Conservative Donnybrook

This afternoon my wife and I went to see Ben Stein’s documentary, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. As one reviewer pointed out, one’s opinion of the film is almost guaranteed to be determined by one’s stance on the Evolutionism v. Intelligent Design “debate.”

The point of the film is not whether ID is superior to Evolutionism, but rather that the mere suggestion that ID might provide some explanation as to the origins of life is strictly verboten in academic and scientific circles. Stein introduces his viewers to several scientists who have been drummed out of their positions because they had the audacity to mention Intelligent Design in their research.

One proponent of evolutionism, William Provine, an avowed atheist science historian at Cornell University, objected to the teaching of intelligent design in part on the basis that it’s “BOOOORING. I can’t think of any topic that is more BOOOORING!” Of course, when asked about the origins of life, Provine posited that aliens might have seeded life on this planet, deftly pushing back the question one generation (How did the seed scattering aliens come to exist, Professor Provine?).

Perhaps no single point shows that Stein was not attempting to advocate for the Intelligent Design position than the fact that Stein did not interview Michael Behe, a microbiologist whose book Darwin’s Black Box I found to provide much evidentiary support for intelligent design. Behe’s argument proceeded by examining the simplest of life forms, a single celled creature, and examined it at the microbiological level. At that level there are mechanisms (Behe uses a flagella as one example) that are incredibly complex structurally and functionally such that they could not have evolved happenstance. He coined the term “irreducible complexity”: Take away any of the structure’s complexity and it would cease to function and therefore would not confer an advantage which would be selected for. Indeed, extra baggage which provided no function would put the organism at a disadvantage, which Darwin predicted would ultimately cause its extinction. Critics of Behe have noted that some of the proteins that make up some of these structures that Behe used as examples occur in other contexts within the cell, however, that still fails to account for their combination into a specific structure which is much more complex than the joining of a few proteins randomly.

Instead, Stein focuses on the critics of intelligent design and their claims that ID is pseudoscience and thinly veiled Creationism. To that end, Richard Dawkins is prominently featured by Stein and given ample opportunity to advance his radical programme of atheism as the only rational position. At one point, he asks Dawkins if there were no circumstance under which Dawkins could concede intelligent design. Dawkins responded, like Provine, that he could imagine alien seeding as a possibility under which ID would not be completely ludicrous. Another opponent of ID suggested that life might have evolved from non-life “on the backs of crystals.” Somehow, Stein was able to quash the smirk which must have been fighting to spring into his features. Some people are born to be straight men.

Provine appeared later in the film to advance his (presumably non-boring) view of the world. To Provine the most liberating view is that human beings are nothing but random proteins clinging together for whatever brief moment of time they manage to cohere. That men are completely without any hope of any sort of afterlife, or indeed free will, but will simply blink out of consciousness and slowly decompose is for Provine ultimately comforting. Science is god enough, I suppose.

Unfortunately, Stein’s documentary lost its focus a bit toward the middle when he linked Evolutionism with Nazism, claiming not that evolutionists are Nazis, but that Nazis were Evolutionists and showing the linkage between Evolutionism and the Eugenics Movement of the early 20th century. I have heard it said that when one party in a debate injects the argument with Nazism, he has lost the argument. And, Stein’s critics have been quick to seize upon this digression in the film. Unfortunately, the discussion on Nazism was entirely unneeded and only worked to unfocus the issue that scientists are being silenced and blackballed when they consider the possibility that the universe may have intelligent direction.

The final scene interspersed Stein addressing a packed auditorium, extolling the virtue of freedom upon which this country is founded – including academic freedom – with Ronald Reagan’s Brandenburg Gate address and scenes of people chipping away at the Berlin Wall. I thought he would demand of the establishment, as Reagan did, that they tear down the wall they’ve erected to keep Evolutionism free from competition in the scientific community, but instead he called on those scientists who remain in the shadows, afraid of the censure which would follow were they to consider the ID position, to come out and to storm the wall. In the end, Stein’s way is almost certain to be more effective than my way would been. Those who guard the wall have to see the masses gathering, pickaxes in hand, before they will allow the wall to come down.