He Blinded Me Without Science
Ben Stein has a message for Darwin: "Fuck you!"
It seems incomprehensible that Stein -- former Nixon speech writer, game show host, eye drop pitchman and Neil Cavuto love interest -- could find a way to further cement his reputation as the smartest dumb person alive, but, bless his heart, he's done it. Today sees the theatrical release of a full-length documentary presented and narrated by Stein: Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed casts the man with the velvet monotone as a sort of Michael Mooresque troublemaker -- a mischievous imp out to rankle the establishment and challenge the suffocating status quo, all in the name of getting to the truth that they don't want you to know about.
And against which authority figure is Stein playing the role of the uppity insurgent?
Science.
Feel free to stop reading if you've heard this one before, but Expelled assumes the position not only that the theory of evolution and the faith-based hypothesis known as "intelligent design" are on close-to-equal scientific footing, but that there's an Illuminatian cabal among the science community, no doubt sitting in a Star Chamber somewhere, seeing to it that any developmental view but Darwin's is suppressed at all costs. It's a hell of a parlor trick really, and one the religious right has become admirably adept at exploiting these days: to turn the tables on their adversaries by adopting the tactics and lexicon traditionally associated with the mutinous left, casting themselves as the victimized and oppressed -- the little guys, taking up the fight against (literally, as opposed to an omnipotent deity) "The Man."
In the end though, that's all it is -- a really clever trick, and one that's played to the hilt in Expelled.
Creating controversy where there is none is positively pedestrian by now, but taking it to the lengths that this new documentary does, and doing it with such a salient level of panache, borders on genius. The SNL writing staff, circa 1977, couldn't have created a more audaciously comical premise than Ben Stein -- a man so square he craps cubes -- writing "I Will Not Question Authority" on a blackboard while dressed like Angus Young. Stein is a Dangerous Mind only if you see mark-to-market accounting as a ballsy show of defiance, which makes him the perfect impertinent hero for the God-said-it-I-believe-it set.
Unfortunately, no matter how creative the packaging, the lesson being sold in Expelled remains little more than nonsense. Stein and company can wrap themselves in the American flag and the freedom to question that it provides; they can grab a handful of ostensible pop culture street cred by aligning themselves with the likes of Bono; in the end, it doesn't make so-called intelligent design any more logically sound. It's still a religious assertion, and not a scientific one. It doesn't stand up to even the most rudimentary evidential scrutiny, and while it's always important to ask questions and allow for healthy debate, no matter the topic, at some point a line has to be drawn separating fact from fiction -- or distraction. The truth is important because it's the yardstick by which we measure our reality, and Ben Stein -- or anyone else -- trying to pass off spectacular whimsy as legitimate fact is, yes, damaging. Not everything can be up for discussion, no matter how large a segment of the population might believe otherwise.
And that's the best part of all this: Stein and his supposedly rag-tag little group of freedom fighters are neither rag-tag nor little.
In fact, the idea that we're expected to believe that the religious in this country are few and persecuted is laughable, bordering on offensive.
Last Sunday evening, CNN aired something it called the "Compassion Forum." It was a live event, broadcast from Messiah College in Pennsylvania, in which an entire roomful of religious leaders -- mostly Christian -- were granted an audience with the two Democratic candidates for president, one of whom may eventually be the next leader of the free world. For two hours, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama talked not about war, education and the economy, but about how their faith guides them and, to some extent, who loves Jesus more. The fact that either candidate believes that he or she has the luxury right now to spout metaphysical platitudes is nothing short of staggering -- though certainly not surprising. Just a few days prior to the "Compassion Forum," the entire cast of American Idol, dressed in evangelical white, belted its way through Shout to the Lord not once, but twice on national television. And today, the city in which I live, New York, is at a standstill as thousands crowd the streets -- streets which have been shut down by police -- to reverently welcome an unremarkable man in ridiculous robes and a funny hat who believes that he has a hotline to the creator of the universe and who just wrapped up a meeting with the President of the United States.
In other words, don't even attempt to claim that the religious suffer for their beliefs in this country. Hell, as long as you insist that you're doing it in the name of God, you can swap wives and molest children in The Middle of Nowhere, Texas for years before somebody finally comes and hauls your lunatic ass off to jail.
Ben Stein can rage against the scientific machine all he wants. He can shake his fist and shout, "Don't try to keep me down with your, your gravity, man!" It won't make a spurious assertion -- that intelligent design deserves a seat at the lab station -- any more sound, nor will it make Stein anything more than a rebel without a clue.
Follow Chez Pazienza on Twitter: www.twitter.com/chezpazienza
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The Bible- the greatest work of fiction ever made. Endlessly re-written by successive Kings and religious leaders to fit their personal choices and lifestyle.
Aside from the lack of any credible evidence of a higher being, there are a couple issues that always just irked me (little as they may be in the scheme of things).
1. When they found the shroud of Turrin and carbon dated it, the shroud fit perfectly into their timeline for biblical prophesy, but when they carbon date a dinosaur bone its all a bunch of hogwash.
2. A truly evil person rapes, tortures and kills my child, then on the day of his execution accepts Jesus as his savior so he gets to spend eternity in the same place as my child?? WTF??? What kind of heaven is this? At least in Hell you know what you're going to run into...
Actually, carbon dating found that the shroud of Turin is only about 600 years old.
And they don't use carbon dating on dinosaur bones because the half-life of C-14 is only about 5700 years. It's not useful for dating things that are millions of years old. For dino bones, they use K-40 dating.
My favorite unanswerable question, stolen from Inherit the Wind: And Cain went into the land of Nod. He knew his wife.
OK, so where did she come from? If the Bible is literal truth and "in the beginning" there was just Adam and Eve and Abel and Cain, where the heck did Cain's wife come from?
Maybe that could be Ben Stein's next movie: Finding Cain's wife's ancestors.
I used to ask my preacher that on a regular basis. I never got an answer, but he's got a really bad twitch now.
The battle has already been lost - science just hasn't admitted it yet. When two supposedly "progressive" Democratic candidates feel the need to testify for Jesus, then Ben Stein becomes totally irrelevant. He can sit back and relax and brush up on his trivia. Barack and Hillary have done his work for him. Theocracy has already arrived in America. Because if you must first proclaim your subservience to The Son of God before being admitted to the White House, this ain't a free country no more (if it ever was). As an aside, let me wax prosaic and point out (as billions before me have) that the far right and far left meet out there in the Looney Tune world. Another enemy of Darwin is none other than Alex Jones (he of the PrisonPlanet). Mr. Stein: meet Mr. Jones. Dodo birds of a feather?
I share your frustration, but considering that people are leaving churches in droves, and young people aren't buying into their parents' dogmas, (both facts born out by statistics) I have hope that in a few generations (should we survive that long) there will be less religious influence in this country. I also don't think that the politicians need to kiss up to the religious as much as they do. I think they do it to cover all their bases. Most people in this country wont be offended by religious rhetoric, but it's a sure bet that some will be offended by a lack of it.
While I agree mostly with your point about religion-v
Ben Stein is like the Geico lizard--annoying and ubiquitous.
What is religion but ghosts, magic and wishful thinking? Oh, I left out the fairies, (little angels by another name), hatred of outsiders, slavish, blind obediance to authority and a dull witted patriarchy that believes anything that merely questions it is heresy and must be destroyed.
Hey Hey! Tonight is the AAAS sponsored science debate. Which candidate is going to go to that? If you guessed zero, you're smarter than Ben Stein and might just have touched the nail on the head even if we've yet to even discuss hammers.
Why should the population be smart enough to see through Ben Stein's BS when the people who are attempting to lead us have themselves done nothing to really get a handle on the tough scientific and technological issues that face our modern society?
Politicians understand the demographics of this nation. For all the persecution complex of the far religious right, Christians are the majority (something like 80%). An openly atheist or agnostic candidate would have zero chance of winning a nationwide election. Politicians know that there is zero risk in talking about religious faith.
Excellent point. But if we had a truly representative democracy, us non-theists would have 15-20 percent of the seats in the Congress. I rather like entertaining that this little fantasy will someday come true at least before my as-yet-unborn grandchildren die. The downside is that those grandchildren will likely have the possibility of living decades longer than we do, thank g--, oops, thank science, I mean.
I was hoping for a more thoughtful analysis of Expelled -- what points does Stein make to fill 90 minutes, and why are those points dishonest or demonstrably wrong?. This reads like Chez hasn't actually seen the movie. I've seen the 30-second commercial four or five times and what strikes me is that Expelled is billed as a "documentary" but the scenes shown are clearly not done in documentary style. Maybe Chez could shed some light on this, if he had seen the movie he was trashing.
The movie isn't really the point; the point is that there is a new addition to the 'don't think' army that has the reputation and outward appearance of a thinking person. Anyone that even hints of a stance that philosophy is on equal ground with science in it's conclusions about reality doesn't deserve 90 minutes of my attention but I am sure the author of this blog suffered through it before publishing this piece.
I enjoyed reading your writing so much. Thank you. "...Not everything can be up for discussion, no matter how large a segment of the population might believe otherwise.
The Bush Presidency is a study in the failure of Intelligent Design.
This is becoming a national embarrassment. In the 21st century, in one of the supposedly most advanced nations in the world, we have a large number of people who cannot distinguish between myth and science. This is an educational failure of a magnitude which borders on unimaginable.
The Creationists have no concept of the processes of rational thought, logic and critical analysis. Not only do these people not understand what constitutes science, they have no idea what constitutes spiritual belief. Interpreting the religious texts in any system was never meant to be simple. That's the whole point of such writings. The very concept of religious literature originally was to make people think deeper about subjects, to look for explanations, not to blindly accept what appears as written.
This movement should be ashamed of themselves. They have taken one of the world's greatest pieces of literature and reduced it to a comic book. They have hamstrung their offspring's ability to cope with the world, lowered the bar of cultural achievement and are seeking to destroy three millennium of progress in western thought through their ignorance.
A very wise Esprit you are.
There is a classic cartoon in which we see a scientist standing in a room of wall to wall chalk boards with equations flowing like the nile on the last board near the end of the equation, highlighted it says "and then a miracle happens"..
Yeah. I miss the Far Side, too. If you're ever read Behe's treatises on ID, you can see that his entire argument boils down to, "well, I can't think of any way that evolution could produce something this conplex, therefore, a creator must have intervened at this point."
So, because, HE can't think of a model, he assumes no one else could either. (even though biologists have developed evolutionary models for many of the examples he cites). Talk about an ego trip.
CP
Please do not underestimate the Intelligent Design God Warrior crowd. They cannot be fought with reason based on fact, when their power is the support of tens of millions of Americans who have rejected the fact-based world.
This is what happens when every aspect of our lives is about money and greed and short-term profit, at the expense of everything else. People get so embittered and fed up they reject it all, baby and bathwater alike. These are the same people who elected (or, propelled into power, if you prefer) a George W. Bush, not once, but twice. They haven't gone away.
Louisiana is again struggling with yet another legislative attempt to weaken state public school science curriculum standards in favor of intelligent design Check out www.2thead
And just when some thought the Republican party had decided to clean up its act and excise itself from the death-grip of far-right religious extremists.
Don't get so busy making poking fun at them they steal the reins of government yet again.
Push for restoration of a free and independent press and news media, push for major campaign finance reform, election reform, education reform, and push for reigning in predatory corporate profiteers.
Push for a miracle.
An amusing little fact about EXPELLED:
There was no critic screening of the film for review in any of today's entertainment news reports. This means that the producers and distributors themselves have zero faith in the project's profitability, and are hoping for at least one day's worth of proceeds before yanking it from half its screens to make room for IRON MAN.
One of the problems with this debate is that ID proponents either do not understand or willfully ignore the fact that this is not an either-or debate. So many pro-ID arguments are framed in terms of perceived problems with evolution. However, even if you were successfully able to disprove any or all of the elements of evolutionary theory- it would, in no way, validate the idea of intelligent design. I have yet to hear a legitimate, scientific argument for intelligent design. Science works in a fairly straightforward way. You observe phenomena, you develop a hypothesis and you test this hypothesis. If the hypothesis holds up, you can then work toward developing a theory around it. This theory is testable and falsifiable. It stands up to rigorous peer review before it can even begin to be accepted by the community as a whole. Intelligent design fits none of these criteria. Its most basic tenet seems to be the odd circular logic that begins with the idea that only an intelligent designer could create something so complex. This is not a scientific theory-it is a philosophy. If you want to teach it in philosophy class, that is fine. But it has no place in a science class.
This is spot on, but the problem is that ID advocates attempt to establish religion and science as belief systems entitled to equal consideration. The fact is, however, that science is a methodology, not a faith. There was an interesting article by Ronald Dworkin in the New York Review of Book a couple of years ago, in which he points out that ID begins with the correct observation that there are certain things for which evolutionary theory is unable to account (understandable, as scientific theories, er, evolve). The leap of logic then insists that the entire theoretical framework must therefore be scrapped--this is not how science operates; there are certain things in math that don't "work" either, but nobody insists on doing away with numbers--followed by an even more untenable assertion that an intelligent designer must be the responsible agent. As Dworkin points out, scientists love nothing more than a good debunking, which puts to rest the claim that no ID advocate has ever published anything in a peer reviewed journal owing to pure bias: the person who could disprove Newton, for example, would be an immediate Nobel Prize winner, and the same would apply to someone who could seriously challenge Darwin.
The truly strange thing is that this is merely the resurrection of amply discredited 18th century theories of biological development, with a few terms exchanged for pseudo-scientific ones.
Well said. What we are dealing with is completely different philosophical approach to reality. Science is a methodology, but it also carries with it the assumption that the universe is comprehensible and obeys set laws and therefore, it can be studied and measured.
When a scientist is confronted with something they don't understand, they say, "we don't know and this is an excellent area for further research."
When an ID proponent sees something they don't understand, they say, "some supernatural force intervened here. We don't understand and shouldn't bother trying to study it further."
Imagine if people like Lousi Pasteur had taken that approach. Doctors would still not be washing their hands before surgery because diseases are caused by some kind of incomprehensible "bad humours" and not bacteria carried on their hands from patient to patient.
The attacks on the Pope were gratuitous and offensive. The Point could have been made very well without them.
The attempt to reconcile faith and science is an honorable, perhaps even necessary,one, even if this film did it in a particularly stupid way.
In this reconciliation, however, we must also be willing modify our understanding of "God," the Great Spirit of Life, and this is what fundamentalists resist. In their arrogance they fear to acknowledge that they have have a very limited, and often wrong understanding, not just about science,but also about the nature of the Highest Spirituality.
For example, if there be a Highest God and also Darwin's discovery is honored, then we end up with vision of a Living Spirit whose creativity, like human creativity involves tinkering, experimenting, and maybe even wit. In this process, the creator is an artist who doesn't really have a good idea of what is being created until the work is done, and even then, no work of art is ever really "done."
This is, of course, a very liberal view. Liberals believe truth is rarely pre-known but rather is discovered through open process.
DrB
Go ahead and be offended by the jokes about his Popery. To many of us, he's just a guy wrapped in sheets. One who was a Nazi Youth, but let's not quibble. For us, the Pope jokes are funny, and I'm glad they're there.
As far as "Highest God and also Darwin's discovery.
Good point about the Pope. Chez is right about ID but it's comments like this -- making Christians a fair target of derision where other religious groups are not -- that allow evangelicals to make Stein's argument somewhat persuasively for a lot of on-the-fence Americans.
"gratuitous and offensive"? You're going to defend the guy who sat on this issue of pedophelia when he was a cardinal? The pope has to earn my respect. And he hasn't. He's just another celebrity, in this case speaking out about world poverty while he runs around in gucci slippers. Now that's gratuitous and offensive.
I disagree completely. Science and scientists have been singled out by religious extremists and various churches so many times throughout history, why should ANY respect be paid to the elected leader of any one particular church. Hell, the Spanish Inquisition alone should warrant continued ridicule and shame indefinitely for this particular church. And, not to beat a dead horse (too late), but science is based on verifiable observation and faith is based on FAITH. A whole person understands the limits of the verifiable universe and has faith in things that are unexplainable. These concepts are NOT mutually exclusive and therefore the arguments in favor of one or the other are nothing but a smokescreen for fascist extremists.
Any faith that is not flexible enough to internalize discovered truths is dangerous both to itself and to truth. It seems to me that that this inflexibility is a Judeo-Christian manifestation.
For what its worth, creationists who keep repeating "theory" like its a dirty word, here are some other "theories" taught in science class.
Theory of gravity (Newton's hypothesis that gravitational attraction operates on an inverse-square relationship)
Germ theory of disease (microorganisms cause disease)
Cell theory (all living things are made up of cells)
Also, bad theories can be discarded. For example:
Phlogiston theory (substance said to be responsible for oxidative processes, i.e. burning)
Geocentric theory (that Earth is the center of the universe)
Steady-state theory (theory that the universe is neither expanding nor contracting)
These theries were abandoned because of better/simpler explanations or the uncovering of discrepant data that could not be accounted for using the theory in question. What would induce a proponent of ID to give up his/her theory? Nothing related to the realm of observation or deduction, certainly. In which case, we can conclude that ID is not a scientific theory at all.
Don't forget quantum theory! It's widely known as an extremely successful theory, because (and this is exactly where I.D. and creation "science" fail as theories): It EXPLAINS and PREDICTS phenomena that had not been seen before the theory was first proposed as a hypothesis. (Big oversimplification here... Like evolution, modern quantum theory is actually a whole set of interconnected theories.)
It is the explanatory power of a "theory" that gives it scientific "street cred". I.D. makes no statement that we can use to understand that have not yet been observed. And every scientific theory stands ready to be adjusted or replaced as it is repeatedly tested against observation.
On the other hand, the set of theories collectively labeled "evolution" explain what we have observed, and predict what we will find when we look deeper into reality. Examples are the intermediate forms between land-dwellers in what what is now Pakistan and cetaceans. Or the increasingly well understood relationship between dinosaurs and birds. Or the increasingly fascinating observations of genetic chemistry. Evolution theory is even informing research in how to develop algorithms.
So Dr. Stein (who is such a wonderful interesting guy, I wish I could like his politics..
Well said. Stein is a propagandist for his masters; this is also about global warming; it's an effort to sow doubts about what the methods of science are capable of telling us.
Things fall down, because God wants them to fall down.
People get sick because they don't have enough faith.
We are made of Divine Spirit.
See, all very easy to debunk.
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