Well, last December I finally forced myself to watch Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, Ben Stein's movie on Intelligent Design. For those who thought it was the greatest, I'm sorry.
Having read plenty about it beforehand, watching Expelled confirmed my suspicion: The subtitle is an appropriate Freudian slip. "No intelligence allowed" is a pretty good description of the movie, not the scientific community that it pretends to expose. My second thought was, if this is the best that the Intelligent Design community can come up with, they'd better just pack it up and go home. Its substantial collection of logical fallacies and anti-scientific rhetoric is an insult to the intelligence of its audience, not to mention mocking and accusing scientists and the scientific community in general.
The movie brings false accusation against scientists by its constant reference to Hitler, concentration camps, and other threatening and murderous images. This constant ad hominem argument is not only wearisome, it is slanderous. The truth is, Hitler used Darwinian ideas in his writings to justify killing the Jews, but he also used Christianity in the same way ("the Jews killed Christ", etc.). Does Hitler's use of Christianity prove that Christianity is dangerous and destructive? Or does it prove that Hitler was a madman who could use any rhetorical argument to his advantage, no matter how illogical?
The movie mocks the scientists by taking their arguments out of context and presenting them in a manner calculated to make them look stupid. One of the best illustrations of this is the comment that life might have begun "on the backs of crystals", then he switches to a fortune teller with a crystal ball. If someone doesn't know the difference between a crystal structure and a crystal ball, he should not pretend he's doing any favors to science or the truth. This doesn't mean that life began spontaneously on crystals or anywhere else; it does mean that Stein has used such goofy, anti-scientific rhetoric, that it defies belief.
I'm sure that among scientists there is a fair amount of bias against "Intelligent Design". Richard Dawkins and others represent a fringe movement of the scientific community that is increasingly hostile toward the Christian faith. At the same time, there are many practicing scientists who also believe in God as the Creator and designer of the universe, who are not persecuted. Some, like Francis Collins, actually came to belief in God through their scientific work. Many of these Christian scientists reject the arguments of the "Intelligent Design" movement. So what's going on? Why does science generally not accept Intelligent Design as an explanation?
There are several reasons:
a) Intelligent Design provides no positive scientific hypothesis that leads to productive research. It's main thrust is to point out problems with the current scientific paradigm, which can be valuable, but it provides no other beneficial theory that science can use in practice.
b) Many of the scientific evidences proposed for Intelligent Design are seriously in question based on the evidence (for instance, claims that the bacterial flagellum proves supernatural design).
c) Intelligent Design is a good philosophical assertion or religious belief, not a scientific theory.
d) The anti-intellectual and even deceptive practices and arguments of creationists, including those by Ben Stein in Expelled, have provoked a strong anti-religious backlash among scientists who recognize the gross errors employed. I don't want to put the blame for such bias solely on Christians, but with this kind of unintelligent tripe going around, it's difficult to blame the scientific community for wanting to exclude anything that looks like "religion".
I hadn't intended to give a full review of the movie. For some more detailed reviews, showing why it fails historically and scientifically, see links at ASA's response to Expelled and Expelled Exposed: Why Expelled Flunks.
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I wrote the earlier comments about Hitler without actually having quotes at hand. But here is one quote from http://hitlersdiaries.com/HitlersDiariesPhilosophy1.html,
"Jesus was most certainly not a Jew...it's certain that Jesus was not a Jew...Christ was an Aryan...".
And here are a couple of other quotes (from http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler):
"In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and of adders. How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison."
"We tolerate no one in our ranks who attacks the ideas of Christianity ... in fact our movement is Christian."
"For this reason alone it is vital that the Passion play be continued at Oberammergau; for never has the menace of Jewry been so convincingly portrayed as in this presentation of what happened in the times of the Romans."
But then he writes things like, "Christianity is not a natural religion for the Germans, but a religion that has been imported and which strikes no responsive chord in their hearts and is foreign to the inherent genius of the race."
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