EXPELLED: Evolutionary Ignorance
The other night I saw “EXPELLED,” a documentary by Ben Stein that exposes a serious crisis in American society: The denial of freedom of speech to those who question evolutionism.
“EXPELLED” features interviews with university professors and others who have lost their jobs because they dared to suggest that perhaps Darwinian evolutionary theory does not adequately explain the origin and complexities of life on this planet. Even worse, some of them mentioned the forbidden term “intelligent design” in articles or lectures, thus signing their own career death warrant.
Not one of these people espoused creationism; none of them even suggested that evolutionary theory not be taught in public schools. They only wanted freedom to discuss different points of view.
That, they discovered, will not be allowed by Big Science.
Himself a Jew, Stein was led to consider some curious and rather scary links between belief in Darwinism and the eugenics movement, which led directly to the Holocaust. Though he makes it very clear that holding to Darwinian evolutionism does not automatically lead to killing off undesirables, Stein’s interviews demonstrated the well-known fact that Hitler was a fanatical follower of Darwin, and used Darwinian theory to justify eliminating the insane, deformed, and otherwise “unworthy” people from society. The same was true of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao Zedong, by the way.
Stein also interviewed eminent Darwinists at length. Allowing them to speak for themselves in answer to his questions, he let them show how irrational is their resistance to dialogue and how inaccurate are their characterizations of those who believe in intelligent design.
One common statement is that no reputable scientist could ever question the “fact” of evolution of all life from the simple to complex by random, impersonal processes.
But Stein found a number of people with one or more doctorates in science and/or mathematics who had serious doubts about the scientific basis for evolutionary theory. It seems that real evidence is lacking for the belief (and it is a belief) that all life comes from some original “simple” cell that somehow mutated into the plants and animals populating the globe today.
When pressed really hard, one evolutionist posited the possibility (he had no proof) that it all started with something piggy-backing on crystals. Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, said – sit down and try to be calm –that perhaps life on earth came from a superior race on another planet who had evolved to a higher intelligence and then had “seeded” the Earth with the original life forms. This is science?
As it happens, I ran into the problems with evolutionism a long time ago, so I asked a friend who worked at the prestigious Cold Spring Harbor laboratory. “Of course,” he replied, “all serious scientists know that evolutionary theory lacks sufficient evidence.”
“So,” I queried, “why don’t they tell us the truth?”
“Because the only alternative is creation, and we can’t believe that!”
My curiosity piqued by his admission of the lack of proof for macro-evolution, I have read a number of books and articles over the years. Thus, I was not surprised when I recognized a couple of the people whom Stein interviewed, including William Dembski, who has been called “the Isaac Newton of information science,” and who holds two doctoral degrees, and the eminent German-born Jewish mathematician, David Berlinski.
If you want to follow this up, I recommend the following volumes, written for non-scientists like myself:
Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, by Michael Denton, an evolutionist who is alarmed by recent findings that undercut evolutionary theory.
Darwin’s Black Box, by Michael Behe, who maintains that Darwin simply could not know how “irreducibly complex” even the simplest cell is, making natural selection over long periods of time virtually impossible.
Darwin on Trial, by Phillip Johnson, a professor of law at Berkeley, who used the normal rules of evidence to evaluate the claims of evolutionary theory and found them almost without basis.
Icons of Evolution: Science or Myth? by Jonathan Wells (who also has two doctoral degrees), which examines the most commonly cited instances of development from one species to another and shows that they are all either fraudulent or lacking any foundation in fact.
I haven’t finished William Dembski’s Intelligent Design yet, but it looks pretty good.
Note: Not one of these people argues for young earth creationism.
But you might want to look at Faith, Form, and Time, by Harvard Ph.D. Kurt Patrick Wise. A student of one of the most eminent Darwinists of the 20th century, Stephen Gould, Wise actually thinks that the Genesis account of a six-day creation makes better sense scientifically than does the evolutionary model.
One caveat about “EXPELLED”: Stein is pretty angry about the suppression of evidence and the silencing of people who dare to challenge the status quo, so this documentary, though very well done, comes across as pretty stark and black and white. But then that’s how the dogmatic evolutionists portray the conflict between evolutionism and intelligent design, so maybe Stein is simply telling it as it is.