Expelled -- the movie
Plot Outline:
"This movie follows Ben Stein as he seeks to determine whether Intelligent Design is a pseudo-science trying to undermine evolutionary biology or whether it is legitimate science being
suppressed by a scientific establishment that is hostile to any deviation from the status quo.
Ben Stein Exposes
Richard Dawkins:
[Dinesh D'Souza, 4-18-08] "Stein puts to Dawkins a simple
question, 'How did life begin?' ... Dawkins, however,
frankly admits that he has no idea. ... Evolution has no
explanation for how life got started in the first place. Darwin
was very clear about this.... In order for evolution to take
place, there had to be a living cell. The difficulty for
atheists is that even this original cell is a work of labrynthine complexity. Franklin Harold writes in
The Way of the Cell that even the simplest cells are more ingeniously complicated than man's most elaborate inventions....
"Dawkins himself has described the cell as the kind of supercomputer, noting that it functions through an information system that resembles the software code.... Is it reasonable to posit that a chance combination of atoms and molecules, under those conditions, somehow generated a living thing? Could the random collision of molecules somehow produce a computer?
"It is ridiculously implausible to think so. And the absurdity was recognized more than a decade ago by Francis Crick, codiscoverer of the DNA double helix. Yet Crick is a committed atheist. Unwilling to consider the possibility of divine or supernatural creation, Crick suggested that
maybe aliens brought life to earth from another planet. And this is precisely the suggestion that
Richard Dawkins makes in his response to Ben Stein. Perhaps, he notes, life was delivered to our planet by
highly-evolved aliens.....
"Stein brilliantly responds that he had no idea Richard Dawkins
believes in intelligent design! ... The issue now is simply whether a natural intelligence (ET) or a supernatural intelligence (God) created life. Dawkins can't bear the supernatural explanation and so he opts for ET."
Video clips:
"A lengthy preview of Expelled, where Ben Stein seeks an
answer to why Intelligent Design is being suppressed in the
Scientific, Political, and Educational communities."
Ben Stein interviews
a number of educated atheists to get their thoughts on
Religion and Intelligent Design
Don’t Doubt It:
"...for about ten minutes, Expelled touches on Darwinism’s historical social costs, notably the unintended contribution to Nazi racial theories.... The standard biographies of Hitler almost all point to the influence of Darwinism on their subject. In
Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, Alan Bullock writes: 'The basis of Hitler’s political beliefs was a crude Darwinism.'... Hitler, like lots of other Europeans and Americans of his day, saw Darwinism as offering a total picture of social reality. This view called
'social Darwinism' is a logical extension of Darwinian evolutionary theory and was articulated by Darwin himself.
"The key elements in the ideology that produced Auschwitz are
moral relativism aligned with a rejection of the sacredness of human life, a belief that violent competition in nature creates greater and lesser races, that the greater will inevitably exterminate the lesser.... Most disturbing of all, in
The Descent of Man, Darwin prophesied:
“At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races.”....
“'Eugenics,' breeding humans for excellence, is a word coined by Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton in 1865, six years after Darwin published
On the Origin of Species. In America itself, between 1907 and 1958, in states including Indiana, California, and Washington, some 60,000 genetically
'unfit'persons were legally sterilized against their will. Germany took eugenics to the point of murder,
euthanizing 70,000 of the unfit.
"You only have to read
Mein Kampf to see the indebtedness. A shrewd manipulator of his fellow Germans’ sympathy for scientifically flavored racial theorizing, Hitler gives a Darwinian-style analysis of how the struggle for existence mandates a defense of the Aryan race.
He invokes the 'principles of Nature’s rule,' 'her whole work of higher breeding,' in which
"struggle is always a means for improving a species’ health and power of resistance and, therefore, a cause of its higher development."
"Like Hitler, Charles Darwin saw natural processes as setting moral standards.... In a 1937 German propaganda film,
Victims of the Past, the audience is shown a retarded person as the narrator intones,
'In the last few decades, mankind has sinned terribly against the law of natural selection.
We haven’t just maintained life unworthy of life, we have even allowed it to multiply.”
"...the
civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and
replace throughout the world the savage races."
Darwin,
The Descent of
Man,
vol I, 201
"The western
nations of Europe.... immeasurably surpass their former
savage progenitors and stand at the summit of
civilization..."
The Descent of
Man,
vol I, 178
Video
clips:
Scientists explain how the complexities of a single cell
are far more advanced then what the scientists in Darwin’s
time thought.
http://www.wingclips.com/cart.php?page=expelled&gclid=CMOg8rab6JICFSYuagodL1VT4w
An Intelligent Discussion about Life:
"People frequently use the word 'evolve' as a genteel way of saying
'change'... Unfortunately, people sometimes are told that Darwinian evolution simply demonstrates
'changes over time.' If that were so, how could any sensible person object to it? Even ardent critics of Darwinism accept
'microevolution' — change over time within species. Animal and plant breeding, after all, are kinds of human-guided microevolution....
" But classical Darwinists such as...
Richard Dawkins assert much more. Dawkins, for example, acknowledges that living organisms
'give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.' But,
he argues that this appearance of design is completely misleading
because undirected Darwinian processes — random mutations and natural selection — can produce the features of living systems that look designed....
"...my colleague, philosopher of science Stephen Meyer, argues that digital code stored in the DNA molecule points to intelligent design. He notes that DNA stores information using sequences of chemicals that
'function just like alphabetic characters in a written text or binary digits in a software code.' This discovery has profound implications.
As he explains, "Whenever we trace information back to its source — whether we are looking at an ancient hieroglyphic, a headline in a newspaper or software code in a computer program,
we always come to an intelligent agent — to a mind, not a material process. So
when we find information in life in the form of the digital code in DNA, the most likely explanation is that DNA also had an intelligent source."
"...I am
quite conscious that my speculations run beyond the
bounds of true science."
Charles Darwin to Asa Gray,
cited by Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin, (New
York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1991) p. 456.
"...the early
progenitor of all the Vertebrata must have been an aquatic
animal, provided with branchiae, with the two sexes united
in the same individual, and with the most important organs
of the body (such as the brain and heart) imperfectly
developed."
Darwin,
The
Descent of Man,
vol II, 389, 390
"...we
may safely infer that not one living species will
transmit its unaltered likeness to a distant futurity."
Darwin, Origin of Man,
647
"...various races differ much from each other...the capacity
of the lungs, the form and capacity of the skull...in their
intellectual, faculties."
The Descent of
Man,
vol I, 216
Darwin and the Nazis
By: Richard Weikart
The American Spectator
April 16, 2008:
"Richard Dawkins, PZ Myers, and some other Darwinists are horrified that the forthcoming documentary,
Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, will promote Intelligent Design to a large audience when it opens at over a thousand theaters nationwide on April 18. Ironically, their
campaign to discredit Ben Stein and the film confirms its main point, which is to
expose the persecution meted out by Darwinists to those daring to criticize Darwinian theory.
" One aspect of Expelled that troubles Dawkins and some of his colleagues is its treatment of the ethical implications of Darwinism, especially its discussion of the historical connections between Darwinism and Nazism. Isn't this a bit over-the-top, suggesting that Darwinism has something to do with Nazism? After all, Darwinists today are not Nazis, and Darwinism has nothing to do with anti-Semitism....
"...features of Darwinian theory that have contributed to the devaluing of human life (then and now):
1. ...humans were not qualitatively different from animals. The leading Darwinist in Germany, Ernst Haeckel, attacked the
'anthropocentric' view that humans are unique and special.
2. ...denied that humans had an immaterial soul. He and other Darwinists believed that all aspects of the human psyche, including reason, morality, aesthetics, and
even religion, originated through completely natural processes.
3. ...there is no objective, fixed morality and thus no objective human rights....
4. Since evolution requires variation, Darwin and other early Darwinists believed in human inequality....
5. ...humans are
locked in an ineluctable struggle for existence...."
Angry attacks
from various sources.
These critics were featured at
Fandango,
when we tried (unsuccessfully) to by tickets online. Most of the other links --
which were not posted on the main page -- were positive. Fandango seems
to stand with those who refuse to consider Intelligent Design -- even if the
designer would have nothing to do with the Biblical God:
"As a work of nonfiction filmmaking it is a sham
and as agitprop it is too
flimsy to strike any serious blows." - Mark Olsen, Los Angeles Times
"...a flimsy attempt to discredit Darwinist theory as the cornerstone of
modern biology..." - Justin Chang, Variety
Ben Stein Vs. Sputtering
Atheists:
"PC liberalism's power centers are the news media, the
entertainment industry and academia, and all are in the
clutches of an unmistakable hypocrisy: Theirs is an ideology that
preaches the freedom of thought and expression at every opportunity,
yet practices absolute intolerance toward dissension. ...
"I came out of it stunned. Ben Stein's extraordinary presentation
documents how the worlds of science and academia not only crush
debate on the origins of life, but also crush the careers
of professors who dare to question the Darwinian hypothesis
of evolution and natural
selection....
"He allows the principal advocates of Darwinism to speak their minds.... One theorizes that
life began somehow on the backs of crystals. Another states
electric sparks from a lightning storm created organic matter
(out of nothing). Another declares that life was brought to Earth
by aliens. Anything but God. The most controversial part
of the film follows Stein to the Dachau concentration camp, underlining
how Darwin's theories of natural selection led to the eugenics movement,
embraced by Adolf Hitler."
See
Creation
See also
Darwin's Black Box
| Origin of life
EXPELLED and Academic Free Speech
The Creator of all
|
What Darwin didn't know
Religion, Science and
Intelligent Design?
EXPELLED and Academic Free Speech
|
