Re: Expelled - Ben Stein's Brilliant And Subversive Documentary


"raven1" <quoththeraven@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:7b4l04dqf4qqe41pq4sio46jfqso0bpcv8@xxxxxxxxxx
On Sat, 19 Apr 2008 20:27:10 -0400, Jason Spaceman
<notreally@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

From the article:

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April 19, 2008 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org -
Darwin...Darwin...Darwin...you can almost hear Ben Stein muttering to
himself as this subversive little documentary, "Expelled - No
Intelligence Allowed," unfolds. Having opened only yesterday it has
already left the piggies that feed at the trough of big science
foaming at the mouth and staggering about in near apoplexia.

So outraged are the fascisti intelligentsia by Stein's work that as
the film's website makes clear, "...the National Center For Science
Education has taken the extraordinary and unprecedented step of
building a website devoted solely to discrediting the...film..." an
overtly political act.

Science subordinating itself to politics?

How can this be and why was it deemed necessary?

Because Stein and Mathis are feeding an already science-ignorant
public deliberate lies.

Besides, since it has been presented as a 'political documentary'. I just
can't remember the source and provide a link. Guess I found it at p.t.


Well primarily because Ben has seen fit to present the not-so-pretty
face of what the field of evolutionary biology has become and how an
obviously left-leaning bunch of fanatical atheists are suppressing -
at all levels - inquiry into an interesting if not promising avenue of
exploration called intelligent design.

But isn't intelligent design merely a code phrase for creationism?

No, not at all.

The courts disagree, and took the ID advocates to task for their
blatant dishonesty on this point.


Intelligent design [ID] is a hypothesis, a way of attempting a better
explanation regarding the origin of the species than Charles Darwin's
now 150 year-old theory. ID rests heavily upon an idea called
irreducible complexity, a term originated by biochemist Michael Behe
and explained in his 1996 book "Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical
Challenge to Evolution," which posits that biological systems are far
too complex to have simply "evolved," from the inanimate components
percolating in some primordial pool of mud.

A/k/a the logical fallacy of "Argument from Personal Incredulity".

Behe argues

Based on nothing more than the aforementioned personal incredulity.

that the odds are impossibly high of such a thing
happening by chance, ruled out mathematically because of the sheer
number of mutations required, which would have to occur, in exactly
the right order, at exactly the right time to construct the DNA for
even such a simple organism as a bacterial flagellum.

But this is a movie review, not a scientific treatise.

The central topic of Expelled is not about the science of intelligent
design, though that is certainly laid out, but rather it is about a
more universal concerns, liberty and freedom, especially intellectual
freedom and its intentional suppression in this particular case.

To establish that fact Stein interviews on camera a half-dozen or so
highly credentialed professional scientists who have been forced out
of academia, lost their jobs and blackballed, one for the simple act
of having allowed to be published in the periodical he was responsible
for editing, a single article which mentions the verboten term,
intelligent design.

For this and similar sins against scientific orthodoxy these folks are
either fired, fail to be granted tenure, see their grants dry up or
are simply harassed out of their positions. The anxiety quotient is so
high over potential loss of employment and retribution that many
scientists who have first-hand knowledge of this phenomenon refused to
be seen on camera, for fear of reprisal, and were interviewed in the
dark.

Stein does an extraordinarily good job exploring the dark side of the
Darwinian theory of evolution, how explaining life as a mere series of
complex chemical reactions cheapens it to the point where Hitlerian
theories such as Eugenics and master race ideology become justifiable.

A/k/a the logical fallacy of "Argument from Adverse Consequences".
Whatever philosophical or political conclusions one chooses to draw
from a scientific theory are irrelevant to the truth or falsity of the
theory.

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Read it at
http://www.pipelinenews.org/index.cfm?page=expelled4.19.08.htm











J. Spaceman



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