Sitting here sipping wine and watching the movie “Underdog” (my kid’s pick) seems like a fitting end to the day that I first saw “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.” The juxtaposition is a fitting analogy. When I first left the movie I was elated, thinking “someone finally got it right.” Upon a bit more reflection I now think I have more criticism than praise. For this post I’d like to deal with some of the other criticisms I’ve read.
Ben Stein’s movie “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” has already made an impression on a large number of people. Having just been released the criticisms are legion (pun intended). Even though I think the movie is flawed for reasons I will deal with later, the criticisms are often more flawed than the movie, that is, where they’re not outright false.
One of the points the movie tries to make is that ID is not Creationism. More importantly the movie makes the point that the “tried and true” tactic of critics of ID is to confound it with Creationism. Right on queue enter, The Orlando Sentinel editorial:
How do you re-package that tried and untrue, untested and untestable faith-without-facts warhorse, “Creationism” after its nearly-annual beat-down by an increasingly exasperated scientific community?
After you’ve tried renaming it “Intelligent Design,” I mean.
One wonders if the writer saw the movie. The article goes on to answer the question it posed:
With comedy. Mock your “Darwinist” foes the way comics, thinkers, scientists and educated people everywhere have been mocking creationism since Scopes took that monkey off our back.
One now wonders if the author read their own first two paragraphs - or a history book that contained an assessment of the Scopes trial which was won by the Creationists - it took a longer protracted fight to finally get that “monkey off our back.”
For a more reasonable critique (other than my forthcoming review, which is coming from an ID sympathizer) see “No intelligence allowed in ‘Expelled’.”
Another mischaracterization of what ID is includes the following from beliefnet.com:
Intelligent Design is based the fact that (1) there are questions that natural selection does not answer — which Darwinian scientists admit, and (2) therefore, some intelligent force must be behind creation — which cannot be proven by scientific means and therefore is more appropriately considered within the fields of philosophy or religion.
As the movie states (though perhaps all to briefly and unclearly), ID is, at its core, based on the idea that “design” or “intentionality,” (i.e. intelligent purpose) has certain attributes that allow it to be distinguished from undirected randomness. Several of these attributes that have been popular include: Michael Behe’s “Irreducible Complexity” (a good overview and recent defense can be found here) as well as A.E. Wilder Smith (and somewhat William Dembski’s) application of information theory to the genetic code and biological systems. The idea behind the later is that information theory can be used to distinguish randomness from non-randomness. This idea has wide use in the Electrical Engineering discipline of Signal Processing, Cryptography and Cryptanalysis, and even in SETI (Carl Sagan’s pet project, “The Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence”).
Another oft-repeated criticism is that the movie doesn’t deal with the facts of the case for ID or evolution. However, from both the title and the extended trailer I’m surprised anyone thought that the movie would. That the movie never intended to was clear from both. From both I expected exactly what I got, an expose on the political correctness embedded in the scientific establishment that punishes dissent.
Finally, in several places I found the simply false statement that the movie doesn’t provide a definition of “Evolution.” In fact it does so carefully in order to to explain exactly what the disenfranchised scientists are questioning. I found this criticism puzzling because it was so patently false that I can only assume that some of the pre-screenings didn’t have this particular scene.
I will follow this up with my own review of the movie.
