Ben Stein Smart Bombs Darwinian Bunker (Richard Dawkins concedes possibility of Intelligent Design)

A rousing SRO preview on Tuesday of the new Ben Stein documentary, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, brought a Kansas City audience to its feet.

And with good cause. Stein’s often funny, always engaging frontal assault on the oppressive neo-Darwinist establishment is arguably the smartest and most sophisticated documentary ever produced on the right side of the cultural divide, on any subject, ever.

As such, Expelled represents still another blow to the progressive orthodoxy of government-issued science in its winter of discontent.

The winter started early when in November two separate labs, one in Wisconsin, one in Japan, announced the breakthrough discovery that adult skin cells can be reprogrammed to mimic embryonic stem cells.

Just two years earlier, the elfin journalist Chris Mooney had likened adult stem cell research to creationism and assured the readers of his best seller, The Republican War on Science, that this “dogma” had been "resoundingly rejected by researchers actually working in the field."

As the winter rolled on, and as all four major global temperature tracking outlets showed a precipitous drop in annual global temperature, and as snow fell in Baghdad for the first time in recorded history, only Al Gore remained in meltdown.

Meanwhile, on a seemingly daily basis, the neo-Luddites from the Earth Liberation Front and the Animal Liberation Front have been putting a distinctly left wing face on the “war on science,” in this case a real war on real scientists.

And into this breach, armed with his trademark tennies and bemused grin, marches Ben Stein, America’s only economist/ presidential speechwriter turned comic actor. The producers at Premise Media could not have recruited a better on-screen presence.

Although the role Stein plays has been compared to the one Michael Moore plays in his film, the Stein persona is conspicuously brighter and more benign.

Nor do Stein and his producers resort to the kind of editing that make Moore movies something other than documentaries.

In Bowling For Columbine , for instance, Moore cobbles together five different parts of NRA honcho Charlton Heston’s Denver speech a week after Columbine.

Moore then inserts into the mix a “cold, dead hands” remark from a speech Heston gave a year later. In the process Moore turn Heston’s conciliatory Denver address into a provocative call to arms.

Stein resorts to no such tricks. He gives certain interview subjects all the time and all the rope they need to hang themselves, unedited.

One highlight among many is Stein’s one-on-one interview with Richard Dawkins, the dashing Brit who has made a small fortune as the world’s most visible neo-Darwinist.

To his credit, and to the utter discomfort of the public education establishment, Dawkins does not shy from discussing the atheistic implications of Darwinism.

Indeed, Dawkin’s anti-deity call to arms, The God Delusion, has sold more than a million copies worldwide. Where Dawkins wanders into a black hole of his own making is in his discussion of the origins of life on earth.

To Stein’s astonishment, Dawkins concedes that life might indeed have a designer but that designer almost assuredly was a more highly evolved being from another planet, not “God.”

Stein does not respond. He does not need to. For the past hour of the film, the audience has met one scientist after another whose academic careers have been derailed for daring to suggest the possibility of intelligent design.

The choice of Stein as narrator is inspired for another reason. That reason becomes most apparent when he and two “creationist” allies, mathematician David Berlinski and nuclear physicist Gerald Schroeder, visit a remnant of the Berlin Wall, the central metaphor of the film.

At the wall, the three discuss the value of freedom, the central idea of the film, and the need for the same in science. The audience has already met Berlinski, an amusingly sophisticated American living in Paris.

The audience has seen less of Schroeder, but he is wearing a yarmulke. All three are Jewish.

Indeed, it would be hard to imagine any three individuals on the planet who less resemble the Inherit the Wind stereotype that Darwinists have been scaring soccer moms with for the last half century.

Expelled opens nationwide on April 18 th. The neo-Darwinists and their allies in the major media will do their best to kill it.

Co-producer Mark Mathis tells me that two network news producers have already chosen not to cover the film because it was “biased,” unlike, say, the much-covered Fahrenheit 911.

The producers have contracted with the same firm that marketed Mel Gibson’s The Passion to get the word out. They will use much the same strategy.

Central to this strategy is the creation of a powerful buzz and a strong enough opening weekend to catch Hollywood’s attention and hold it.

Jack Cashill is an independent writer and producer and, on a contractual basis, the Executive Editor of Ingram’s Magazine, Kansas City’s premier business magazine.

In addition to his work with Ingram’s, Jack has written for Fortune, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Weekly Standard, Missouri Medicine Medical Journal, and regularly for WorldNetDaily. He has had one collection of essays published—Snake Handling in Mid-America and one novel—2006: The Chautauqua Rising.

Within the last five years Jack has written five books of non-fiction — First Strike, Ron Brown’s Body, Hoodwinked: How Intellectual Hucksters Have Hijacked American Culture, Sucker Punch: The Left Hook that Dazed Ali and Killed King's Dream and his latest, What's the Matter with California. Three of them have cracked Amazon’s top ten list.

Jack has produced at least a dozen documentaries for regional PBS and national cable channels, including the Emmy Award-winning, The Royal Years. Written and directed by Jack Cashill, the acclaimed documentary, Reconsidering the Region: Wyandotte County REBORN, premiered January 16, 2008. Jack has also produced an audio book, Understanding America: the great speeches, sermons, documents and narratives of the American experience.

In addition, Jack hosted daily talk radio shows for five years—four of those with KMBZ, Kansas City’s foremost AM station, and one year with Catholic Family Radio’s national network. Jack has a Ph.D. from Purdue University in American studies, has taught media and literature at Purdue and at Kansas City area universities, and served as a Fulbright professor in France.

Jack's latest book, What's the Matter with California, came out October 2, 2007. He has already appeared on C-SPAN2's Book TV. On Simon & Schuster's behalf he is currently touring for the book - and enjoying it.

What of Shroeder? Has he too, made himself foolish? If so, please show us how...

What's that you say? By his being associated with this Ben Stein film? Did you see it? What elements, exactly, are so foolish?

Like Coulter, you say? Just lump Stein in with her, huh? What a shortcut!

Rather than being a "critique" of science;
Isn't this film much about more about, how even the mere expression of doubt, as to the validity of the idea that life just somehow sprung up on it's own --- life, coming from non-life, produces such vehemence among the Neo-Darwinists that they viciously excoriate, and seek to entirely banish all those who dare to raise such doubt?

You might fool yourself into believing that isn't going on, and wish to also blow a smokescreen with your blithe comments, but you can't fool everyone.

There is a witch-hunt going on, enforced by the faithful followers of the Church of Neo-Darwinism, and it is as merciless as a Stalin lead purge.

"Science", is one thing....
but on this other matter, concerning the socio-political implications, including the viciousness of the anti-theists towards those among them in the scientific community who dare break ranks with them, I'll believe my own lying eyes, since I could see clearly, before the puffs of smoke arrived, thank you very much!

Now watch this thread devolve into typical crevo-thread debate nonsense --- without discussing or referencing the subject matter of the article, directly!

...three, two, one...

Do you know what the decay rate of carbon was in 1850?
Do you know what the decay rate of uranium was in 30 AD?
I would expect not and anything you try to claim to bolster your argument will border on that of religion as it will take faith to believe that the way it is now is how it has always been.

It is unfortunate that education propagates unscientific thinking as such as to assume that everything is the same today as it was 1000 years ago.

Faith? No, I don't need faith as science has evidence. Even creationists, on those rare occasions that they try to do research, come up with the same evidence. The RATE Project was designed to prove a young earth, but they produced evidence showing just the opposite!

See Assessing the RATE Project, by Randy Isaac.

From the article (emphasis added):

In 1997, the Institute of Creation Research (ICR) and the Creation Research Society initiated an eight-year research program to investigate the validity of radioisotope dating of rocks. The project was named RATE for Radioisotopes and the Age of The Earth. Preliminary investigations carried out in the first three years were summarized in volume I of this work, published in 2000. Volume II, published in 2005, represents the final report. At $79.99, 818 pages, and 3.5 pounds, the book is a heavy investment. For most interested parties, the final five pages of text, pp. 765–9, are sufficient to grasp the essence of the book. A nontechnical version of this book, authored by Donald DeYoung, and a video documentary have also been prepared. Both are titled Thousands Not Billions: Challenging an Icon of Evolution.

...

The conclusions of the RATE project are being billed as “groundbreaking results.” This is a fairly accurate description since a group of creation scientists acknowledge that hundreds of millions of years worth of radioactivity have occurred. They attempt to explain how this massive radioactivity could have occurred in a few thousand years but admit that consistent solutions have not yet been found. The vast majority of the book is devoted to providing technical details that the authors believe prove that the earth is young and that radioisotope decay has not always been constant. All of these areas of investigation have been addressed elsewhere by the scientific community and have been shown to be without merit. The only new data provided in this book are in the category of additional details and there are no significantly new claims.

In this book, the authors admit that a young-earth position cannot be reconciled with the scientific data without assuming that exotic solutions will be discovered in the future. No known thermodynamic process could account for the required rate of heat removal nor is there any known way to protect organisms from radiation damage. The young-earth advocate is therefore left with two positions. Either God created the earth with the appearance of age (thought by many to be inconsistent with the character of God) or else there are radical scientific laws yet to be discovered that would revolutionize science in the future. The authors acknowledge that no current scientific understanding is consistent with a young earth. Yet they are so confident that these problems will be resolved that they encourage a message that the reliability of the Bible has been confirmed.

In Thousands Not Billions, the incompatibility of the young-earth position with current scientific understanding is glossed over in the final four pages of the book. The thermodynamic dilemma is dismissed with

Possible mechanisms have been explored that could safeguard the earth from severe overheating during accelerated decay events. One of these involves cosmological or volume cooling, the result of a rapid expansion of space. Many details remain to be filled in for this and other proposed processes of heat removal (p. 180).

Unfortunately for young-earth advocates, cosmological expansion does not cool material on earth nor does it cool some materials and not others. Yet DeYoung concludes: “Young-earth creation is neither outdated nor in opposition to science” (p. 182).

In other words, the RATE project spent over a million dollars and concluded that science is right. B

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