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EXPELLED: NO INTELLIGENCE ALLOWED (2008) (*1/2)

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Host and co-writer Ben Stein and director Nathan Frankowski take a Michael Moore approach to their documentary on Intelligent Design. The tone is snarky and the slant is obvious. It's an opinion piece. Each viewer will experience the film differently depending on the ideology they bring in. But unlike Moore's films, EXPELLED lacks the same wit and too often intelligence.

Stein begins by interviewing professors who have lost their jobs over their ID beliefs. The film argues that academia has no tolerance for alternative theories to Darwinism and will eliminate all those threats. He interviews many ID scientists who claim that it is valid science and not Creationism dressed up under another name. God has nothing to do with it.

But wait… Stein then spends a good portion of the second half of the film discussing how Darwinism has killed people's belief in religion. But I thought ID had nothing to do with God, so why bring Him into it? So one starts thinking back. Stein never once asks any of the ID scientists about their beliefs in God, but dogs renowned atheist/scientist Richard Dawkins about his lack of belief in God, claiming that his atheist beliefs are guiding his belief in Darwinism and not good science. But one of his ID scientists gives up the ruse by describing ID as "the study of patterns in nature that are best described as intelligence." That still sounds like putting the cart before the horse. Another way of saying that it is looking for patterns in nature that are best described as intelligence. Isn't that what Stein is accusing Dawkins of doing?

Then the film goes into the tried and true Creationism argument that nature is too complex to not have been designed. Stein quickly poo-poos one evolutionist's theory that the first living cell formed on the back of crystals, because they have to ability to mutate. It goes into detail about how complex a cell is and how there is no way it could have evolved over time. Inconvenient to this film is work from scientists that have detailed ancient proteins and how they evolved functions. It reminds me of the infamous Kirk Cameron video where he and a jolly Creationist use the banana as proof that God created the world because it perfectly fits in a human hand. What they fail to understand is that the modern banana one finds in the supermarket is not how it originated in nature. Papua New Guinea farmers started to domesticate the banana 8,000 or so years ago and bred it into the current shape over time.

The film purports one of the biggest misconceptions of statistics as well. The likelihood that the 250 proteins needed to align for a functioning cell would need a trillion upon trillion upon trillion tries. The problem with their argument is that odds don't change once one event occurs. If you flip a coin and you get heads, the odds you will get heads again on a second toss are exactly the same. So in the game of evolution, over millions of years, on one day, some 250 proteins banded together and won the lottery of a lifetime. You only have to win once and those proteins are ahead of all the other proteins. The film includes shots of roulette wheels and slot machines and as anyone knows if you win once at the casino you are more likely to stay in the game than the guy next to you who hasn't seen a cherry all day.

Then the film proposes that unchecked Darwinism leads to Communism or Nazism. Somehow Stein links Nazism, Communism and eugenics to liberal thinking. He interviews Richard Weikart, the author of FROM DARWIN TO HITLER, who states so sternly that Darwin's theories led to Hitler's atrocities. He makes Darwinism out to be some radically dangerous idea. But he never once suggests that theology has ever been used to justify anything unseemly.

The film presents this debate as two equal sides. One side, the Darwinists, have all the power and are keeping out any opposing ideas. But it never mentions that 99.975% of scientists accept Darwinism as fact, because over repeated study after study it has held up to scientific scrutiny. That leaves the ID scientists and other(s) in the slim minority of less than 1%. It's like saying flat Earthers should have an equal say at the table. If you think that is unfair just remember the Catholic Church was still trying to ban Hellenistic astronomy centuries after its origins before Christ. Now even a hardcore IDer wouldn't argue for a flat Earth theory. So does that make ID just a slimmed down version of Creationism simply giving up the pointless argument that dinosaurs and man roamed the Earth together?

Stein casts himself in this film as a rebel, who is challenging conventional wisdom. It reminds me of my own history with Creationism. It perfectly fit my contradictory impulses to question the status quo and support my religious worldview. But then that questioning side of me continued to ask questions. I read Darwin and Sagan and Dawkins. I learned more about the scientific method and realized that I had never really challenged what Creationists were reporting. It sounded science-y enough to me. I took it on faith.

As a film, EXPELLED is like Creationism. It presents convenient answers to complex topics, which is seems to not understand. It makes giant jumps from point A to Z in leaps of faith. The absence of proof in one specific area of Darwinism doesn't disapprove it as a whole nor does it prove the opposite conclusion. It tries to present itself as scientific, but is just being dishonest about its intentions. Whether you agree with his opinion or not, at least when Michael Moore makes a film about guns, the health care system or capitalism you know he understands what they are.

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Rick DeMott
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