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By Peter T. Chattaway
 CANADIANS are making their mark on the evangelical movie scene -- but unlike our brethren south of the border, most of us may have to wait until the movie in question comes out on video to see what all the fuss is about.
The latest Christian film to crack the all-important top-ten list at the box office is Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, a documentary on the Intelligent Design (ID) movement hosted by Ben Stein, a former speechwriter for Presidents Nixon and Ford who is best known for playing a boring teacher in Ferris Bueller's Day Off.
The film opened at #10 when it was released to American theatres April 18, but as of this writing, there are no plans to release it in Canada, even though producer Walt Ruloff lives on Bowen Island and writer Kevin Miller, a former critic for Hollywood Jesus and an occasional contributor to BC Christian News, lives in Abbotsford.
As with a number of recent films, Expelled owes much of its success to controversy -- beginning with the accusations made as far back as last September by atheist scientists Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers, who claimed they were interviewed for the film under false pretenses, and had no idea of its religious inclinations.
Whether that's true is not for me to say. But the film itself -- which I saw at a local post-production facility in downtown Vancouver -- certainly plunges into its controversial subject matter in a way that is designed to get attention, provoke laughter, stimulate outrage and generally produce more heat than light.
In many ways, Expelled follows the template set by Michael Moore and his imitators. Stein injects his interviews with deadpan humour -- telling one ID theorist that he was tossed out of the academic establishment for being a "bad boy" -- and occasionally he wanders around, looking lost outside the Discovery Institute in Seattle or being turned away from the Smithsonian by a security guard.
The film, directed by Nathan Frankowski, also uses cheesy archival footage to mock some of the atheists' claims; and the closest it ever comes to explaining what ID theory actually is, and thus whether it deserves any sort of scientific attention, comes via a cheeky animated sequence on 'The Casino of Life' that is similar in feel and tone to the history-of-guns bit in Moore's film Bowling for Columbine.
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Alas, the film also cherry-picks quotes in a way that will be disappointing to anyone who is familiar with the debate over ID and the origins of life. British scientists-turned-clergymen Alister McGrath and John Polkinghorne are dropped in for a few seconds to explain that religion and science can get along, but no mention is made of the fact that both men subscribe to evolutionary theory and are critical of ID.
And Stein's climactic interview with Dawkins includes an exchange that is treated like a major 'gotcha!' moment, yet if anything it suggests there is something fundamentally dishonest, or at least disingenuous, about the ID movement.
Put simply: To assure people that ID really is science and not just religion in disguise, ID theorists have been insisting for years that they make no claims about the nature of the Intelligent Designer himself. He could be natural, like an alien, or he could be supernatural, like a god; all they want to do is look for evidence of design itself. But the moment Dawkins runs with the possibility that aliens might have created life on Earth, the movie pounces as if to say the very idea is absurd.
Matters are further confused by the fact that the film never acknowledges that some ID theorists actually believe in evolution, albeit perhaps only to a point. Instead, the film allows the viewer to think that ID and evolution are natural enemies -- an idea deepened by the film's efforts to link Darwinism with the Holocaust.
The problem is, evolutionary theory -- which is both older and newer than Darwin, by the way -- is either true or it isn't, and it doesn't matter much whether people have abused the theory, any more than it matters whether people have abused, say, the teachings of Jesus. Within the film, Dawkins links the Bible to genocide just as surely as Stein links evolution to genocide, so what good does that tactic really do?
What we need is a film that can explore the limits of science, the nature of scientific research, and the interplay of science and faith in a way that makes us all better thinkers. But would anyone want to be involved, and would it get so much publicity from the media, and would it do as well at the box office? Probably not.
April 24/2008
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But ID is a belief. It cannot be tested or falsified. We "Darwinists" mainly get upset when people want to put a faith-based ideology in a science class. It is not fair to our children to represent a non-science as science just to appease adults that apparently lack strong faith in their own religion.
These ID "scientists" should be fired for focusing on ID in a SCIENCE classroom. That's the beef. Talk about it all you want in philosophy class or wherever else. But science professors shouldn't be getting paid for failing to teach accepted science in favor of a belief system.
Makes me very glad I'm British and these people get laughed out of town and called liars very publicly when they try to push it into schools across here.
If the US wishes to remain a first world nation then you need to put an end to this rubbish now, if not then I hope you enjoy watching the rest of the world rush past you and leave you in the dust.
You complain about "repression in the scientific community". Did you expect people who make dishonest claims about biological evolution, because they want to replace science with magic, to be respected? Proponents of intelligent design magic are equal to flat-earthers and they deserve to be ridiculed. If they don't want to be ridiculed they should keep their childish medieval beliefs in church and out of our schools.
The producers of Expelled are compulsive liars. For information google "Expelled Exposed".
Why are so many people so willing to throw out mountains of scientific evidence to justify their medieval beliefs?
There's many reasons. For example they're too lazy to study science. They prefer the easy answer to every problem: god-did-it. They want to throw out science and replace it with religion. They believe in a god-of-the-gaps. The problem is as gaps in human knowledge disappear their god-of-the-gaps runs out of hiding places. To defend their god-of-the-gaps they become liars. I noticed most creationists are compulsive liars, and the producers of the anti-science propaganda movie "Expelled" are no exception.
The most important reason there are still creationists is because they are just plain stupid. There can be nobody more childish and dimwitted than people who prefer magic instead of scientific explanations.
Wrong! Wrong, wrong, wrongetty, wrong, wrong!
About as wrong as you can be.
Not only do we understand how such new information could be written into DNA (replication and mutation), it can even be done in the lab and has been observed countless times.
1. Long, M., Betran, E., Thornton, K. and Wang, W. (2003). "The origin of new genes: glimpses from the young and old." Nature Reviews Genetics. 4(11): 865-875.
2. Adami et al., 2000. (see below)
3. Alves MJ, Coelho MM, Collares-Pereira MJ, 2001. Evolution in action through hybridisation and polyploidy in an Iberian freshwater fish: a genetic review. Genetica 111(1-3): 375-385. [2]
4. Brown CJ, Todd KM, Rosenzweig RF, 1998. Multiple duplications of yeast hexose transport genes in response to selection in a glucose-limited environment. Mol. Biol. Evol. 15(8): 931-942. [3]
5. Decadt, Y. JG, 2000. On the origin and impact of information in evolution paper available on the internet.
6. Hughes AL, Friedman R, 2003. Parallel evolution by gene duplication in the genomes of two unicellular fungi. Genome Res. 13(6A): 1259-1264.
7. Knox JR, Moews PC and Frere J-M, 1996. Molecular evolution of bacterial beta-lactam resistance. Chemistry & Biology 3: 937-947.
8. Lang, D. et al, 2000. Structural evidence for evolution of the beta/alpha barrel scaffold by gene duplication and fusion. Science 289: 1546-1550. See also Miles, E.W. & Davies, D.R., 2000. On the ancestry of barrels. Science 289: 1490.
9. Lenski, R.E., 1995. in Population Genetics of Bacteria, Society for General Microbiology, Symposium 52, eds. Baumberg, S., Young, J.P.W., Saunders, S.R. & Wellington, E.M.H., Cambridge University Press, UK., pp. 193-215.
10. Lenski, R., Rose, M.R., Simpson, E.C. & Tadler, S.C., 1991. American Naturalist 138: 1315-1341.
11. Long M. (2001). "Evolution of novel genes." Curr Opin Genet Dev. 11(6):673-80.
12. Long, M., Betran, E., Thornton, K. and Wang, W. (2003). "The origin of new genes: glimpses from the young and old." Nature Reviews Genetics. 4(11): 865-875.
13. Lynch M and Conery JS, 2000. The evolutionary fate and consequences of duplicate genes. Science 290: 1151-1155. See also Pennisi, E., 2000. Twinned genes live life in the fast lane. Science 290: 1065-1066.
14. Nurminsky DI, Nurminskaya MV, De Aguiar D, Hartl DL. (1998). "Selective sweep of a newly evolved sperm-specific gene in Drosophila." Nature. 396(6711):572-5.
15. Ohta T., 2003. Evolution by gene duplication revisited: differentiation of regulatory elements versus proteins. Genetica 118(2-3): 209-216.
16. Park IS, Lin CH, and Walsh CT, 1996. Gain of D-alanyl-D-lactate or D-lactyl-D-alanine synthetase activities in three active-site mutants of the Escherichia coli D-alanyl-D-alanine ligase B. Biochemistry 35: 10464-10471.
17. Prijambada ID et al., 1995. Emergence of nylon oligomer degradation enzymes in Pseudomonas aeruginosa PAO through experimental evolution. Applied and Environmental Microbiology 61(5): 2020-2022.
18. Schneider, T.D., 2000. Evolution of biological information. Nucleic Acids Res 28(14): 2794-2799. [4]
19. Zhang J, Zhang YP, Rosenberg HF, 2002. Adaptive evolution of a duplicated pancreatic ribonuclease gene in a leaf-eating monkey. Nature Genetics 30(4):411-415. See also: Univ. of Michigan, 2002, How gene duplication helps in adapting to changing environments. [5]
20. Whitman CP. (2002). "The 4-oxalocrotonate tautomerase family of enzymes: how nature makes new enzymes using a beta-alpha-beta structural motif." Arch Biochem Biophys. 402(1):1-13.PubMed DOI
21. Bos DH. (2005). "Natural selection during functional divergence to LMP7 and proteasome subunit X (PSMB5) following gene duplication." J Mol Evol. 60(2):221-8. PubMed
22. Ballicora MA, Dubay JR, Devillers CH, Preiss J. (2005). "Resurrecting the ancestral enzymatic role of a modulatory subunit." J Biol Chem. 280(11):10189-95. PubMed
23. Todd AE, Orengo CA, Thornton JM. (2002)."Sequence and structural differences between enzyme and nonenzyme homologs." Structure (Camb). 10(10):1435-51. PubMed
24. Todd AE, Orengo CA, Thornton JM. (2002). "Plasticity of enzyme active sites." Trends Biochem Sci. 27(8):419-26. PubMed
25. Bartlett GJ, Borkakoti N, Thornton JM. (2003). "Catalysing new reactions during evolution: economy of residues and mechanism." J Mol Biol. 331(4):829-60. PubMed
26. James LC, Tawfik DS. (2001). "Catalytic and binding poly-reactivities shared by two unrelated proteins: The potential role of promiscuity in enzyme evolution." Protein Sci. 10(12):2600-7. PubMed
27. Todd AE, Orengo CA, Thornton JM. (2001). "Evolution of function in protein superfamilies, from a structural perspective." J Mol Biol. 307(4):1113-43. PubMed
28. Raes, J., Van de Peer, Y. (2002). "Gene duplication, the evolution of novel gene functions, and detecting functional divergence of duplicates in silico." Appl Bioinformatics. 2(2):91-101. PubMed
29. Van de Peer, Y., Taylor, J. S., Braasch, I., Meyer, A. "The ghost of selection past: rates of evolution and functional divergence of anciently duplicated genes." J Mol Evol. 53(4-5):436-446.
30. Carginale, V., Trinchella, F., Capasso, C., Scudiero, R., Riggio, M., Parisi, E. (2004). "Adaptive evolution and functional divergence of pepsin gene family." Gene. 333:81-90. PubMed
The film's subtitle, "No Intelligence Allowed," refers to what Stein and the filmmakers decry as a lack of "academic freedom" or "open inquiry" in academia and the scientific community. The movie argues that gatekeepers in those circles aren't even allowing ID as a topic of discussion.
Is it right to stand up for free speech or not? ID should be allowed to be discussed in universities and in scientific communities.
http://www.expelledexposed.com/index.php/the-truth
If America is about anything it is about freedom...freedom of speech and freedom of inquiry. The makers of the movie are not so much making the point that everyone needs to accept ID, but that everyone should be allowed to hear the evidence and arguments for both SCIENTIFIC viewpoints and make their own decision. The POINT to the movie is about allowing researchers and professors to be allowed to openly discuss and explore both approaches and allow the chips to fall as they did in the solar vs terrestrial orbit argument of times past. The level of hysterics coming from the Darwinist camp seems telling.
As Shakespeare would probably say, they 'protest too much'.
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=six-things-ben-stein-doesnt-want-you-to-know
It's bad science.
That's why most scientists don't like ID, not some knee jerk reaction on the basis of their atheism.
Where's the Christian campaign to 'teach the controversy over the shape of the Earth'? How come no one thinks Flat Earthism should be taught to school kids, yet thinks the biology equivalent - ID - should?
If ID science worked, however much evolutionary biologist hated it, it would *be* science.
It doesn't work and just saying that it does, doesn't make it so.
Until someone comes up with a scientific theory of ID that works, why should it be taught to children? Is it really that controvertial to not teach failed science?
It's not protesting too much. It's protesting precisely the right amount.
This article seems to be in response to an article by Dr. Stephen C. Meyers, "Intelligent Design: The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories". You can read it at http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=view&id=2177. Jim, are you the author of the wiki article?
That http://wiki.cotch.net/index.php should be essential reading for anyone who thinks they have a good argument about evolution though.
Incidentally, that Meyer article is the one that Richard Sternberg published, and over which Sternberg claims to have been victimised.
I can only hope that if I ever suffer bullying it the workplace it's as non-existant as that suffered by poor Mr Sternberg:
http://www.expelledexposed.com/index.php/the-truth/sternberg
If America is about anything it is about freedom...freedom of speech and freedom of inquiry.
A couple points in reply.
First, national politics has nothing to do with it. The film does try to suggest that there is something significant about the fact that the American Declaration of Independence contains the word "Creator". But from a scientific point of view, it doesn't matter what any political document says.
Second, there are limits to all freedoms, even in America. The freedom of expression does not permit anyone to commit libel or slander, or to yell "fire!" in a crowded theatre unless there is, in fact, a fire in that theatre. Likewise, there is a lot of freedom in scientific circles, but only some theories are permitted because only some theories qualify as scientific. It is not at all clear that ID is one of those theories. (There is a reason why scientists study astronomy and not astrology -- and for what it's worth, ID theorist Michael Behe apparently admitted in court that his definition of "theory" was broad enough to include astrology.) In fact, ID theorist Paul Nelson reportedly said a few years ago that IDers like him have, so far, produced "no general theory of biological design." So until they can produce such a theory, IDers will have difficulty convincing anyone that they represent a genuine scientific movement.
PLuS wrote:
I think you need to check your notes again, Peter. The film clearly states that the IDers have no problem with evolution. The question is how it happened. Was it guided or unguided? At least three of the IDers make this point in the film.
Names? And by "evolution", do they specifically mean the emergence of new species from old species? Or do they simply mean what some creationists call "micro-evolution"? It is so-called "macro-evolution" that I was referring to in the review, and I do not recall any of the IDers coming out in favour of that. The closest they get, that I can recall, is saying that Darwin had some good ideas but didn't have the whole picture -- which is vague enough to allow for just about anything.
The real questions that "Expelled " raises: if I want to conduct research on Intelligent Design will the referees judging my research squelch it because they don't welcome potential counter evidence? Will the referees of my intended publication after I do the research reject it solely because they can't countenance a challenge to their theory? Will I lose any chance of tenure because I try to publish evidence that disputes Darwinism?
"Expelled" claims "yes."
With respect to Jim's list of articles, they are interesting and worthy of consideration but as scientists we need to focus on disproving our theories not proving them. We already know it is easy to publish evidence in support of Darwinism. That evidence is welcome. If I have evidence to dispute it can I get that published? Given the rancor, the ad hominem arguments against ID, and examples cited by "Expelled" I think it would be very difficult if not impossible no matter how strong the evidence or how compelling the argument.
ListenUp provides an excellent first hand interviews with Ben Stein and others from "Expelled." It is well worth hearing from them the intent of their film.
http://www.listenuptv.com/
~Peter
ID supporters - including people at the Discovery Insititue and other leading lights of ID/ Creationism might be taken more seriously if they didn't constantly make claims that are flagrantly not true.
I agree that science needs to try and disprove itself. The notion of falsifiability is a key concept of the scientific method. It means - for the benefit of those who may not know - that when you come up with an idea, you also come up with ideas that would disprove it. In this way, you can test the strength of the theory.
For example, an oft-quoted falsification of evolution would be 'rabbits in the pre-cambrian' meaning that because evolutionists believe rabbits evolved in a later time period, the discovery of a fossil of one in a pre-Cambrian stata of rock would significantly undermine evolutionary theory. And, of course, to date, no such fossil has been found. It remains something that would change our entire understanding if found. The potential for falsification doesn't go away.
To date, there has not been a single properly falsifiable theory to emerge from the proponants of ID. Michael Behe stated that the bacterial flagellum could only have arrived as a complete system. The idea being that if you removed any part of the flagellum it wouldn't work. Clearly an animal wouldn't evolve an adaptation that didn't work because evolution is quite clear that such disadvantaged individuals would be weeded out by natural selection. So, it must have been created as a single unit of inter-related parts. Falsification of this would be to discover a way in which the parts could have existed, probably by having been adapted from something else with another purpose, now since gone (and this is indeed what happened with Behe's example).
Behe has now pretty much abandonded examples of modification of biological systems because everytime he's come up with one, it's been debunked. He's now working at a biochemical level, hoping to find soemthing there.
If he does (unlikely as that may be), ID's next claim is that an intelligent designer must have created it (whatever 'it' turns out to be). Science cannot disprove a non-existant intelligent creator any more than it can disprove the existance of fairies. Therefore ID cannot be falsified. How can you test for such an intelligent designer? You cannot. This is why ID is not science.
Another point worth making is that not one evolutionary scientist has ever said you can't teach ID in a religious studies class. They've just said, 'it's not science, therefore you can't teach it in science classes'.
You are right that the holocaust doesn't mean that Darwinism is true or false, though it does point to the fact that if one does have a moral code, it doesn't come from Darwinism.
The idea that "design" is merely a belief issue is bizarre. Looking at design is a key scientific tool for Archaeologists.
Exploring the interface between faith and science may be an interesting issue, but it is not a key issue. If you took away all the scientific insights of polytheists, pantheists (like Einstein), monotheists and Christians through the ages and left only those of agnostics or atheists, how impoverished would the field of science be?
Those who seek to diminish or disallow scientific discoveries on the basis of a scientist's belief system corrupt science. Science is about a certain kind of truth—not about the belief system, race, gender, age, etc., of the person with the insight. Anyone who has scientific insight should be welcome to the table. That some are currently blackballed merely because of their belief system is anti-science.
Here's a few off the top of my head:
Kenneth R Miller is one - he's an evolutionist and a theist. Biology professor at Brown University.
Colin Humphreys is professor of materials science at Cambridge. He's a Baptist.
Tom McLeish is professor of polymer physics at Leeds.
Russell Stannard is now emeritus professor of physics at the Open University and an Anglican.
It's simply not true that theists are 'not allowed' to do science and it's certainly not true that anyone has been blackballed because of their religious beliefs either.
There's a massive - and I would have thought entirely obvious - difference between people 'not being allowed' to do science because of their beliefs (which is utter nonsense) and not being allowed to claim that untestable, unscientific claims are, in fact, science (which does).
I think people possibly misunderstand what science is. Science is a method of explaining the material universe by recourse to evidence - it can be checked by physical evidence or calculations; there has to be proof. God cannot be proved. You all know that. You all insist that God is nothing without faith. That's why God is outside of the limits of science! As soon as you say, '...and observable thing X is down to God' you've stepped outside of what science can do by the very definition of what it is.
Does anyone here think that it would be reasonable to acknowledge it as good science if a vocal minority tried to claim that gravity works because of the direct intervention of Allah (or Vishnu or Thor etc), but yet was unable to offer any proof of the existance of said deity..? Doesn't that just sound the tiniest bit ridiculous..? That's a belief, not science! And that what ID comes down to.
Plenty of world-renowned Christian scientists exist. Plenty of world-renowned scientists from other faiths exist. They're just not insisting that the definition of what science is and can do be changed to accomodate unprovable beliefs.
Paul Nelson, a young-earther, affirms nothing more than "change over time".
Jonathan Wells affirms nothing more than "minor changes within species" and explicitly belittles Darwin's efforts "to show how this same process leads to new species, in fact, to every species."
William Dembski comes closest to affirming evolution as most people use the term, except he pours on lots of qualifiers and never mentions any of the particulars of evolutionary theory except to marginalize them. After stressing the limitations of "natural selection", whatever those limitations might be, he concludes: "What we're finding with Darwin is that he had some valid insights, but it's not the whole picture."
Nowhere in these quotes do any of the IDers profiled in this film affirm, say, common descent, which is a key part of the sort of evolutionary theory that I had in mind when I wrote that "the film never acknowledges that some ID theorists actually believe in evolution, albeit perhaps only to a point."
And for what it's worth, I was thinking primarily of Michael Behe, author of Darwin's Black Box, when I wrote that bit; Behe is not profiled in Expelled, as far as I can recall, but I believe he does accept common descent etc. -- he just doesn't think that Darwinian theory can account for the microscopic cell, the basic building block of life, and so he casts his lot with the ID crowd.