Posted on 04/19/2008 12:17:00 PM PDT by cornelis
I like rebels, especially ones who go against type. Take Ben Stein in his latest film, Expelled, which comes out this Friday. Dressed in a sport coat, tie, and tennis shoes, he’s not who you expect — the deadpan, monotone-voiced but ever-likable teacher he portrays in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and The Wonder Years.
Stein retains his characteristic deadpan affect, but this time he’s playing himself — a deceptively erudite and well-educated interviewer, who is passionately skeptical of evolutionary biology and its leading proponents.
The film’s endeavor is to respond to one simple question: “Were we designed, or are we simply the end result of an ancient mud puddle struck by lightning?”
Big science doesn’t like that question because they can’t answer it. Underneath their antagonism toward explanations that suggest an intelligent cause, lies a fundamental egoism. Science wants to deny any evidence of a supreme being precisely because it wants to be a supreme being. Moreover, representatives of big science in the film are unsettlingly snippy, suggesting that they feel threatened by rival opinions, rather than assured of their own.
To make this point, the film introduces teachers and scientists who are shunned, denied tenure, and fired for questioning dogmatic Darwinism. The film’s producers spent two years traveling the world, talking with more than 150 educators and scientists who say they have been persecuted for questioning Darwin’s theory of natural selection.
Dr. Richard Sternberg, a biologist, publishes a peer-reviewed paper, which posits evidence for intelligent design (ID) in the universe. For his efforts, Sternberg’s bosses at the Smithsonian Institution trashed him so badly that it led to a congressional investigation.
Iowa State University denied tenure to Guillermo Gonzalez, an accomplished astrobiologist. University officials admitted that Gonzalez’s work on ID is a factor.
For Richard Dawkins, by contrast, job security is not a problem. To this superstar Oxford University evolutionary biologist, and devout atheist, intelligent design is nothing more than an “ideological cousin of creationism.”
The highlight of the film features Ben Stein interviewing Dawkins, who concedes that an intelligent being may have created life on earth. But that being cannot be “God.” Instead, he suggests it may be an alien, itself a product of “Darwinian evolution.” Oh, the scientific imagination — there’s nothing like it on God’s green earth.
Dawkins has since complained that the interview was set up under false pretenses, and that he didn’t even know who Stein was. It is rather astonishing that it did not occur to the world’s smartest atheist to look up Ben Stein on the Internet, where he might have readily discovered numerous examples of his writings that are critical of Darwinism.
Dawkins dismisses the Emmy-winning actor as having “no talent for comedy.” He believes during the interview Stein is an “honestly stupid man, sincerely seeking enlightenment from a scientist.” A lawyer, a law professor, an economist, and a speechwriter for both Nixon and Ford, Stein hardly seems to fit the description “honestly stupid.”
In the end, the film isn’t really about intelligent design as much as about a relentless attack on an authentically free inquiry. As Ben Stein points out, “Freedom of inquiry has been greatly compromised, and this is not only anti-American, it’s anti-science. It’s anti-the whole concept of learning.”
— Dave Berg is a senior segment producer at The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.
Good question. I meant to say that humans are stuck on earth because they cannot set up space colonies. As far as space exploration, I don't know of any prohibition of God that would prevent either scientific discoveries or exploration, with the caveat that not all that God knows (creating life and matter, etc.) can be discovered by humans.
Your statement:
“Here are some facts:
- No life has EVER been observed.”
Be more accurate with your statements. To say “no live” is more common than “intelligent live”. If the more common statement is true the more special is also true.
“It WAS SUPPOSE TO WORK!!!!!”
The same for my car. Because my car doesn't’ work at the moment no car ever will work?
“Your Columbus example does not make sense. I am not surprised.”
I am not surprised you didn't get it.
Your logic is that we haven't detected something until now so we can't do something.
The problem with your logic is you can't rule out a detection for the future. So your deduction has no base.
“you forgot the topic (intelligent life apart from earth) !!”
Thread title is “Intelligent Critique (Film Expelled adroitly addresses the dogmaticism of Darwinian theory)”. Look up.
You expanded the topic of your statement with your own statement “No life has EVER been observed”
“So where is the evidence?”
There is no possibility to prove something not existing: existence of God, existence of intelligent life apart from earth or existence of my car.
Deuteronomy 4:32?
Is ID just another word for creationism?
Stephen Hawking doubts that there is intelligent life on earth.
The Nazis also FOLLOWED PERVERTED Darwinian eugenics programs to their "logical" and monstrous conclusion benefit their own racism when no credible scientist that understands modern genetics would argue that people of Jewish decent are automatically "genetically inferior" to people of "Aryan" decent.
Fixed. You guys screaming the "Darwinists" to use as a scapegoat remind of the liberals blaming guns on school shootings. Guns don't kill people. People kill people. If people would use guns responsibly, there would be no reckless killings, only saving of lives by stopping violent criminals. If people would use genetics properly, there would be no senseless killings, only a Renaissance in ending horrible diseases and mutantions caused by bad genes.
Liberal Democrats and their knee-jerk efforts to ban guns by saying it will "end" violence have failed, and when those same liberal Democrats tried to ban the teaching of the evolution in school during the 1920s, it also failed. The culture of fear cannot stop freedom of expression in this country.
Show me a credible geneticist today that publishes papers arguing "the Jews" throughout the world are all inferior humans at the genetic level, simply by virtue of their hertiage. This isn't "Darwinism", this is delusional hatred from Hitler.
What the hell is wrong with this doofus?
Tagging a group as "big science" is as stupid as liberals who talk about "big oil" or "big drug" or "big tobacco".
Does he think insulting biologists will make him viewpoint more scientific? Is this his big plan to get modern biology and genetics taken over by the Discovery Institute?
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