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A Blood Libel on Our Civilization. Can I expell Expelled?
National Review Online ^ | April 28, 2008 | John Derbyshire

Posted on 04/28/2008 12:01:40 PM PDT by Delacon

What on earth has happened to Ben Stein? He and I go back a long way. No, I’ve never met the guy. Back in the 1970s, though, when The American Spectator was in its broadsheet format, I would always turn first to Ben Stein’s diary, which appeared in every issue. He was funny and clever and worldly in a way I liked a lot. The very few times I’ve caught him on-screen, he seems to have had a nice line in deadpan self-deprecation, also something I like. Though I’ve never met him, I know people who know him, and they all speak well of him. Larry Kudlow, whose opinion is worth a dozen average opinions on any topic, thinks the world of Ben.

So what’s going on here with this stupid Expelled movie? No, I haven’t seen the dang thing. I’ve been reading about it steadily for weeks now though, both pro (including the pieces by David Klinghoffer and Dave Berg on National Review Online) and con, and I can’t believe it would yield up many surprises on an actual viewing. It’s pretty plain that the thing is creationist porn, propaganda for ignorance and obscurantism. How could a guy like this do a thing like that?

I turned over some possibilities, but decisively rejected them all. The first thing that came to mind was Saudi money. Half of the evils and absurdities in our society seem to have a Saudi prince behind them somewhere, and the Wahhabists are, like all fundamentalist Muslims, committed creationists. This doesn’t hold water, though. For one thing, Stein is Jewish. For another, he is rich, and doesn’t need the money. And for another, the stills and clips I have seen are from a low-budget production. Saudi financing would surely at least have come up with some decent computer graphics. No, Ben Stein is no crook. He must then be foolish; and that’s sad, because I now think less of a guy I once admired, and whom my friends admire. Life, it’s just one darn bubble bursting after another.

To return to the matter of computer graphics for a moment, it seems that the producers of Expelled, rather than go to the trouble and expense of making their own, may have just stolen some. (The creationists have posted a defense here. There will probably be a lawsuit under way, which I shall report back on. Oh, and as I write this, I see a Reuters report that our defenders of faith and morality may have stolen some music too. How many more shoes will drop, I wonder?) It is at any rate clear that they engaged in much deception with the subjects they interviewed for the movie, many of whom are complaining loudly. This, together with much, much else about the movie, can be read about on the Expelled Exposed website put up by the National Center for Science Education, which I urge all interested readers to explore.

These dishonesties do not surprise me. When talking about the creationists to people who don’t follow these controversies closely, I have found that the hardest thing to get across is the shifty, low-cunning aspect of the whole modern creationist enterprise. Individual creationists can be very nice people, though they get nicer the further away they are from the full-time core enterprise of modern creationism at the Discovery Institute. The enterprise as a whole, however, really doesn’t smell good. You notice this when you’re around it a lot. I shall give some more examples in a minute; but what accounts for all this dishonesty and misrepresentation?

My own theory is that the creationists have been morally corrupted by the constant effort of pretending not to be what they are. What they are, as is amply documented, is a pressure group for religious teaching in public schools.

Now, there is nothing wrong with that. We are a nation of pressure groups, and one more would hardly notice. However, since parents who want their kids religiously educated already have plenty of private and parochial schools to choose from (half the kids on my street have attended parochial school), as well as the option of home schooling, now very well organized and supported (and heartily approved of by me: I just wish I knew how they find the time); and since current jurisprudence, how correctly I am not competent to say, regards tax-funded religious instruction as unconstitutional; creationists are a pressure group without hope, if they campaign openly for the thing they want.

Understanding this, the creationists took the morally fatal decision to campaign clandestinely. They overhauled creationism as “intelligent design,” roped in a handful of eccentric non-Christian cranks keen for a well-funded vehicle to help them push their own flat-earth theories, and set about presenting themselves to the public as “alternative science" engaged in a “controversy” with a closed-minded, reactionary “science establishment” fearful of new ideas. (Ignoring the fact that without a constant supply of new ideas, there would be nothing for scientists to do.) Nothing to do with religion at all!

I think this willful act of deception has corrupted creationism irredeemably. The old Biblical creationists were, in my opinion, wrong-headed, but they were mostly honest people. The “intelligent design” crowd lean more in the other direction. Hence the dishonesty and sheer nastiness, even down to plain bad manners, that you keep encountering in ID circles. It’s by no means all of them, but it’s enough to corrupt and poison the creationist enterprise, which might otherwise have added something worthwhile to our national life, if only by way of entertainment value.

This dishonesty showed up very soon after the creationists decided to don the mask of “alternative science” in the 1990s. A key episode was the Kunming conference of June 1999. In very brief — you can read the full story in Forrest and Gross’s Creationisms Trojan Horse (“A bad book, a very bad book,” shuddered the Discovery Institute’s Bruce Chapman when he saw it on my desk, like a vampire spotting a clove of garlic), pp.56-66 — there is a very interesting bed of extremely old fossils near Kunming, in southern China. Paul Chien, a little-known creationist of Chinese ancestry from San Francisco, acted as a front man for the Discovery Institute to organize a conference in Kunming, bringing in professional paleontologists from China and abroad, but without telling them of the Discovery Institute’s involvement. The aim was “to produce and then to promote a book containing the conference papers of [creationist] members immediately juxtaposed to those written by respected scientists in the relevant fields.” (Forrest & Gross, their italics.) When the real paleontologists found out what was going on, and how they had been brought across China, or around the world, they were not pleased. Embarrassing scenes followed. No book ever appeared.


Examples can be multiplied. The witty and mild-mannered federal Judge Jones, who presided over the 2005 Kitzmiller trial in Dover, Pa., felt moved to note that: “The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy. It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy.” The response of the Discovery Institute was to launch sneering, slanderous attacks on the professionalism and competence of Judge Jones (a church-going conservative Republican appointed by President George W. Bush).

So it goes with the stalwart defenders of truth and morality over at the Discovery Institute. So it goes with Ben Stein, apparently, since he has signed up with these mountebanks, for reasons that remain mysterious to me. The misrepresentations in Expelled are far too numerous for me to list here, and the task is unnecessary since others have done it. The aforementioned Expelled Exposed website is a great resource. Biologist P. Z. Myers, in a less organized way, has been pointing up the errors and deceptions in Expelled since the wretched thing hove into view. (Here he links to a whole stack of reviews, including a couple of positives.) Other science-literate bloggers have been weighing in, often very angrily. One of my favorite comments came from “Pixy Misa” (Andrew Mazels) who correctly called Ben Stein's accusing Darwin of responsibility for the Holocaust “a blood libel on science.”

I would actually go further than that, to something like “a blood libel on Western Civilization.” One of the most-quoted remarks by one conservative writer about another was Evelyn Waugh's on Kipling. It bears quoting again.

[Kipling] was a conservative in the sense that he believed civilization to be something laboriously achieved which was only precariously defended. He wanted to see the defences fully manned and he hated the liberals because he thought them gullible and feeble, believing in the easy perfectibility of man and ready to abandon the work of centuries for sentimental qualms.

Western civilization has many glories. There are the legacies of the ancients, in literature and thought. There are the late-medieval cathedrals, those huge miracles of stone, statuary, and spiritual devotion. There is painting, music, the orderly cityscapes of Renaissance Italy, the peaceful, self-governed townships of old New England and the Frontier, the steel marvels of the early industrial revolution, our parliaments and courts of law, our great universities with their spirit of restless inquiry.

And there is science, perhaps the greatest of all our achievements, because nowhere else on earth did it appear. China, India, the Muslim world, all had fine cities and systems of law, architecture and painting, poetry and prose, religion and philosophy. None of them ever accomplished what began in northwest Europe in the later 17th century, though: a scientific revolution. Thoughtful men and women came together in learned societies to compare notes on their observations of the natural world, to test their ideas in experiments, and in reasoned argument against the ideas of others, and to publish their results in learned journals. A body of common knowledge gradually accumulated. Patterns were observed, laws discerned and stated.

If I write with more feeling than usual here it is because I have just shipped off a review to an editor (for another magazine) of Gino Segrè’s new book about the history of quantum mechanics. It’s a good, if not very remarkable, book giving pen-portraits of the great players in physics during the 1920s and 1930s, and of their meetings and disagreements. Segrè, a particle physicist himself, who has been around for a while, knew some of these people personally, and of course heard many anecdotes from their intellectual descendants. It's a “warm” book, full of feeling for the scientists and their magnificent enterprise, struggling with some of the most difficult problems the human intellect has ever confronted, striving with all their powers to understand what can barely be understood.

Gino Segrè’s book — and, of course, hundreds like it (I have, ahem, dabbled myself) brings to us a feeling for what the scientific endeavor is like, and how painfully its triumphs are won, with what sweat and tears. Our scientific theories are the crowning adornments of our civilization, towering monuments of intellectual effort, built from untold millions of hours of observation, measurement, classification, discussion, and deliberation. This is quite apart from their wonderful utility — from the light, heat, and mobility they give us, the drugs and the gadgets and the media. (A “thank you” wouldn’t go amiss.) Simply as intellectual constructs, our well-established scientific theories are awe-inspiring.

And now here is Ben Stein, sneering and scoffing at Darwin, a man who spent decades observing and pondering the natural world — that world Stein glimpses through the window of his automobile now and then, when he’s not chattering into his cell phone. Stein claims to be doing it in the name of an alternative theory of the origin of species: Yet no such alternative theory has ever been presented, nor is one presented in the movie, nor even hinted at. There is only a gaggle of fools and fraudsters, gaping and pointing like Apaches on seeing their first locomotive: “Look! It moves! There must be a ghost inside making it move!”

The “intelligent design” hoax is not merely non-science, nor even merely anti-science; it is anti-civilization. It is an appeal to barbarism, to the sensibilities of those Apaches, made by people who lack the imaginative power to know the horrors of true barbarism. (A thing that cannot be said of Darwin. See Chapter X of Voyage of the Beagle.)

And yes: When our greatest achievements are blamed for our greatest moral failures, that is a blood libel against Western civilization itself. What next, Ben? Johann Sebastian Bach ran a slave-trading enterprise on the side? Kepler started the Thirty Years War? Tolstoy instigated the Kishinev Pogrom? Dante was a bag-man for the Golden Horde? Why not go smash a few windows in Chartres Cathedral, Ben? Break wind in a chamber-music concert? Splash some red paint around in the Uffizi? Which other of our civilizational achievements would you like to sneer at? What else from what Waugh called “the work of centuries” would you like to “abandon … for sentimental qualms”? You call yourself a conservative? Feugh!

For shame, Ben Stein, for shame. Stand up for your civilization, man! and all its glories. The barbarians are at the gate, as they always have been. Come man the defenses with us, leaving the liars and fools to their lies and folly.



TOPICS: Crime/Corruption; Culture/Society; Editorial; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: benstein; creationism; derbyshire; directedpanspermia; expelled; intelligentdesign; moviereview; panspermia
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To: DoctorMichael

Good one.


141 posted on 04/28/2008 3:33:02 PM PDT by Delacon ("The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." H. L. Mencken)
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To: Anitius Severinus Boethius
Mr. Derbyshire claims he goes a long way back with Ben, but has never met him, and trashes a movie he hasn't seen, calling it creationist porn. The guy can write for quite a while about movies he hasn't seen and people he hasn't met.

Of course, I just wrote a post about an article I didn't read past the first two paragraphs. I'm just following Mr. Derbyshire's literary model.

142 posted on 04/28/2008 3:34:35 PM PDT by Richard Kimball (We're all criminals. They just haven't figured out what some of us have done yet.)
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To: Anitius Severinus Boethius
I was going to post what you said, so I'll just copy it, cause it's worth repeating:

I haven't seen it either.

Of course, I also didn't write a big article bragging about how ignorant I was concerning a documentary right before trashing it.

143 posted on 04/28/2008 3:35:14 PM PDT by Lakeshark (Thank a member of the US armed forces for their sacrifice)
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To: Notary Sojac

Notary Sojac, thanks for continuing the philosophical discussion.

Remember the lines “We hold these truths to be self-evident...” Natural rights are based on a premise that each individual is autonomous. There’s no proof for that and the cruelty of state run dictatorships seems to be the norm in world history.

Also, it’s possible to be an agnostic and also a righteous person. So long as you believe in the principles of liberty unabridged. Not liberty as granted by the federal government.

This whole scenario highlights (ID/creationists with their belief that children are a gift from God and the evolutionists with their belief that children are a cog in the wheel of the state and if you want to stick a fork in their head go ahead because I could give a rip) the need to abolish the department of education and also the concept of public schools in the U.S. Too too many of our students are being taught that the 2nd amendment grants the government the right to establish the national guard and that the 1st amendment abolishes the practice of religion in public.

The number one reason to abolish public schools is to do away with the concept that our children belong to the state - after all, that’s the underlying message in all the lesson plans.

Yours truly,
The Woim


144 posted on 04/28/2008 3:35:56 PM PDT by The Woim (Agitating for social change also means fighting to abolish the Dept of Education)
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To: tpanther

“btw...I’ve yet to see a conservative refer to themselves as a “con”...just FWI. ;)”

I ref myself that way all the time and you are the first to question it. Makes sence to me. This is a conservative forum. In forums, people tend to use shorthand to save time. I right “con” for that reason. I can’t believe I am the only freeper to do that. Freeper btw is short for someone who posts on FR(Free Republic). ;)


145 posted on 04/28/2008 3:39:01 PM PDT by Delacon ("The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." H. L. Mencken)
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To: Delacon

DING DING DING...in the making my point for me dept...you just won first place!

So why IS it that the Godless liberal elite are so afraid when a student DARES utter ID or creation to the point the auto-answer is always a scream: BUT BUT BUT...THAT’S NOT SCIENCE!!!!!!!! (Nevermind, as I said, no one can define science in the first place, as it’s all too often concensus!)

BAN this and BAN that!

Banning prayer from gov. schools was EXACTLY what you just described! Liberals chose govt. AS their God, while conervatives know better and reject such a thing, simple as that!

Twisting it around and projecting otherwise doesn’t make it any less so!

(Nevermind, as I said science itself is all too often mere concensus in the first place!)

HELL, how the hell can anyone tell if it’s science or not, when the Stalinesque liberal academics squash all opposing views!

Look at it this way...just WHO is it hijacking the government and or the legal system in this bizarro-effort to squash ALL public displays of Christianity via the myth of separation of church and state?

GOD gave us our inalienable rights. The founding fathers said as much.

Basically the only time I see Christan groups involved in the legal system NOW is to stem off attacks from the godless liberals & ACLU types or try to reclaim the lost ground from liberal attacks.

Christmas, a federal holiday was sooooooo awfully offensive on the school calendar here that liberals snuck it off, by threatening the board with legal action, and they folded like a tent. Not a parent knew about it until school started.

Christmas, you know that FEDERAL HOLIDAY on Dec. 25th!

That kind of thing is BLATANTLY unAmerican, and wouldn’t have happened had liberals NOT ,been allowed to run rampant with their hatred of God Separation Church and State insanity in the first place!

Now don’t try and go spin this as some “con” thing, that IDers or Christians are the ones banning evolution or hi-jacking kids like Newdow!


146 posted on 04/28/2008 3:40:12 PM PDT by tpanther (The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing-----Edmund Burke)
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To: Soliton
This is a for-profit movie.

An TV news programs aren't? I don't think the fair use doctrine distinguishes between profit and non-profits; and it is a documentary film. Can you show the law that says a for-profit cannot assert a fair-use defense?

Besides, you said it wouldn't make a profit.

147 posted on 04/28/2008 3:40:16 PM PDT by SeaHawkFan
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To: The Woim

No offense intended, of course, just words of wisdom which should be taken as such... (As most words of wisdom, I expect mine to be completely disregarded!)

Yours truly,
The Woim


148 posted on 04/28/2008 3:40:34 PM PDT by The Woim (Agitating for social change: Abolish the Dept of Education NOW!)
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To: Dog Gone

Has anyone touched on the idea that trying to PROVE God seems to show an obvious lack of FAITH?


149 posted on 04/28/2008 3:41:20 PM PDT by Delacon ("The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." H. L. Mencken)
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To: Dog Gone

I haven’t seen the movie, but Hitler DID utilize Darwin to his own ends, and thanked eugenics professors in the U.S.


150 posted on 04/28/2008 3:42:57 PM PDT by tpanther (The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing-----Edmund Burke)
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To: curiosity

How do they do that?

Oh I get it.

Submit their findings to liberal elitists and wait for a phone call!

LMAO!


151 posted on 04/28/2008 3:44:56 PM PDT by tpanther (The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing-----Edmund Burke)
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To: SeaHawkFan

Look up copyright law. Movies are expressly named as requiring a license. Why did they get licenses for the other music in the “documentary”. And no, it won’t make a profit.


152 posted on 04/28/2008 3:48:21 PM PDT by Soliton
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To: tpanther

Give me a break. There is science, the ongoing pursuit of facts and truth in the physical world. There is bad science, which is stuff that has been disproven and then there is non science that are taught because of their intrinsic value of which ID may have a place.


153 posted on 04/28/2008 3:48:40 PM PDT by Delacon ("The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." H. L. Mencken)
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To: tpanther

“I haven’t seen the movie, but Hitler DID utilize Darwin to his own ends, and thanked eugenics professors in the U.S.”

Yeah, and I haven’t read Mein Kamp but know enough about it to know it is a very awful book.


154 posted on 04/28/2008 3:49:58 PM PDT by Delacon ("The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." H. L. Mencken)
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To: Dog Gone

HOWEVER, if you think about, a VOLUME of films could be made on how liberal elitist professors are ruining the country from attacking our troops from Bezerkly, to gun loathing idiots to Harvard, to infanticide on demand in between.

Are you saying they get a free pass collectively or that Ben Stein shouldn’t even bother because he didn’t encompass all that’s wrong with liberal academia in one short 90 minute piece?


155 posted on 04/28/2008 3:50:58 PM PDT by tpanther (The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing-----Edmund Burke)
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To: DoctorMichael

I’ll ask a question about DoctorMihael that I have been asking about the many media proponents of global warming: to what extent does DoctorMichael have scientific knowledge to back up his opinion? Or, is he repeating back what he has heard from others?

ad infinatum...

We STILL don’t have a concensus. It’s called discussion, exchange of ideas, just as the Goreacles were exposed!

(That is in this country, despite the concerted efforts by liberals to squash it and make us more like Euroweenieland!)


156 posted on 04/28/2008 3:56:10 PM PDT by tpanther (The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing-----Edmund Burke)
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To: tpanther

What Hitler may or may have not done is entirely laid on him.

To assert that Darwin laid the foundation for Naziism is a smear of the first order, intentionally done, and done so to equate anyone in academia who questions ID as a Nazi.

It was about the cheapest shot possible, and Stein took it. I really was a big fan of his, but I’m reeling at the intellectual dishonesty of this movie. This was really beneath him.

There could have been a movie or television documentary about the ID movement and why universities don’t consider it science. Both sides could have had time to explain their perspectives. That would have been worth watching, and hopefully informative.

“Darwinists” = Nazis is IQ 60 stuff. It has no place in the discussion.


157 posted on 04/28/2008 3:56:16 PM PDT by Dog Gone
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To: The Woim

who makes you send your kids to public school?


158 posted on 04/28/2008 3:57:04 PM PDT by Soliton
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To: Delacon
Has anyone touched on the idea that trying to PROVE God seems to show an obvious lack of FAITH?

I pointed out that the existance of proof makes fait impossible

159 posted on 04/28/2008 3:59:08 PM PDT by Soliton
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To: The Woim
Curiosity raises an interesting point - he says simply that it’s not unreasonable for IDers to provide the proof. OK, what about your fossil records?

What about them?

Watch the documentary and watch Prof. Dawkins spew his anti-religious bigotry.

Dawkins' personal opinions on a matter unrelated to his research has no bearing on the merits of his research. And it's his discoveries in the field of zoology, not his anti-religious ravings, that got him his academic position. If you read his academic papers, there's no mention of religion.

Mind you, I don’t care what you believe. I have some atheist friends who I talk “philosophy” with all day long.

I'm a practicing Catholic, FYI.

Also, There’s no chance whatsoever that Darwin saw an “evolution” of a species after on a few years - I’m talking about the birds on the island (I forgot the name of the island).

Of course not. What he found was evidence that suggested a hypothesis to him, for which he found more evidence. After his death, still more evidence validated parts of this hypothesis, and caused other parts to be modified somewhat. But in general the weight of the evidence is strong enough to have caused the hypothesis to graduate to become a working scientific theory.

But it's still a theory that is open the challange. The only problem is that if you want to challange it, you have to produce some evidence, which ID advocates have yet to do. Refusal to take seriously vacuous, evidence-free challanges to a theory can hardly be considered "censorship."

160 posted on 04/28/2008 4:00:42 PM PDT by curiosity
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