The most bizarre thing about the new intelligent design
propaganda film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed isn’t that
former Nixon speechwriter Ben Stein is being paid to extol a
pseudoscience whose hypotheses can’t be tested (everyone has a price),
nor is it that the film compares science with Nazism and Stalinism
(though it does, repeatedly and remorselessly). What’s truly weird is
that the filmmakers don’t seem to understand the tenets of intelligent
design.
Proponents of intelligent design—which is essentially a legal
strategy, developed in the wake of a Supreme Court decision rejecting
the teaching of creationism in public schools—try to discern
traces of an intelligent designer in the universe and in living things.
Crucially, however, the “theory” remains agnostic as to the identity of
that designer. This was an important component of the legal
underpinning for the movement: If intelligent design proponents ever
hinted that the designer was God, the teaching of intelligent design in
schools would, like the teaching of creationism, constitute an
infringement on the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause. At the same
time, though, not naming the designer meant that intelligent
design proponents like Michael Behe had to allow the possibility that
their designer is one of many gods, or even an intellectually superior
alien. (Followers of the almighty Flying Spaghetti Monster memorably
satirized this problem.)
So when Richard Dawkins—an evolutionary biologist, atheist,
and prominent critic of intelligent design—concedes to Ben Stein
in Expelled that he is open to the idea that aliens may have
seeded our planet with life, intelligent design has actually scored a
point (even if Dawkins never argues that an alien visitation could be
somehow inferred from the evidence, and even though the theory of
natural selection isn’t particularly preoccupied with how life first
began). But this modest victory means nothing to the movie’s target
audience of evangelical Christians, so Stein takes the intellectually
bankrupt way out and makes vicious fun of Dawkins for believing in
aliens.
Intellectual bankruptcy is, in fact, the defining characteristic of
Expelled. Stein flits around the country collecting risibly
anecdotal evidence of a conspiracy to choke academic freedom
(apparently, tenure-track professors have an inalienable right to spend
their time writing intelligent design textbooks instead of
peer-reviewed journal articles), but he never bothers to define his
terms. You won’t learn the definition of intelligent design from this
movie, much less anything about the theory of evolution by means of
natural selection.
Instead, you’ll be told that scientists are all vehement
atheists—not a single agnostic or religious person who accepts
the theory of natural selection appears in the film. Meanwhile, clumsy
montages of archival film clips will try to convince you that the
science departments of research universities are like the Soviet Union,
East Germany, and Communist China all rolled up in one ivory tower.
And, most memorably, you’ll be warned that accepting Darwin’s theory of
natural selection is a slippery slope that will soon have you espousing
eugenics, embracing racial purity and genocide, and sieg-heiling Hitler
himself.
And Expelled doesn’t resort to this
evolution-leads-to-Hitlerism hysteria in passing: It devotes a solid 20
minutes of its running time to a sequence in which Stein, who is
Jewish, visits a German hospital where Nazis starved, murdered, and
cremated the physically and mentally disabled. Asked what inspired this
cruelty, a random museum docent (who doesn’t speak English very well)
softly replies, “Darwinism.” Never mind that scientific theories do not
stand or fall depending on whether homicidal dictators wantonly
misinterpret them, or that Charles Darwin was never a proponent of
social Darwinism, or that he contributed only a modest portion of
modern evolutionary theory. Just compare scientists to
Nazis—that’ll, uh, really convince everyone that intelligent
design should be welcomed as a legitimate scientific pursuit.
If Expelled is the best argument the intelligent design crowd
can muster, thinking people who hope that the next generation will be
taught the scientific method—not lazy, religiously motivated
shortcuts like intelligent design—can breathe a sigh
of
relief.