Expelled (movie)

The movie theater screening Expelled in the home town of Iowa State University (ISU) apparently couldn’t handle all the people who showed up last night, and the audience responded with a standing ovation for ISU astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez, who was denied tenure by ISU because of his pro-ID views. According to The Ames Tribune, A line for the 7:10 p.m. premiere showing of “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” at the Varsity II theater on Lincoln Way stretched back five storefronts to the Bali Satay House Friday… Those who made it into the theater before it filled up generally responded positively to the film. They greeted the ending credits with applause and, after Gonzalez wrapped up a brief discussion following the film, Read More ›

[Discovery Institute President Bruce Chapman just asked me to post this on his behalf:] Discovery Salutes Expelled by Bruce Chapman The producers of Expelled have high hopes as the film opens today. Practical questions of theater exposures and audience awareness are things that we, as a think tank, cannot assess, of course. But we are cheering the filmmakers on. First signs look positive. The over-the-top attacks of most official reviewers–offended by the film’s message, not its quality–may turn out to help in some quarters. These are the exact same reviewers who commonly tell us not to object to offensive Hollywood products, but just to judge a film for its production quality. By now a large share of the population is Read More ›

David Klinghoffer has this up at Jewcy today: Hitler understood something about Judaism that even many Jews today don’t grasp.I mention this because you’re soon going to be hearing a lot about a new movie, Expelled, which understands something about Hitler that, in turn, many Jews and non-Jews don’t or don’t want to understand.Starring comic actor Ben Stein, Expelled is a snarky theatrical documentary about the suppression of American scientists who dissent from Darwinist evolutionary orthodoxy. Controversial stuff. What’s really turning critics apoplectic, though, is the case made in the film that Darwinism inspired the Nazis. Read the rest here.[Note: For a detailed defense of Ben Stein’s documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, please see: NCSE Exposed at NCSEExposed.org]

David Berlinski has this piece in Human Events: One man — Charles Darwin — says: “In the struggle for survival, the fittest win out at the expense of their rivals. …”Another man — Adolf Hitler — says: Let us kill all the Jews of Europe.Is there a connection? Read the rest here.

In an illuminating irony, not one but two theatrical documentaries open today that trace the genealogy of the Holocaust back to earlier literary texts. One is Expelled, in which Ben Stein touches upon the use Hitler made of Darwinism. The other documentary is Constantine’s Sword, based on the bestselling book of the same name, by James Carroll.
Carroll tells the history of the Christian churches from the perspective of their countenancing of anti-Semitism. As Carroll argues, it all goes back to “the Jews hatred we so easily detect in the New Testament, and that would flower in anti-Jewish violence.”

Now which of these films do think has been savaged in the liberal press, and which has gotten raves? Clearly, to blame Christianity for Auschwitz is an industry standard in the mainstream media, while considering the role that Darwinism played is simply forbidden.

In previous posts this week, I’ve demonstrated Hitler’s debt to Darwin. The extermination of a supposedly inferior people for purposes of advancing racial hygiene is an idea with roots in Darwin’s Descent of Man. I said yesterday that the only major element in Nazism with no blatant reference point in Darwin’s literary corpus is the hatred of Jews in particular.

Today on the Jewish hipster website Jewcy, however, I uncover the deeper Darwinian logic of Hitler’s Jew-hating obsession. Not, I emphasize, that Darwin himself ever said a word against the Jews.

David Klinghoffer nails the Darwinists’ noisome effort to deny Darwinism’s influence on Nazi ideology in today’s National Review Online. He knocks down the straw man arguments they employ–the pretense that the film is mainly or even substantially about this topic, or that the film blames the bulk of the Nazi enterprise on Darwin or that the film calls today’s Darwinists Nazis. But mainly he simply marshals the historians. (The very best current history, of course, is Darwin to Hitler, by Richard Weikart of Cal State.)

[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 and Part 2 I discussed how Michael Shermer’s review of Expelled applies one-sided skepticism to anything that challenges Darwinism, withholding skepticism of claims made by pro-evolution sources. When claiming that Richard Sternberg faced no discrimination after sympathizing with Darwin-skeptics, but simply invented a “conspiracy,” Shermer failed to scrutinize the blatantly false and contradictory claims by Darwinists trying to cover up what really happened. In that case, Eugenie Scott made private concessions that Sternberg did not do anything mortally wrong in his handling of the publication of Stephen C. Meyer’s paper on intelligent design (ID), and spoke as Read More ›

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 ›