Moist Your Mind... With Intelligence

I finally saw the movie "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed" today.

The vast majority of the documentary film was spent restating more or less standard creationist (i.e. non-atheistic-micro, but possibly not macro, evolutionary) concerns. And there is certainly nothing at all wrong with this as the film was aimed at a general audience, I presume, and general audiences are not necessarily familiar with such material.

There are two points, with respect to the film, that I would like to note here.

First, there have, it is claimed in the movie (and I have no reason to doubt this claim) been several persons who have lost their jobs because of their perceived affiliation with some strand or other of the creationist movement. The people in question are primarily professors but there was at least one journalist mentioned. In the course of the movie these people are named, as well as the organisations they previously worked for, and were given an oppurtunity to appear on film. The alleged offending party at their organisation-say a university campus-were also given the chance to present their side of the story.

If these allegations are true, and they almost certainly are, then I can sum up my feelings towards the situation with a single word. Appalling.

Before the host Ben Stein went straight to the horses mouth, he swung by Skeptical Inquirer Magazine. The man in charge of that publication said that there has been no such discrimination so far as he knew. Of course, his magazine and staff had nothing to do with the purported discrimination itself. And I am not sure we should expect him (his name escapes me at the moment) to know about such clandestine matters as campus faculty politics. Still, this move by Ben, or whomever, was amusing because the rest of the film was tracking down the various offended and, to a lesser sucessful extent, offending, parties. I say this is amusing because Christians are all to used to hearing skeptics make great claims that turn out to have no basis in reality.

At any rate, as the movie progressed Mr. Stein asks what he can do to help keep academic freedom alive and well at university campuses. In a special feature on the dvd, he announces that there is a petition circulating around for just this very purpose. For more information about the petition go to expelledthemovie.com

The main focus of the documentary, besides exposing a kind of religious persecution, was the intelligent design movement (or ID). It has been interesting for me to watch the reaction of mainstream evolutionists to the ID. And this brings up the second point I wished to make with respect to "Expelled". It is now my thesis that the hard-core young Earth creationists really did have a point all along.

But let me back up a bit. As I explained in a previous post, I have come to believe in an old Earth. With smart people like Alister McGrath and John Polkinghorne being full-blown theistic evolutionists, why, I was on the verge of becoming one myself. After all, the Bible explicitly says animals were made from the dust of the earth which is essentially the same idea that as that of chemical evolution out of "a warm little pool," it seems to me. I even went on wikipedia and saw that the general descent of life matches more or less the Genesis account (i.e. the order of the animals is the same in both "accounts" it would seem). And since all truth is God's truth, nature cannot contradict Scripture. As a Christian I care a great deal about truth so I want to take scientific truth very seriously.

But, there is a catch. Sometime ago I was watching a clip of Dr. Francis Collins. He is either a theistic evolutionist, or, at the very least, an advocate for the compatibility of Christianity and neo-darwinism. He is a biologist and wrote "Searching for Darwin's God". In this clip he was addressing a room of his colleagues about a recent high profil ID trial which he had apparently just testified at. The whole room was laughing (at his instigation?) about how silly the ID movement is. But what he said about the ID movement was-more precisely, his description of irreducible complexity-was nothing like I remembered it. I checked it out and found that he had grossly misrepresented it.

But badly misrepresenting a scientific view, especially when its proponents have been careful, and infinitely patient, to clarify the misunderstanding, and laughing at it is precisely what evolutionists have always accused the hard-core creationists of doing. Similar argumentum ad pot-calling-kettle-black was no doubt also found in the movie "Expelled" by biologists speaking out against ID.

It is very difficult to avoid the conclusion that mainstream biology is willfully ignorant not only of the hard-core creationism in vogue in the past, but also of the currently more respectable ID points of view. In other words, it appears that non-religious scientists are really not the rational, reasonable, unbiased people they want us religious people to believe.

So it appears that macro-evolution with atheistic connotations is the only game in town for biologists that are not religious as Bill Craig would say. And furthermore that they will not even consider an alternative viewpoint. I want to be crystal clear on this point. I am not claiming that macro-evolution from a single common ancester never occured or that there is no scientific data pointing in that direction. That may (or may not) be the case. All I am saying here is that creationists of all stripes (including theistic evolutionists) are not getting a fare shake and that we do have a legitimate point to make. I would think, what is good for the creationist goose, is good for the non-religious evolutionary gander.