No intelligence, indeed

During the opening act of the propaganda film Expelled, Cornell historian of science Will Provine summed up intelligent design as "utterly boring." The same could be said of Expelled, a film steeped in the controversy over the brand of creationism known as intelligent design. An hour and a half long experiment in "Gish Gallop," Expelled is a film that ultimately gets so frustrated by the incoherence of leading ID advocates that it ultimately collapses in upon itself and admits that, yes, this really is all about finding the Judeo-Christian god in nature.

The film seems to have been slapped-together. Some people, like Christopher Hitchens, briefly appear but are never to be seen again. Others are briefly introduced but only pop up when a particular quote is needed, and are entirely ancillary to the "main" storyline, which doesn't actually exist. Some talking heads that you might expect, like Michael Behe (who appeared in the trailer for the film), are nowhere to be seen at all. While it kicks off with a kind of "road-trip" vibe common to documentaries, the approach is eventually abandoned and new authorities pop up seemingly at random.

The trajectory of the film is difficult to chart. Perhaps taking a cue from the famous "Who, What, When, Where, Why, How" model of storytelling, the film starts with a list of "the expelled." Richard Sternberg, Caroline Crocker, and Guillermo Gonzalez are among the familiar faces that appear in this segment. The film is short on facts, but the implication is that these people were "expelled" because other academics conspired to keep anyone who even thinks about intelligent design out of science.

At this point Ben Stein ponders whether ID qualifies as science, and the film switches gears. It quickly stalls out. The concepts of evolution, natural selection, creationism, and intelligent design are not defined, but we are assured the ID really, really is science. Promise. *wink* There is a lot of complaint about "Darwinism," but, as we have known for so long, this is about all the ID advocates manage to do.

David Berlinksi, in particular, is in rare form. He essentially calls biology junk science because he claims it doesn't have the same rigor as mathematics. In particular, he avers that evolution is a "room full of smoke" because we can't even come up with a proper definition for a species. I guess it didn't occur to him that a rigid, universal species definition is so difficult to come up with (at least in part) because species continue to evolve! Indeed, he is the literal armchair philosopher of the movie, and he once again amply illustrates just how much he knows about evolution and science in general.

More generally, though, the ID folks tell us that ID is science because evolution by natural selection can not explain certain things about life. (Insert standard arguments about genetic information and where it might have come from here.) This must have chafed Bruce Chapman, as later in the film he complains that too many journalists unfairly sum up ID in just this fashion.

The portion of the film about the origin of life is a farce. Fleeting references are made to a smattering of ideas (i.e. Ben goes to a documentary film recommended to him by Jonathan Wells to find out what the latest scientific hypothesis on the origin of life is *headdesk*), a lot of people say "We don't really know, it's just a hypothesis," and the upshot is that it is impossible to create a "simple cell" without divine intervention. What is meant by a simple cell, among other things, is never made clear, which fits nicely into the "If I can't understand it, God must have done it" argument.

At about the halfway point, the film again changes focus. Just how deep does the control of the Darwinians go? The entire film is marked by specially-selected and doctored bits of old educational and propaganda films, but they use it so much that it becomes unintentionally funny. The film asserts that "Darwinism" has a massive support structure, stretching out from academia into the mass media and even the courts. The way in which the influence of the "Darwin menace" is presented is reminiscent of old anti-communist propaganda films like "What is Communism?" where communism is repeatedly referred to as a "lying, dirty, shrewd, godless, murderous, determined, and ... criminal conspiracy." The makers of Expelled have borrowed so heavily from such propaganda that it ends up coming off almost as self-parody.

A particularly aggravating part of the documentary involves the discussion of the NCSE and the existence of people who are religious and have no problem with evolution. No theistic evolutionists appear or voice their views, and the film (using snippets of interviews with journalist Larry Whitham and Richard Dawkins) acts as if such people are sparingly rare if they exist at all. The concept that acceptance of science not only erodes belief, but must crush it (the "warfare of science and theology" model), plays right into the hands of the filmmakers.

The next section of the film is devoted to just this point; if you are a scientist you must be an atheist, and if you believe in God then those scientists are out to destroy your religion. In this model, science ends up replacing religion as it erodes it, which is an extremely vague argument and does more to inflame than illuminate. Indeed, science and religion are not mutually exclusive things. What we learn about the natural world may, and often does, conflict with certain religious beliefs, but I tire of the "moderates" being marginalized by whoever can shout the loudest on either side of the issue. To other members of their religions these people are not true-believers, and to some scientists their credibility is undermined by their attachment to potentially harmful fairy tales.

If I am discussing evolution with someone, and we both agree that unverifiable supernatural mechanisms should not be part of the discussion, great. I may agree or disagree with them on matters of religion, but that is something else entirely. Can religious belief, or lack of religious belief, influence the way we talk about evolution? Of course, it would be foolish to say otherwise, but it is frustrating to see the idea that agreement with evolution must lead to atheism so prevalently espoused. We marginalize people willing to try to reconcile their religious beliefs with science at our own peril.

According to the film, evolutionary science not only constricts academic freedom, but its champions are bent on destroying religion. To paraphrase the argument, "If agreement with evolution eradicates religion, leaving us with no moral compass, then what will happen?" The inference is that evolution will rise to the level of a moral doctrine to take religion's place (didn't all those scientists just say they wanted to see science replace religion?), and this "experiment" has been played out before.

This introduces the most gratuitous part of the film where Ben Stein visits Nazi concentration camps and tries to make "Darwinism" directly responsible for genocide. This worry has been around since natural selection was posited as a mechanism for evolution, and it became a popular rhetorical tactic of creationists around the time of WWI. From homosexuality to communism to global war, acceptance of evolution by natural selection has been blamed for just about any social ill (real or imagined) and atrocity you can probably think of. If we think we evolved from "lower" animals, and do not keep God at the front of our minds, what is to stop us from acting like them?

The film doesn't try hard to connect Darwin to the Holocaust. If evolution was meant to destroy God, and without God there can be no morality, horrible things can result. This argument is easily torn apart, but it is not meant to necessarily convert anyone. This segment, and the film in general, is meant to anger and energize those already inclined to agree. Christians, members of a majority religion, are never so energized as when they believe they are an oppressed minority (as scripture says to expect).

[What is interesting is that, in this film as in previous anti-evolution diatribes, "evolution" = "Darwinism." The fact that other evolutionary mechanisms have come and gone is not mentioned at all. This has some important implications for the charges the movie makes about eugenics. As Peter Bowler suggested in The Eclipse of Darwinism, some of the prominent scientists behind eugenics thought of evolution as being non-Darwinian, or that natural selection was relatively insignificant to evolution. H.F. Osborn was one, and I think the support of eugenics by non-Darwinian evolutionists merits further investigation. This should not be an attempt to pin the blame or clear Darwin's name, but to see if the social views of non-Darwinian evolutionists were influenced by the way they conceived of evolution, and the evolution of humans in particular.]

The most ominous music is saved for a visit to Down House and the Natural History Museum in London. There is almost no narration, other than a quote mine from Darwin's The Descent of Man, and I guess the viewer is supposed to feel creeped out by the images of old books, glass vials, and skeletons. What I found especially interesting, though, was the selection of old books featured in this sequence. First was Evolution of the Human Race From Apes by T.W. Jones (1876). I'm sure that the director thought that this was a book supporting Darwin, but it is, in fact, a critique originally presented as a lecture series. The book starts off with this quote from the end of the second lecture;

Our present advanced knowledge in Natural Science has not rendered the idea of Evolution a bit more probable than it was in former times. And it must be firmly denied that the conceit of " Natural Selection by Survival of the Fittest " has, in any degree, imparted to the theory more substantial body than it had before, or raised it to the Scientific position which Darwin and his followers claim for it.

Next to appear is Lyell's Antiquity of Man, followed by The Supernatural in Nature by J.W. Reynolds, The New Truth and the Old Faith by "A Scientific Layman," and Haeckel's Evolution of Man. The images of the NHM also focus on human evolution. We might argue with creationists about flagella and dinosaurs, but what it really all comes down to is what Darwin carefully tip-toed around in On the Origin of Species. Have we evolved, and what does that mean about our identity?

The film offers no direct answer, but the last few minutes serve to undermine what the ID crowd has tried to tell us for so long. This isn't just about a nebulous "intelligent designer," but a Creator, namely God. If we believe that we are all the "fearfully and wonderfully made" children of a sovereign deity, then we can prevent future atrocities because we will be free to do what's right. Evolution, on the other hand, will not only subjugate us, but turn us against each other and lead to our destruction.

This is patently absurd, but it is a deeply held fear by many. We could talk about transitional fossils and genome comparisons until there was nothing else to say, but many people have an ideological commitment that simply will not allow them to accept evolution. By "an ideological commitment" I do not mean a belief in a god who punishes and rewards. Many people believe in a deity and accept evolution, and even if we disagree with them on theological or philosophical grounds, they should not be ignored.

What I mean are people who cling so tightly to a narrow interpretation of religious doctrine that they cannot accept that we can act ethically and help each other without a fear of hell in our hearts. Despite all evidence to the contrary, they do not accept morality apart from God, and they fear evolution because to them it not only erodes faith, but brings out the murderous ape-man within, something akin to the nightmare visions of Raymond Dart and Robert Ardrey.

Expelled is nothing more than a rehash of standard creationist arguments in a shiny new box. It is not meant to convince so much as to rile those who already agree with it into action; to make the debate over the cherished concept of freedom while appealing to religious sentiments. It is not funny, nor particularly interesting, but it spews out enough half-truths fast enough that some people will be dazzled by all the flying bullshit.