Science and Culture Today | Page 1321 | Discovering Design in Nature

Last night in Dallas the official theater run of Expelled was kicked off with a gala premiere complete with red carpet, film narrator Ben Stein, and the film’s main stars, the Expelled scientists. Here’s a few pictures. (For full disclosure, I took the crummy one, the others were supplied by an attendee with a camera that far outclassed my phone.)Click for full size images. Expelled scientists, Drs. Richard Sternberg, Guillermo Gonzalez, Robert Marks and Discovery’s Dr. John West at the world premiere of Expelled. Drs. Gonzalez, West, and Marks on the red carpet. Attendees partied before the actual screening of the film. Some of the attending Expelled scientists being introduced to attendees by the executive producers. (Left to right: Robert Read More ›

Finally, a writer known to me personally to be a smart and honest guy, no ignoramus nor a propagandist, attacks the Hitler-Darwin thesis in Expelled.

Ronald Bailey, who used to write book reviews for me at National Review, comments on the movie in the libertarian magazine Reason. He complains that linking Darwinism with Nazism is the “most egregious part of the film.” He harrumphs that the Expelled filmmakers “overlook the fact that people down through the millennia have found all sorts of justifications for why they are permitted to murder each other, including plunder, tribal competition, and, yes, religion.”

OK, but when Muslims today commit mass slaughter in the name of their religion, or when Christians once did so, it becomes reasonable on that basis to ask probing questions about the truth of Islam or Christianity. For that matter, it’s fair to question my own faith, Judaism, for the Hebrew Bible’s countenancing of Joshua’s bloody war against the natives of Canaan.

It would be ridiculous to say that any of this adds up to a slam-dunk argument for rejecting Islam, Christianity, or Judaism. Similarly, Hitler’s appropriation of Darwinian language in Mein Kampf is by itself no case for rejecting Darwinism.

Today The Seattle Times is sure to provoke a reaction from Darwinists with an article by Discovery Institute president Bruce Chapman, “An Intelligent Discussion about Life.” “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” is a trenchant new film by actor/economist Ben Stein, the man first made famous in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” He’s now tackling with humorous dudgeon the classic example of ideological science, Darwinian evolution. Stein shows Darwinists insistently misrepresenting the scientific case against their theory. Where facts and reason might fail to persuade, personal attacks are employed, sometimes even by organizations supposedly committed to civil discourse. When I was taught Darwin’s theory in college more than four decades ago, it was represented as unassailable. But I also was taught in those Read More ›

[Note: For a detailed response to critics of Ben Stein’s documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, please see: NCSE Exposed at NCSEExposed.org] The Darwinists claim that anyone who cites historical works in defense of the proposition that Darwin’s theory influenced Nazi ideology is “quote mining.” As usual, that is a cover-up. So is the straw man argument that the film Expelled is trying to blame poor old Darwin for the Holocaust or to claim that Darwinism originated anti-Semitism or that Darwinism was the sole source of Nazi ideology. Any such straw man intentionally exaggerates the message of the one segment of Expelled where the Nazi ideology of eugenics and race is explored. Another straw man is the pretense that the film Read More ›

[Note: For a more comprehensive defense of Ben Stein’s documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, please see: NCSE Exposed at NCSEExposed.org] In part 1 I observed that the famous skeptic Michael Shermer’s attack upon the movie Expelled over at Scientific American adopts the following approach when denying the persecution experienced by intelligent design (ID) proponents: Shermer Blames-the-Victim Case #1: Richard SternbergThe conversation with Michael Shermer in the Expelled film revolves around the publication of Stephen C. Meyer’s pro-ID peer-reviewed scientific paper in the journal Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. The editor who oversaw the publication of that article was Dr. Richard Sternberg, who, according to investigations by both the U.S. Office of Special Counsel and also by subcommittee staff Read More ›

President Bush’s welcome of Pope Benedict XVI today was noted for its evocation of the pontiff’s words that “all human life is sacred, ‘each of us is loved and each us is necessary.” It is a pro-life message, after all. The lead in to the quoted words is found on little prayer cards available at Vatican City gift shops and is also worth noting: “We are not some meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary.”Enriches the significance, doesn’t it?

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

It has become the main angle of attack against Expelled to express outrage at the film’s linking of Darwinism with Hitlerism. We need to look today at what Hitler himself wrote in Mein Kampf.

Thus, London’s Guardian newspaper publishes a hit piece on Expelled by Adam Rutherford of Nature magazine. He hasn’t seen the movie but believes gentlemen like P.Z. Myers who “indicate that Expelled suggests the Holocaust was a direct result of Darwinian thought.” That’s not what the film suggests, but never mind. Rutherford dismisses the “absurdity” of the “reductio ad Hitlerum” as “specious and simplistic.”

What Expelled has to say about the Darwin-Hitler connection is more along the lines of something a far more distinguished writer had to say in the very same newspaper just a month ago.

John Gray, political philosopher at the London School of Economics, wrote an essay in the Guardian. In passing, he noted how,

Always a tremendous booster of science, Hitler was much impressed by vulgarized Darwinism and by theories of eugenics that had developed from Enlightenment philosophies of materialism.

Which is entirely correct.

The key chapter in Mein Kampf is Chapter XI, “Nation and Race,” where Hitler discusses the imperative to defend the Aryan race from the Jewish menace.

[Note: For a more comprehensive defense of Ben Stein’s documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, please see: NCSE Exposed at NCSEExposed.org] Scientific American has a long history of opposing intelligent design (ID), so it comes as no surprise that they have tasked their columnist Michael Shermer with the job of attacking Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. Michael Shermer is the founder of Skeptic Magazine, who loves to boast about how evolution liberated him from belief in God. In fact, he does just that in his article attacking Expelled, opening it by saying: “In 1974 I matriculated at Pepperdine University as a born-again Christian who rejected Darwinism and evolutionary theory,” but when he “finally took a course in evolutionary theory in graduate school Read More ›

As he is wont to do, Discovery senior fellow and Secondhand Smoker Wesley J. Smith, always asks the tough questions, like “Is Richard Dawkins a Raelian?”

Tonight the ever entertaining David Berlinski will continue his cross-country trek presenting his new book The Devil’s Delusion with a stop in Seattle. Even though he seems somewhat charmed with Berlinski, Daniel Engber, writing for Slate, is doing his part in warning America not to be taken in by the professional skeptic. According to Daniel Dennett, Berlinski exudes a “rich comic patina of smug miseducation”; Richard Dawkins implies that he may be wicked to the core; and blogger-ringleader P.Z. Myers has called him a “pompous pimple” and a “supercilious snot.” (Berlinski, for his part, makes no effort whatsoever to remain above the fray; he delivers some colorful rejoinders in the course of this interview he conducted with himself for an Read More ›