Ben Stein's Expelled - Must See Movie

Posted by Tony Vilgiate at 10/29/2008 5:25 AM
Categories: Science, Entertainment

I had been following the development and release of Ben Stein's movie "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed" since first hearing about it in the first quarter of the year.  I anxiously awaited the local release, but to my chagrin, never saw it playing at a local theater. (Which, for conservative Colorado Springs, was odd...)  Well my wait is over and I got a chance to watch the whole movie this weekend.  My review is a singe word: AMAZING!

The movie draws some interesting conclusions about the state of academia in today's world.  Some conclusions that will often have you considering if that college savings account you have been struggling to fund for Junior is worth the effort. 

There are a few backgrounder articles that I really recommend reading before you watch the movie.  These backgrounders will give you some outside perspective that is essential to possess before venturing into the debate of whether Intelligent Design has any scientific merit. 

There is an article by an eminent biologist and genetic mutations expert, Wolf-Ekkehard Loennig of the Max Planck Institute for Breeding Research in Cologne, Germany.  His paper entitled, "The Evolution of the Long-Necked Giraffe" is essential reading for the serious student who has been told that no "credible scientist" questions the validity of Darwinian Evolution.   

From his paper as cited in Human Events: 

...the scientific data that are available to date on the question of the origin of the giraffe make a gradual development through mutation and selection so extremely improbable that in any other area of life such improbability would force us to look for a feasible alternative. Yet biologists committed to a materialistic world view will simply not consider an alternative. For them, even the most stringent objections against the synthetic evolutionary theory are nothing but open problems that will be solved entirely within the boundaries of their theory. This is still true even when the trend is clearly running against them, that is, when the problems for the theory become greater and greater with new scientific data. This essential unfalsifiability, by the way, places today's evolutionary theory outside of science...

In the 1980's there was ample debate about the foundational principals of Darwinian Evolution and whether or not there needed to be room left in the debate for "external intelligence".  The same Human Events Article cited above quotes a 1980 New York Times article about a meeting at the Chicago Field Museum of Natural History with "nearly all the leading evolutionist in paleontology, population genetics, taxonomy and related fields." You can read that article by following THIS LINK. 

In June of 2006, over 600 scientist holding doctoral degrees went on the record expressing skepticism about Darwinian Evolution.  They all signed a "petition" entitled "Scientific Dissent From Darwinism". This goes in complete contrast to the currently propagated world view that "virtually every scientist in the world believes the theory to be true," as PBS television claimed in their promotion of their series, "Evolution".

If you perform a "Google Search" for Darwin, Darwinian, Darwinism, you are just as likely to find anti-darwinian articles as you are to find pro-darwinian articles.  Some are bad science, some are just pure religious apologetics, some are just pure Darwinian apologetics.  It is amazing how many books, DVDs, article and essays are out there about the insufficiency of Darwin's theory. 

The bottom line in the Darwinian Evolution v. Intelligent Design debate are some nagging scientific laws, such as the second law of thermodynamics.  Things in the natural world trend toward entropy not toward higher states of organization.  There is also the obvious lack of transitional organisms in the fossil records, the obvious inconsistence in the time it takes to "evolve" a beneficial mutation and the "survival of the fittest" argument.  How many generations of an organism developing a "little bundle of nerves" that will eventually become a "rudimentary eye" would you need nature to select on a "survival of the fittest" paradigm.  When the mutation is not increasing the organism's survival chances? Worse how does it "prove" that one species transitioned to another species?  It is at best you have a theory that you can build up support through some subjective jumps via observation, but you can't scientifically prove it.  It takes faith. Faith in the original "spark" of life at worse, and faith in a completely random chance act that managed to collect 250 proteins in a self-replication way at "best"....

Whether you believe in a Creator God, or Aliens who seeded our planet, the evidence points toward design.  There is sufficient dissent within the scientific community to at least put the Intelligent Design theory out there and not pretend that "there is consensus" in the science world. 

Ben Stein does a masterful job of asking probing questions of the scientific elites in academia, and the conclusions that are drawn are thoughtful and worth a few hours of your time.   Rent it.  Buy it. Share it with a friend. 

 

What did you think of this article?




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