Expelled:
No Intelligence Allowed
Year: 2008
Rating: PG
Overall Evaluation: 9.5
Significance
Suppositions
Story
Style |
10.0 / 10
10.0 / 10
9.0 / 10
10.0 / 10 |
Click HERE
for evaluation criteria.
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Style
Rated PG for thematic material, some disturbing images
and brief smoking.
Story / Suppositions / Significance
Expelled is a documentary on the issue of
teaching (or even seriously considering) Intelligent
Design in academia. I don’t think it was the best
documentary ever made, but it was good. I have to agree
with some of the film’s negative critics - but
not with most of their conclusions. Basically, their
main issue is that the film is skewed in its presentation.
Well yeah, of course it is. No one makes a
documentary about something they do not think is important,
and their take on its importance will usually come through.
I would even say it should come through. While some
film makers are better at hiding their agenda, this
does not make more blatant messages false. Whether or
not Expelled is 100% objective (I’d guess it was
about 90.5% objective haha), its message is important
if for no other reason than to wake America up to the
fact that a considerable number of scientists disagree
with the Darwinian hypothesis and are simply being lambasted
into silence.
To make Expelled, Stein and company talked
with educators and scientists who say they have been
persecuted for questioning Darwin’s theory of
natural selection. This included Dr. Richard Sternberg,
who was fired from the Smithsonian Institution for publishing
a paper that mentioned I.D. as a possible way to help
explain life’s origins. Guillermo Gonzalez, an
accomplished astrobiologist who was denied tenure at
Iowa State University because of his pro-I.D. stance
(which university officials admitted, BTW).
Also interviewed extensively is the Dickety-Doc
himself, Richard Dawkins (Oxford University). Dawkins
is the current pop-prophet and media darling of Darwinism.
In a rather bizarre moment, between his typical rants
about the evil of religion and how it holds back real
science blah blah blah, Dawkins states that evidence
of I.D. points to aliens who themselves were evolved
along Darwinian paths. So, even if I.D. were to topple
Darwinian evolutionary theory on earth the evolutionists
will simply push it back to another planet??? Whoa!
Talk about dying in the ditch for an ideology! How can
that possibly be seen as authentic science? These people
are so committed to keeping the supernatural out of
the equation that they will stick to their theory even
if it means positing a Darwinian evolution on another
planet to explain its lack of presence here! I wish
I had faith like that . . . not.
As stated above, critics of the film are whining quite
a bit about the rhetorical devices employed by the film
(examples of these with useful comparisons to Fahrenheit
9/11 can be found here). Stein’s use of holocaust
imagery, communist film clips, and much anonymous footage
to alternately make fun of and accuse evolutionism-ists
is clearly designed to evoke emotional responses. My
reply - so what? First off, this is typical documentary
behavior (consider “Jesus Camp’s”
use of Bush/Iraq news footage to frame their entire
story of the so-called evangelical subculture, or, well,
anything that Michael Moore has ever produced . . .
).
Second, it shows the atheists can’t take their
own medicine. Is Expelled emotionally manipulative?
Yes. Is the rhetoric overdone? Yes (if only slightly).
Does the film use scare tactics? Yes. Is this the same
tactics that these new militant atheists use with regard
to religion? Absolutely. Blaming religion for what a
handful of people over the centuries have done “in
the name of God” . . . referring to scientists
with better credentials than themselves as stupid because
they don’t bow the knee to Darwin . . . it makes
for brilliant satire if nothing else.
Most important though - none of this whining over rhetorical
devices matters if it’s true!!! I was a member
of the women’s abuse council at DSS. At our first
meeting we listened to a 911 call from a child who was
watching his mother being brutalized by his father.
It was one of the most horrible things I have ever experienced,
and it certainly made me want to help the group in passionately
acting to stop such things. Was that propaganda? Was
it emotionally manipulative? Did it use scare tactics?
Yes. Did that matter? No.
What the critics seem to be failing to do is give me
a reason to think Stein’s thesis is false. Rather,
they have launched a series of their own emotive attacks
- some very personal ones on Stein himself.
Richard Dawkins whines about everything from the title
of the film being changed to being misrepresented when
he tries to be nice to the “IDiots” (his
phrase). He says that the interview was set up under
false pretenses and that he didn’t even know who
Stein was. OK, first, so what? He said what he said
regardless of what he thought he was doing. Second,
Dawkins is now attacking Stein (a lawyer, law professor,
economist, and speech writer for two presidents) as
“honestly stupid.” Dawkins even goes so
far as to mock Stein’s reaction to his visit to
a Nazi death camp (and if you don’t believe that
he would do such a thing then you don’t know Dick!).
Basically it boils down to him not being aware of the
film’s agenda. What seems “honestly stupid”
to me is not bothering to Google Stein’s name
to discover his background before agreeing to be filmed
for a documentary! Even if this was somehow Stein’s
fault, the point is moot - facts are facts regardless
of one’s purpose for exposing them.
Andy Klein (LA City Beat) gives this enlightened response
to the film: ” In its simplest terms, Expelled
sees Hitler’s push for racial cleansing as a natural
result of Darwin’s ideas. Whoa. Big F—ng
Whoa.” Brilliant! Insightful! Seriously Andy,
have you read Mein Kampf? Consider this quote:
At some future period, not very distant as measured
by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost
certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races
throughout the world. . . it will intervene between
man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, even
than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon,
instead of as now between the negro or Australian
and the gorilla.
Is this not textbook Nazi racism? Nope - it’s
from Darwin’s Descent of Man! Klein makes another
rhetorical-yet-factually-lacking statement with regard
to Planned Parenthood: “‘The spirit
of eugenics lives on in Planned Parenthood’ –
huh? – and then lumps together “abortion
and euthanasia” in one breath. This is yet another
tip-off as to Expelled’s true goal.”
Wow. There is NO QUESTION about the eugenic origins
of Planned Parenthood (Margaret Sanger, the founder,
once said that, “The undeniably feeble-minded
should, indeed, not only be discouraged but prevented
from propagating their kind”); and the medi-ethical
issues of abortion and euthanasia go hand in hand by
definition (whether one is for or against either).
Jeannette Catsoulis (NY Times) called Expelled “One
of the sleaziest documentaries to arrive in a very long
time . . . a conspiracy-theory rant masquerading as
investigative inquiry.” She then revealed startling
ignorance when she stated that, “Every few
minutes familiar — and ideologically unrelated
— images interrupt the talking heads: a fist-shaking
Nikita S. Khrushchev; Charlton Heston being subdued
by a water hose in ‘Planet of the Apes.’”
Excuse me? Is she seriously questioning the evolutionary
links between evolutionary theory and communism or Planet
of the Apes (a film wholly dedicated to the evolutionary
hypothesis)???
Sorry guys, but these links have been recognized by
scholars for quite some time. Discovery Institute fellow
Dr. Richard Weikart explains the Nazi connections in
his book From Darwin to Hitler (even a pro-Islam website
shows many of these Nazi/Communist connections). While
it’s true that Hitler did not mention Darwin by
name, he hardly ever named thinkers from whom he derived
ideas. Even if, like most people today, Hitler never
even read Darwin, he would have learned evolutionary
ideals in school, and popular media (again, like most
people today). As Weikart notes,
“Hitler believed that population pressure
causes a struggle for existence between organisms
that leads to evolutionary progress. He also believed
that this struggle occurred between human races. This
is completely Darwinian . . . and Hitler often described
evolution in Darwinian terms. . . . Hitler’s
anti-Semitism did not derive from Darwinism, but many
of his ideas did have Darwinian roots.”
Dawkins himself tries to make a strong distinction
between Darwinism and its social ramifications when
he says, “As I have often said before, as a scientist
I am a passionate Darwinian. But as a citizen and a
human being, I want to construct a society which is
about as un-Darwinian as we can make it” (see
“Dick” link above).
William Dembski pointed out the media ’s inconsistency
with regard to these connections:
. . . the same weekend that “Expelled”
opened in theaters saw the opening of another documentary,
“Constantine’s Sword.” Here’s
what the Village Voice has to say about that film:
“X marks the spot, literally, where Christianity
and the Catholic Church fostered the centuries of
religious hatred and anti-Semitism that culminated
in the Holocaust…” So, for our culture’s
secular elite, a film that shows how Christianity
“culminated in the Holocaust” constitutes
cutting-edge cultural commentary. But a film like
“Expelled,” which carefully documents
how the Nazis appropriated Darwin’s ideas, is
“bizarre and hysterical.”
Where are the facts??? Whether or not Expelled has
any artistic merit, what few critics seem to be unable
to do is find actual instances of outright falsehood.
Besides vague references to “other issues”
being involved with Sternberg’s firing I have
not heard anything but outraged opinions about Stein’s
outraged opinions.
But being outraged is not the same thing as being outrageous
. . . not if you’re right. |
