Bruce Chapman

The blog site Little Green Footballs has slandered Discovery Institute, whether intentionally or not, by implying that we are in league with Islamic radicals in Turkey. They base this fantasy, apparently, on a CBC radio report of a year ago that was so poorly researched that it called Discovery Senior Fellow David Berlinski “Paul Berlinski” and referred to us as the “Christian Discovery organization.” Then they interview a host of people of varying views in Turkey who are critical of Darwinism and imply that they are all connected. They seemingly imply Discovery’s involvement in this situation based on the fact that Berlinski was invited to speak at a conference held by the municipal government of Istanbul last year. Big deal. (Berlinski, by the way, is a secular Jew, so work with that fact for a while, boys.)

If people at LGF think they can make the case that Discovery Institute is somehow soft on Islamic radicalism and terrorists, perhaps they should pick up a copy of our Senior Fellow John Wohlstetter’s new book, The Long War Ahead: And the Short War Upon Us. It is published by Discovery Institute Press and I challenge the LGF folks to read it–or any of my own writings on the Iraq War and the war on terrorism generally–and continue contending that this institute would ever have any truck with people–Muslim or otherwise–who doubt the danger of Islamic fascism.

There are several good news stories on the recent development in the federal court case in which Yoko Ono seeks to prevent further distribution of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, the Ben Stein film. And then there is this one from ars technica: Notice the way the writer feels obliged to abuse free speech–by misrepresenting intelligent design–even as he defends it.Read more here at Discovery Blog.

Much the way Marxist determinism was marshaled in the past to explain practically everything, an “evolutionary advantage” is now sought. Endless grant money seems to be available and journalists are eager to report the research speculations as “science.” I am collecting a file of such stories. So here I am trying to figure out how a study might be concocted to explain this moving account of a sports team that showed great conscience and panache. Surely someone can get a government grant to find a Darwinian answer to replace the common sense one.

David Berlinski’s The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions (reviewed brilliantly by George Gilder in the new National Review) is just arriving in book stores, while in Paris an entirely different, and also invaluable, book, Origines (Origins), has been published this week in French by Saint-Simon. Read the rest here.

The quadrennial international convention of the Methodist Church, meeting in Fort Worth, today adopted an historic and detailed resolution deploring the legacy of Darwinian eugenics that saw its 20th century extreme expression in the theories of Adolf Hitler.

Yes, that would be the Nazi ideology that the Darwinists of today–and major media–pretend sprang on the world fresh from the head of Hitler, wholly unconnected to the history of Darwin’s theory, Francis Galton and Ernst Haeckel. For the ten minutes it spent on this topic, the current film Expelled, starring Ben Stein, has been the target of unstinting left wing media attack and revisionist history.

The Methodists’ resolution–adopted by a vote of 836 to 28–apologizes for the denomination’s own failure to resist the eugenics movement in this country in the 20th century. They were not alone, as John West explains in Darwin Day in America. But no other mainline Protestant denomination has yet had the courage to admit to the racism of Darwinist eugenics and the supine attitude that leading American religious leaders, as well as the scientific establishment, adopted towards it.

[Note: For a comprehensive rebuttal to critics of Ben Stein’s documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, please see: NCSE Exposed at NCSEExposed.org]

It does not seem that Arthur Caplan, the toast of MSNBC, has even seen the film Expelled, his representations of it are so uninformed. Yet he is prepared to charge in public that Ben Stein is a “Holocaust denier,” someone whose name should be forever “a source of scorn.”

Would this be same Ben Stein who takes his Expelled audience through Dachau to show them where the Holocaust took place? Some denier!

Brent Bozell III’s column at Townhall says he was invited to preview Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, the Ben Stein film that screens for the public at a reported 1000 theaters this weekend. “I went into the screening bored,” he writes. “I came out of it stunned.” This makes a point that needs underscoring. Anybody who is bothered by the malign conformity of contemporary politics and culture in academia and the media should be paying attention to the evolution debate. It isn’t marginal. It’s central. The refusal to allow debate and the reckless determination to punish dissent aren’t limited to the sciences, but they are crucially present there. Materialist science is being allowed to define all reality far too often and, Read More ›

From Edward Douglas at Comingsoon.net: Summary:The filmmakers’ intentions are kept deliberately vague–is this about free speech or about teaching religion in the classroom?–but it’s a surprisingly entertaining and informative doc that at least tries to address the debate over intelligent design from another angle.Story:Ben Stein takes a look at intelligent design and how scientists and teachers who’ve dared to address it have come under attack from the scientific community using Darwin’s theories of evolution. To read more, click here:

From Dave Berg at National Review: I like rebels, especially ones who go against type. Take Ben Stein in his latest film, Expelled, which comes out this Friday. Dressed in a sport coat, tie, and tennis shoes, he’s not who you expect — the deadpan, monotone-voiced but ever-likable teacher he portrays in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and The Wonder Years.Stein retains his characteristic deadpan affect, but this time he’s playing himself — a deceptively erudite and well-educated interviewer, who is passionately skeptical of evolutionary biology and its leading proponents. To read more, click here.

From Dinesh D’Souza on AOLNews.com: In Ben Stein’s new film “Expelled,” there is a great scene where Richard Dawkins is going on about how evolution explains everything. This is part of Dawkins’ grand claim, which echoes through several of his books, that evolution by itself has refuted the argument from design. The argument from design hold that the design of the universe and of life are most likely the product of an intelligent designer. Dawkins thinks that Darwin has disproven this argument… To read more, click here.