CAPITOL IDEAS: No Intelligence Allowed!
Bethell, Tom
c a P I T o L I d e a s No Intelligence Allowed! by Tom Bethell It’s not often that i attend private screenings, so when I was invited to see the director’s cut of Expelled: No...
...There are many of them, and they are edited and knitted together with such skill that the whole film is a pleasure to watch...
...Now the cell is seen to resemble a high-tech factory...
...What I had not expected was that the film would take the war to the enemy...
...Dressed in his squarest business suit, Ben Stein has heard about this controversy and so he sets forth to investigate—his clumpy sneakers striking a defiant note...
...It was shown in downtown Washington, D.C...
...That was a time when the most interesting Soviet authors used pen names to avoid being “expelled”— to the Gulag...
...It’s the position taken by Ken Miller of Brown University, Francis Collins of the Human Genome Institute, and by many religious figures...
...The film, a documentary, is about scientists and researchers who acknowledge the scientific evidence for the intelligent design of life and who have been ostracized or denied tenure as a result...
...But fossils can’t reveal ancestry so in the end they don’t get us very far...
...f e b R U a R Y 2 0 0 8 T H e a M e R I c a n s P e c T a T o R 5 5...
...My only complaint about Expelled, scheduled for April release, is that its ending came all too soon...
...As always he makes us laugh, less by his words than by the way he so plainly emphasizes them...
...Dawkins and Provine are among those evolutionists who unflinchingly accept the logic of their own position and reject what might be called the diplomatic option...
...At moments it brought tears of joy to my eyes...
...But design is ruled out a priori in Darwin’s naturalistic worldview...
...Tom bethell is a senior editor of The American Spectator...
...Stein can hardly believe it...
...But no, Discovery fits within a single office...
...It puts diplomacy before truth and adopts the Rodney King mantra: “Can’t we all just get along...
...Dawkins and others later complained that they hadn’t been warned that the movie would be unsympathetic to their cause...
...Design advocates say it isn’t...
...I would love to see more of this fascinating project and I assume that at least some of it will be included in the DVD...
...The evolutionists were obliged to believe in a fundamentally simple world because all they had was an elementary mechanism—random mutation plus natural selection—to account for it...
...Myers of the University of Minnesota...
...He surprises us, too, by allowing that if life really was designed, the designing must have been done by intelligent beings elsewhere in the cosmos who themselves evolved by naturalistic means...
...We know it’s true, of course, so we relish the prospect as he girds himself for shocking discoveries and starts knocking on doors in search of the truth...
...The vast majority of species that once lived are now extinct...
...at the Goethe Institute...
...In his bestseller The God Delusion Dawkins calls this the Neville Chamberlain option, and says no, we really can’t...
...It is surely the best thing ever done on this issue, in any medium...
...In America...
...The real action today is within the microscopic study of living organisms...
...It’s actually beginning to resemble a real city...
...There’s no answer in the Darwinian scheme—other than trial and error...
...Some segments may be cut and others added...
...Ben Stein pays a call on leading Darwinians, among them Oxford’s Richard Dawkins, William Provine of Cornell, and P.Z...
...The DNA within the cell, once thought to be mostly (98 percent) “junk” is now believed to be functional all the way through (a dividend of the Human Genome Project...
...The advocates of intelligent design agree with him about that because they insist that life must have been designed...
...The new research—and it doesn’t make any difference whether it’s carried out under the auspices of the Discovery Institute or the National Science Foundation—is uncovering a miracle of complexity...
...From his apartment in Paris, Commentary contributor David Berlinski dismisses Darwinism with elegant disdain...
...I can only say that his interviews, conducted in a wide variety of locations, from Paris to Jerusalem and from London to Seattle, are outstanding...
...I have written about this controversy for over 30 years and by the movie’s end I felt that those of us who have insisted that Darwinism is a sorry mess and that life surely was designed are going to prevail...
...Ben knocks on Bruce Chapman’s door at the Discovery Institute, which has received so much publicity as practically the sole institutional supporter of intelligent design that when Ben arrives at the Seattle address he reckons it must occupy the whole building...
...Incompatible worldviews are at stake, and the debate between the advocates of chance and design, often a proxy for combat between atheists and churchgoers, can become acrimonious...
...The double irony is that Dawkins’s second encounter with Ben Stein is perhaps the high point of the film...
...Dawkins, speaking with refreshing frankness, comes across as not in the slightest bit confused or caught off guard...
...How did it get that way...
...Stephen Meyer, Jonathan Wells, Paul Nelson, and 5 4 T H e a M e R I c a n s P e c T a T o R f e b R U a R Y 2 0 0 8 T o M b e T H e L L others appear on camera...
...He allows that science knows nothing about the origin of life, and that, yes, the Darwinian message is antithetical to religion...
...Francis Crick of DNA fame took the same view in the 1980s...
...In response, Ben Stein said that no one he interviewed asked what the film would be about, and the coproducer Walt Ruloff said at the preview that interviewees were paid and were even told ahead of time what the questions would be...
...By turns serious and hilarious, it manages to be instructive without ever being didactic...
...This seeks to keep everyone happy by agreeing that evolution happened on schedule but allowing also that God arranged things that way...
...We also meet a number of the best known insurgents...
...In Darwin’s day the cell was thought to be little more than a “simple lump of protoplasm,” or, in another ludicrous simplification, a “cavity” filled with a “homogenous transparent fluid...
...Walt Ruloff said in his pre-screening announcement that Premise Media had filmed 400 hours of interviews...
...In a word, they have been “expelled” from the academy...
...Here we are only beginning to discover the amazing complexity found at the molecular level...
...More commonly, however, the movie defuses the underlying tension with lightness and comedy...
...Expelled makes use of Cold War imagery, and the producers might have extended that metaphor by saying that we are now in the Samizdat period (before the fall of the Berlin Wall...
...The growing allusions in the scientific literature to “molecular machines” have inspired one biologist, who calls himself Mike Gene, to publish The Design Matrix...
...I don’t know his real identity, which he conceals for obvious reasons...
...by Tom Bethell It’s not often that i attend private screenings, so when I was invited to see the director’s cut of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, starring our own Ben Stein, I jumped at the chance...
...We are introduced to the leading expellees, including Caroline Crocker (from George Mason), Rick Sternberg (from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History), Guillermo Gonzalez (Iowa State), and William Dembski (Baylor...
...Can it be, when openness and diversity and freedom of speech are so admired, that a defensible point of view has been suppressed...
...What does the science show...
...I stress that I didn’t see the film in its final form...
...I didn’t even know that such a place existed, but then downtown Washington has been rebuilt in recent years, with whole neighborhoods reconstructed...
...In the movie there are somber moments, as when Stein visits World War II death camps and traces the Nazi philosophy back to the godless Darwinian world in which fitness must prevail and everything is permitted...
...The real question about the evolution of life by Darwinian means is not whether it is brutish or cruel or chilling or helpful to conservatism or harmful to it, but whether it is true...
...Their designs were then somehow transported down to Earth...
...New animal designs and “models” appear in the fossil record without detectable precursors...
...c a P I T o L I d e a s No Intelligence Allowed...
...Cornell’s Provine was also excellent, pulling no punches in telling how his own youthful faith did not long survive his instruction in the Darwinian catechism...
Vol. 41 • February 2008 • No. 1
