Posted on 01/17/2008 7:42:51 AM PST by ZGuy
Intelligent design theory, or ID, is opening new doors of scientific research, particularly in cancer and other disease research, according to its adherents, but a new movie, "Expelled" starring Ben Stein explores how an "elitist scientific establishment" is apparently muzzling and smearing scientists who publicly discuss ID.
The First Amendment is under brutal attack in the scientific community, Ben Stein, a former presidential speechwriter-turned-actor and commentator, says in the film, which opens in theaters on Feb. 12.
"I always assumed scientists were free to ask any question, pursue any line of inquiry without fear or reprisal," he says. "But recently, I've been alarmed to discover that this is not the case."
In an exclusive interview with Cybercast News Service - with audio clips below - Stein contends that rigid Darwinists are silencing their critics in academia, which the film explores, and discusses how ID ideas are helping in cancer research and similar work.
Yet the ID research that could potentially produce medical breakthroughs, says Stein, is also being undermined by Darwinian scientists who don't want ID research viewed as legitimate.
Cybercast News Service: Is this controversy about science versus religion, or is this more science versus science? Simply, is this about scientists with different worldviews -with one group more willing to open themselves up to alternative explanations than others - as the film suggests?
Ben Stein: Well, first of all, I question your premise. It's not just scientists versus scientists. It is a particular subset of science which does not admit any kind of questions - it is a kind of perversion of science, which doesn't allow for any kind of questioning of itself. Science should always be in the business of attempting to disprove itself. Neo-Darwinian science is exactly in the opposite business of endlessly trying to rationalize itself - and reprove itself, you might say - reprove that it's right without any kind of test. So it's not scientists - it's really, I would say, scientists are the ones willing to look into intelligent design. The people who are anti-science are the ones unwilling to look at anything new or different. So I'd say it's a perverted kind of science versus what I would call a more classical science. But it is also science versus at least the possibility of belief.
Cybercast News Service: There is a fair amount of discussion of creationism and how it might relate to intelligent design, and there are a lot of critics who say this is just folks with religious convictions trying to use intelligent design as a Trojan horse to advance a form of creationism. ... What sort of separation do you see or perhaps don't see between creationism, on the one hand, and intelligent design? Do you have your own definition of intelligent design, and is it distinct and different from creationism?
Ben Stein: Well, I would say it's creationism by someone. For me, I've always believed that there was a God. I've always believed that God created the heavens and earth - so, for me it's not a huge leap from there to intelligent design. I think for some of the people who work on intelligent design, they're not as long-time believers as I am. So, I would answer that question, in brief, by saying, I believe in God and God created the heavens and the earth and all the life on the earth. But what other people, who are intelligent design people, think, I could not characterize. (Listen to Audio)
Cybercast News Service: There is a segment in the film, where it's made clear that intelligent design can open up new areas of inquiry that could improve the human condition. One involves a neurosurgeon, Michael Egnor, and another scientist, Jon Wells, who indicate that given how the cells are put together, with eye toward intelligent design, and with the idea that animal cells have tiny turbines - or if viewed as tiny turbines - he was able to formulate a theory that said in the event these things malfunction and don't properly shut down and could break apart, this is the first step on the way to cancer. He seemed to be suggesting that intelligent design theory could open up a lot of possibilities into improving the human condition. He doesn't explicitly say 'a cure for cancer,' but at least providing additional insight into new areas of treatment or a better understanding of how cancer is formed. What is your reaction to that part of the film? What sort of potential is attached to research going forward?
Ben Stein: Well, I think, I wouldn't say, if you say intelligent design is the answer and we're all created by an intelligent designer - that does not by itself provide the cure to cancer or any other disease or does not provide any ideas about how to deal with a stroke or with the heart hammering blood into the brain. But I would say, if you accept a broader, an even broader premise than intelligent design, namely, don't foreclose anything in your study of the human body and of the cell, then you are a lot more likely to get somewhere. I'd put it like that. I don't think saying intelligent design just automatically gets you anywhere. (Listen to Audio)
Ben Stein: But I think if you say we are going to study everything, and we are not going to let anyone close down our rights of inquiry, then I think we are getting somewhere. But also, there is this big issue about RNA and DNA, and whether RNA and DNA can respond to changes in the world around them. I think we say it can respond to changes in the world around them and that neo-Darwinians say it can only do that by random chance - it only happens by random chance. We say the cell may have the possibility of doing itself in an intelligent way that there may be some intelligence in the cell itself so that's probably a big difference between the two of us. We, on this side, think at least there's a possibility. We believe there's some possibility the cell could have an intelligence of its own. (Listen to Audio)
Cybercast News Service: The film spends a fair amount of time on the complexity of the cell and makes the point that no one at the time, including Darwin himself - no one could have anticipated that level of complexity ...
Ben Stein: Not even close. (Listen to audio)
Cybercast News Service: In what way did the film have any influence or change in your thinking and how it relates to intelligent design or scientific inquiry?
Ben Stein: Oh, when I first started working on this, I had no remote clue of how complicated the cell was, and I was believer just because I'd always been a believer and the idea that an intelligent being created the universe. But after working with these scientists and interviewing them and learning about how complex the cell was and how unlikely the proposition was that it all happened by random chance, then I was just overwhelmed by this data. And I was just overwhelmed by the fact, at least as I am told, that Darwinists have never observed natural species being originated ... There's not even a clear definition of what a species is - and the Darwinists have no theory whatsoever about the origin of life, none whatsoever, except the most hazy, the kind of preposterous, New Age hypothesis. And I think our theory that there is a creator strikes even some people, even Dawkins very possibly, as more likely than it all happened by total chance.
Cybercast News Service: Mr. Dawkins describes the proponents of ID as being ignorant. They don't buy into the scientific consensus - a lot of arguments made that there is a rock solid consensus in favor of evolution to explain biology. What is your reaction to this notion of consensus, and how does this complicate the journey for scientist or academics open to the idea?
Ben Stein: It doesn't complicate it at all because Dawkins, at least in my opinion, is completely wrong, and we produced a number of people who are bona fide scientists who clearly believe there is a possibility of intelligent design. So, his idea that there is a complete rock solid consensus is completely wrong. I mean, God bless him, he's obviously an intelligent guy, but it's obviously wrong. The people we produced weren't actors pretending to be scientists - they were scientists. (Listen to Audio)
Cybercast News Service: Why do you think the very idea or suggestion of intelligent design is so antagonistic to scientists who claim they have evidence? Why not have the debate? If they are so confident, why not have debate?
Ben Stein: That's a deep question. That's a sociological, psychological and ethical question. One, if they are Darwinists and they owe their jobs to being Darwinists, they are not going to challenge the orthodoxy because that would challenge the whole basis of their jobs and their lives. So they are not going to challenge the ideology that has given them lush positions in real life. That's one thing. Second thing, once people are locked into a way of thinking, they are unlikely to change. Third is, if they acknowledge the possibility of intelligent design and that intelligent design is God, then they may think God has moral expectations of them and they may be falling short of those moral expectations, and they may be worried about some sort of judgment upon them. (Listen to Audio)
Cybercast News Service: The film starts with you giving a presentation about American freedom, and when you get near the end of the film there's a Polish official - I believe a member of the EU Parliament - who said there's actually more freedom and latitude in Poland than here in the United States to explore these questions, and he blames it on political correctness. Mr. Stein how did we get to this point? ... If there's more latitude for scientific inquiry overseas in a recently released communist country than there is in the United States of America?
Ben Stein: That is a very, very, very good question. How did we get here? I don't know. How did we get to this point in Hollywood? There's (sic) only certain attitudes allowed about military, religion, or small towns or about business? I don't know how we got to this, this kind of orthodoxy. I think there is this kind of Marxist establishment in this country that has been overthrown in other countries, but not overthrown here. There is a very powerful Marxist establishment within the intelligentsia that does not allow questioning of its premises. (Listen to Audio)
Cybercast News Service: What do you think needs to happen in academia? What suggestions or prescriptions do you think will come out of the film?
Ben Stein: We want more freedom. I just spoke to some young people in Orlando. And I said, this to us - at least to me, I don't know what it is to other people in the film - is a bit like the Civil Rights movement. You want to have freedom, where our goal is freedom. We want freedom. We want all our rights, not some of them, all our rights to free speech. We want them here in America, and we want them now. That's what we want; we're not going to get it. But we hope to open the door wider to some serious debate on these issues. (Listen to Audio)
Cybercast News Service: The point is made that journalists have a tendency to embrace the establishment position ...
Ben Stein: If the establishment position is the sort of left-wing establishment position. They are certainly not going to embrace the Republican establishment position. (Listen to Audio)
Cybercast News Service: This reminds me of the global warming debate. The Union of Concerned Scientists, exactly one year ago, put out a report on Exxon Mobil for their position on global warming, and in their report they say too often journalists' inclination to provide political balance leads to inaccurate reporting - and that members of the media should not quote ExxonMobil officials or anybody who questions the scientific consensus.
Ben Stein: Yes, that is precisely the analogy. Very well done. I totally agree. There are still plenty of scientists who question fossil fuels' role in global warming, but you're not allowed to question that anymore.
“You know when and where life first arose?
I’m impressed!”
Well...as far as this discussion is concerned we’re dealing with life on Earth. I’ve not seen much discussion of other planets in the Bible.
The “when” for life arising on Earth is around 2 billion years ago, as far as modern scientific thinking goes.
I find the determination of the age of the Universe even more impressive, based on the work with cosmic background microwave anisotropy measurements.
Mapping the human genome, while a tremendously valuable accomplishment, does not by any stretch of the imagination constitute reverse-engineering it.
First of all, man has not yet accomplished the engineering of life. I have no doubt that, given a little more time, technology will lead to such a breakthrough. However, biological life, and especially human life, is made from complex, nonlinear systems, just as most physical systems are inherently nonlinear in nature.
Engineering such systems is difficult, and reverse-engineering of them is more so. Scientific theories incorporate predictions that are testable. Nonlinear systems are innately unpredictable. Also, multistability baffles such attempts to quantify the logic of the design. Further, nonlinear systems are chaotic, thus aggravating the possibility of reverse engineering life.
Your statement affords about as much weight as saying that we have looked at the processes of weather and concluded that whomever (or Whomever) designed the earth’s climate was illogical. Nonsense. Even though chaotic, there is a measure of predictability (in the short term) to weather. Yet we cannot predict weather very far in advance. At the same time, earth’s weather and boundaries of land and sea are part of a delicately balanced ecosystem that MUST exist for life, as we know it, to exist.
The human genome is far more complex than weather. Your claim that characteristics lead to some inference of an illogical design is just a way of making the outrageously egotistical claim that you can do it better. Show me. While we can build specialized machines to extend our capabilities beyond inherent limitations of our basic design, no one has come close to designing a complex system that can replicate even a small part of the functionality of simple life forms.
Common genetic material shared by living things points us to a common Designer rather than a common ancestor. Flaws are not part of the design but are part of the Fall.
Some supposed flaws are presumptuously designated thus because their function and utility have not been identified. Evolutionists scoff at the idea that anything that we do not understand can be explained by creationists as “God did it”. But the same scoffers have no trouble leaping to unwarranted conclusions about so-called flaws which may serve a currently unknown purpose. This is typical of scoffers who mock anything outside the scope of their immediate knowledge, including but not limited to the reliability of the Holy Scriptures.
“So, do you think God created life when he created the universe almost 12 billion years ago, or did he wait 10 billion years as the fossil record seems to indicate?”
Our current scientific model (Lambda-CDM) for dating the universe is flawed. I will concede that it may have been reached through a reasonable (naturally speaking), deductive process based on the best empirical evidence we have to date. But even from that viewpoint, it is unreasonable to put the level of confidence in our measurement of time as is being done by persons such as yourself. It is a theoretical model (again Lambda-CDM), a lens if you will, for viewing and interpreting the empirical data.
Billions of years is theoretical. (That is, not to be confused with factual. I know all about the arguments to do with the importance of theoretical models to science. Do you? Theories can be useful but are subject to change. God is not a theory. He is a fact. The empirical evidence has been recorded as He has been observed. Either a person accepts or rejects the record, but the existence of God does not need to be supported in the same way a theory does.) Most people who throw around these immense numbers have no idea of their implication. Invoking such numbers is not much different than invoking Deity. Those numbers might as well be infinite.
Because, if we analyze empirical data gathered over maybe 200 years to derive information about a universe that is supposed to be 12 billion years old, that is the equivalent of trying to analyze the events and processes of a human lifespan (less than 3 billion seconds for most of us) based upon observations of a human experience which takes place over a period of, at most, a couple of minutes. While it may be possible to extrapolate these processes to assess what a hundred years (lifespan) might look like, the prediction is highly unlikely to have any meaningful, real world utility. How could it? Likewise, how can what we observe and measure over a couple of centuries be accurately and precisely applied (by extrapolation) to the processes we think occurred during billions of years. The sheer size of this amount of time overwhelms the possibility of our limited time, energy, resources and intelligence to accurately assess what has occurred. (I am not saying it is an unworthy endeavor, we just should not be overconfident as to the results and implications of this model of time.)
The age of the universe depends on your vantage point. That is, time moves at different rates depending on various factors including velocity and mass. It would be more appropriate to describe the time "contained" in the universe. We cannot think of billions of years in the same fashion as the natural inclination of our mind to ascribe likeness to the time we measure with watches and calendars.
Again we are discussing nonlinear systems. The "billions of years" concept projects a linear time onto what might be described as an essentially-infinite, nonlinear system.
The earth has not literally traveled around the sun billions of times. To say that life arose in a violent universe over billions of years as a lucky coincidence would be an understatement to the extreme. The likelihood of the delicate balance of an ecosystem required to sustain an interdependent ecology becomes staggeringly small when looked at in the context of billions of years. You might as well go out of your door and look at the end of your driveway for a lottery ticket which the wind has blown there and, by chance, happens to have the winning number, and expect that every other person around you can do the same, and that the money to redeem these tickets is available for everyone to be rich, and the wealth necessary to support the winnings happens to exist, all by chance. Good luck.
“You nailed it. Teach Creationism in Sunday School. Teach Science in real school.”
While I cannot agree with your assessment (and I have also replied to post #3), anyone who supports the true conservatives of this race cannot be all bad.
How, for the life of me, anyone who claims to be conservative supports the other candidates is beyond me. My best guess is that either they must not be truly conservative or are convinced that few people share their conservative views and have no hope of succeeding.
Regardless, I’m looking to more school board bankrupting themselves by chasing this chimera.
But speaking of making big bucks fast, Ben Stein will pay you ten dollars for a ticket stub for his new movie. I see an opportunity for churches to make some fast cash by sending kids out to beg for ticket stubs.
If the proponents of ID accept the central claim of Darwin, which is common descent, then they are part of that “consensus “ are they not? The chief difference between them and the neo-darwinists is philosophical rather than “scientific.” The ID people say that too much is put down to “randomness.” where randoness cannot explain certain developments. Karl Popper said that deniability is essential to any theory. Darwinists seem to deplore any effort to deny any part of the conventional wisdom. They stand for an oxymoron: scientific orthodoxy.
If the proponents of ID accept the central claim of Darwin, which is common descent, then they are part of that “consensus “ are they not? The chief difference between them and the neo-darwinists is philosophical rather than “scientific.” The ID people say that too much is put down to “randomness.” where randoness cannot explain certain developments. Karl Popper said that deniability is essential to any theory. Darwinists seem to deplore any effort to deny any part of the conventional wisdom. They stand for an oxymoron: scientific orthodoxy.
It's true that randomness doesn't explain evolution. But then natural selection isn't random, is it?
Random implies that cange is not affected by consequenses. In terms of economics, that would be like saying product change is random, rather than tracking consumer preferences.
Like the “invisible hand?” natural selection is offered as the result of accumulated events. But are we talking about the same kind of events? There is nothing in economics equivalent to the human cell. IAC, you need to look at the rhetoric of the Darwinist apologists which does seem to reduce every biological event to the collision of “atoms”—ala Lucretius when we long ago disposed of that notion of the atom. With them it is always 1870. So many of their arguments sound suspicously like that of Thomas Huxley, excep that Huxley is their superior in so many ways.
That would surprise a lot of biologists, including Darwin. Adam Smiths was the inspiration for the idea of natural selection.
Prior to Darwin it was well known that selection could make miniature lapdogs with funny hair out of wolf-like feral dogs, but Adam Smith provided the insight that an "overmind" was not necessary to guide systems that responded to consequences.
Such systems adapt to changing conditions without central planning.
Well, breeding shows that an "overmind" can produce certain results in a way that the accidents of enviroment cannot. Suppose we are archaelogists who set up a game and agree to draw no conclusions except from the study of skeletal remains of dogs and the situations in which they are found--being agnostic about the existence of human beings. Now is it not possible that we might conclude that the environments alone might not have caused the resulting differences? I submit that few of the players can indeed be agnostic about the existence of humanity: that nearly all must enter the game predisposed to an answer. Unless, of course, they be idiot savants like Bobby Fisher who can enter the game completely cut off from his fellow human beings. Maybe a Vulcan.
I’m sorry…“That’s” ID’s great contribution to science? That’s why ID should be incorporated into genetic research? Taught as a science? Because until the Bible enlightened us to that concept, no-one new “living things reproduce their own kind”? So Pasteur (guided by that obscure biblical secret) gained advantage over fellow evo-scientists who believed… what… that creatures produced alien offspring?
OK, thank you for justifying why we should undermine science classes with divine intervention “science”.
How is it that you have Internet access and have not the slightest clue of what you are talking about?
You can stumble upon the answers without even making half an effort.
First of all, Pasteur had no "fellow evo-scientists" because Darwin's evolution came a few years later. However, natural selection was commonly accepted from a Christian perspective from which Darwin developed his own particular tautology: i.e. survivor's survive. As a contemporary, Pasteur rejected Darwin's ideas.
Just like many today cling to the dead theory of evolution in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, so “scientists” of Pasteur’s day clung to the unsubstantiated idea of spontaneous generation of microscopic organisms (which had already been shown to be false in its presumption that maggots arose from decaying meat).
In 1862, when Pasteur tested his hypothesis regarding bacteria reproducing “after their kind” he demonstrated that the prevailing view of scientists of his day, namely that microorganisms were spontaneously generated, was not supported by empirical evidence.
Pasteur played not merely an important but rather a critical role in the development of microbiology as a branch of natural science and is attributed with saving more lives than any other scientist, something that would never result from Darwin’s vain imaginings.
The fact that you are unaware of how Pasteur’s faith informed his scientific accomplishments reveals a failure on either your part or the part of your instructors (or both).
Volumes of evidence against the evolutionary model are readily accessible to anyone who cares to investigate.
Possibly, but where does that lead? Darwin doesn't argue against the possibility of miracles, but only against the necessity.
Selection means that some individuals leave more offspring than others. That's really it. The whole ball of wax.
However, is some external designer produces teacup poodles from wolves, that implies a rather drastic change in the environment, and we would expect to see the modifications in the environment. In the case of poodles, we can readily see dogs living in houses rather than the forest, and eating packaged food rather than having to hunt.
What?
I’m sorry, your description of Pasture’s work implied that it was uniquely attributed to biblical teaching and/or contrary to evolution. But the half dead theory of classical spontaneous generation as you should know was contrary to the common ancestry principle of evolutionary theory as well.
Still, I suppose that’s as good a justification as any for suggesting divine intervention be taught as a science in science class. Another nice post…
That is a good point. Spontaneous generation is completely incompatible with common descent. More like ongoing special creation.
You note the government labs. I was amazed to note the other day that the Fermi Lab recently came up with something new. It was not that world-shaking, but after spending forty years chasing after nuclear fusion it is nice to know that they can do something else.
“Pasture’s work [you] implied was uniquely attributed to biblical teaching and/or contrary to evolution”
His work was based on his understanding of the Bible. He did not believe the accepted dogma of his day because it did not harmonize with his theology. Theology is similar to theory. To a believer, theology is subject to being corrected by the facts of the Bible in the same way that scientific theories are subject to being corrected by the facts of nature. However, Pasteur was not content to argue his views on the basis of faith only. He demonstrated they were correct by scientific testing. (And he was willing to be corrected by the facts as well).
Spontaneous generation of small organisms such as worms and maggots had been discredited prior to Pasteur, but he carried this further by discrediting the popular view that microscopic organisms were spontaneously generated.
You are correct that this idea does not agree with Evolution, however evolution does rely on the spontaneous generation of new information.
I am not convinced that the spontaneous generation of small organisms, microscopic ones, or of new genetic information can be falsified. That makes it very difficult to disprove that such events occur. It also makes such views unscientific.
It is up to evolution supporters to show that the spontaneous generation of new information occurs (as a fact) or can be falsified (as a theory).
Indeed.
Pasteur"Virulence appears in a new light which cannot but be alarming to humanity; unless nature, in her evolution down the ages (an evolution which, as we now know, has been going on for millions, nay, hundreds of millions of years), has finally exhausted all the possibilities of producing virulent or contagious diseases - which does not seem very likely."[emphasis added]Although he shortly afterwards refers to "the myriad species of Creation", it is clear that he accepted the reality of evolution. Moreover, he characterised the interaction between microbes and hosts as a "struggle for existence" (a phrase, it must be remembered, invented by the Swiss botanist Alphonse de Candolle, and borrowed by Darwin). However, I doubt he accepted that evolution occurred by natural selection, as the French rarely did until the 1950s and Jacques Monod's writings. However, he was not a creationist, at least at this point in his life.
Moreover, much has been made about Pasteur's faith. It is often claimed that he was a devout Catholic, but it seems he was very lax in his religious devotion, reading through church services as a student, and not attending church much during his life. He was, it must be said, opposed to the philosophical vogue of radical materialism in France, from which the spontaneous generation debate sprang, but he was hardly a model believer. Even so, despite claims made by Farley and Geison that Pasteur allowed his research to be guided by his a priori philosophy**, he did turn out to be correct that the growths of germs were caused by pre-existing germs, and that fermentation was due to yeast.[emphasis added]
**Strictly, Pouchet had shown that hay infusions would generate even when boiled, because, as it was shown a while later, hay had heat resistant spores. {Geison 131} Had he stayed in the competition, he may very well have won (although not because he was right about spontaneous generation). More worrying to us moderns is that it transpires, now that Pasteur's notebooks have become available (they were made available only in the 1970s, and an index published only in 1985), that Pasteur repeatedly ignored positive results in experiments, claiming that they were due to error rather than spontaneous generation; in fact only 10% of his experiments gave his desired result. {Geison 130}[emphasis added]
If you are correct that Pasteur was informed by his religious faith, and it appears you are not, it seems his faith caused him to fudge his data and he discovered the truth not through his faith but in spite of it. It also seems you are guilty, in a much more egregious manner than modern science, of extrapolating evidence well beyond what the context warrants. Pasteur's conclusion that modern extremely complex organisms do not spontaneously form from raw materials, does not invalidate, in any way, the concept that complex molecules, which are much less complex than a modern organism, could form deterministically (amino acids form in space and on Earth through concusion) and through imperfect replication and selection develop further complexity. This is an area where initial complexity has an enormous impact on outcome. If you purposely ignore that essential difference in your argument you are being highly disingenuous.
It seems your arrogance is unwarranted as well.
I presume your “spontaneous information generation” suggestion is referring to Dembski’s recent claim to have discovered a new “law”. So you say now it’s up to others to disprove it? You should know that science doesn’t work like that (even if his claims were relevant to the theory of evolution). There’s a summary response to those making the claim here.
Another example of creation "science?"
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