Marylee Shrider: Ben Stein's film on intelligent design is about freedom
| Friday, May 02 2008 06:20 PM
Last Updated Friday, Mar 27 2009 08:25 PM
If the point of a documentary film is to get people talking, then Ben Stein’s new movie, “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed,” is wildly successful.
Film critics — always among the most reliably liberal of the liberal mainstream media — find nothing to like about this movie, which takes up the debate between evolution and intelligent design by interviewing college professors and scientists who were reportedly fired or denied tenure because they had the nerve to question the Darwinian theory of evolution.
Two weeks after its release, the movie is still showing at Bakersfield theaters or was, as of Friday. Still, if the movie’s critics had their way, few would see it.
The critics don’t merely dislike “Expelled,” they hate it, calling the film “creationist crackpottery,” “stacked-deck, religious-right propaganda” and the most “shameless, stupid and loathsome piece of propaganda ever to skulk its way into the theater.”
Whoa. I haven’t heard critics so savagely and uniformly trash a movie since “Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo.” No argument there — the trailers alone were incredibly gross — but what is it about “Expelled” that has the critics so enraged, so shrill, so frightened?
It’s the message, of course. It’s the message that there’s room in the scientific community for those who can make a case for intelligent design, the theory that living things are too complex to be accounted for by Darwin’s theory of evolution and that a higher intelligence may be responsible for those complexities.
The film isn’t so much about ID, as it is about the freedom to debate ID in academic and scientific circles. It’s about the exchange of ideas and the freedom to question anything and everything, which is what science is supposed to be about.
Isn’t it?
One thing the film does NOT address is ID in public schools, a topic of considerable interest to many in Kern County. Of the ID proponents interviewed for the film, not one so much as suggested that the teaching of ID be required in public schools, which, according to the film’s production notes, might “politicize the theory and hinder its fair consideration by the scientific community.”
Room at the table. A level playing field. That’s all the scientists want.
And scientists they are, despite film critics’ claims to the contrary. Roger Moore, film critic for The Orlando Sentinel,blasted Stein for loading the film with “disgruntled, under-credentialed academics” and “anti-evolution think-tank cranks.”
Cranks? Under credentialed? Perhaps Moore failed to check his sources, or maybe his standards are simply higher than mine, but I’d hardly call men who hold doctorates or professorships from universities like Yale, Princeton, Oxford and the UCLA School of Medicine under-credentialed.
There’s no doubt the film gets heavy-handed at times. The suggestion that Darwin’s theory set the stage for the Holocaust — driven home by disturbing images of Nazi death camps and a droning, funereal soundtrack — goes on too long. But the film’s crowning moment is worth the price of admission.
That moment comes near the end of the documentary, when Stein confronts noted atheist and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins with the question “How did life begin?”
“I don’t know,” Dawkins replies.
Dawkins, who has since claimed he was duped by Stein into making the film, offered up a couple educated guesses, but admitted the anti-ID community can not yet identify the spark, the catalyst behind the creation of life.
They don’t know, yet ridicule and squash any argument to the contrary.
This is a film about freedom. This is a film worth seeing, no matter what the critics say.
Marylee Shrider’s column appears Saturdays. Reach her at mshrider@bakersfield.com or 395-7474.
