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.
What evidence exists to support ID?”
John 15:22
If I had not come and spoken to them, they would not be guilty of sin [would be blameless]; but now they have no excuse for their sin.
John 15:21-23 (in Context) John 15 (Whole Chapter)
That isn’t evidence.
Amazingly, this is the same reason the global warming hoaxers give.
Darwinism DID NOT start with Charles Darwin, nor did it end with him.
Then who started it?
That isn’t evidence.”
Not of ID.
Is your 70 + or - on earth really worth it?
Darwin stole from Malthus, but it all has its roots with Satan.
Are we talking science or are we talking religion?
Thats exactly right wagglebee!
Just ignore the 300 lb Gorilla in the living room.
Yet you blindly follow w/o question yet ignore the miracles around you. Basically your Bible is a 30 second Disney cartoon showing evolution. God is a far better explanation.
Pray for W and Our Troops
Certainly you don’t mind if other people find your religion lacking?? Of course you are for open discussion and thought, right?? Or are you a Stalinist when it comes to evolution?
Pray for W and Our Troops
I have read the multiple Bibles from cover to cover multiple times.
Any other rumors / falsehoods about me that you would like to spread?
What is my religion?
Then what is your definition of dummie?
I was always taught that calling others that was improper and rude.
——Yea - Darwin sure sound evil——
Even if Darwin was not evil and intended no such use from his hypotheses, much evil did flow from evil minds which were looking for any and all excuses to perform their evil deeds.
This alone does not negate Darwin’s hypotheses, nor does it negate Christianity which he was also known to use directly in front of the crowds in Germany. The underlying effect was that silently Hitler used Darwinian precepts to foment hatred in his own mind, and used false Christian precepts to deliver it to the populace.
Easy, your a Fundamentalist Atheist. Your preists are scientists and evolution is your creation. You can’t stand the fact that your not the top of the heap, which you’re not. How empty a life can you lead?
Pray for W and our Troops
I have no problem with those who believe in deities.
Some of my closest friends are Jewish and Christian so I do not know why you call me a fundamentalists.
Nor have I tried to ‘convert’ anyone to my ‘side’.
And how do you know what sort of life I lead?
You haven’t seen it yet, have you?
——Nor have I tried to ‘convert’ anyone to my ‘side’——
So we can completely dismiss anything you have to a say as having absolutely no value whatsoever ;-)
C’mon, you wouldn’t be here if you didn’t care what others think.
I post on this site in the desperate hope that the lurkers will see that not every conservative hates modern science.
See I know quite a few people who have trouble voting for republican simply because they appear to be anti-science. Such behavior isn’t good for the country nor is it good for the conservative movement.
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