of an explanation of the origin of life without a designer/creator.
To be fair, a few people in the movie make some good points, for instance, one Professor for mathematics questions which influences the other first, the interpretation of the scientific evidence or the worldview, unfortunately it's left at that because it's an interesting topic in its own right. For the purpose of the movie however it's enough to say that the mainstream scientists may be biased.
