Zeal For Truth

Last week, Premise Media Corporation released a film to over 1000 theaters in the United States. It’s called Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. The movie is hosted by comedian Ben Stein and explores the suppression of scientific research on Intelligent Design (ID) theory in American academia. Expelled exposes a pattern of censorship in the scientific establishment; Intelligent Design ideas cannot even be discussed. The merest hint of ID sympathies can damage or end a scientist’s career.

The bottom line
I’ll give you the bottom line first because most of you are lazy and won’t read the article. Should you see Expelled? That depends on you.

• If you know what ID is and you think it doesn’t qualify as science, don’t bother to watch Expelled. It won’t change your mind.
• If you know little or nothing about ID, Expelled won’t give you enough background information to understand the issue. Don’t bother.
• If you have some basic knowledge about what ID is and how it differs from Creationism and from evolution, you should watch Expelled.
• If you’ve been following the Intelligent Design vs. Evolution debate in academia and you understand the issues, then you already know everything Expelled has to say and more. Skip it.

What Expelled does well
The film does a great job of highlighting several cases where scientists and journalists have lost their jobs and suffered damage to their reputations as a result of expressing sympathy toward Intelligent Design ideas.

Expelled also hits the mark in its interviews with prominent atheists and evolutionary scientists. Stein clearly shows that their support of evolution is intimately tied to their rejection of God and religion. There’s some truth to the saying that evolution is a religion.

The highlight of Expelled is an interview with the vituperative atheist Richard Dawkins. He holds nothing back. His antipathy for Intelligent Design is second only to his hatred of all things religious.

What Expelled does not do
Although Ben Stein interviews several people whose careers have suffered as a result of their ID beliefs, Expelled fails to establish any pattern of widespread persecution of ID. Stein mentions several times that he interviewed many scientists who were unwilling to go on the record about their ID belief for fear of the consequences. That’s troubling, but we need more on-the-record stories to establish that the censorship of ideas is widespread.

Curiously, Expelled fails to offer a good definition of either evolution or Intelligent Design. One would expect a documentary to at least define its subject matter precisely. This is important for any documentary, but even more critical when the subject is Intelligent Design: the whole debate hinges on whether Intelligent Design qualifies as legitimate science. Correctly defining ID might explain why some scientists believe it is unscientific and therefore should be booted out the science lab and left to the philosophers.

Another blatant omission is any mention of Michael Behe or his work on irreducible complexity, which is a key part of Intelligent Design.

Finally, the biggest problem is that Expelled does not stay on topic. It starts as an exploration of academic freedom and the supression of Intelligent Design theory. Then halfway through the movie, it suddenly shifts. Stein travels to Dachau to explore the link between Darwin and Nazism. What that has to do with academic freedom of speech in America is anyone’s guess. The connection between Darwin and the Nazi eugenics program is something worth exploring, yes, but not when the subject is academic freedom. It gets in the way of an otherwise good movie.