Scientific American is piling on the latest propaganda film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed staring Clear Eyes spokesman, game show host, has-been actor, and former Nixon speech writer Ben Stein.

Links here. Excerpts below the fold:

Ben Stein’s Expelled: No Integrity Displayed

Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed–Ben Stein Launches a Science-free Attack on Darwin

See also: Expelled Exposed

More below the fold:

Ben Stein’s Expelled: No Integrity Displayed

(The newsreel footage from the old Soviet days kept confusing me. Stein does know that the Stalinists rejected the theory of evolution as a biological rendition of capitalism, doesn’t he? And that they replaced it with their own ideologically driven, disastrous theory of Lysenkoism? Does Stein think that moviegoers won’t know this?)

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Ben Stein wants you to stop thinking of evolution as an actual science supported by verifiable facts and logical arguments and to start thinking of it as a dogmatic, atheistic ideology akin to Marxism.

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The movie’s unreliable reporting is even more obvious during the scene in which Stein interviews Bruce Chapman, the president of the Discovery Institute, the institutional heart of ID advocacy. Stein asks whether the Discovery Institute has supported the teaching of ID in science classes so avidly because it is trying to sneak religion back into public schools. Chapman says no and the film blithely takes him at his word. No mention is made of the notorious “Wedge” document, a leaked Discovery Institute manifesto that outlined a strategy of opposing evolution and turning the public against scientific materialism as the first step toward making society more politically conservative and theistic. Maybe Ben Stein didn’t think it was relevant, but wouldn’t an honest film have trusted its audience to judge for itself?

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The most conspicuous absence from the movie, however—and you would think it was impossible in a movie about evolution and ID—is any real science.

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Instead, various Discovery Institute fellows intone that evolution is a “slippery,” hard-to-pin-down theory. No such criticism is made of ID, a notion which firmly states that at one or more unspecified times in the past, an unidentified designer who might or might not be God somehow created whole organisms, or maybe just cells, or maybe just certain parts of cells—they’re still deciding and will get back to you on that.

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… even children understand that in science, two ideas are not equally good if one of them is wrong. Some of the ideas fluffing up ID are demonstrably wrong; the rest are often described as “not even wrong” because they are so untestable or irreconcilable with the rest of science.

Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed–Ben Stein Launches a Science-free Attack on Darwin

… when I finally took a course in evolutionary theory in graduate school I realized that I had been hoodwinked. What I discovered is a massive amount of evidence from multiple sciences—geology, paleontology, biogeography, zoology, botany, comparative anatomy, molecular biology, genetics and embryology—demonstrating that evolution happened.

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This propaganda production would make Joseph Goebbels proud.

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