The review in Scientific American can be considered “an opposing viewpoint” but it cannot be considered “balanced”.
“For a more balanced review, try this one from Scientific American:”
Scientific American - BALANCED?
You’ve got to be kidding me!
Run by a bunch of homosexuals and PRO EVOLUTION to an EXTREME. No, there is no “balanced view” by that magazine. It’s pur propaganda. At one time it was a scientific magazine. It is not now.
Ben Stein’s Expelled: No Integrity Displayed.
The title alone is a clue about the review ... integrity ... . LOL!!! Have another beer!
balanced?
Translation: I don't like this review, so I am going to change the subject.
LOL—everybody loves Ben Stein! That’s why they buy Alaskan seafood.
Stein is not taking on science, from what I'm reading, he's about Ideas and History and Free Inquiry.
There is nothing extreme about finding the roots of Darwinism in the Holocaust--the "Master Race" was about exterminating "inferiors"--Darwinism gone mad, but Darwinism nonetheless. Margaret Sanger, eugenicists--all from an Idea.
The Dawkin bunch are attempting to suppress dissent--powerful scientist often do. Look at how the climate change crowd tries to shout down skeptics so they can cash in on carbon credits.
That was a balanced review?
They admit they are hardcore neo-Darwinists from the outset. They are also missing the point of the movie too. Buried in page 3 or 4 of the review is the defense of their position on the issue of not being able to explain the origin of life, “We don’t know yet.”
Not a tenable position from which to lob criticism at those that suggest that an intelligent designer, and even perhaps God, may have lit the match after all. Evolution may have been a way of explaining the development of species, but there’s still a lot of it, beside the question of origin, that is something less than settled fact.
More to the point of the movie, secular humanists are using neo-Darwinism to replace God with Man as the Supreme Being in the United States. He links it with Nazism because every crackpot that manages to set up a dictatorship uses some aspects of Darwinism to go eugenic on their own population, and those of their neighbors.
If science doesn’t know yet, it should say so, if only to ensure that some dangerous autocrat doesn’t hijack the theory to wipe out a race of people. It should readily say, “The origin of life COULD be God, and it could be a Martian, and it could be somebody else, because at this point we don’t know.”
It certainly has less than concrete ideas on WHY species evolve in the manner they do.
Stein posits that there is less-than-reasoned reactive vitriol to any position that may admit the presence of a God anywhere in public life within academia. He posits the dangers of this tendency, and provide evidence that Atheism, a massively untenable belief system in its own right, has made its home in our most prominent institutions of higher learning in the US.
I haven’t seen the movie, so I don’t know if he makes his case. I have always looked at science as the attempt of man to decipher the language of God. I don’t see the two as incompatible at all, Science and Religion. If any thing, I believe the penduluum on this matter has swung all the way across the arc from it’s opposite apogee, marked by the trial of Galileo. That’s my bias.
I think the people waiting for the ‘singularity’ and the people who react to ID’ers like dracula to a crucifix ought to camp out. That would be a fun documentary to film.
No honest review would equate ID and Creationism.
No thanks. Scientific American sold it's soul some time ago.
There is just way to much political bias in the articles they publish. Political Correctness and Science just don't mix. Like the LA Times, Scientific American was once a great American institution. That time has passed.
On the other hand I think Stein's thesis is simply wrong and so I'm betting that in this case I'm actually in agreement with the SA reviewer.
Go see it before believing the critics that are so obviously afraid it will expose their racket