I just returned from watching this as well. If you believe the press it is about creationism vs. Darwinism. It is not. It is about academic freedom or the lack thereof.
Before you spout, watch the movie. It is thought provoking, fun and intelligent. You may not agree with its premise, but it will make you think.
I really don't think that would be appropriate since there is no basis for ID that rests on anything like hard science. Since there is no answer to the "Who designed the designer" question and there never will be it is a scientific dead end. Darwinism may be an incomplete theory but it is the best we have. After all, a lot can happen in 10-15 billion years. Or even 2 to 3.
If the movie isn’t about creationism / religion why does the promo kit contain material from the discovery institute?
We going to see it tonight. I’m looking forward to it.
I was extremely disappointed.
I thought the movie was too cheaply made. The message wasn't the one I was expecting, and sometimes the movie made the same huge mistake about "evolution" that the Darwinists make.
This is a documentary where Stein interviews a number of people. The people and their affiliations are only identified by Stein's narration. Apparently titles, displayed briefly at the bottom of the screen reinforcing this narration, would have blown the budget. The interviews are not show from beginning to end, so a person first identified at the beginning of the film reappears later but it is up to the viewer to remember who is who. The number of different people makes this difficult. I thought that titles reminding the viewer who it was that Stein was conversing with would have helped me, at least, remember who each person was. (Who was the French guy, I wanted to know.)
I expected that the movie would show that critics of Darwinism have been treated unfairly by academia and also demonstrate that such criticisms are at least reasonable. Instead it showed that proponents of Intelligent Design, especially Intelligent Design by G-d, are the ones being "expelled." For me there is a difference. Genesis might be the way things happened, but even if it is not that doesn't mean that Darwinism is correct.
I think it would have been useful to spend more time on the scientific contradictions that some of us see in Darwinian evolution. My own opinion is that the books which do this best, both written by credentialed scientists, are Spetner's Not By Chance and Behe's Darwin's Black Box. Neither Spetner nor Behe appeared or was quoted during the movie.
The point was made that "evolution" means different things to different people and while no one said it directly the point was made that Darwinists frequently conflate micro-evolution (which every sane person agrees does occur) with macro-evolution in an effort to to transfer the truth of the former to the validity of the latter. But then Stein essentially made the same error in the part of the film that dealt with the Nazis and Eugenics. These people were interested in selective breeding of humans in the same way people in the horse racing industry engage in selective breeding of horses. But neither the Nazis nor the horse racing folks thought (or think) that they were going to produce a new species.
I also expected that some of Stein's dry humor would be sprinkled throughout the film using sarcasm to help discredit Darwinism. Except for his interview with Richard Dawkins near the end of the film I didn't observe much humor or sarcasm.
ML/NJ
May I repeat your statement to some freepers who are already jumping on the critical bandwagon: